By Reverend Laurie DeMott

During the long western NY winters, many of us develop cabin fever and we point to the months of bitter cold or the lack of sun as the reason for our restlessness, but I often think another cause is the absolute stillness of a winter landscape. During the summer, even a short walk outside will fill your senses with an abundance of activity: birds sing in the treetops, the smell of apple blossoms fills the air, bees buzz about the flowers, the leaves rustle in the breeze . Everywhere you look there is movement and life. But in the winter, the few birds that dare to stick around and brave the northern cold do so silently weathering the days huddled in bushes. Any aromas are so muted that you have to have the nose of a dog to smell them. There are no leaves to dance on the wind, no streams to babble happily over rocks; everything is encased in immobilizing ice. The only thing that moves in winter is the snow.

And so yesterday I sat in my lawn chair where I usually sit to watch the bluebirds flying back and forth to their nesting box and instead I watched the snow. I watched it drift down from the sky. I watched it swirl across the hard pack of my backyard. I watched it pile up on the fur of my dog, Zack, who sat next to me content to share this moment of reverie outdoors. I watched the drifting snow turn the frozen landscape into something moving and alive once more.

The 23rd Psalm praises God for leading us besides still waters but I think that for most people, it is not still waters but moving waters that transform us. We can sit for hours mesmerized by the waves rolling in upon an ocean shore or the cascade of ripples across a sun-drenched lake, but when the wind stops and the waters are still, we turn to one another and say, “It is dead calm today.” Our very language reveals our sense that still water is dead water but moving water is living water. To move is to be alive.

Our association of life with movement is now being underscored by work being done in the realm of subatomic physics. One writer explains, “In very simple terms, the [new] view of reality emerging from subatomic physics... looks like this: Physical reality is not composed of fundamental building blocks of matter [as we once thought], but of fields of energy which comprise the universe.... Matter [is only] a temporary condensation or density of a field of energy.”

In other words, when you look at a pebble and you think, “This is a stone”, what you are really seeing is energy that has momentarily (in a geological time sense) become so tightly packed together that it has taken on shape and weight. Everything around us – from the butterflies flitting across the meadow to the milkweed on which they rest to the soil in which the milkweed grows – all of those things are just different manifestations of the same energy flowing through the universe. It clumps together here to make a plant, there to make a rock, and then eventually it breaks down again and moves on to take on new forms and functions. What we see as objects, then, are only snapshots in time of a constant swirl of energy that is moving, forming, and reforming around us. Life is never really still but is always changing and on the move.

Now, I have surely given all of the scientists in the congregation shudders by my oversimplification of subatomic physics but I admit that my explanation is less influenced by science than it is by a very ancient worldview, because what I am describing is the way in which people in Jesus’ time understood the nature of the Holy Spirit. The description I gave of subatomic particles would be an equally apt description of the Holy Spirit so when John the Baptist told the people that he would baptize them with water but Jesus would baptize them with the Holy Spirit he meant that he would immerse people in the flowing waters of the Jordan but Jesus would immerse us in the flowing energies of the Spirit.

Today, we tend to think of the Holy Spirit (when we think of it at all) as a kind of person, though one we can't see, sort of like a ghost. Our older English Bibles even used that word in their translations with the result that many generations of children were afraid to say their prayers at night for fear that the Holy Ghost would truly visit them while they slept. To think of the Holy Spirit as a person, however, clothes it with too much entombing form and robs it of its central character, namely, its constant movement. In trying to describe their experience of the Holy Spirit, biblical writers used predominately three images – wind, flames of fire, and flowing water – because they understood that the Holy Spirit is our sense of God alive and on the move. The Holy Spirit is God streaming through the universe, swirling about our lives, sometimes cohering momentarily in a place, in a heart, in an event, but never frozen in that one place, that one time, or even that one idea. The Holy Spirit is God as living water, flowing across the landscape of our lives like the waters of the Jordan River.

Maybe this is why we don't talk about the Holy Spirit very much, because who can hold the wind? Who can “keep a wave upon the sand?” We prefer our God to be safely tucked away in heaven, unchanging and predictable, or ensconced securely in the body of a Jesus long long ago in a galaxy far far away. That kind of God -- that kind of Savior -- is one that lends itself more readily to the world of religious institutions where clerical types like to write definitive treatises on the will of God to be engraven on stone and rule over generations of the faithful yet to be born. This immobile sort of God can be taken out like a beloved knickknack when we feel in need of a God but then be safely tucked back on the shelf when we are feeling better so that we can go about our normal everyday business without any fear that God will go mucking about in our lives.

Of course, the problem with such a God is that eventually an unmoving God loses the power to move us. We, the followers of a frozen God, become the frozen chosen and our faith has about as much appeal as a block of wood. We wonder why we rarely feel God close to us, not considering the fact that in order to feel the wind, it has to be moving. A while ago, a preacher criticized his denomination by saying, “If the Holy Spirit were removed from [our churches], 99% of what we do would go on unhindered!” His comment caused an uproar because people don’t like being told that their faith is too tame to be real and yet his pronouncement was in line with that of John the Baptist’s whose words, “Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” were as much a warning as a promise.

The Holy Spirit is God on the move and God out of our control. We try our best to get the Spirit in check by asking one another “Do you have the Spirit?” as if we can catch God in a net and safely caged the Spirit in our hearts, wings clipped, but the Holy Spirit cannot be contained. The Holy Spirit cannot be leashed. The Holy Spirit is by definition God on the move, God streaming through our lives like living water, God carving through stony hearts, God raining upon the deserts, God cascading down in righteousness, God drowning out injustice, God on the move going where God will go.

I said at the beginning of this sermon that we love to watch things move – who doesn’t like to picnic next to a creek or stare into the dancing flames of a wood fire? – but Jesus is not asking us to watch the Holy Spirit. When the choir was rehearsing the anthem we sang today, I had to keep stopping them because they were singing, “I’m going down to the river to pray.” “Wait a second,” I would say, “Look at the lyrics. We’re not going down to the river to pray – we are going down in the river to pray.” We are not called by Christ to go down to that river to sit on the shore in mediation as the water tumbles by; we are called to step right into those flowing streams and let the Spirit swirl around us as we immerse ourselves completely in it. No wonder we will need to pray: God calls us to dare to let the Spirit carry us where God wills and not always just where we will.

The fisherman Peter had no thought of getting caught up in some religious movement when he left his nets -- he was just tagging along after a man he admired who was saying some pretty interesting things. But once Peter put his foot into that stream, his old life was swept away and ended up living a life of unexpected challenge but equally unexpected depth and excitement.

The crusader Paul had no thought of becoming a Christian as he trudged down the road to Damascus but he was caught up in the whirlwind of Christ’s love and it carried him to new roads, new places, and a life of immeasurable consequence.

Those are the famous disciples who dared to step into the river and let God carry them where God willed, but there are thousands upon thousands of less famous disciples who have dared to go down in the river to pray and emerged ready to take on new battles against injustice or to be bold for compassion, to accept new ideas or entertain changes in their lives that led them to greater wholeness. They become part of the stream of living water that is working to carve out a new landscape in our barren world.

Where is God challenging you to change? Where is God alive and moving in your life? Where is the Holy Spirit urging you to adventure, to new ways of thinking, new ways of doing, new ways of being? “Fear not,” Christ says as he stands in the middle of the tumbling waters of the Jordan, “I am with you”, and then he stretches out his hand to you. “Come, and step into the river. Immerse yourself in the living water and let God carry you to a new day.”