(4/22/2026) 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
A few days ago I was writing a letter. I was typing apace when I suddenly realized that I had written the following: "I do not believe in the Spirit."
Obviously there is a Spirit. Obviously the Spirit exists and is active and I take it on faith that the Spirit exists. I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord. I believe in the Holy Spirit.
Right?
I spend a lot of time addressing the Father, Daddy, Creator, Protector, Hope, Mother. I'm not great at trust but I have a conscious and clear understanding that God exists, sees, intervenes, loves. For whatever reason, even in the midst of the worst times of my life, I have not doubted this - if not that everything happens exactly as I want it, and it's not that I will ever know why, but that God is bigger than me and at least there is compassion for my plight, and like Abraham and Job I can at least whine about it, and trust that God is at least not against me.
I see Jesus all the time - the fellow with the sign on the corner, the friend in tears, the mother rejoicing in her child, the parent trying to get the toddler moving then, and now to sit still. A pastor caring for someone in need; someone praying with a friend after service; a stack of food for Backpack Buddies. Celebrants at a funeral. The prisoner, the sick. The lovers in the park. The protestors on the bridge. Jesus is ridiculously easy for me to see.
The Spirit... well, now.
Look, I spent two decades living with literal insanity. Reality was distorted and twisted around me, facts were denied by creative fictions, existence and meaning was challenged in every conversation. The only way I survived was by clinging to absolute truth - recordings, notes, memory, other people, books, more recordings. It took me years to realize what was happening, not because the falsehood was subtle but because it was so baldly obvious in its absurdity: the kind of imagination that it was impossible to believe someone made up because it seemed so improbably far removed from reality. By the time we got to the Court years I was taking great pains to indicate how many other people, facts, and sources agreed with whatever I said, and if it was just me I made that very clear, if I would even say the thing at all based on my own testimony. I am down-to-Earth, grounded if you will. I am devoted to keeping to truth in speech, and I view that in the only plane I know: the human one.
So hear my own skepticism when I say that I have been led to action by the Spirit. So far these have been subtle things, and I can absolutely logic them away, but some of them are hard to explain naturally and in totality it is hard for me to think they were entirely internal. A strong inclination to a task, coupled with individually improbable events that led to the specific situation at a specific time that made it possible. A reminder of someone, a strange impetus to write a letter - a letter, in the mail, in 2025! And then again, and again, and again. (This last time I bought a sheet of stamps. Come at me, Spirit.) A note of encouragement here, an appreciative word there, lunch with a long-missed friend. A corrective word, both right and terrible in its effects, that I could not avoid. All of these proclaiming Jesus - usually, explicitly - and also absolutely terrifying in the implication.
It is a strange thing, this Spirit. On the one hand it is not like I originally set out to do any of those things, but by the time I actually did them I certainly did want to do them, and believed them to be right. And on the other hand I had no idea how these things fit into the lives of the receivers; despite knowing - now - how some of these had been received at important times, it still makes me very uneasy when something starts brewing. "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (Mark 3:8) As someone who enjoys a simple and orderly life, and who likes the illusion of having planned things nobly, the Spirit is incredibly troubling.
And even at its core, I absolutely do not want to believe that the Spirit is in me and influencing me! It is easy to believe that I am following my own deeper consciousness, that I am in touch with my dream state, that I am reacting to some kind of vitamin deficiency or lack of sleep or God only knows what. How much easier to imagine that some memory has stirred, and some observation has passed into my subconscious, and I have realized some thing that needed to be done. This idea of a super-physical being is absurd on its face.
And really - the Spirit? How proud I must be to imagine that God is interested in this one old fellow from Chapel Hill, and his friends and children. I can see how those activities of the Spirit are for others - and obviously the check of the true Spirit is proclaiming Christ - and yet it feels like putting on airs to claim actions that I have done as the work of the Spirit. What if I am mistaken? What if I have misunderstood? What if I mess up the timing? What if I put in too much of myself and the message is corrupted (guilty) or too little and the message is overly jarring (never happened)? What if this wool doesn't get wet? What if it does? Actually let's do that last one again, and also if you could please move the sunlight up a few steps then I could be really sure.
So what a comfort, perhaps, to read that "each is given the manifestation of the Spirit." If I believe - as I do - that God has chosen me, for some reason that particularly escapes me, then I suppose I must also believe from this passage that I do have the Spirit, incredible though it seems. Whether for wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, or some other thing, it must be there. And that implies that, in some mysterious way, I am connected to Christ, and I am connected to all other believers.
...and seriously. I am walking into straight up mysticism here; in fact in my letter from the other day I concluded that I have become a "reluctant humanist mystic," which sums up where I am on this. I do not practically believe in the Spirit, but I do practically believe that I do have the Spirit in me, and that the Spirit has done things through me - and also that sentence disturbs me in a way that I rebel to even write, even amidst these readings for Pentecost Sunday.
Perhaps I will one day become less reluctant, or more accustomed to the Spirit, or less bound to my human understanding. Perhaps I will always be unsettled at the idea of the Spirit, and keep on running toward Joppa on the way to the more complex tasks, before getting brought back around. Nonetheless I pray for this Pentecost that the Spirit whose existence makes me so queasy continues to work through me and through all the other believers, in fearlessness, so that the church has the full benefit of all the wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues and interpretation that God wants to offer us during our coming challenges.
PS - On a personal note, this has been the most troubling lectionary to write so far; even now I am not quite sure I want to publish it. Pentecost was always coming, and none of the passages are any easier despite the many alternates this week - it's going to take me another 15 years to clear them! Clearly the Spirit runs throughout the Scriptures, and despite my naturalistic tendencies I do recognize that the Trinity is the way it is. And yet it feels so very crazy, in the post-Enlightenment deism of the modern church, to suggest that God is actively directing us in some mystical way. Maybe the Spirit really does use the natural order - tweaking our consciences through things that we know or perceive or remember at the edge of our reason - but that doesn't really seem consistent with the portrayal of the Scriptures, so maybe not either. Perhaps by next Pentecost I will have some better understanding for you; yet either way, I pray that we both are driven by the Spirit to these good deeds for the church whether we have any understanding or not!