The Spirit's Nomadic Word

DO WE KNOW what we even mean when we say “God”? In the wake of the crucifixion, with our theological grammar shattered on Golgotha—where, in Jesus, God died—the events of Easter have us fumbling for new words.

To speak of our faith involves piecing together syllables into phrases that venture to say the unimaginable. The resurrection shocks us out of familiar patterns of thinking about God—an unsettling of our minds but also our lives. That is what we see on Pentecost: a bewilderment. People lose control of their tongues. The Spirit dispossesses the leaders of their power over communication. God reorders their movement with the invitation of the gospel. Pentecost morning concludes with an evening of food and fellowship, “the breaking of bread and prayers,” communion among strangers (Acts 2:42).

The Holy Spirit instigates a reformation of our communities as part of how we articulate the Word of God. “We need to find a new language,” writes Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether in Sexism and God-Talk, “that cannot be as easily co-opted by the systems of domination.” Habits of life accompany habits of speech. The events of Pentecost reveal a Spirit who refuses to honor our hierarchies of authority, of who represents God. From this primal episode in Acts, the church becomes a movement that transgresses the borders between insider and outsider, neighbor and foreigner, friend and stranger.

You never know who might surprise you with the truth of God. Anyone can “speak as the Spirit gives them utterance” (Acts 2:4, KJV).

Unruly Vines

“I AM THE vine, you are the branches,” Jesus tells his disciples in John’s gospel (15:5). The vines behind my house creep along a fence, then trespass into my neighbor’s yard to crawl onto the roof of a toolshed and jump into the tree canopy. There’s a wildness to vines, which Jesus offers as a metaphor for his movement in the world.

The twists and turns of Christ’s vine lead Philip on “a wilderness road” (Acts 8:26). He travels without a plan—until the Spirit interrupts with a command: “Go over to this chariot” (verse 29). There Philip finds an Ethiopian eunuch—a foreigner with a queer sexuality—and the two engage in biblical interpretation, which leads to the Ethiopian’s request to join the people of God. “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” he asks (verse 36).

Like a shoot of a vine dangling at the trellis’ edge, Philip wonders if this baptism will reach outside the divine plan for the church. On the one hand, scriptures forbid eunuchs from entering the assembly of God’s people (Deuteronomy 23:1). On the other hand, scriptures welcome eunuchs into God’s house (Isaiah 56:4-5). To include or to exclude—either way, Philip could use the Bible to justify his decision. What does he do? Philip chooses the wild love of Jesus. If the branch bears fruit, then the church will know that this experiment in faithfulness is part of the true vine.

May 9

God’s Friends

“I DO NOT call you servants any longer,” Jesus tells his disciples, “but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). Their relationship status with Jesus has changed. His announcement confounds their religious imaginations and theologies of power. Jesus refuses to be a master. He will leave behind a community of friends, not of slaves.

Human creatures are not enslaved to Christ by fear. “I think that modern atheism since Nietzsche is a rejection of the idea that the deepest truth about [humankind] is that we are slaves,” Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe preached in a Good Friday sermon. “For the Christian tradition, the deepest truth about people is that they are loved.” Jesus’ friendship abolishes any trace of a master-slave dynamic at play with God and us. “God loves us because we are in Christ and share his Spirit,” McCabe continued. “We have been taken up to share in the life of love between equals which is the Godhead.”

Jesus reveals the noncoercive love that is the life of God—the One who desires our companionship: without hierarchy, without imposition, without dominance. Christ has made us friends of God. “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). He has chosen us to love the world as he does.

May 16

Our Lovesick God

BY THE TIME we get to this Last Supper scene in John 17, Jesus has been talking for four chapters. Whenever he gets to what feels like a good conclusion to his point, he rambles on, sometimes repeating himself word for word.

As I read these chapters, an episode from the 1990s TV series Friends flashed into my mind. Ross (played by David Schwimmer) wanders around the living room while on the phone with his girlfriend, Julie (played by Lauren Tom), then plops on the couch next to Rachel (played by Jennifer Aniston), who rolls her eyes. “Okay, you hang up. No, you hang up, no you, you, you, you,” Ross says to Julie over the phone. “Okay, I’ll hang up at the count of three—one, two, three ... You’re right, I didn’t hang up! You hang up, no you.” Finally, Rachel, beyond annoyed, snatches the phone and ends the call. Shocked, Ross pouts.

In John’s gospel, Jesus just can’t say goodbye. He knows his time with his beloveds will soon end but he won’t let them go. His words fill the air because Jesus can’t bear the looming emptiness, the agony of separation. He pleads to God for them, for their safety, for their enduring companionship even though he knows everything will change at dawn. He spirals into madness at the thought of a future without them. In John’s gospel, Jesus’ story is one of a lovesick God. The incarnation is a doctrine about a God who fell in love with the world.

May 23

Migratory Spirit

GOD'S PRESENCE SURPRISED Jesus’ friends with a rushing wind, alighting on them with the fires of heaven and inspiring them to speak in languages they did not know. The multitudes of visitors to Jerusalem heard them in the streets. “At this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:6). The people are “amazed and astonished” (verse 7), “amazed and perplexed” (verse 12) at the sounds of their homeland now in this foreign city.

I remember when a staff person at a Christian youth camp made fun of another Latino kid and me as we played together and spoke Spanglish. “I bet you two can’t even do math in American,” he chided. “You best be speaking English here.” The absurdity confounded me at the time, as if numerals and mathematical rules differed in Spanish and English. But the racism was clear. The Christian counselor’s scolding taught me that to speak in Spanish in the U.S. has been racialized as a refusal of U.S. Euro-nationalist culture.

At Pentecost, God does not impose a common language. Instead, God affirms human differentiation as holy: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” (verse 17). The book of Acts tracks the migration of the Holy Spirit as the gospel of Jesus Christ wanders through peoples and across lands, flowing from one body to another—a nomadic gospel that trespasses borders and cultures.

May 30

The Body’s Sigh

WHEN I THINK about the Trinity, my thoughts turn to the heavens—to an unimaginable God, beyond my comprehension. The apostle Paul, however, begins much closer: in our groaning. “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). The location of the trinitarian life of God’s self is the human being at prayer—the Trinity inside of us, in our body’s sighs, our wordless prayers. “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” Paul theologizes, “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (verses 15-16).

God’s Spirit befriends our spirit. The inner life of God dwells within our interior life. In prayer, in our groaning, we become a home for all three persons of the Trinity. God lives with us, in us, not as some outside power, not as a cosmic clockmaker, not like royalty on a throne in heaven. Instead, Paul uses the language of pregnancy to describe God in us—all of us “groaning in labor pains” (verses 22-23).

We are like Mary, God born in our lives, the gospel in our flesh. “We are all meant to be mothers of God,” Meister Eckhart preached in the 14th century, “the Son of God begotten in us.” Each of us undergoes the travail of the Holy Spirit, awaiting Christ’s birth in our lives.

The presence of the Trinity in us starts with a sigh, the wordless longing for redemption.