24 May 2026

The Bible, the Spirit, and Us

Acts 2:1-7, 12-21

We read the story of Pentecost now, from Acts chapter 2, verses 1-7 and 12-21.

2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?

***

12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ 13But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’

14But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: ‘Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
17 “In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
   and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
   and your old men shall dream dreams.
18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
   in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
     and they shall prophesy.
19 And I will show portents in the heaven above
   and signs on the earth below,
     blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness
   and the moon to blood,
     before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

We don’t really know what to do with the Holy Spirit, do we? We have sort of a picture of God the Father, and we have a somewhat clearer picture of Jesus the Son, but then there’s that third member of the Trinity, and we don’t have any idea what to think about her. We can’t even explain what she does. I mean, the Gospel of John says that the Spirit “convicts us of sin and righteousness and judgment,” but does that mean that the Spirit is, like, our conscience? Or again, John speaks of the Spirit as a “Comforter.” So the Spirit something that makes us feel good? Paul says that the Spirit gives us gifts for service. So the Spirit is our talents? It all feels sort of artificial, as if we’re plastering the Spirit’s name on some pretty normal earthly stuff. The Holy Spirit feels kind of like the fifth wheel of the Trinity: there, but we aren’t sure why. It wasn’t always like that, though. The New Testament takes the Holy Spirit a whole lot more seriously than we do, and so did the early church and the medieval church. There’s a lot in medieval theology and religious art about the Holy Spirit. So what happened?

One of the things that happened was the Scientific Revolution. Remember, before the Age of Reason, “spirit” was an everyday word. People lives with the assumption that they were surrounded by spirits, both good and malevolent. Nearly everything that happened was attributed at some level to the work of spirits. In that Enchanted World, the idea that God had sent his Spirit to be among us was not a puzzle to work out; it was a relief. Whew! We’ve got a Spirit on our side! But then science began chipping away at that enchanted worldview. Things that everyone used to just know were the work of spirits became things that were caused by, for instance, germs. It took a while for this new idea to take, mind you – if you think about it, the idea that disease is caused by invisible bugs doesn’t sound any better than the “invisible spirit” theory – but we got there. Today, we live with the default assumption that everything that happens has some natural cause, and so talking about a Holy Spirit that is all around us feels weirdly superstitious. Especially if we’re reading the King James Bible, and it’s the “Holy Ghost.” So that’s one reason that we don’t talk that much about the Holy Spirit.

But there’s another one, too: the Protestant Reformation. One of the things that Martin Luther accomplished in his struggle against the Roman Church was to establish the supremacy of scripture. The authority of the Church was secondary. Our only true authority was the Holy Bible: Sola Scriptura. But if the Bible is our sole religious authority, what does that leave for the Holy Spirit to do? Now we can say, as Luther surely would have done, that inspiration of the Bible was the work of the Holy Spirit. So the Spirit isn’t irrelevant; it’s just that it can feel as if the Spirit is done. Now that we have God’s inspiration in front of us in black-and-white, we might feel that we no longer need anything else. In effect, we Protestants have replaced the dependence on the Spirit with a dependence on one of the Spirit’s works. As a result, for most of us at least, the Holy Spirit has been tucked away in the back of the closet where we keep our Christmas and Easter decorations, to be dragged out and uncomfortably acknowledged one day a year, on Pentecost. 

In fairness, I should add that Catholics have not fallen into this particular trap. In fact, not every Protestant has gone down that road. There are still two groups of Protestant Christians who have not given up on the Holy Spirit, who still regard her as a source of inspiration apart from, or even above, that of scripture. One of these groups, of course, is the Pentecostals, who believe that the Spirit is at work today in the same way that she worked at Pentecost – in power and mighty works – still speaking beyond the words of the Bible. And the other group, a very different group, is the Quakers: who, when they gather for worship, sit in silence, waiting for the Spirit to speak through each believer’s inner light. These two groups have refused to relegate the Holy Spirit to a secondary status, but most of Protestant Christianity has consciously or unconsciously adopted the view that all we need now is the book. And here’s an interesting coincidence: Pentecostals and Quakers, as different as they are on the surface, were both among the first to elevate women to official positions of leadership in the church. Apparently listening to an authority beyond scripture makes a difference.

Now let’s go back to the Day of Pentecost itself. I’ve just implied that the witness of scripture is in a way opposed to the witness of the Spirit, that churches choose to focus on one or the other. But that’s a false dichotomy. As I said, scripture is one of the works of the Spirit, so how could they be antithetical? Look at what happened on the Day of Pentecost. Peter and the other Apostles were filled with the Spirit and with power, driving them out to proclaim Christ to the crowds miraculously. And Peter begins his great speech … by quoting scripture, from the prophet Joel. We didn’t read the whole of Peter’s sermon, mostly because it’s really long, but you can’t go more than four verses before you come to another quotation from the Hebrew Bible. To put it simply, the Spirit filled the Apostles and drove them to scripture. But she did more than just send them to the Bible, she showed them meanings there that they had never seen before. The passages that Peter quoted to his faithful Jewish listeners were not generally understood to refer to the Messiah, but in the Spirit’s hands that day, they became a powerful description of a different kind of Messiah, one who didn’t just conquer the enemies of Israel, but one who had conquered the enemy of all humanity: Death itself. The Spirit not only recalled the ancient words of scripture; she also cracked them open to show that there was yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s Word.

We’re in the middle of a sermon series on the Bible, talking about how to read it faithfully and consistently. Today, on Pentecost, I add something new. Reading scripture as intended means reading it in dialogue with the Holy Spirit. This inspired book is one of the places where the Spirit speaks to us, and to read it faithfully, expecting to receive some insight from the Spirit, is an act of worship in which the latent inspiration of words on a page becomes the Word of God within us. We read to learn about God, yes, but in another sense the Bible reads us, because through scripture the Spirit can reveal to us something about ourselves. 

I’ve told you that I started my daily Bible reading time some 45 years ago. When I first started, I was a studious college student, and I made copious notes in the margins of books. Well, one of the curious things that has happened repeatedly since then is that I have come back to one of the Bibles that I read at that time and found a long note in the margin describing some deep insight that I had just received in that day’s reading. And then I look the text itself, and I have no clue where that particular insight came from. As far as I can see, it has no connection to the actual words of the scripture passage that I had underlined. The Spirit had used the words of scripture to speak to me, but she said more than was actually there. When we open ourselves at the same time that we open the Bible, the Spirit will find a way to speak to us. The Spirit of God is bigger than the Bible and is perfectly capable of speaking beyond our understanding of the book. She did it at Pentecost, and she can do it for us.

Which takes us back to the lectio divina exercise we did at the start of today’s service, the ancient practice of the church from before the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, where we open the words of scripture, and allow them to read us and to guide our prayers. The Holy Spirit who shook the world at Pentecost has not gone away. She is very near to those who remember how to listen, and there is nowhere that she speaks more often than in this book that we call the Holy Bible.