From the Pastor’s Desk – June 2024

For the last few weeks in worship, we have been exploring God’s mysterious gift of the Holy Spirit. On the last Sunday in May, the Holy Spirit is identified as a member of the God-Head, the Trinity, and I will once again try to explain the unexplainable.

I am reminded that in the early church, Celtic Christians chose, not the dove, but the wild goose as a symbol representing the Holy Spirit. It sounds strange to us, but it has a long tradition in Ireland.

While the Roman Church imagined the Holy Spirit in the form of a peaceful, graceful dove, the Ancient Celts understood the Holy Spirit to be like a wild goose. When you hear of the Spirit descending like a heavenly dove on you, you hear harps and strings softly playing and get a peaceful feeling. The image of the Holy Spirit as dove has become so familiar and domesticated an image we pay little attention.

The image of a wild goose descending upon you is a different matter altogether. A wild goose is one noisy, bothersome bird. I like this image of the Holy Spirit as a wild goose because it jars us out of our complacency. We need such an image to correct our overly safe and overly sweet image of the Spirit. One preacher friend asked, “How many times can you sing ‘There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in This Place’ without your blood sugar reaching diabetic levels?”

When the Spirit comes in the Bible, it never seems to be sweet or safe. God’s Spirit called the prophets to speak to Israel in words that were bold and sometimes dangerous. Ezekiel saw a vision of God’s Spirit blowing through a valley of dry bones and bringing them to life. John the Baptist dressed in camel’s hair and eating wild locusts proclaimed, “I baptize you with water but he who comes after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Paul gave this advice to young Timothy, “For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:6-7).

Neither safe nor tame, the Spirit inspired Paul to proclaim, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28).

It was this wild Goose that Jesus referred to when he preached his first sermon and quoted Isaiah, saying, “For the Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of God’s favor” (Luke 4:18).

The Holy Spirit empowers the church to be the agent of change in the world, a counter-cultural entity. The task of the church is to breathe in the Spirit and be inspired by the Spirit to act on behalf of God. But the church has been waiting to exhale far too long. As the Spirit of God flows into us, it also ought to flow from us in the way we treat one another, the way we speak to one another, in the way we treat others in our community, in the way we live out the new life we receive when we accept Jesus Christ as Lord.