The Weird Time Is About to Happen
The Weird Time Is About to Happen
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17, trans. mine).
Shoes made of dove feathers, water that bang-booms us into an eternal ocean, holy wind that climbs into our bodies, ancient, naked life and fire on the feet of vessels of clay. “The new way of the Spirit” (Rom. 7:6). The Spirit is more freely available than we realize from Jesus, the Baptizer in the Holy Spirit. O, we of little faith!
The Spirit of God is not some out of condition, wheezing crazy man, that cares not one jot for our vagrant, vanquished heart. He is disorientating, visionary, dangerous, illuminating, and brimming with meaning. He walks the lonely backroads with us, preaches to us in the black, and insists we eat his words like bread.
That’s the key in the door.
God isn’t hanging about. He’s banging around in our soul, leading us into places, crossing under lintels, paying the price of entry with his mad story of love’s redemption sacrifice. Gospel stuff. Occupation of property stuff. Wildness has entered inside now.
As we struggle out in the dark, in a culture that cannot be neutered or reasoned with, the old sounds and strong songs emit their warmth and the sweet breath of the Spirit. When the Spirit of God takes over a place, wildness has entered, fat drips off the meat, wine warmed by fire rouses the body and eases cares, and doors are open to whoever wanders by. There is a weight where the Spirit enters a place; we have weight because of him: an anchorage, a residence, and a people we are grateful to sit with.
The Spirit of God is not some out of condition, wheezing crazy man, that cares not one jot for our vagrant, vanquished heart.
It’s a good and true place where God performs tasks we cannot. When assaults from the outside world begin and we are reminded that we are low under the bar of goodness, the church is a place to enter into. The doors are open to disappointed people, to people with bags under their tired and suspicious eyes. For those with Coleridge’s albatross hung round their necks, the Wild Dove is available to create a deterrent to expectations that we are sick of. No more drifting, no more jabby messages, no more flighty little stories to dampen our ardor.
The Spirit of Life says, “Damn the torpedoes!” The weird time is about to happen. Sacred songs from the genesis of our beginnings are sung. Ancient rituals as old as the Israelite prophets are observed. Supplicatory prayers brimming with milk and light. Sermons with no lack of cream and grace separate out our old, dead life and new, Christ life. And we stand up, excited, as the seemingly blank space behind the altar opens and the whole angelic horde floods into the Church. They cannot wait to witness Jesus remake the world.
This is why God is good. He holds the church together, holds us together with all that is going on. A little peace, with gentle hands, scoops up the children. The mother finds her fawn under the dark oaks. The church bell sings loud and clear, “Come, come all that is small and hopeless and sickly. The Spirit is come, don’t sweat it. I have come for my beloved.”
In the church, we are in all sorts of places at the same time. We disintegrate. Jesus in the manger with all the animals as Noah watches God fling open heaven’s gates. Somewhere out at sea with Jonah as the Spirit broods over the abyss. Processing to the wedding of Jacob and Rachel, who has absolutely no idea who he’s marrying, as Jesus gives everyone a drunken thrill at Cana. In the church, the ceremony of the Spirit makes us be in all sorts of places at the same time.
This is the new way of the Spirit. He’s not leaving us. He has points to make, something to address about reality and the meaning of things, and what (and who) is rightfully his. Magnificat stuff:
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant…” (Luke 1:46-48a, trans. mine)
With the Spirit we will get lost in the world. We are on a new track. It’s a strange way, something much older than us, sodden with palm branches. Sometimes it will seem breathless and hallucinatory, but that’s the world blowing smoke in our eyes, accusing us of gobbling up some psychoactive plant. It wants us to see everything through temporary eyes, surviving day to day in grinding boredom, nights crammed with dreaming. But the holy wind blows us ever onward, processing with the one and twenty, or two hundred, or two thousand — with angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven — through the Fenris-cold world to the wedding feast set out for us at the table of the Lord in his holy house.
That’s where the God of mercy dwells, where we who are weakened can drop our walking sticks and dance barefoot under the golden rays of the Sun of Righteousness.
