Romans 8:12-17; 26-27
12 Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. 13 For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. 15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
A few weeks ago I preached on the baptism of Jesus, and I really wanted to end that sermon on a teaching that I feel is often ignored in the Mennonite Church when we talk about baptism. I mentioned the proclamation from heaven declaring Jesus, and us, as beloved sons and daughters of God. I think that is absolutely true, you are God’s sons and daughters. You are loved. But a couple people pointed out to me that I jumped right over another aspect of Jesus’s baptism. Look again at this pronouncement from Luke’s gospel, chapter 3, verse 22, “And the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’”
I went right for the beloved-ness, but skipped over the Holy Spirit altogether. This is even more embarrassing when I think of what John says just before Jesus’s baptism in verse 16: “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
The baptism of Jesus is bookended with teaching on the Holy Spirit, but I ignored it. No, not intentionally, but I didn’t say anything about this important teaching. I won’t make that mistake again, especially as we can see in today’s scripture that our beloved-ness and the Holy Spirit are intricately connected. Paul writes, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”
Today, I want to look at a little Mennonite Pneumatology. Pneumatology is just a fancy way of describing the study of the Holy Spirit, the Hagias Pneuma in Greek. Our Mennonite theology tends to focus on Jesus, and I don’t apologize for that! But we, I, could do a lot better job of talking about the role of the Holy Spirit. What I want to do today is look at some Mennonite history, ask why Mennonites have shied away from pneumatology, and then do what can be described as a bit of a survey of biblical references to the Holy Spirit and look at how these references can help shape our understanding of what we are called to as Christians in the 21st century.
The first thing that I want to mention is that even though many modern Mennonites don’t emphasize the work of the Holy Spirit as much as the other persons of the Trinity, that hasn’t always been the case. The first Anabaptists saw their movement within the Protestant Reformation as a Spirit-led initiative. It was the Spirit that called them to be rebaptized, and it was the Spirit who empowered them to endure the persecution of the other denominations. Many Anabaptists understood John the Baptist’s reference to Baptism by Fire as a reference to the persecution of the church, where thousands were martyred in a period of about one hundred years, many by burning at the stake.
But one of the most amazing things to me is the way the early Anabaptists understood the Holy Spirit as their guide in interpreting the Scriptures. Like the Jerusalem Council from Acts 15, the Anabaptists called upon the Holy Spirit to help them understand the timeless message of the text. In Acts 15 the Council writes, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us,” as if the Holy Spirit was right there with them, guiding these simple fishermen and tentmakers as they discerned the future of the church. Likewise, the Anabaptists understood the Spirit as their guide, even though many of them had no formal training. Indeed, there were Anabaptists like Conrad Grebel and Menno Simons who had formal, religious training. But when most Anabaptists were meeting in caves and homes to avoid persecution, they relied upon leaders, many of whom couldn’t read, to lead their churches.
Our history is a Spirit-led one, so what happened? I can only speak from my observations here, and have no study to back up my hypothesis. I would start with Mennonite humility and simple dress. We have historically dressed in cape dresses and plain coats, worn simple hairdos and mustache-less beards. We have passages like Luke 14:11, “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” And we all know how to misquote Proverbs 16, Pride cometh before the fall. (That’s not what it says, but it works.) Though perhaps in a different way, Mennonites still consider a humility and simplicity virtues.
Then comes the early 20th-century charismatic movement. People were rolling on the floor, handling snakes, drinking poison, speaking in tongues, and being slayed in the Spirit. Surely this ecstatic style seemed so out of sync with traditional Mennonite humility. For some Mennonites, that was a good thing, and many charismatic Mennonite churches and even denominations were formed. Others forced the pendulum to swing too far back the other way and we just didn’t talk about the Holy Spirit, at least not in the same way as the charismatic churches did.
Furthermore, unfortunately, many saw the Charismatic movement as an opportunity to make money. People went on the road, calling their selves “faith healers.” With the rise of television came the televangelist. Absolutely, there are some people doing wonderful things for the Kingdom of God by using various mediums of communication. But when the one’s doing the most healing and the most slaying in the spirit are also driving the fanciest cars, living in the biggest houses, and flying in their own private jets, I get suspicious. In fact, I get a little angry because these are people claiming to follow the one who said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.
That is my best guess as to why modern Mennonites don’t focus a lot on the Holy Spirit, and I think it is time for a change. I believe that the Holy Spirit is alive and active among and within us. I believe in the gifts of the Spirit, and I believe that some do have the gift of healing, or prophesy, or any of the gifts listed in the Bible. My advice to you is simply to pass on a word I heard from a pastor on this very subject. He said to always be open, but cautious.
Let’s move to our biblical survey. We simply cannot look at every passage about the Holy Spirit in our time this morning, so we will hit a few I find helpful.
My first question for you is when did God create the Holy Spirit? Is this something that God decided would be helpful at Jesus’s baptism and then split into three separate entities? No, we find references to the Holy Spirit all the way back in Genesis. In fact, the Holy Spirit is the first part of the Trinity mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, appearing in Genesis 1:2, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
The Hebrew Bible does not provide a clear understanding of the Holy Spirit and tends to depict the Spirit as a part of God, which doesn’t contradict our trinitarian understanding of the Spirit. Reading this passage reminds me of John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” According to these two passages, there never was a time when God did not exist as three-in-one.
Let’s move on. The book of Isaiah tells the story of the Babylonian Exile and then the return of the people to the promised land. Isaiah was a prophet who received messages from God which he conveyed to the people. In Isaiah 61:1-2a we read this: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
If that sounds familiar, it is the text that Jesus used for his first recorded sermon in Luke 4. In both cases, the Spirit is a messenger between God and the person through whom God wishes to speak. The Spirit is the communicator. And this goes both ways. Not only does the Spirit tell us what God wants us to hear, the Spirit tells God what we need, even when we don’t have the words to say. As our text for this morning says, when we don’t even know what we ought to pray, the Spirit intercedes with groans that even we can’t understand.
The Spirit knows us better than we know ourselves.
I mentioned the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus at his baptism. I think that was an act of equipping. Many times the giving of the Holy Spirit is about God providing people with the ability to do the ministry to which they have been called.
One of the best-known stories of the Holy Spirit also is about equipping. I’m speaking specifically of the events of Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost. The disciples are gathered together when they hear a loud wind blowing through town. Let’s pick up in verse 3-4, “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”
My interpretation of this event is that the gifting of the Holy Spirit and the disciples speaking in tongues was all about spreading the news of Jesus to people of every nation, ethnicity, and language. When we find lists of the spiritual gifts in places like 1 Corinthians 12, it is almost always God gifting people to do some kind of ministry or to live out the call of Christians.
I like what Pastor Greg Boyd writes in his book, Seeing is Believing, “The main work of the Holy Spirit, then, is not to supplement what the Son did but to apply what the Son did to the lives of God’s people. He glorifies Christ by revealing him to his children (Jn 16;14). He does not speak of himself (Jn 16:13) but rather causes people to behold the glory of the Lord in the face of Jesus Christ, thereby transforming them into this glory.”
What about the whole idea of speaking in tongues? I don’t think that I have any kind of exhaustive list of what the Spirit can do, and I do believe that the ecstatic, unintelligible speaking in tongues that we see in some Christian traditions is a manifestation of the Spirit. What I want to push back on is any form of Christianity that says that speaking in tongues is the sign that someone has the Holy Spirit. First of all, I think that most of the references made to speaking in tongues in the New Testament is about super naturally speaking other languages to spread the Gospel, and not some personal prayer language between you and God. When people make this the sign, the sine qua non, keep in mind that Paul faced people with a similar perspective. And Paul often tried to downplay this gift. You will notice that when Paul lists the gifts of the Spirit, speaking in tongues is always last or near last. And in 1 Corinthians 14:18-19 he writes, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.”
The point throughout Paul’s work seems to be that speaking in tongues is no more important, no more valuable, and no more a sign of the Spirit’s presence in a person than any of the other spiritual gifts. This isn’t a contest. I would say that speaking in tongues was never intended to be evidence of the Spirit. Do you know what is evidence? Love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. We call those the “fruit of the Spirit.” When you are living in the Spirit, you will bear these fruit.
I want to address one last passage in our biblical survey this morning. I’ve looked at this before, but it needs our attention again today. I would file this aspect of the Spirit under the category of “empowering.” In 1 Corinthians 12:3b, before he gets into a list of Spiritual gifts, Paul writes, “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus is Lord! Looks like I’m filled with the Holy Spirit. No, this isn’t just about uttering the words. This is about saying it and meaning it, even when you face negative consequences. To say that Jesus is Lord is to simultaneously say that Caesar is not. When Jesus is Lord, your job cannot be Lord, your boss cannot be Lord, your president or country cannot be Lord. Paul proclaimed “Jesus is Lord,” and it cost him. He was imprisoned, beaten, and ultimately put to death for his faith.
Our Anabaptist forebearers proclaimed, “Jesus is Lord,” and many of them were burned at the stake, drown in the river, or beheaded.
When Martin Luther King Junior stood up and proclaimed that all men were created equal, when the government said that they were not, Dr. King was saying that Jesus is Lord.
When Orie Miller, founder of Mennonite Central Committee, stood before the president of the United States to ask for exemption from military service for conscientious objectors, Orie Miller was proclaiming “Jesus is Lord.”
And though we don’t have a clear pneumatology in the Old Testament, I believe it was the Holy Spirit that empowered Moses when he told Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” I believe it was the Holy Spirit who strengthened Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and Daniel, preventing them from bowing down and worshipping idols.
As NT Wright says, it is the Holy Spirit who empowers us to speak up when the world does not look like the Kingdom of God. It is the Holy Spirit who empowers us to speak even to those in positions of power. Nobody can say that Jesus Christ is Lord, but by the Holy Spirit.
Now please note that none of these men were perfect. They all had their share of problems. But God’s Spirit still worked through them, and God’s Spirit can work through a flawed person like you and me.
The Spirit of the living God serves as a communicator, and equipper, and an empower-er. And I’m sure a whole lot of other things as well. It is my hope that we can continue to develop a more robust Mennonite pneumatology that will help us as we seek to make God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
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