As we celebrated the Lord’s Baptism last week, we spent some time thinking about what baptism is for all of us and what it means for our lives as Christians. We noticed in Luke’s Gospel, as well as in the Book of Acts, that baptism is about “water and fire” – according to the terms chosen by John the Baptist:
– We speak of a baptism of “water” to refer to the fact that Baptism is about forgiveness of sins, being adopted as God’s children, being accepted in God’s family.
– We speak of a baptism of “fire” to refer to the fact that baptism is also about being sent on a mission in receiving the Holy Spirit.
As we inquired about the Holy Spirit, we noticed that the Holy Spirit is presented by Luke (both in the Gospel and in Acts) as “power” and Luke insists on the fact that those who received the Holy Spirit are empowered. The question was then for us: “What kind of power is the Holy Spirit?”
Well, if you have had a chance to read Chapter 8 in the Book of Acts, you’ll remember the story of Simon who, mesmerized by the deeds of the Apostles, wanted to give them money in exchange of the Holy Spirit. Not surprisingly, Simon was harshly rebuked by Peter, and the story makes it quite clear that the Holy Spirit is a gift for the Community of believers and it cannot be used for one’s personal ambitions. Simon’s naivety can make us smile of course: How can one think about “buying” the Holy Spirit? And yet, we have to notice that we are still often confused about what it means to receive the Spirit – especially maybe in our time and place where so many people claim to be spiritual or at least profess an interest in spirituality. Luckily for us, “what it means to be spiritual” is exactly the question Paul tackles in the First Letter to the Corinthians, a Letter that we will read from a lot during this season of the Epiphany. We jump right in in our passage today as Paul announces to the church in Corinth:
“Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed”, and Paul goes on explaining what genuine spirituality is, and this what I also invite us to think about today and in the coming weeks.
I would like to make it clear that I don’t pretend to explain what spirituality is in general, it’s not about judging or even evaluating other denominations or other faiths by applying them our Christian criteria. What I think is important for us to understand is what kind of spirituality is Christian spirituality according to Paul, what are the manifestations of the Spirit in our lives and what it means to be a spiritual person.
– According to Paul, the first and most important sign that reveals a spiritual person is that they confess that “Jesus is Lord”. This seems evident but yet it isn’t. In the Corinthian church, as well as for many people today, Jesus was seen as a wise person, or a prophet but a lot of people weren’t convinced about Jesus’s divinity. And yet, the basic Creed of Christian faith, now and then, is to believe that Jesus is Lord. For the Christians at the time who had a Jewish background, “Lord” wasn’t a title, it didn’t mean that Jesus had an important position: Lord is “Adonai”, the word Jewish people use to avoid to pronounce YHWH, the name of God. Professing that Jesus is Lord means to profess that Jesus is God, he is unique and above all, and he is the one who has ultimate authority. For the Corinthians it meant that they could not continue to follow other gods or to believe that the Roman emperors were gods. For them and for us, it also means that Jesus does not bring just a teaching, or a wisdom, or even a prophecy.
Being a spiritual person means that we believe that Jesus is Lord. According to Paul, this is a requirement to be a Christian, but this is also a promise: if we accept the Holy Spirit in our lives, we will understand better and better who Jesus is and our faith in him will grow.
– The second thing we need to know is that according to Paul there are a lot of ways of being a spiritual person. Our response to the revelation of the Holy Spirit that “Jesus is Lord”, leads us to conform our lives to Jesus’s teaching and example by “a variety of services” and “a variety of activities”, and what Paul stresses above all else is that those services and activities are targeted towards the common good.
In this, Paul is completely in line with the Book of Acts: the Spirit is power and empowers us, but as Simon learned the hard way, the Spirit does not empower us to fulfill our selfish needs and ambitions, the Spirit empowers us so we can serve others. It is, I think, worth pausing a little bit on that:
Why do people want to be more spiritual? There are quantities of reasons: Sometimes it’s because they are curious, they want something new, they want to experience emotional highs, or on the other end, people are interested in spirituality because they want to find certainty, they want to find peace and serenity. There is some of that of course in Christian spirituality, but according to the authors of the New Testament, Christian spirituality is first a spirituality of service: the aim of our spirituality is to help each other, to build up the community and each other.
Now to serve each other, people receive a “variety of gifts” from the Holy Spirit. Paul names a few: Utterance of wisdom, utterance of knowledge, gifts of healing and working of miracles, the gift of discernment, and he also names the gift of speaking in tongues. We don’t hear about that a lot in our churches but in the Corinthian church, people used to think that the most spiritual thing was the ability to speak in tongues, and that everybody who wanted to become a spiritual person needed to be able to do so! Paul wants to prove them wrong by showing them all the other ways people were called to serve God and their neighbors.
It can be worth it to pause a little bit on that too: What about us? Do we think that our spirituality is the only way of being spiritual, or maybe, on the other way around, we think that because we don’t have that one thing we cannot be a spiritual person? Paul invites us to think about what we can bring to the Community that is unique, and to recognize other Christians’ gifts. The Holy Spirit is certainly manifested in wisdom and speech, but also, and as important, in all sorts of acts of welcome, compassion and justice.
We will talk more about that next week as we continue to dive in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. But before we conclude for today, I would like us to have a quick look at the Gospel to understand another way of recognizing the presence of the Spirit in the midst of all the different ways the Spirit is manifested. Today, we’re in the beginning of John’s Gospel, right after Jesus’s baptism. The disciples have just encountered Jesus and they realize there is something very special about him. They have witnessed Jesus’s baptism and how the Holy Spirit has descended on him. And John takes a very interesting angle on what follows this baptism: Instead of insisting on the repentance, by sending Jesus off into the wilderness (as we see happening in the three other Gospels), in John’s Gospel Jesus heads out to a wedding party and Jesus actually turns the water of purification into wine for all the people to drink. This is the first sign he gives about his divinity, the work of the Spirit in him! Now if you have the beginning of the book of Acts in mind, maybe you’ll remember also that when the people see the Apostles filled with the Holy Spirit, they wonder if they have been drinking (Acts 2). The symbolism here is quite simple: like good wine, the Holy Spirit brings joy to the people. A certain sign that the Spirit is working in us is that we experience joy and that we communicate this joy to others. A spiritual person, whatever their abilities are, is a person full of joy – not of course because they have been drinking, but because they know God intimately.