TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 24th Sept. 2023).

You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).

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‘God then is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility ’

—St. John of Damascus[i]

‘Oh, I wanna be just as close as the Holy Ghost is’

—Bon Jovi[ii]

READ: PSALM 139 (NLT)

A BED OF ROSES AND A BED OF NAILS

Over the next few months and into the New Year, with the exception of a couple of breaks here and there, we’re going to take time exploring the Holy Spirit, and I thought this ancient song provided a good starting place.

It’s a song that speaks about the Spirit of God, after all. Throughout this song, the songwriter makes this incredible claim that God’s intimacy is inescapable.

As I was preparing this week, Psalm 139 got me thinking about another not-so-ancient song from the 1990’s. For the younger audience; yes, songs from the 90s are not ‘old’ songs.

The song that came to mind is a rock power balled called Bed of Roses, by my favourite band, Bon Jovi.[iii]

Yes, by all means, wherever you are, sing it if you know it!

It wasn’t only this song that came to mind, however. But also a time, back in 1995, long before I decided to follow Jesus, when I was fifteen and singing this song in my bedroom when a very reflective moment occurred. I say ‘sing’, but that is pushing it. Really, I screeched along to this song while wielding a tennis racket as an air guitar.

Like Psalm 139, Bed of Roses is a song about intimacy. However, unlike Psalm 139, Bed of Roses is not about the presence of intimacy, but rather the absence of intimacy. Jon Bon Jovi, who wrote the song, and who found himself on tour with his band for huge lengths of time, is singing about the distance he feels between him and his wife, Dorothea.

This distance is more than a physical thing that originates from being in another country to his wife. He also knows he hasn’t been faithful to her, true to her, or mindful of her. It’s a song about detachment. In one part of the song, he writes that he is so far away, that even one step, in any direction, would be a step towards her.

He longs to close the distance, to be near. As he sings to his wife in the climax of the chorus, he wants to be as close to her as the Holy Ghost is.

If you are not a Bon Jovi fan, that’s a really cheesy line.

If you are a Bon Jovi fan, it’s still a cheesy line.

But even as a cheesy line, and despite the fact that Jon Bon Jovi is not preacher (regardless of his claim in another of his songs[iv]), this lyric hits on the insight of Psalm 139.

Of course, back when I was fifteen years old, I would not have explained Bed of Roses as I just did. I didn’t know, or even care to know who Bon Jovi was singing to, or what he was singing about. However, I do remember singing along to this song on one occasion, with my tennis racket—no, my air guitar—in hand, like I had done on many previous occasions, and suddenly not being able to sing the words, ‘as close as the Holy Ghost is.’

I am not sure what prompted it, but I stopped screeching, I zoned out, and I started to think. It was as if I had heard these words for the first time… and they irritated me. It wasn’t their ‘cheesy-ness’ that wound me up, but the claim they made about God being close.

I didn’t feel that God was close. I thought God was ignorant, callous, and cold. Actually, a year or two earlier than this I had come to the firm conclusion that God did not exist.

I knew a few stories about Jesus, but I didn’t want to know what they were about. I’d heard of the Holy Spirit, but I never spent any time thinking about ‘what’ that was.

Yes, I know there will be people now saying, ‘the Holy Spirit is a who, not a what’. I agree with you, now (and we’ll look at that next week). But, to be frank, as a fifteen-year old atheist, I couldn’t have cared less about the distinction.

I thought this song lyric was stupid. I’m no romantic, but if God doesn’t exist, and you’re saying to someone that you want to be as close as God is, then that’s not a good thing. Is it?

But, while I was thinking this, a foreign idea crept into my head, ‘What if God did exist? What if God is close?’ And then the strangest thing happened: I started having an argument with myself.

If you have never argued with yourself, then it’s a weird thing to grasp. Many of us have probably relived or rehearsed arguments in our minds: times when we imagine talking to someone other than ourselves, whether real or fictitious, about a different point of view and imagining how we would answer. But arguing with yourself is not like that. This was a full-blown internal cat fight.

There was some part of me arguing there could be a God and that God was close, and another part of me arguing that God could not be close, because God does not exist.

The argument only lasted a few minutes. My Bon Jovi album was in the middle of playing another song when the argument came to an abrupt end. And, in case you are wondering, I won.

I mean the ‘me’ who disliked the lyrics.

With what I thought was a simple and sophisticated argument, I shot down Bon Jovi’s theology in a blaze of glory (sorry, couldn’t resist that).

My reasoning went something like this: If God did exist (and that is a big ‘if’), then God would have to be bigger than all that exists. God would be massive. In this sense, you could be close to God in distance, but in reality, you would be standing next to a skin cell on a giant’s sweaty toe. You would be so far away from God’s face, God’s line of sight, out of earshot, that God would be totally unaware of you and unconcerned about you.

You could have no way of closely knowing the God you know exists—you couldn’t begin to comprehend God, and God, that huge giant of a being, would have no way of comprehending your existence because you’d be so small in comparison.

For fifteen-year-old me, seeking to experience the intimacy of God’s presence was a wild-goose chase. By the way, to say something is a wild-goose chase is to say that you are wasting your time reaching for something that cannot be grasped.

I need to add, here, in respect of my atheist friends, my argument was not a solid one, at all.

Also, in case you are asking, I don’t think this anymore. Nearly three years later, at the age of 18, I would find myself having an experience that would turn all my certainty upside down.

That’s a story for another time.

But I wonder, how would you describe God?

Would you describe God as near or far?

Is God impossible to comprehend, to know, or is God intimate?

As it happens, there is a Hebrew word the writers of the Old Testament use a lot when talking about God; a word they use to describe both these things, near and far, at the same time: Rûah.

RÛAH (A.K.A, THE UNGRASPABLE GRASP)

Rûah is a word that occurs nearly four hundred times in the Old Testament, and it’s purposely hard to pin down.

It’s a breathy word (try saying it), and it’s used to ‘convey concepts as diverse as a breath, a breeze, a powerful gale, an angel, a demon, the [seat of understanding] in a human being, [the cultural inclination of a nation], and even the divine presence itself.’[v]

One word in Hebrew (Rûah) carries all these meanings, so sometimes it is translated spirit, sometimes breath, and sometimes wind. Even when it’s applied to God: it can mean spirit of God, wind of God, breath of God …

As the Jewish writer, Rabbi Rachel Timoner describes, in the language of the scriptures, ‘each time our lungs fill, as we inhale, it is rûah. It is rûah that rushes past us when we stand on a mountain top… it is rûah that God gives us and takes away, so says Ecclesiastes. Rûah is beyond us, around us, and within us. It is as natural as breath and as supernatural as God’s own self.’[vi]

A little word… that covers the expanse of experience.

Of course, how and where rûah occurs helps those who translate the Bible from Hebrew to English determine whether it means breath or wind, or something else. However, it’s really important we appreciate the drama of how elusive this word is, and why the Hebrew writers use it the way they do—especially when talking about God. Because they could have chosen to tidy things up and made it clearer had they wanted to do so.

When the ancient Jewish writers described God using the word rûah, they were insisting that God has no shape or form. In the Old Testament, it’s forbidden to make an image of God. Meanwhile, as the Jewish writers were using this word, the nations around them, like many ancient civilisations, were also describing their gods. They did so by making idols, statues of their gods out of gold, silver stone, or wood.

The thing is, when a craftsman takes some stone or silver and begins to carve or mould that material into an image of their god, then, in a real way, they are ‘creating’ their god; they are making decisions over their god’s image and features. We could say they reduce god to something finite; god is limited to what they are able to imagine, and control, and tame.

Rûah is a protest against that sort of imprisoning of God. When using the word rûah, the biblical writers, tapping into the ideas of wind and breath, are describing something unseen, indescribable undefinable—undesignable.  God is not a build-a-bear project. At the same time, within the same statement, even though God is unseen, God is dynamic. God not only moves, but God is the mover that animates other things to move.

Rûah is ungraspable, untameable, uncontrollable, disruptive even. Like the wind, we can’t catch it, or tell it where to go, but we can all feel, experience, and be shaped by it. Like the breath we involuntarily take every moment of every day, in an absent-minded way, even though we don’t see it, we live by it, and move because of it.

This rûah is life-giving life. Life-shaping life.

Please don’t misunderstand. The ancient writers are not saying God is the wind, or that God is oxygen. They wouldn’t, rightly, ‘fix’ God into such objects. This would be as ridiculous as conceiving God is a piece of rock you have carved.[vii]

They are not saying is. They are describing God’s immediate presence. That God is as uncontainable as the wind, but as close to you as the breath you take.

Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit in the same way, in chapter 3 of John’s gospel. He says the Holy Spirit is like the wind—you can’t define or direct it: it’s beyond your ability to grasp and understand. And yet, Jesus, in the same breath, also speaks about the Spirit’s work of birthing divine life and an awareness of the Divine (Jn 3:1-8).

According to Jesus, the Holy Spirit is wild as the wind, as nurturing as a mother.

Rûah is a wild word, because God is a wild God. We cannot domesticate or litter train God. Like Aslan, the lion in the Narnia stories, the Holy Spirit is not safe. And yet, he is good. Thoroughly good. Everything that lives is held in the goodness and intimacy of God’s sustaining rûah.

To adopt some theological words to talk about this: We would use the term transcendence to talk about the vastness of God, God’s incomprehensibility and that God is ‘beyond’ all of this; and we would use the term immanent to talk about God’s close proximity to creation and God’s capability of being known.

These two terms may seem like a contradiction when held together. But, as the brilliant Abraham Joshua Heschel describes, ‘The dichotomy of transcendence and immanence is an oversimplification. For God remains transcendent in His immanence, and related in His transcendence’[viii]

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul makes the same point.

In Acts 17:24-31, Paul talks to people who are used to making idols, of crafting and designing gods out of stone and precious metals, and praying to them. Paul tells them God is not like, and that they need to turn away from that way of thinking. You can’t make God, or make God a place to live; it’s God who made us and who made us a place to live.

As part of his conversation, Paul says to them that, it’s ‘in God that we live, and move and exist’ (Acts 17:28). Paul is not saying the universe is God. He’s saying that God is bigger than what exists, and that everything that exists, exists in God. God is massive. In addition to this, Paul also says that, ‘God is not far from any one of us’ and that God’s desire is that we would touch him and feel him (Acts 17:27). In other words, that we would know he is present, and that we would know God in the way he knows us.

God is beyond the world, but present in it all. God may be big, but God is not absent. God is everywhere, present to everyone.

As C. S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia stories says it, ‘We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him.’[ix]

CLOSENESS AND IGNORANCE

To take us back to Psalm 139, the ancient songwriter is making this same point. Verse seven is this song’s way of saying the whole of creation is crowded with God.

It’s not that God has squeezed into it, like one of those contortionists you see climbing into small suitcases. Unlike my silly ideas as a fifteen year old, it’s not that you run the risk of being next to God’s armpit in one place, and next to God’s toe in another place. Everywhere you could possibly go, whether it’s the far reaches of the known universe (‘the farthest oceans’), or even where human breath is non-existent and cease to be (‘down into grave’), according to psalmist, you will find yourself in the knowledge of God.

As he writes it, ‘I can never escape from your Spirit (Rûah) | I can never escape from your presence.’ (Ps. 139:7).

The word presence is the Hebrew word, panim. It literally means face. But it is not saying God has a literal face. It conveys this idea of being in someone’s line of sight, in earshot; That they are attentively aware of you. In other words, we are never next to God’s toe (not that God has toes); we are always in God’s face.

Hebrew poetry is not about rhymes, by the way, like ‘Roses are red | violets are blue | Tristan refrigerates chocolate | and so should you’

Hebrew poetry is about reinforcing an idea by saying it twice and saying it differently the second time around (parallelism). I’m telling you this, because if we were to ask the writer of this Psalm who the Holy Spirit is, then, according to the connection of these two line, and the theme of this entire song, the Spirit would be the inescapable and immediate, attentive, besotted presence of God.

God’s self, brooding over us.

As someone else said it, ‘The discovery at the heart of [this] is not that I am contemplating [and seeking] the divine love, but that the divine love is contemplating [and seeking] me.’[x]

I don’t know where you think you are right now, or where you will be tomorrow. But know this, wherever you are, you are in the inescapable attentive presence of God.

I’m saying this, because as we start a series about the Holy Spirit, we can have this idea that the Holy Spirit only exists in certain places, at certain times, with certain people. But at the hands of the biblical writers, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit will not be confined or tamed by such thinking.

Yes, there are times in the narrative of scripture when the activity of the Spirit is undeniable, grabbing the attention of everybody present. Yes, there are times when the Spirit ‘falls upon’ people and does something extraordinary with them. Yes, there is this language of the Spirit being poured out, the Spirit descending, the Spirit filling, and the Spirit as a down payment.

We’ll look at each of these, one way or another, in the coming weeks.

However, don’t be fooled into thinking there is somewhere that exists where God does not. Such ideas are our futile attempts to put a leash on God and stick God in a box, encapsulating and engraving God into an immovable lump of time and space.

Everywhere we go, God’s presence is present, contemplating each of us.

As the songwriter is aware, this loving attention to his life by God is not just a present thing, but also a future guarantee, and also a reality of his past. Actually, as he goes on to sing, he has been the recipient of Divine loving contemplation even before he was able to contemplate anything about his own self, his world, or even God.

‘You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.’ (Ps. 139:15)

God is close to us. Always. As verse 2 puts it, ‘even when we are far away.’

Now that’s interesting. The same psalmist who confidently describes God’s presence as inescapable, also makes the claim that we can be far away. How can this be?

Maybe there’s a clue in that verse. Notice that the psalmist is not claiming that God is far away–this is never the case, as this ancient song proclaims. Rather, the psalmist, writing from personal reflection, acknowledges his own lack of intimacy. It’s clear in the way the psalmist writes, that this knowledge of God’s intimacy is not only mind blowing, but also something that he’s not always been mindful of, and something he has, on occasion, chosen to ignore.

Maybe, we could say, that like Bon Jovi’s Bed of Roses, the issue isn’t geographical distance or location, and neither is the issue with God’s loving attention and attachment to life, creation and us. Maybe the issue is our ignorance and our disengagement with God’s loving presence?

I’m reminded of the story in Genesis 3: The man and the woman have eaten the fruit and then decide to hide from God in the trees of garden. There’s an interesting phrase that turns up in Genesis 3:8.

It’s normally translated in a way that sequentially suggests that it was only after the man and woman eat the fruit that God then “turns up”; and they know God’s turned up because they hear God walking through the garden at the time of the evening breeze; and then God says, ‘where are you?’. But the Hebrew doesn’t quite read like that—it’s not that sequential, should we say.

In the Hebrew, it may be more accurate to say ‘they heard God’s sound in the rûah (the wind) of the garden, and the sound of God was calling, ‘Where are you?’

It’s not that God has just shown up on the scene, and the question of ‘where are you’ is not a lack of knowledge on God’s part. God was already present. The sound of God was already present in the garden. God was already calling them to engage with his presence, to know him, as he knows them.

I’m even tempted to say, that even while the serpent was whispering, the sound of God was also moving around them.

But they choose not to engage—they give their ears to another voice, another sound. Afterwards, they run and attempt to hide, attempting what Psalm 139 says is impossible. And as one writer notes, the fact they do is comical. Hiding, like in the game hide-and-seek, means trying not to be seen. However, you cannot hide from a sound.[xi]

There’s an intentional double meaning in the Hebrew of Genesis 3:8. You can translate it as the man and the woman hid in the trees. And you can also translate it as God’s ruah was in the trees. Both meanings are present, because both are true.

They may think they are hiding, but where the wind is, where the sound is, God is also—and God is calling them, ‘know me.’

We could say that this call of God to intimacy with him, this ‘Where are you?’ to humanity, is a question that echoes and billows throughout all the pages of the biblical story, and it’s a question that is still calling to us today, as we persist in running and hiding.

God is everywhere, desiring us to know his immediate attentive presence in our lives. ‘God is the passionate seeker who wants us to seek him in return…’[xii]

There are numerous stories and allusions in the the scriptures of God searching for us. ‘Like a shepherd, I will come and find my flock’, as Ezekiel describes. Jesus talks about God as a shepherd who goes seeking for the one stray, and like a woman searching high and low for a missing coin. It is not that God has lost us, misplaced us, or that God does not know where we are. It’s a seeking because God knows where we are, but what God wants is for us to engage.

God is mindful of us. It is we who can be so absent-minded of God’s present presence. Sometimes, we are just plain ignorant. And sometimes, we’re just plain rebellious.

But God wants us to know him, so he seeks us, he calls us, wherever we hide.

THE GOOSE CHASE

In the Celtic tradition of Christianity, the Holy Spirit is likened to a wild goose.

It may seem a daft and unusual likeness. But, thinking of the Holy Spirit as a wild goose is a great way of reminding us that the Holy Spirit cannot be tamed or controlled; that the Holy Spirit has a tendency to disrupt and surprise; that the Holy Spirit is passionate, nurturing and vigilant.

Most of all, like most encounters with wild geese, you discover that it is not normally you who chases the goose, but the goose that chases you.

The Holy Spirit is after you and is for you; wanting to lead you into an experience of the heart of God. And in that deep, living union, in that abiding—when we become attentive to God’s awareness of us—you will be filled to bursting with who God knows you to be, who you were created to be.

The Holy Spirit is not going to rugby tackle you, though, nor force you to the ground, or catch you in some snare against your will. The Spirit is not a possessive spirit. Rather, the Holy Spirit pursues and ‘honks’, calling us to cease running and to become attentive to the attentive presence of God.

God is watching you right now, contemplating you. God knows you, and is calling you. God is as close as the breath you are taking.

Like the end of Psalm 139, there’s this willingness, on our side, that God longs for; that we would open ourselves up, invite God to show us what he knows, and hear what God has to say to us.

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‘“For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will search and find my sheep. I will be like a shepherd looking for his scattered flock. I will find my sheep and rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on that dark and cloudy day.”’

Ezekiel 34:11-12 (NLT)

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[i] St John of Damascus (675-749 AD), Exposition of the Faith, 1.4

[ii] Bon Jovi, Bed of Roses, from the Album, Keep the Faith.  On a Personal note: I’m a Bon Jovi fan, so I can’t resist the impulse to sneak a lyric in here or there. And this is not the first time I have done so 😉

[iii] I need to explain my use of favourite. As with most people who declare themselves as “fans” of Bon Jovi, I have a specific era of their music that this label applies to. For me, that era spans from (and includes) Slippery When Wet to Lost Highway. At a push, I’ll include a few of the tracks on The Circle album, but beyond that, I’m out. Also, since Richie Sambora left the band… well, let’s just say there is no Bon Jovi without Sambora.

[iv] Have a listen to Lay Your Hands on Me (it’s on the New Jersey album—it’s the opening track)

[v] Jack Levison, Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life (Paraclete Press, Brewster, Massachusetts, 2013), p. 14. [brackets mine]

[vi] Rabbi Rachel Timoner, Breath of Life: God as Spirit in Judaism (Paraclete Press, Brewster, Massachusetts, 2011), p. xviii

[vii] As the Prophet Isaiah explains with expert poetic utterance: God sits above the circle of the earth, holding the oceans in his hands as if they were a drop of water in a bucket. The islands and nations are like grains of sand in comparison to God’s greatness; even collectively, they are a mere speck of dust on a set of scales. It would be crazy to think you could find a comparable fixed image for this God (Isa. 40:12-31)

[viii] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (HarperPerennial, Modern Classics, 2001), p.622

[ix] C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer, p. 77

[x] Stephen Verney, The Little Book of Lent: Daily Reflections from the World’s Greatest Spiritual Writers, Friday, Week 4.

[xi] See Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Art of Listening: Covenant & Conversation | Bereishit | The Art of Listening | Rabbi Sacks | הרב זקס)

[xii] Tom Wright, Acts for Everyone: Part 2 (SPCK, London, 2012), p. 91