Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 8th Oct. 2023), continuing our series on the Holy Spirit.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘In restless dreams I walked alone
The Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence’
‘Wake up, sleeper | rise from the dead |and Christ will shine on you.’
Ephesians 5:14 (NIVUK)
AN EXPLOSION OF GLORY
As we begin this third session in our exploration of the Holy Spirit, I would like to remind you that if you have missed anything, you may catch up on our YouTube or Spotify channels. Several foundational ideas have been introduced in the past two weeks, and we won’t be repeating them every week.
Having said that, I do want to express my thanks to my friend, Simon Watkinson, for being with us last week and taking us into the inner life of the Trinity.
Simon reminded us that God is one being who exists eternally as three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is eternally relational. As Pastor Tim Keller describes, this means, ‘God is not characterised by self-centeredness, but mutually self-giving love… Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to and rejoices in the others.’[i]
God is not static. The inner life of God is a ‘dynamic pulsating activity’, says C. S. Lewis.[ii] As the theologian, Serene Jones words it, ‘God’s very reality is radically multiple, radically relational, and infinitely active.’[iii]
As Simon explained more clearly last week, what all this boils down to is that if God is triune, then this loving relationship is the very centre of reality and the very fabric life was cut from
Furthermore, the reason God creates from out of this eternally-loving relationship, it is not because of some lack in God. Rather, ‘God is seeking to extend that perfect internal communication of the triune God’s goodness and love … The universe is an explosion of God’s glory.’[iv]
In other words, creation is not an Instagram feed where God, craving validation, desperate for love, generates content and applies filters to get likes and comments. The universe was made by a God who is a community of persons—who have loved each other for all eternity, who lacked nothing—simply seeking to share the joy of this self-giving, other-directed love.
God creates because God is self-giving to the core.
Remembering this will help us immensely in the weeks ahead as we explore the Holy Spirit together.
Now, however, we are going to look at the start of the book, the first few verses of Genesis, and look at the work of the Holy Spirit in this explosion of God’s glory.
I’m going to read from three different translations to help us picture the scene.
READ: GENESIS 1:1-3
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’ (NLT)
‘In the beginning God
created the heavens
and the earth.
The earth was barren,
with no form of life;
it was under a roaring ocean
covered with darkness.
But the Spirit of God
was moving over the water.
God said, “I command light to shine!” And light started shining’ (CEV)
‘First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss. God spoke: “Light!” And light appeared.’ (The Message)
TERROR FORMING
When I was seven, I was plagued by the same nightmare, night after night, that would cause me to scream the house down with a blood-curdling shriek. I also sleepwalked. Occasionally, the two combined and my mum or dad would find me screaming in some rather odd circumstances and some rather odd poses.
If they were still alive, my mum and dad could have told you some stories.
If you were to ask my brother Colin, he would say that Tristan used to have nightmares about ‘Lego men building things.’ He would tell you this because he was there when I gave this answer to my mum and dad, when they, as caring and concerned parents, asked to know what my nightmares were about.
But it wasn’t the truth, and it wasn’t my first answer, either. I only said I was having nightmares about Lego men because I was sick of answering the same question. I had already told my mum and dad what I was having nightmares about: nothing.
You may want to give the same response as my mum and dad: ‘they must have been about something?’ But that’s my point; my nightmare wasn’t about something or anything: my nightmare was about nothing.
I could not explain this as a seven year old, and I will still struggle to explain as a forty-three year old. But here goes:
While sleeping, I would be engulfed with this overwhelming presence of nothingness; none-existence; a despairing, oppressive, bottomless emptiness; a chaotic, all-consuming inky blackness. And this nothingness would be seeping into me, unmaking me, numbing me. It was like my senses were being overtaken with it; I couldn’t feel, see, hear or speak. I would scream, with all I had, as this was happening, but, in the nightmare, no sound would escape.
In the real world of my bedroom, however, I would be waking up the house. Nowadays, my own snoring wakes me up. Strangely, back then, my own screaming could not wake me up. It would take my mum or dad grabbing hold of me and vigorously shaking me to wake me.
In the verses we’ve just read, the ancient writers describe a time before life, when there was a watery, shapeless disorder, a darkness with no form and no meaning.
Two terms are employed to describe how bleak and haunting this scene is.
The first is the Hebrew term, tohu vavohu. And although it sounds like a catchphrase from the comedy quiz show Shooting Stars, there isn’t anything funny about it. It means formless and void.[v] ‘A soup of nothingness.’ It’s a life-threatening, hostile word; the undoing of life. Later on in the scriptures, two prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, will use tohu to describe what happens when humanity regresses, when they stop imaging God’s self-giving, other directed love and start worshipping idols or themselves; there is a un-worlding of the world, a digression into chaos (Isa. 34:11; Jer. 4:23). It’s as if the fabric of the cosmos is unravelled, or bent out of shape, and perishes.
The second term is tᵊhôm, translated ‘The deep’, or ‘The waters’. We could say, ‘an Abyss’. Tᵊhôm is an ocean-themed word. But this is no scenic turquoise-coloured shallows in the tropics. Tᵊhôm is not the place for scuba diving. It’s a bottomless chasm, a vortex of chaos. And when something is bottomless—like my teenage son’s stomach—it’s never satisfied, always hungry to devour and swallow. Tᵊhôm is used in the story of Noah. The fountains of ‘the deep’ burst open, devouring the world (Gen. 7:11, 8:2). It’s the same word that the ancient Israelites use to the describe the sea (cf. Ex. 15:8; Job 38:16; Ps. 106:9; Isa. 51:10; Jon. 2:5) . Or, maybe a better way of saying this is that the sea—with its instability, restlessness and potential to devastate—was a perfect way for the ancient writers to describe this primordial world: restless, devastating, instable.
It’s a bleak and hostile scene, lacking all we would consider good and life supporting. Like my nightmares, it’s oppressively chaotic. Yet, God is here, right in the thick of things—when they are at their most dark, formless, void, and sodden. In verse two, we read that the Spirit of God (the Rûah Elohim), like a wind, like a breath, is present and is moving in the midst of the waters.
That verb (merachefet) is sometimes translated hovered or fluttered, sometimes brooding, sometimes sweeping.[vi]
There’s nothing wrong with any of those words, but the English can’t really carry the weight of the Hebrew. The word carries this idea of oscillating motion: it means to vibrate, to quake, to shake.
It’s not just a movement, but a movement followed by a movement, followed by a movement, etc., generating movements followed by movements, etc.
And it would be wrong of us to picture this activity as something the Holy Spirit is doing away from it all, as if the Spirit is shaking with anticipation in the corner, waiting for God to say ‘go’. This shaking is not something that is happening to the Holy Spirit, it is something the Spirit of God is doing to the chaos and oppression and formlessness: God is shaking it, in order to wake it up and bring life out of it.[vii]
In Genesis, a devouring, self-serving, greed-driven, chaotic abyss is transformed into a life-bearing, life-nurturing, self-giving world. And the Spirit does this by shaking what is to what ought to be.
It’s like my mum and dad grabbing hold of me when I was entrapped in my nightmares of nothingness, and shaking me, saying, ‘wake up.’
That’s the image here. It’s a great image—if it’s helpful. God, in his Spirit, grabs hold of the welter and waste[viii], and shakes it, saying, ‘Wake up o sleeper, rise from the dead, and let the light of Christ shine on you.’
BEAUTIFIER & LIBERATOR
It’s worth saying, this isn’t a one-time occasion. Verse two of Genesis certainly doesn’t describe it as a one-time event. The version of the word used to describe this shaking of reality is not in the past tense, but the present tense.
Yes, whoever wrote this is writing about the distant past, ‘In the beginning… when God created.’ But, even though we translate it, ‘the Spirit of God was moving’, the original language is more like, ‘the Spirit of God is moving.’
It is an is, not a was. Which may seem like bad grammar, leading us to “correct” it. But, for the original writer, the present tense is vital. The creative role of the Spirit is characterised not by a past event, but by perpetual events. Shaking and rattling chaos into order is not just something the Holy Spirit did, once, back then. It is something the Holy Spirit continues to do.
If I were to describe the chief work of the Holy Spirit, a work that is consistent throughout the stories of the Bible, then I would describe it as ‘terror-forming’ (not merely, terraforming)
The Spirit frequently takes hold of nightmarish landscapes, shakes them, and transforms them into the dream of God. The Spirit works, continually, to bring beauty out of chaos; order where there is anarchy; light where there is darkness; form and fruitfulness out of what is void and barren; meaning where there is meaningless; Liberty where there is oppression.
We often describe the Holy Spirit as the giver of life. While true, this doesn’t go far enough. The Holy Spirit is the beautifier of life, the liberator of life. A work we have often called redemption.
Again and again, the Spirit comes to the edges of disorder and chaos, and unsettles the norms, disrupts the habitual, rouses the dead and shakes the oppressive.
There is the story of Noah, when ‘the deep’ covers the earth. The people made to image God have become destructive, imaging the appetite of the abyss and chaos, more than the self-giving love of God, and so the abyss comes to reign, flooding the landscape. But once again, like in the opening of Genesis, the Spirit of God blows across the waters, driving the abyss back, and rebirthing creation (Gen. 8:1-2).
In the story of the Exodus, the people of Israel find themselves as slaves under the power of Egypt, a place of tohu: darkness, futility, and death. If you know the climax of the story (or have seen the Prince of Egypt), then you have heard about how God delivers Israel out of darkness, through the waters and into life. Exodus 14 mentions the Rûah, the wind, the Spirit, blowing upon the waters and opening up a passageway of dry land that ‘enabled the Israelites to make the long walk from slavery to freedom.’[ix] (Ex. 14:21)[x]
Throughout the Bible, there is this principle that wherever we see creation, freedom or renewed life, there we recognise the continual shaking and reviving work of Spirit.
In the words of one ancient songwriter, ‘When you send your Spirit, [life is] created, and you renew the face of the [earth].’ (Psalm 104:30, NIVUK)
The ancient prophet, Isaiah describes the Holy Spirit being like a downpour of rain upon thirsty land. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries showing how parched and cracked the Serengeti is before the seasonal rains come, and how it is transformed into a lush paradise after the rains? Then you can picture what Isaiah describes when the Spirit is poured out, turning wildernesses into fertile fields. Isaiah isn’t solely talking about the Spirit’s effect on landscapes, but also on humanity (Isa 32:15; 44:3-1). Like rain rhythmically beating the ground, the Holy Spirit awakens what has been dormant, giving new life to what has been buried and encased in hard earth.
One modern writer describes the work of the Holy Spirit being like springtime: things become fresh and green when the Spirit works. All of life vibrates in the presence of the Spirit, things begin to dance again when the Spirit moves.[xi]
C. S. Lewis, in his famous The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, using his character, Aslan the Lion, to describe God, talks about when Aslan shakes his mane, and issues a thundering roar—when the Spirit sends a tremor through existence—then death and winter have to let go, and life springs up.[xii]
One of the most vivid pictures of this is in a vision experienced by an Old Testament prophet called Ezekiel, that you can read about in Ezekiel 37. Ezekiel is given a picture of a valley full of old brittle bones, scattered everywhere, littering the entire valley floor. Thousands of bones. A landscape of death.
It is a desolate picture, describing how Ezekiel’s own people, the community of Israel, felt in their exile, in the depths of oppression, scattered and broken and dead. Ezekiel is asked by God, ‘can these bones live again?’ He says he doesn’t know, ‘only you know that, God.’ He’s not in a hopeful place or a hopeful frame of mind. But God tells Ezekiel to prophesy, to speak God’s words into the situation.
For those who were with us a couple of weeks ago, when we looked at the word Rûah, this passage is densely packed with that word, and all its elusive meanings.
As Ezekiel speaks to the bones, this shaking, this rattling starts to take place, as the bones begin to come together … I will leave you to read the story.
The vision is another reminder that even when all seems lost, when redemption seems impossible, the Holy Spirit is present, shaking things up, working, in the fullness of time, to make all things beautiful (Rev 21:5). There will be a day when death, and sorrow, and pain, and even the tᵊhôm itself will be no more. A day when all nightmares end.
There will be many of us, I am sure, living lives where chaos seems to constantly crash into our lives, whether that is a mental or physical struggle, or aspects that are social or material, such as our relationships with others, our finances, or work situations. But know this, ‘As in the beginning, the Spirit [shakes] the darkness and chaos, calling it and coaxing it into transformed existence.’[xiii]
The nightmares will not go on forever. God is here, moving in our midst, breaking chains and renewing life.
UNFINISHED SYMPATHY
I firmly believe this. But I also want to be clear: I’m not promising prosperity and riches and a Mercedes Benz.
The Holy Spirit, like it did to Jesus after his baptism, often drives us into wildernesses (Mk. 1:12, Lk. 4:1). As we’ll see in a couple of weeks, Jesus moved in the power of Spirit. At the start of his ministry, Jesus read some powerful words from Isaiah to describe his mission:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’[xiv]
Jesus came to bring liberty and beauty to creation, to shake what is to what ought to be. But ushering in new life involves opposing powers that obstruct such renewal. So, Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, also unsettles the norms, disrupts the habitual, rouses the dead, and shakes the oppressive. In following the mission of God, Jesus is drawn towards those who suffer. And, in opposing the powers, Jesus himself—the second person of the Trinity, God, God’s Spirit-filled and anointed One—is ultimately led to suffer and die on a cross
You’re not going to witness anyone more in sync with the Holy Spirit than God Incarnate, but his life was not a luxurious life.
So listening to the Spirit and working with the Spirit can also take us into the very places where there is chaos and ugliness with the purpose of cultivating beauty and peace. Engaging in such work can put us in some uncomfortable and, at times, dangerous places.
In the beatitudes, when Jesus speaks of how blessed it is to be a peacemaker, the very next beatitude is about being persecuted (Mt. 5:9-12)
In Mark’s gospel, when Jesus talks about the work of the Holy Spirit in believers, it’s in the context of strengthening people to speak and witness when they are being beaten or arrested for their allegiance to God’s beautifying and liberating work. (Mk. 13:11-13)
As Jürgen Moltmann notes, ‘[T]he Spirit is the power to suffer in participation in the mission and the love of Jesus Christ, and is, in this suffering, the passion for what is possible, for what is coming and promised in the future life, of freedom and of resurrection.’[xv]
We’re not promised a beautiful life, in the here and now, but we are called to participate with the Holy Spirit in beautifying life, with a passion for what is possible and what will come to pass.
But more than this; if, as I’ve said, the Spirit is shaking what is to what ought to be, and if the Spirit is opposing all that rots and devours the splendour and beauty of what God intends, then the Spirit also has to shake me.
As I said at the start, this world was made to contain and extend the overflow of God’s mutually self-giving, other-directed love. The fabric of creation, the same cloth we are cut from, has this grain of God’s inner life woven into it. We’re made to reflect that very same life—to love God, to love others (as well explore more of next week). But self-centeredness, greed, pride, apathy and prejudice, destroy, twist and fray the fabric of what God has made.
God is moving, shaking the things that are tohu and tᵊhôm towards life and beauty. But we, in our own desires and capacity, can shake things in the opposite direction. On top of that, our hearts can also be so hardened against the suffering and chaos that exists in our world.
‘Our eyes are witness to the callousness and cruelty of man, but our heart tries to obliterate the memories, to calm the nerves, and to silence our conscience.’ As the Jewish writer, Abraham Heschel describes.[xvi]
Speaking for myself, it’s strange and disturbing how comfortable I can be eating takeaway or breakfast while watching the news display the catastrophes of the world.
In the scriptures, this same breath of life, this same wind of God, this same Holy Spirit, is frequently likened to a scorching desert wind, an east wind.[xvii] It’s the scorching east wind (Rûah qāḏim) that blows through the waters in Exodus, by the way, working against slavery and injustice and tyranny (Ex. 14:21). The prophet Hosea speaks of God’s Spirit being like a desert sandstorm, refining God’s people because they refused to work on the principles of love and justice and confidence in God (Hos. 13:15; 12:6-7). It’s a burning wind (Rûah Bā’ar) that Isaiah describes when God refines, renews and restores what God loves (Isa. 4:2-4)
The Spirit is a refining heat, melting the hardness of the human heart.
I’m saying this, because we may want the Spirit to work exclusively on the tohu and tᵊhôm of the world, the abyssal chaotic places out there. But it’s within us where the work needs to be done. Only by working in here will out there change and transform for the better.
The Holy Spirit wants to shake us and re-awaken us.
God makes a promise in the Old Testament that he will place his Spirit within us, and it will renovate hearts of stone into hearts of flesh (Ez. 36:25-27).
I need this. ‘I need the Holy Spirit to consume my hatred, bitterness, and my desire for vengeance. When the Spirit falls, I discover that it’s my prejudices, preferences, stereotypes and twisted sense of justice which God seeks to [burn up].’[xviii]
I need it, and you do to, because God doesn’t want us to merely know of the Spirit, or be aware of the Holy Spirit, but God wants us to vibrate, to move with, to resonate with the Spirit. To resonate means to be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound. The Holy Spirit wants us to echo and shake with his desire for beauty and liberty, and the dream of God.
As Paul writes in Galatians, ‘If we live by the Spirit, let’s also keep in step with the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:25). Let’s also keep moving, shaking with the Spirit.
VENI, SPIRITUS SANCTUS
Let’s close with a prayer from the 13th century, Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton:
‘Come, Holy Spirit
Cleanse that which is unclean
Bend that which is inflexible
Fire that which is chilled
Correct what goes astray.’[xix]
Or, in the words of the 12th century song of Hildegard of Bingen:
Holy spirit, making life alive,
moving in all things, root of all created being,
cleansing the cosmos of every impurity, effacing guilt,
anointing wounds.
You are lustrous and praiseworthy life,
You waken and re-awaken everything that is.
Amen
‘“I am the Lord, who opened a way through the waters, making a dry path through the sea … But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do. For I am about to do a brand-new thing. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it?”’
Isaiah 43:16, 18-19 (NLT)
‘At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Saviour’
Paul, Titus 3:3-6 (NIVUK)
[i] Tim Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Scepticism (Hodder & Stoughton, An Hachette UK Company, London, 2009), pp. 214-215
[ii] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
[iii] Quoted in, Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 176.
[iv] Historian George Marsden, summarising Jonathan Edwards’ reasoning behind God’s creative purposes. Quoted in Ibid, Tim Keller, p. 218
[v] To be more precise, tohu means formless and void. We are not sure what vavohu means. Most scholars assume it’s a word to provide a rhyming echo to tohu, therefore deepening, onomatopoeically, in the reader’s imagination the vividness of this void.
[vi] Merachfet occurs one other time in the Old Testament, in a different form, in Deuteronomy 32:11, where God is likened to a mother eagle, stirring up her nest and hovering (yerachefet) above her chicks. The root form of the word, rachef, also occurs when the prophet Jeremiah describes the ‘quaking/trembling’ in his bones (Jer. 23:9)
[vii] The scientist in me now wants to go off on a tangent about how reality, the particles (or strings) that make up all that exists are said to oscillate and shake. As my favourite scientist, Brian Greene describes, ‘the microscopic landscape is suffused with … vibrational patterns [orchestrating] the evolution of the cosmos.’ [Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 135.] For life to exist there is a fundamental shaking; a continual movement permeates the universe. In the words of the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, ‘Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death’ (Pensées, 129). For this reason, a number of theologians throughout the centuries have described God as the mover behind all movement, and the sustaining presence in the universe. Again, linking back to our first session, to speak of God’s Rûah is to speak of God’s presence oscillating all that is.
[viii] ‘Welter and waste’ comes from Robert Alter’s excellent translation of Genesis 1:1.
[ix] Rabbi Rachel Timoner, Breath of Life: God as Spirit in Judaism (Paraclete Press, Brewster, Massachusetts, 2011), p. 102
[x] In Exodus 15:8, in the Song of the Sea, the people of Israel equate this wind to the breath of God, a ‘blast from [God’s] nostrils’ (NLT)
[xi] Jürgen Moltmann, referencing Hildegard of Bingen, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life (SCM Press, London, 1997), pp. 54, 68-69
[xii] “Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight | At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more | When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death | And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.” C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2010), p. 75.
[xiii] Andrea Hollingsworth, Groans too Deep: The Holy Spirit and Suffering. Groans Too Deep: The Holy Spirit and Suffering – Biola University Center for Christian Thought / The Table – Biola University Center for Christian Thought / The Table
[xiv] Luke 4:18-19, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2 (NIVUK)
[xv] Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (SCM Press, London, 1967), p. 212, quoted in Ibid, Andrea Hollingsworth.
[xvi] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (HarperPerenial, 2001), p. 5
[xvii] For some references of the east wind being a desert wind see: Gen. 41:6; Job 15:2; Jon. 4:8
[xviii] Tristan Sherwin, Living The Dream? The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity (Black Coney Press, 2019), p. 218
[xix] Quoted in Leonardo Boff, Come, Holy Spirit: Inner Fire, Giver of Life, and Comforter of the Poor (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Press, 2015), pp. 184-85.
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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