The Holy Spirit and our culture – what’s going on out there?

AJM Holy Trinity, June 2007

Isaiah 10.33-11.5, Acts 2.1-4

Introduction

We have had 2 readings. In each, something happened. In both cases it was a work of the Holy Spirit. In both cases it was a new work of the Holy Spirit. in the first, Isaiah tells of how the Holy Spirit would fall upon a man in a way it never had before. Not as an occasional thing, as it always had been up to then and as it was for Isaiah himself; but as a permanent mark, a new way of being. That man would later be recognised as Jesus.

In the second reading, Luke tells us how the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples after the death of Jesus. Again it was the mark of something new, an experience they would have over and over again – though never as unexpectedly – and one which would change their lives.

This should be our experience. We stand here in the presence of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is with us. This gift of the Spirit is something which extends in turn to us; it is what characterises, or should characterise, the life of the church.

The question is, does it? I travel about a lot these days, and the truth is that whereas sometimes it does, often it does not.

The church today

We aren’t often accused of being so filled with the Spirit that we look drunk – with some notable exceptions….

The church is not generally seen as an exciting, controversial place to be. In fact, it’s generally thought to be rather a boring place, where the unexpected doesn’t happen very often. It’s been in steady decline now for 100 years.

Let me give you some statistics:

· Peak attendance at church in this country was 1904 (33% of adults attended church then)

· The latest research (by Peter Brierley of Christian Research) suggests that only 6.3% of the population are now found in church on an average Sunday. This is what it looks like in the country as a whole – the blue areas have 7-9% attendance, the yellow bits 5-7%, and the green bits less than 5%. The white bit is Wales, which is a case all on its own…

We know that

· Membership of the CofE declined by 14% in the 1990s alone (28% for children)

· The average age is going up; it was 36 in 1980 (same as national average), 47 in 2000 (national average 38). A third of Anglicans are now over the age of 65 (as opposed to only 16% in the general population)

· The number of churchgoers dying each year is bigger than the number of new converts

Now with the best will in the world it’s hard to feel positive about these statistics. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin has said that the church is now seen as a good cause in danger of collapsing for lack of support. The bishop of Durham has written recently that it’s seen as an upmarket version of daydreaming for those who like that sort of thing. And that’s the charitable view. A vicar in Maidstone has suggested more robustly that ‘the church has done for Jesus what Jaws did for swimming lessons’…

Meanwhile we have Richard Dawkins announcing that faith is one of the world’s great evils, and we are bombarded with calls for the secularisation of society, the abolition of Christmas, and so on and so forth. Somehow I don’t think this can have been what the first Christians envisaged, that first day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit burst through the door and turned their lives inside out.

The world we live in

However, that’s not the whole story.

Here’s another set of statistics. These are from a survey commissioned by the BBC in the year 2000 and compared with the same questions asked in 1987. They show that while church attendance may be going down, general spiritual awareness is rising, and it’s rising quite fast.

· 20 years ago 27% of people said they were aware of the presence of God in their lives; now that figure is 38%.

· 20 years ago 25% of people said they had experienced answer to prayer; now that figure is 37%.

· 20 years ago 12% said they were aware of evil; now it’s 25%.

The obvious question to ask is, what are people doing in response to this increased spiritual awareness? They aren’t noticeably placing their faith in Jesus and asking to be filled by the Holy Spirit, so what are they doing? Well, they are turning to other things. Polls taken in 1950 and again in 1998 found that in 1950 7% believed in tarot and 6% in astrology, whereas now 18% put their faith in tarot and an amazing 38% in astrology. In many places more people visit spiritualist churches than Christian ones; and there are more registered witches in the UK than Christian ministers.

In January I was leading a retreat for the clergy of Bristol. It was held in Glastonbury. Now I’d never been to Glastonbury before, and I was totally fascinated by it. In the Middle Ages Glastonbury Abbey was one of the great centres of the Christian faith in these islands. Now it’s a ruin. And Glastonbury has become a centre for alternative spiritualities. The things people try behind closed doors in most places are all up and down the high street in Glastonbury. It’s a kind of picture of the age, if you like. The one that particularly took my fancy was a shop called The Psychic Piglet. GK Chesterton once said that if people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. And here it is.

But I did notice one thing. Everyone in the place was wearing sort of trendy gothic clothing, capes and boots and shawls. But they all looked ill – the whole lot of them. Middle aged women hacked and coughed as they walked up the street. Men leaned on sticks. Pavement herb sellers looked haggard. Even the young people, in black with pierced body parts, looked pale. They really didn’t look as if their spiritual search was bringing them peace and purpose. Now I am married to a man whose life was saved through prayer. Which would you go for, the centuries of prayer represented by the Abbey, or the dreadlocked coughs of the New Age?

Here’s another graph. This one is from a study conducted amongst non-churchgoers by Yvonne Richmond in Coventry (Nick Spencer, Beyond the Fringe – researching a spiritual age, LICC 2005):

· 60% believe in near death experiences

· 57% in déjà vu

· 42% in telepathy

· 40% in guardian angels

· 32% in out of body experiences

· 31% believe in astrology

· 31% in ghosts

· 28% in psychics/mediums

· 24% in faith healers

I’ve added in the regular churchgoers on the bottom right…

So it’s clear that although people are not looking to the church for guidance in their spiritual lives, they are increasingly aware that there is a spiritual dimension to life, and increasingly interested in exploring it. It’s not that they have anything against Jesus – the Coventry study remarks that ‘Jesus emerged from the interviews with a good reputation’. But they do have things against the church. One person said that ‘I think the established Church could be tried in a court of justice and could be found guilty of killing off spirituality’… It’s not really the Holy Spirit who’s not been doing his stuff; it’s us.

So where have we gone wrong? How have we managed to get ourselves into the situation where spirituality is on the rise and the Holy Spirit sits in a corner?

A changing cultural story

I think to understand that we need to go back a bit in history. We are living at a time of cultural change, when we are moving from one way of organising our understanding of life to another way. We are moving from 300 years of what’s called modernity, to a new phase which as yet we call only by the name postmodernity. Lots of people have said clever things about these two worldviews, but I like to summarise them like this. These are 2 statues by Michelangelo.

Modernism – like David, on the left:

• Rational, analytical, predictable

• Clear lines and definitions

• Uniformity, lots of copies – there are more plastic Davids in Italy than I’ve had hot dinners…

The modern period is one in which institutions flourish, structures are important, facts the key tool. Its main values have been recognised as efficiency, calculability, predictability and control (George Ritzer).

Postmodernism – like the slave, on the right:

• unfinished, poorly defined

• imagination

• impatience, creativity

Period in which autonomy flourishes, flexibility important. Postmodernity is characterised by decentralised networks, unpredictability, flexibility and uncertainty. It’s also characterised by increased spiritual awareness and experimentation. So, why is this happening?

I think there are a number of reasons.

1. The limitations of the rational; an incomplete response to human need

John Drane has said that ‘we are the only people in the whole of history to have supposed that a mechanistic and individualistic understanding of life offers the way to become fulfilled and whole persons’. Max Weber talked about the ‘iron cage of rationality’. We are discovering, as we try to meet our needs with money, education, higher living standards, better medicine, that there is more to life than a rationalistic and scientific world view can offer. It leaves stuff out.

I was with a group of curates from big charismatic churches this week. They said that people who work in the city are flocking to Alpha because they are in search of meaning. They have everything money can buy; and yet they feel trapped in a cycle of meaninglessness. One of them used to be a stockbroker. He said that when he resigned in order to go to theological college, people were coming to his desk in tears – not because he was leaving, but because they were staying! They said they wished they had the courage to do what he was doing, they wished their lives had the sense of purpose his did. They felt trapped.

2. The continued existence of evil

So that’s one thing. Then there is the continued existence of evil. We thought that economic growth and technological advances would bring peace and prosperity, enable us to reach our potential as human beings, and make the world a better place. But all it’s done is unleashed 2 world wars, a holocaust, worldwide political oppression, and a growing tide of international terrorism. In the C20th, 167m people were killed by ideologically or politically motivated tyranny. Evil is stronger than ever, and despite Dawkins saying that religion is the cause of all evil, it erupts most powerfully in godless, secularist societies. And we have no idea what to do with it – except perhaps drop bombs on it… The modernist dream is over – ‘Progress might have been all right once’, said Ogden Nash – ‘but it’s gone on far too long.’

3. Developments within science itself

And then I think finally, because of developments within science itself. The popular concept of science is that it works by an objective process of gradual discovery, peeling back facts like layers of an onion. But it’s increasingly apparent that it doesn’t. It proceeds by intuition and metaphor.

· Einstein: ‘the supreme task of the physicist is the search for those highly universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path leading to these laws. They are only to be reached by intuition, based on something like an intellectual love’.

· Colin Gunton: It is now widely accepted that almost all intellectual advance takes place by means of metaphor. .. Metaphor is not mere ornament, but an indispensable means of articulating the shape of reality. Metaphors are the means of interpreting one part of the world by another, by imaginatively transcending the power of language.

And if you think about it, the most startling scientific discoveries of our time can only be talked about in metaphorical terms – the Big Bang and the expanding universe; string theory; the curving material of spacetime. Even Stephen Hawking doesn’t claim his theories as truth; just as useful constructs for explaining what is. Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine. We know that light is simultanously wave and particle; we have chaos theory, plural universes, quantum physics, and we now suspect that the fundamental unit of matter is not a particle but a dance, as strings vibrate inside subatomic particles. The latest theory is that the whole universe is a string-net liquid, a kind of invisible spider’s web on which the particles of reality are somehow glued. This is a long way from the certainties of Enlightenment science. Reality is a whole load more complicated than we’d thought.

Where does this leave us? Well, Gerard Kelly calls it a ‘cultural Millenopause’ (in Getting a grip on the future without losing your hold on the past, Monarch 1999). Something of a crisis. This is what journalist Clifford Longley has written:

· Having constructed a society of unprecedented sophisticaton, convenience and prosperity, nobody can remember what it was supposed to be for. Just enjoying it does not seem to be enough. Indeed enjoyment as an end in itself quickly turns to ashes in the mouth. Not only is it boringly bland. It is even more boringly purposeless. There is more to human life than comfort, entertainment and the avoidance of suffering. (B McCloughry, Living in the presence of the future, IVP 2001, p32)

Just that no one knows what it is.

The response of the Church

So how can we respond? We can only do it as Jesus did it and as the first disciples did it – by learning to depend on the Holy Spirit, and by realising that he is what many people are looking for. We may try to persuade ourselves otherwise, but there is actually no such thing as spirituality which does not depend on the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God. Anything else is superstition, or emotion, or demonic. Deception. We are and can be spiritually alive only to the extent that we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. I wrote an account of my visit to Glastonbury High Street in the ReSource newsletter, and it produced a sackful of angry letters. People here, the letters protested, are very spiritual; just as spiritual as us. Who are we to judge them? Should we not be learning from their earnest desire to develop their spiritual lives? The problem with that is that it assumes there is such a thing as a genuine spirituality apart from the Holy Spirit who is made available to us through Jesus. There isn’t. Only a sham. And a dangerous one at that. Watching it is a bit like watching lemmings hurling themselves off the top of a cliff. Nice creatures; but not a good strategy for life.

In Mozambique a few weeks ago we were running a Rooted in Jesus conference for clergy and catechists. They were nearly all men. One evening the cooks came to see us. The cooks were all women. We are missing out, they said. We can hear all this praying going on, but we don’t get to join in. Can you pray for us too? Well, it was the end of a long day, and we were tired; but we said OK. We’d travelled 5000 miles; perhaps God had planned for us to meet with these women. Perhaps they had been waiting for just this moment. So I groaned inwardly and asked their names. How can we pray for you?

The first one said she was called Lydia. Lydia’s brother had died suddenly a year ago, and she’d been very close to him. She’d been devastated by his death, and had been unable to sleep ever since. She’d go to sleep OK, but she’d wake at 2 or 3 in the morning and toss and turn for the rest of the night. Was she a Christian, we asked? No, she said. We explained that only Jesus could help her, if she wanted to ask him to. She said she did. She asked him. We prayed for her to be filled with the Holy Spirit, she smiled and said that felt wonderful, and went away. Next morning: 70 hungry conference delegates, and no breakfast. Lydia was still asleep.

The next 2 women, Alicia and Elena, said that they were regular members of the church. But they said they had the same problem as each other. They’d go to church, and they’d open their mouths to join in with the prayers and the creed, and no words would come out. They couldn’t understand why this was; they knew the words, they opened their mouths and moved their lips, but there was something blocking their speech. There was obviously nothing wrong with them physically, so the problem had to be spiritual. We asked if they had ever been to a witchdoctor. Northern Mozambique is notorious for its wealth of witchdoctors. They have different sorts – feticeiros, sorcerers who effectively do black magic; and curandeiros, spiritual practitioners who consult spirits and prepare herbal medicines which they believe carry spiritual power for healing. These women had been to curandeiros. Alicia said she’d been often with her husband when he was sick. Had he been cured? No, he’d died, and she’d not been again. Elena said she’d been once or twice. But when I asked her to look at me she couldn’t; her eyes were flickering all over the place, and she said she had a cold constriction in her chest. Now we don’t have witchdoctors as such here. But we have mediums and spiritualists and various organisations which practise occult ceremonies of one kind or another; and evasive eyes and cold constrictions are common symptoms reported by people who have been deeply involved in those things too. The Holy Spirit is the same everywhere; evil spirits are the same everywhere too. Just that we are less used to looking for them. Anyway, we prayed with Alicia and Elena, inviting them to answer the baptism questions, do you turn to Christ, do you repent of your sins, do you renounce evil; and then praying for them to be filled with the Holy Spirit. They themselves were then both able to pray aloud.

The next night we prayed for our driver, who said that he was not a Christian but would like help with the sudden waves of unprovoked anger which washed over him whenever he was alone. We explained that if he committed his life to Jesus, we would pray for him to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He did so, and said he was experiencing waves not of anger but of amazing peace. That night he had a dream, in which he saw a great flood in which all the houses were swept away and all the people drowned. His house alone stood firm; he alone survived.

The Holy Spirit today

So how does that work, and can we make it work here? Well, we started with Jesus, so let’s finish with Jesus.

Jesus’ ministry is sandwiched between 2 events.

· Mark 1.10 reads: Just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

That was the beginning of his ministry, a ministry made possible by the direct relationship with God which Jesus now had, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

At the end of his earthly ministry, Jesus was crucified. Let’s jump to the end of Mark’s gospel, chapter 15. He was nailed on the cross at 9 in the morning. When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At that point, Jesus died. This is what we read:

· Mark 15.38: Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

Now in both of these quotes the verb is the same. It’s the verb ‘schizo’, to split or to tear – from which we get our words ‘schism’ and ‘schizophrenia’. So it’s not a gentle thing at all. On these two key occasions, at the beginning and end of Jesus’ ministry, something happened. It was violent, significant and it was a work of the Holy Spirit. It was a tearing of the heavens, a ripping of the vault of the sky and its symbol the curtain of the temple – a ripping of the barrier between God and man, a ripping which made active and dynamic participation in the Christian life possible for all believers, a ripping which allowed us to see for the first time beyond the tangible reality of the world which surrounds us, and into the spiritual reality of the heavenly places. It was the making of a hole in heaven.

I think one of the ways of thinking about our ministry now is that we are trying to help people see the holes in heaven. Sometimes it takes a crisis in people’s lives, and we shouldn’t be surprised at that – Jesus did say he came to seek and to save the lost, not those who have life all sorted. But in our search for a meaningful spirituality we need to look to this hole. If we are to help others, we need to show them that Jesus has broken through the barrier which separates them from God. There is a real spiritual world out there, and it is open to us to engage with it in a way that is both safe and immensely fulfilling.

Between us we have many stories to share, both from our own personal experience and from that of those we have known. Sometimes God does it through our most basic attempts to help. I could tell you about Richard, an inmate of Swansea prison invited by the chaplain to attend Mass – where Jesus spoke to him from the cross and told him he loved him, the first time he’d ever heard those words. A few weeks ago I met Dawn, who’s been coming to one of our Alpha courses. She told me she’d been transfixed by the sight of Jesus in Leicester city centre on Good Friday, given her life to him and gone home wondering why on earth she’d thought she needed to do all that shopping, buy all that stuff she didn’t need. It doesn’t take much - a clumsy invitation, a willingess to be there in a crisis, a readiness to pray. We can all do that. The Holy Spirit does the rest.

So here we are, remembering the day the Holy Spirit burst through the curtain and made himself available to every one of us who wants to receive him in the name of Jesus. There is no other way to receive him; and all who ask in this way do receive him. There is a hole in heaven, and we can see through it. It’s just that most people don’t realise. But once they do, it changes everything.

Let’s pray together…