Waiting to Exhale

This morning in church we learned that trying to keep the Holy Spirit in is like trying to not exhale after smoking. "The church has waited too long to exhale." This brought to my mind all kinds of images of the implications of verses like "Jesus breathed on them." Really, Jesus let out a puff of smoke on then. Maybe sometimes the Holy Spirit comes out in smoke rings. Pretty funny.

There's more of substance, though. 1 Corinthians 12:7 says "to each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good." In Loyalty to God: The Apostles' Creed in Life and Liturgy,Theodore Jennings says, "It is not in our devotions, nor in our worship that we are promised the presence of Jesus, but rather in the carrying on of his mission."

Our pastor told a story of a Dutch preacher and his family who were taken prisoner during WWII. They were transported on cattle cars to what they assumed would be a Nazi death camp. When the car stopped and the doors were opened, before them was not a death camp, but the mountains of Switzerland. Someone had switched the lines and saved their lives. Their lives had moved from constant fear to certain death and then to freedom. As they stood there, the Dutch preacher asked, "What do you do with such a gift?"

You exhale, I guess. You breathe on everyone around you. Dan Boone writes, "We never receive the Spirit for ourselves alone, to be our private possession. The Holy Spirit is always the Spirit of mission. The Spirit is making all things new, and by the gift of the Spirit we participate in this newness. The Spirit is not for private, interior experience, but for energy to be sent into the world on the mission of God."

So we go, with our manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, and we do. That's where Jesus is present.