Someone recently asked me if I would talk some about the Holy Ghost. “We hear a lot about God and Jesus, but not a lot about the Holy Ghost. As we move from Easter toward Pentecost it is a good time to focus on the Holy Spirit.

We refer to the Spirit in several ways: Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, Spirit, and Counselor. All of these refer to one of the three persons in the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Three aspects of the One God. This doctrine is one of the great paradoxes of the Christian faith. This means, it is confusing and hard to understand.

Jesus says in today’s Gospel message that unless he leaves the counselor will not come…”I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. The Gospel story, the story of the people of God does not begin nor end with the physical person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Spirit of God, which was in Jesus, was the same Spirit present before the creation of the world. The Spirit is the breath of God, the breath of all life from God.

The Spirit is our spirit within us, and yet it is also around us, above and below, before and after. The Spirit is what Paul Tillich calls the “ground of all being.” The spirit is the Spirit of all life.

On the other hand, there are other spirits in the world, which have their source in the Spirit of darkness. Karl Barth describes evil, the spirit of darkness as “the not,” the void, a force that draws life toward non-being. I suspect you also have experienced my worst nightmare, the nightmare of falling into darkness. I don’t know about you, but in this nightmare I have never seen the bottom. I fear the bottom, but I am also terrorized by no bottom, by no boundaries to the darkness. In terror I fall endlessly into a vast dark void until the terror is so great I wake up. I suspect that evil and sin stem from this sense of terror and desperation, of grasping at things to prevent the fall, at trying to find someone else to take our place. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit communicates to us: We are not alone in the darkness. We are connected to the Alpha and the Omega who was at the beginning, is with us in the middle, and will be at the end. There is no place we can flee from God’s Spirit.

We hear from the author of I John: "test the spirits to see whether they are from God." One of the early controversies of the Church was whether or not the perfect Spirit of God could have contact with human flesh. Humanity and the natural world was such a wreck, so wretched that it would ruin God. Therefore, some thought, the Spirit of God wasn’t really Jesus; it only used the body as a kind of costume. And therefore the God part of Jesus didn’t really feel human feelings of terror and pain. The God in Jesus didn’t really suffer on the cross, and didn’t really intend to redeem Creation. The task for these Gnostics, as they were called, was to spiritually detach themselves from the physical world and become spirit through gnosis, through knowledge and rational thought.

But the Church decided it was important to affirm, as Judaism had for centuries, that God is intimately involved in Creation and human History. The world was not messed up by an imperfect creation by a lower god, but was created good by the One True God. Jesus didn’t fake being human. He didn’t fake suffering on the cross. He didn’t pretend to fear the terror of the blackness of death.

Jesus was human even as he was also Spirit, the spirit of God, the God who was the Creator of all life. Thus when we hear the admonition to acknowledge that Jesus has come in the flesh, that Jesus is the Way, it is not the kind of close-minded, exclusive claim we might think from listening to our brothers on the far right. The way of Jesus, the point is, is not to escape the world and its suffering, or to ignore it to indulge our own pleasure, but to face it head on with integrity of love.

“The One who is in you,” John says, “is greater than the one who is in the world… Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Jesus shows us the way of love. Not a love that risks nothing because it isn’t really there. The Spirit then was embodied by Jesus in human flesh.

At the same time, the Spirit embodied in Jesus of Nazareth is not limited to his body only, or the life of his body only. The Spirit of love rises with Christ and is found in all those who love as Christ loved. That is, the Spirit of God, the same Spirit who was in Jesus of Nazareth, is found in all those who embody love in the world, in History.

This radical dualism, which separated spirit from flesh too frequently, resulted in the following problems. If the flesh didn’t matter, then one could do with it what one willed. That is, one did not need to worry about personal boundaries or morality. On the other hand, if the flesh of the natural world had no value, or worse could contaminate the spirit, then there was a tendency to avoid and separate oneself from the contaminants. Instead of helping the world and those who suffered in it, one sought escape to more “spiritual” places. Ironically then, such dualism could lead to both rationalism and asceticism, and hedonism. It could lead to both indulgence of the flesh and a separation of earthy things and people.

For instance, since women were thought to be less rational and more of the flesh, male homosexuality was thought to be a more spiritual, less contaminating method of pleasure. Thus when the early church takes a stand against Greek homosexuality, it does so in a desire to confirm that God affirms the process of physical life and procreation. The idea that in the process of creation and evolution of the physical form one may develop a propensity for homosexuality was not a part of ancient thinking. From the Church’s point of view a stand against homosexuality was a stand against an exclusive understanding of spirituality that sought to separate itself from women and the earthy world of procreation. It was the result of an exclusive philosophy not an inclusive one.

We see residue of such dualistic philosophy today, both within the church and in the world at large. It is ironic that a radical dualism that was rejected by early Christianity shows up in the Millennial thought of today’s Christians. We often hear that since the rapture is about to happen there is no need to worry about this world. Nuclear war, destruction of the environment, concern for the balance of God’s creation is not important, because it is all doomed for destruction anyway, and Christians will be whisked away up to heaven. As long as they believe in Jesus and the Bible, and don’t do those individual sins Paul warns against they are fine. There is no use of working for justice, or trying to prevent war and deterioration of the environment. In fact they almost look forward to earth’s destruction, because it affirms their belief that the end is near. Christians can eat what they want, produce what they want, drive the most gas guzzling car they want, fight the wars that give them a standard of living that separates them form the rest of the world, because their body and the world are doomed anyway.

In Secular Western culture we also see residue of this ancient heresy of radical dualism. Nature is harsh and dirty, thus the most virtuous are those who have the means to withdraw and perfect themselves. Separate the old and the disabled, find fulfillment in retreat to the perfect and comfortable. Separate oneself in the ivory towers of academia, fix your imperfect, aging body with Plastic surgery, wear clothes once and throw them out as the fashion changes, private transportation, vacations to controlled paradise, cleaned and packaged food.

Work that requires contact with the earth and filth is given to the lower class, to people we call illegal, more animal-like. Our only contact with them is when they come into help erase the signs of our own flesh, they slip into our rooms while we are gone to change the sheets and clean the toilet, they grow and pick our vegetables and fruit, they butcher our chickens and pack them in plastic, or perhaps, they even cook and serve.

We might come even closer to understanding the significance of this Christian stand for a connection between God and Creation, Spirit and lowly human flesh when we learn that most of the early Christians are lower class, the resident aliens, the stingers in a strange land. Thus the great popularity across cultures from Judaism to Greco-Romans. No matter how low you get, no matter how dirty, no matter how sick, no matter how despised, bloody or beaten or bruised, the Spirit of the one true God is in you. Born of woman, from blood and water, you are a child of God.

“You knit me together in my mothers womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? . . If I say, surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”

Thus we see the most amazing things from this Jesus, the spirit of God embodied in human form: the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords. He stoops down and washes feet. A hemorrhaging woman touches him, and instead of being contaminated by her, she is healed by him. Tortured, crucified, dead and buried, yet he rises again.

We see this same Spirit, the Holy Spirit in Gandhi, who broke the taboo of crossing class to do the work of the untouchables by cleaning latrines; and in Mother Teresa, holding a dying man, lying in his own filth. This is where you find the Holy Spirit.

We do not have to flee from the flesh of human History into the Spirit of eternity, but we find the Spirit and eternity through living with faith and love amidst mortal life and History.

You can see from this perspective why the Church has placed such an importance on the incarnation and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. In essence it means, all of creation is encompassed in the love of God, all of Creation is redeemed. Nothing is left behind. As Paul says, the whole creation waits with eager anticipation for the sons of God to be revealed… Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Often when you ask people where they have had a spiritual experience they will say, “On a High Sierra Mountain top,” “In a beautiful springtime meadow,” “On a Pristine white sand beach,” “Listening to beautiful music,” “meditating at a serene retreat,” “In the intuition of a Mathematical formula,” or “Making beautiful love.” And surely this is true. The Spirit of God is great artist, and is found where life is sustained and enhanced. Yet the Holy Spirit is not only found there, but also where all that jeopardizes life and its fulfillment is resisted and brought under judgment.