LORD OF LIFE LUTHERAN CHURCH
Music Notes
Festival of Pentecost, 11 May, 2008
God came to us then at Pentecost, His Spirit new life revealing,
That we might no more from Him be lost, all darkness for us dispelling.
His flame will the mark of sin efface and bring to us all His healing.
--stanza four, “O Day Full of Grace”
Today’s liturgy, celebrating the Festival of Pentecost, obviously centers around the gift and work of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity given to the Church (or, creating the Church) fifty days after Easter. In the days of the prophets, the Holy Spirit was only given for brief times then withdrawn. Now, the Holy Spirit pervades the Church, God having “pour[ed] out my Spirit on all flesh.” (Acts 2: 17b) There is much to be said in answer to the perennial Lutheran question, “What does this mean,” but today let us consider the work of the Holy Spirit regarding reason, revelation, and the decision-making process of the Christian.
In Psalm 25, the appointed psalm for the day which the choir sings, we pray, “Make me to know Your Ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. . . He leads the humble in what is right and teaches the humble His way. . . . Who is the man who fears the Lord? Him will He instruct in the way that He should choose.” The presence of the Holy Spirit informs the Christian—his or her mind, heart, and intellect. There is a thought in some quarters—particularly in the left-wing denominations—that the Holy Spirit somehow continues to grant “fresh, new” knowledge, enlightening the current generation in a way that had not been available to previous ages. Their intellect, coupled with the Holy Spirit, they reason, has opened new biblical hermeneutics. . . they now claim that we no longer need to believe in the literal inspiration of scriptures. Science has usurped the simple understanding of the Hebrews. Jesus’ miracles were all metaphors, anyways. These neo-gnostics claim that advances in psychology help us to understand people better—what is sin and what is not sin. What God created in one’s psychology certainly cannot be sin! The purveyors of this thought would claim that the Holy Spirit, in His (or Her) prophetic voice, is granting the world new insights into the evils of society and how to create a perfect, progressive world devoid of racism and classism (or ambition.) These scholars would look askance at Martin Luther who said, “He who does not kill and bury his reason and become as a little child does not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” No, these church-people are always seeking the next intellectual blowing of the Spirit, usually profiting by being able to write a book, preaching on the conference circuit, or by being quoted by inane presidential candidates.
On the proverbial other end of the spectrum we have the pietist-fundamentalist, to whom reason and knowledge is meaningless, being obfuscated by their desire to feel something. If worship does not cause them to feel a certain way, they are the first to condemn others (or even themselves) for the lack of “Spirit.” These people equivocate the Holy Spirit with emotions they feel. If they feel bad, they pray to the Holy Spirit to give them joy. If they feel joy, they give thanks that the Holy Spirit who must have given them joy. If they feel good about a decision they made, they reason that the Holy Spirit must have been involved with it. They chide themselves for not praying hard enough if they make a bad decision. They are interested in how scripture makes them feel rather than what scripture actually says. They come to church demanding “relevant” sermons and “uplifting” music so they will feel a certain way or get something practical from the service—it must be tangible and recognizable to them by the time church is over or woe be unto the musician or pastor! Their personal library contains the Christian bestsellers from the 1950s to the 1990s, with the 2000s being represented only by Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. Notably lacking is the canon of great Western literature, whose intellect and received cultural insight is not necessary when one depends on one’s feelings.
These two extremes—which of course are generalizations and caricatures—actually lie close to each other on the theological spectrum. What do they have in common? The intellectual and scholar trusts his reason, while the pietist trusts her emotion. We all know that both reason and emotion are given to us as gifts from God, but the problem arises when one trusts either rather than the Word of God. Either way, we are then trusting in ourselves, since both reason and emotion stem from our being, and not necessarily God. Proverbs 3: 5 admonishes us to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” Whether we rely on the latest scholarly journals to inform us of our faith, or whether we look to our emotions as evidence of God’s working, the prolegomena (a theological word meaning “starting point”) is with ourselves and not the Holy Spirit. Sure the Holy Spirit can give us an emotional joy, and of course He can likewise give us “epiphany moments” that give to us a new understanding of an intellectual question. In fact, this is what Pentecost means! But we cannot define our faith on a daily basis on perceived emotional or rational workings of the Holy Spirit. He is present with us, working faith in our hearts, but most often in mundane and very non-dramatic ways. So, how do we know our theological insight or emotion is of the Holy Spirit? If we knew for sure, it would not be called “faith!”
However, we can better discern what is from God and what is not the more we are in scripture. The shema, that great Hebrew prayer, states, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” We do this by ensuring our weekly liturgy and hymnody is replete with scripture, that our devotional literature is scripturally-oriented and that the Sunday School classes are likewise grounded. “Christian” music from the pop-culture can be notoriously myopic, so if we choose to listen to that we must do so with discernment and it must not replace scripture elsewhere in our lives.
Perhaps the Pentecost grace of the Holy Spirit can best work when we understand that we have not figured Him out.