Homily for Monday, 13 April 2015– Monday of the Second Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 4:23-31; Psalm 2:1-3, 4-7a, 7b-9; John 3:1-8

Who is the Holy Spirit? Our readings today give us a sense of the effects of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Jesus’ earliest disciples, of how the Holy Spirit was acting through them. The Holy Spirit empowers Peter and John and the first Apostles “to speak the Word of God with boldness.” Our reading this morning from Acts says that Peter and John “went back to their own people and reported what the chief priests and elders had told them.” Peter and John had just been warned by these “chief priests and elders” not to speak publicly of Jesus any longer. The Holy Spirit gives Peter and John the courage to risk their lives in defiance of this order of the religious leaders of Jerusalem; to risk their lives for Christ, the living Word of God.

The Holy Spirit, Jesus says in John’s Gospel, will enable Nicodemus to be “born again,” not only by water but “by water and the Holy Spirit.” For the Pharisee Nicodemus and for all of us, the Holy Spirit is the way to salvation. We, too, are “born again”; we, too, receive the Holy Spirit in the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. 

But, again, who is the Holy Spirit? Is this not an almost impossible question for us to answer? Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in our Gospel reading this morning do not seem to help us much in identifying, much less understanding, the Holy Spirit. “The wind blows where it wills… so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit,” Jesus says.

Who, then, is the Holy Spirit: A mysterious “wind”; a force that cannot be contained; God, the third person of the Trinity who is all spirit; does not have a body…? One of the best descriptions I have read of the Holy Spirit, I believe from the theologian Bernard Cooke’s book, The Spirit and the Power of God, is of the Holy Spirit as divine “mischief.”

But do we not think of mischief as usually a bad thing? The Holy Spirit as divine mischief still remains a distant, mysterious power that is not necessarily good. Let me propose, then, as Bernard Cooke does in Power and the Spirit of God, that we think and pray about how we understand and experience power.

Power can be negative: “Power over” another by controlling wealth and resources; by making others fear acting against the wishes of the more powerful; the power of fame or of one’s public office (although this can also be used to benefit other people)… But none of this is how God acts; none of this describes the power of God.

God’s power, worked through the Holy Spirit, is power for creativity, for imagination, for kindness; for seeking the good of one another; for love. These kinds of power can be and are mischievous; uncontrollable. Still today, like Peter and John in Acts, many risk arrest; risk their lives because they are empowered by the Holy Spirit. These people challenge power structures in our world. Many more, and all of us, are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit by our baptism. This is the power to live and speak God’s word boldly, for the good of one another.