Preacher: Dana Cassell

Scripture: Provers 8:1-4, 22-31

A long time ago, in the spring of 2020, a beloved congregant named Nancy included me on a poetry chain mail letter. I don’t really participate in chain letters, but I love poetry and I loved Nancy, who had been a steadfast supporter of me and my ministry, so I forwarded it along and received one or two lovely poems in my inbox in return.

Nancy died a year later, in a pretty traumatic way. I missed her humor, her presence & her unfailing support. I hated that I could not be more present with and to her at the end. In September of that year, I was struggling with my decision to divest myself from church structures that were beginning to feel too constrictive. It was a year & a half after Nancy sent that chain letter, three months after she died, and one month after I resigned from a job I loved but no longer fit into when I got a random email from a random stranger with no text, only this poem by Danielle LaPorte attached to the message:

“The next opportunity to meet, to work, to dine, to interact, to kiss, to speak, to spend, to serve
(no matter how shiny, sexy, lucrative, coveted, necessary, obligatory, or useful it may seem),
Ask yourself this:
Will I have to shrink to make this work?
Or is this a place where I can expand?
Check your logic and call on your courage.
Your heart’s intelligence will guide you.
Hang out where you can unfurl.”

There was so much wisdom in that poem, and the timing of its arrival in my inbox, a year and a half after I forwarded along the poetry chain letter and three months after Nancy died, right in the window of time when I was struggling with what it meant to divest myself of systems and structures that required me to shrink, felt stunning to me. It felt like a message from Nancy herself, like a divinely timed piece of advice from the beyond.

It felt, to me, like a movement of the Holy Spirit.

I suspect you have experienced these kind of stunning moments, when something gets revealed to you, when a path suddenly appears in the wilderness of your life, when the VIBES shift in a gathering of people. It happens sometimes in worship, sometimes when we’re singing together, in big meetings when someone finally names the thing we’ve all been thinking or introduces a new possibility that opens up our discussion. I’ve felt it in hospital rooms, at campfires, and even, believe it or not, on a few particularly powerful Zoom meetings.

In my theological worldview, I ascribe these collective energy shifts to the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is wily and unpredictable, which means that religious leaders who prefer to be In Charge Hoarders of Power don’t like to talk about Her very much. But this Sunday is, in the calendar of the Christian year, Trinity Sunday, and the texts are all about this wily third person, the Spirit.
We read a passage from Proverbs, about Lady Wisdom. There are theological debates about what, exactly, Lady Wisdom IS. She shows up throughout the Hebrew scriptures, is usually gendered as female, and has been variously explained as:
1. The entity that showed up on earth as Jesus
2. The personification of God the Creator’s own inherent wisdom
3. Another name for the Holy Spirit

There are orthodox and heretical ways to understand Lady Wisdom, and the arguments got supremely heated. Legend tells us that these arguments led to Saint Nicholas – yes, that one, Jolly Old St. Nick – punching another guy in the face at the Council of Nicea. I confess that I don’t much care about which interpretation of Wisdom’s identity or place in heavenly hierarchies is “correct.” I’m much more interested in what she DOES, where she GOES, how we might get a glimpse of her at work.

That’s also how I feel about the Holy Spirit. GOD the CREATOR feels distant and ancient, and as much as I love Jesus – and that’s a lot – he was also a MAN who lived 2,000 years ago in a very different culture with very different privileges and challenges than I have in my life, today.

But the Spirit. Man. She’s not distant, or antiquated. She’s also, get this: not a man. (I mean, God is not a man, either, but every time I use a different pronoun for Her, people get their hackles up.) But the Holy Spirit – and Wisdom, her ancient predecessor – have long histories of being described as feminine. And they are more ephemeral, harder to describe, difficult to pin down and dissect. The Spirit swirls around, through space and time, through context and culture, through heart and intellect, relationship and community. She is always on the move.

The Holy Spirit is described in scripture as a comforter, a teacher, a companion, a catalyst. In today’s gospel text from John, Jesus tells his disciples that when the Spirit of Truth comes, she will “guide you into all truth.” Jesus keeps telling his friends that even though he himself is going to be killed and leave them, they are actually getting a better deal in the end because his replacement, the Spirit, will be present with them in even more intimate and unshakeable ways. No tyrant can crucify the Holy Spirit – she slips right off the crosses, dances away from destruction.

In Proverbs, Lady Wisdom tells us that she was with the Creator from the beginning, and her poem is so lovely:

Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
when God had not yet made earth and fields,*
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When She established the heavens, I was there,
when They drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when She established the fountains of the deep,
when They assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when God marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside Her, like a master worker;
And she also tells us that she wasn’t just sitting by, spectating while God created everything. She was DELIGHTING in it all:

I was daily God’s delight,
rejoicing before them always,
rejoicing in her inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

The Holy Spirit, the one in whom we live and move and have our being, the one whose work is guiding us into all truth, who exists to be our companion and our comfort, DELIGHTS in us.

I can imagine that if it was indeed Lady Wisdom or the Holy Spirit behind that belated email chain letter poem that was so touching to me, she delighted in making it happen. I imagine the work of the Holy Spirit feels like sending someone anonymous flowers – or anonymous cash! Or like the feeling you get when you set a couple up and they end up falling in love. Or when you mentor an intern who finds fulfillment and calling in the work you invited them into. Or the satisfaction teachers and coaches must get when a player or a student finally catches on to a new skill.

DELIGHT.

I like the Holy Spirit because she is both mysterious and as close to us as each breath that we breathe. She moves us into action and also comforts us when we are grieving. She is HERE, WITH US, in ways that take us by surprise because, I suspect, we don’t have much practice in paying attention to the Spirit swirling among us.

I wonder how our perspectives would change if we practiced paying attention to movements of the Spirit. What would change if we tried to catch those moments when God Herself is delighting in us, connecting us, opening up pathways and possibilities.

The Spirit is hard to talk about. Poets manage to say all that I try to preach much better, so here’s a favorite of mine, from the poet Denise Levertov. It’s titled “In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being”:

Birds afloat in air’s current,
sacred breath? No, not breath of God,
it seems, but God
the air enveloping the whole
globe of being.
It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,
leaves astir, our wings
rising, ruffled—but only saints
take flight. We cower
in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly
on branches close to the nest. The wind
marks the passage of holy ones riding
that ocean of air. Slowly their wake
reaches us, rocks us.
But storm or still,
numb or poised in attention,
we inhale, exhale, inhale,
encompassed, encompassed.