ACTS 2:1-11

PSALM 104:25-37

1 CORINTHIANS 12:4-13

JOHN 20:19-23

 

Sermon – 5/19/02

 

 

      I really enjoy “Star Wars”.  No, I haven’t seen the new movie yet – if I had a clone, I could have had the clone stand in line for tickets.  But I will see it, and eventually buy the video to add to all the other “Star Wars” videos I own.  It’s imaginative, it’s action-packed, it’s fun.  There’s just one thing that bothers me – that is, besides Jar-Jar Binks.

 

      What bothers me is this: there are tons of people who know about “The Force”, the invisible source of extraordinary power in the “Star Wars” movies, who don’t know about The Holy Spirit – and to whom some people try to explain the Holy Spirit by saying “It’s kinda like ‘The Force.’”

 

      Uh, no, not really.

 

      It’s very interesting to me that this latest “Star Wars” movie opened just before Pentecost, which is today, the day we remember the coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ followers and celebrate the awesome power of the Holy Spirit in the world today.

 

      So I’d like to do a little “compare and contrast” between “The Force” and the Holy Spirit.  Those of you who have escaped seeing any of the “Star Wars” movies and plan to continue escaping seeing them no matter how many more decades they continue, I ask you just to listen to the side of my invisible newsprint pad which describes the Holy Spirit.

 

      So.  According to the movies, “The Force” can enable people to do extraordinary things, including giving them great courage, insight, concentration and skill.  According to the Bible, 2,000 years of Christian history and contemporary real-life experience, the Holy Spirit can enable people to do extraordinary things, including giving them great courage, insight, concentration and skill.  I

 

 

 

 

don’t recall the Holy Spirit ever empowering someone to levitate a spacecraft – but some say the Holy Spirit empowered Joan of Arc, who “levitated” France, which is harder.

 

      According to the movies, “The Force” is sometimes “dissed” and/or misunderstood.  The Holy Spirit is sometimes “dissed” or misunderstood.

 

      According to the movies, “The Force” is everywhere.  The Holy Spirit is everywhere.

 

      So much for similarities.  “The Force” is a non-personal energy field, an “it”.  “The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, God at work in the world and in the church even now”, as the Catechism says (p. 852 in the Book of Common Prayer).  Please use “he” or “she” to refer to The Holy Spirit, not “it”.

 

      “The Force” has a “good side” and a “dark side”, or evil side.  The Holy Spirit has only a good side.  What the Baptismal Covenant calls “Spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God” are not of the Spirit at all.

 

      This is important.  When I was serving as a chaplain at a psychiatric hospital, a schizophrenic patient asked me, “How can I know if the voices I hear are from God or not?”  I replied “One thing I can say for sure, if the voices you hear tell you to hurt yourself or someone else, they are not from God.”  “O.K.”, he said, “I can remember that.”

 

      “The Force” helps people to conquer or manipulate others.  The Holy Spirit helps to bring people together in peace and mutual understanding so as to serve each other and God.

 

      “The Force” is something a person with training and self-discipline can learn to use to serve his or her own will.  The Holy Spirit is someone a person with faith, training and humility can learn to listen to and submit his or her will to, to the glory of God and the well being of others.

 

     

 

Those who are judged to be “strong in ‘The Force’” are discovered ideally as young children and taken apart to receiving elite training, like Soviet or Romanian gymnasts used to be.  On the other hand, people can be guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit at any age and in any condition of physical or mental ability or disability.

 

“The Force” by itself cares for individual peoples’ well being as much as, say, gravity does.  The Holy Spirit cares awesomely for the well-being of each and every one of us, for all six billion people on Earth, and for all the inhabitants of this and any other universes, even galaxies long, long ago and far, far away.

 

“The Force” is, ultimately, a tool.  The Holy Spirit is, ultimately, our general.

 

And most important, “The Force” is MAKE-BELIEVE.  The Holy Spirit is REAL.

 

Sadly, though, Christians have not fully recognized or realized our own spiritual potentials when guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit – and have not spread the Good News of the Spirit’s gifts to others who are starving for spiritual food.  Some in England are so desperate for something to believe in that a recent poll asking people their faith found a statistically meaningful number responded “Jedi Knight”!

 

Fantasy is fun, but when fantasy substitutes for faith, it is a terrible tragedy.  This means some people, when it comes to a crisis in their lives, feel all they have to rely on through thick and thin is – an image on videotape.  That’s it.

 

Thank God, God is real.

 

Thank God, when shipyard workers in Gdansk, Poland went on strike in 1980 and took on their Communist regime, and ultimately, the Soviet Empire, they were not counting on Jedi Knights to lead them and guide them.

 

They were counting on God.

 

In an incredible peaceful revolution, the Berlin Wall came down without a shot being fired, elections-– elections! – were held, and the freedom that people first experienced in their souls thanks to the Holy Spirit spread out for thousands of miles.  And now our President and the President of Russia are talking about how many thousand nuclear weapons we both will disable.

 

Thank God, when South Africans organized, protested and persisted in resistance to the brutal oppression of the apartheid regime, they were not waiting for Jedi Knights to lead them and guide them.  The Holy Spirit raised up leaders – yes, and martyrs – willing to stand up for basic human rights and live out their Christian faith by striving, many in non-violent ways, for an incredible dream: a multi-racial democracy, achieved by non-violent means.  In 1994, the dream came true.

 

When the Montgomery bus boycott sparked the Civil Rights movement in the American South, there were no Jedi Knights there.  But there didn’t have to be.  Rosa Parks was there.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was there.  And, millions of less famous people after them who were better than Jedi Knights, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

 

No Jedi Knights were involved in the People Power Movement under Corazon Aquino in the Philippines which threw out the dictatorship there, nobody named Obi Wan or Luke was in Belgrade when a peaceful mass movement threw out Slobodan Milocevic – remember him?

 

And there are no Jedi Knights in Cuba today, but there don’t have to be: there are 11,020 people with the courage to sign a petition demanding a referendum on human rights.  This is the Varela project which former President Carter publicized in his visit, named for a Roman Catholic priest who was a hero of the Cuban independence movement 100 years ago.  God only knows what will happen next; what has already happened is miraculous.

 

And the Holy Spirit works miracles on the individual level, too. All over the world, there are hundreds of thousands of people who avoided disaster yesterday by not taking a drink of alcohol because they turned over their wills to a Power Greater Than Themselves who could restore them to sanity.  And there are people making good choices, finding hidden talents within themselves, reaching out to others who need them every day all because they listen to a “still, small voice” within their hearts and minds helping them.  The Holy Spirit.

 

And one of the good choices people make is coming – or coming back – to church.  This is why we have red doors to our church (whatever color the outside walls are!).  Red is the color associated with the Holy Spirit – for the “tongues as of fire” which descended upon the disciples on the first Christian Pentecost.  Everyone enters the church – whether they know it or not! – by the power of the Holy Spirit, and painting the doors red is our way of recognizing that symbolically.

 

So let us celebrate the reality of God the Holy Spirit, and the power for good which can be unleashed in us and through us by the Holy Spirit, our “coach” and commander, through whom we can do all manner of wondrous things, to the glory of God and the well being of ourselves and others.  Alleluia, alleluia!

 

 

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

 

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church