One of the interesting things about living in the city is that people are always dumping things on the street for the city to come pick up, junk, tree branches lawn clippings. In fact I routinely patrol my street for the lawn clippings from particular houses, the houses with fresh green grass with few weeds.
I sneak out every week and scoop up the grass clippings to use for mulching my vegetable garden. It helps repress weeds, hold in moisture and eventually restores the soil.
Tomatoes, cucumbers, collards, sweet peppers, lettuce, green beans, the usual southern garden.
We’ve been experimenting with new ways to eat the collards, chop up a few leaves and cook them with rice, or grits or stir fry. It works. Nuevo southern cuisine.
Dirt and vegetables seem to be inherently part of being southern…not sure why, the long growing season perhaps.
There is something also inherently theological about being southern, and its not that “Southern by the grace of God” slogan. It rather has to do with the psychological impression and expectation that Jesus is always present, never far away.
Flannery O’Conner the southern writer said it best when she said the south is not Christ centered, but rather Christ haunted. Jesus is the figure just beyond sight, lurking in the trees, following us.
It is a mystical landscape that we inhabit.
John’s Gospel today gives the theological background to the landscape being inhabited and haunted by Jesus.
Jesus is not leaving us orphaned, but promises a presence, that he calls the Advocate. Depending on the Bible translation, the presence is also called the comforter, the helper, the counselor, the friend. The Greek word with so many meanings is “paraclete”, and the presence that we are promised carries all those meanings and more.
But what does this presence, this Holy Spirit mean to those who hear John’s Gospel?
It all has to do with Jesus. In John’s gospel, Jesus is the full revelation of God, Jesus is God being revealed to the world, after the resurrection and ascension that revelation does not stop, but continues through the presence of the Advocate in the community of believers, the Church.
So the promise of the Presence being with us means that Jesus continues to reveal the fullness of God. That means that the life of Jesus is not only a past event but an ongoing story, stretching up to the present and beyond, and the body of the faithful is where the incarnation, the revealing of God, continues to happen.
That is what it means to receive the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel, to become part of the flesh and blood revelation of God to the world, we are literally and mystically being Jesus to the world.
We have been haunted, and have become part of the haunting of the world.
It is a mystical landscape that we inhabit.
The Holy Spirit does two things.
It conserves and it creates.
The Holy Spirit conserves, it keeps alive the memory of Jesus life, the long history of the saints of God, the traditions of the faithful.
The conservative elements of the Church in some way flesh out this part of the ongoing life of Jesus presence.
Fundamentalists lose this conserving nature of God’s Spirit, because they think that no one had Jesus right up until recently and no one is to be trusted outside of a narrow history of belief. Fundamentalism is not a conserving movement, it is rather a movement of amnesia, a deep forgetting, caused by fear of a past or a future that is different and foreign to our own present experience.
That is why fundamentalism is so obsessed with gathering political and social control. That is why fundamentalism is so intent on making raw power grabs over every aspect of American culture and politics.
It has forgotten everything, and has become nothing but an empty belly wanting to consume everything, pure arrogant appetite covered by a veneer of religious language.
Jesus haunts those who forget. We are haunted by a rich history of memory, of exotic life, and foreign experiences. The Spirit won’t let us forget for long. The spirit humbles our narrow memory.
The other part of the work of the Spirit is that it is creative. Jesus continues to be known, Jesus continues to reveal God to the world in ways that have not been known before. The truth isn’t known only in the past, but is made known now, stretching forward into the future.
That means new things can be believed and lived that haven’t been believed or lived before. When Jesus breaths the Spirit onto the disciples he is God breathing on the dust that has been gathered into Adam, making a human being, something new that was not there before.
A new humanity lives in the breath of Jesus, and we are continuing to discover the many new ways that are human.
The artistic and liberal elements of the Church in some way flesh out this part of the ongoing life of Jesus presence.
It is tempting to jump on the latest new idea, jumping back and forth like a theological butterfly, never staying put long enough to grow deep into any idea of belief.
A flip, flop spirituality loses the joy and creative playfulness of being part an ongoing revelation, and trades it in for something that is uncommitted and disdainful of the past.
Liberalism gone bad loses its roots, its moorings, and is set adrift, fearful of being held down by anything long-term. In some ways it becomes much like fundamentalism, unable and unwilling to relate to anything outside its own experience. It soon becomes governed by fear degenerating into the same lust for power to which fundamentalism is enslaved.
The Holy Spirit haunts those who hop from fad to fad, from shallow commitment to shallow commitment with the restraint that comes with love, with the commitment that comes with love, with the relationship that is more than long-term, that is eternal.
We stand in this tension of Jesus presence, conserving a long, long memory and experience, and creating something new, that has never happened before, knowing God like never before.
Conservative and Liberal, not fundamentalist, not faddish, but rather part of the abiding presence of God being fleshed out here in this Church, this Parish.
That Advocate won’t let us rest or be stuck for too long on any one memory, or any one new experience.
That Presence will always haunt us, making us grow deep where we want to be shallow, and moving us past one way of seeing and doing that we have grown too fond of, holding us down. God is being revealed to the world and we are part of that revelation and it won’t let us rest until the fullness of God is known in the fullness of all things.
The abiding presence of Jesus: sneaking about, adding new plants to a growing garden, and preserving those that have grown old with deep roots and thick trunks, always disturbing, and preserving.
The Presence: always lurking amid the vines and weeds, just beyond sight in the trees. We are not orphaned. We are haunted. Jesus is everywher