sermons
Advent | inspire us | The Spirit Stirs
Where is God? How can God inspire us?
Steve Watson
Dec 01, 2024
Do you ever wonder where God is?
I think most of us do.
As a baby, I must have thought God was inside my momma because she fed me and held me when I cried and sang me lullabies.
My parents took me to church as a kid and I don’t remember much about it – was God in the organ pipes or the Sunday school flannel graph pictures of Father Abraham and his many sons? Maybe, I didn’t know.
But it felt like God lived on Topsfield Road because sometimes on that hill before we took a left turn on our street and drove that last mile home, we’d beg to stop at Richdale’s and get a Sunday afternoon candy bar because hadn’t we been good that day? And weren’t they only a quarter? Sometimes I called that road Candy Bar hill; it was such an exciting place to me, which says more about me than God but still.
It definitely seemed like God lived inside my Nana and Poppop’s house that I’d walk to and relax in while my parents sang in the church choir. I got to pick out my very own Market Basket root beer and any can of Chef Boyardee’s pasta that I wanted, and my nana would heat it up for lunch while I watched cartoons or football pregame shows. And my poppop gave me advice while he walked around and my nana sat across from me, looking at me while I watched tv and that place was peaceful and homey and it felt really good to be there, so maybe that was what God felt like.
Sometimes for years it felt like God was nowhere. There were people who died and no one knew what to say. And there were people who hurt, and angry people and confusing people who did weird and scary things and there were so many people around I couldn’t talk to. And all of that seemed bad, so maybe God was far away, or on vacation, or maybe God was nowhere.
But around that time there was that nice old lady – she seemed really old to me, even though now I know I’m older than she was then. But anyway, she sang songs about God and heaven while she strummed her old guitar and said that Jesus loved us and if we asked Him to live our heart, He’d always be there, and that sounded really nice. Those words and those corny songs stuck with me, and when I prayed in my room at night it seemed like God had moved back into the house, and maybe she was right and God was even Jesus in my heart.
I remember when God seemed like he was in the words of my high school teacher whose kids had died but who stood in front of our whole school with his speech about death and hope and loss and the marvelous incomprehensibility of God. So maybe God was always alive but hard to see and hard to understand, except God rode on the currents of hope that wouldn’t let go of you and God appeared in the words of brave people in dark times.
I remember when 35 years later, I sat with that same teacher in his living room, except he wasn’t a teacher any more and I was a middle aged man now myself, and our wives and we sat and ate and talked like old friends and it seemed like God was in the warmth of that room, like an invisible host.
Then there’s the ocean, with its endless wavy blue and its fierce and gentle push and pull and push and pull. And it always seems big enough for anything, and big enough for anything and beautiful and scary and fierce and gentle all at once always feels like God too.
God can seem like She’s there in someplace really small like the eyes and the voice and the arms of that kind and alluring young woman I met when I was 19 who felt like home so fast and who I’ve kept coming home to these past 32 years.
And God can seem so big like the one who made the galaxies we can see just a little bit of on the darkest nights, when you look up, and it’s like someone flipped a brush across the horizon with all these specks of glow-in-the-dark paint, but they sparkle. And you think those are billions and gazillions of miles away and each of those specks is a whole sun around which clusters of planets like ours revolve, flying around in their own little bits of space like ours with who knows what happening on those big rocks we can’t see or even imagine. And somehow there’s a force big enough to set all this in motion and good enough to want it all to be and happy enough to enjoy it all with us. And that must be God too.
So God can really seem everywhere, except for the times when it’s all so bad it seems like God is nowhere.
The gospel of John tells a story about a really smart woman who talked with Jesus, wondering about whether God lived with her people or with Jesus’ people, like whose side was God on? And Jesus said, well maybe God isn’t on either side or maybe on both sides because after all, God doesn’t live in just one place. He said:
John 4:24 (Common English Bible)
24 God is spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in spirit and truth.”
Jesus says that God is spirit.
That makes sense to most of us. God doesn’t have a literal body or home. Ways we imagine God does – God sitting on a heavenly throne, or meeting God in a church or a temple – are metaphorical. The person and idea and power we call God isn’t a material figure. God is spirit.
But God can also be in relationship with material reality – influencing, encouraging, and leading us.
This being who we can’t see but can be omnipresent, everywhere, who has no body but can have a lot of influence, we call Spirit.
The Bible’s creation story teaches that all the earth is a kind of temple of the Spirit of God – a place God can live and breathe and play and speak, and a place where we can listen for God and love God and be inspired by this God.
The Way of Jesus teaches that the body of Jesus was its own kind of temple of the Holy Spirit too. Jesus was a person where God breathed encouragement and guidance, and Jesus paid attention to God really well.
So this Advent season before Christmas comes, we’re going to wonder about what the the theologians call spirit christology, how Jesus’ special ways of paying attention to the Spirit of God and letting the Spirit of God teach him and influence him and kind of flow through him made Jesus the really unique person that He was.
And if we want, we’re going to ask this same God Jesus loved and listened to to inspire us as well. Because we could use some help finding God, knowing where God is, and letting that Spirit of God give us encouragement or peace or good ideas or a sense of hope or home or whatever else God wants to do.
We’re going to think about two of the first times Jesus was sure he knew where the spirit of God was and what the spirit of God was inspiring and see how that can help us.
They’re both from the fourth chapter of the gospel of Luke, when Jesus’s ordinary small town life as a grown-up son and brother and carpenter and craftsman takes a big turn when he’s awakened to how the spirit of God is inspiring him.
It says:
Luke 4:1 (Common English Bible)
4 Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
People from Jesus’ town had been going down to the Jordan River to get baptised, because there was this wilderness pastor named John who said God is getting close to us again and we need to get ready by changing our minds about everything and changing our lives too. And we’ll get in the water to symbolize that kind of big, deep cleanse. Wash out the old, in with the new.
And maybe Jesus thought this sounded awesome because he was a spiritual guy and excited about God. Or maybe Jesus knew this was his time, that he had to be there for the big and new chapter that was going to start in his life as the savior of the world. Or maybe Jesus just got caught up in the crowd. We don’t know.
But when Jesus went in the water, there was a bird that landed on him, and everyone thought it was a sign, and Jesus knew and everybody knew that God was here. Now. In the waters. In the bird. And especially with Jesus, who heard God say to him:
you’re my kid, the one I love so very much. I like you and I’m proud of you.
And then before it could sink in, before Jesus could say a word to the crowd or go back home and think about what had happened, he was inspired again.
But this time, he knew he had to leave the river and leave his home for a while, take the time off of work and go to the wilderness, by himself.
It was so clear to him, this sense he had to go, that the Bible says Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Jesus went there to get away, to get perspective, to wrestle with his demons and his big temptations, and to keep listening to God. Because he had some really big days ahead. And the wilderness was the perfect place to get ready.
I wonder if you have had interior calls you have experienced in your life, strong senses that there is a particular place you need to go, or a thing you need to do. At least some of the time, these moments are the spirit of God’s call to us.
Jesus was a temple of the Holy Spirit, a place God lived and spoke and Jesus paid attention, so he could be inspired and live the fullest, deepest, most loving, most present life a person can live. The Way of Jesus tells us that we can be a temple of the Holy Spirit too, not usually as fully or deeply as Jesus, but that we too can be inspired. So we too can live full and deep and loving and present and powerful lives, with the help of God and friends.
I wonder what it’s been like if you ever felt like God was prompting you to go somewhere particular or do something particular.
- Has the wilderness ever called to you?
- Have you ever had a keen sense that there’s this thing you just have to do?
Years ago, I heard that more undocumented immigrants were being detained and locked up in ICE detention centers to await deportation. And I heard that some of them had kids here who were citizens, and some of them were taxpayers who had lived here a long time and hadn’t been back to their country of origin in decades. And I learned that some of them at risk were my friends.
And I thought this was really sad. But I also thought there was nothing I could do.
But one day a rabbi I know was telling me about how she volunteered with a radical interfaith clergy group who would be able to go inside the ICE detention center in Boston to make visits as a chaplain. And I thought:
oh, it is so interesting what you do.
And then she said:
Steve, I think you should get involved.
And before I could make an excuse about why I wouldn’t be doing this, a thought formed crystal clear in my head. I thought: the spirit of Jesus is speaking through my new friend. And before I could edit myself for social acceptability, I told my Jewish rabbi friend that maybe this sounds weird, but I feel like the spirit of Jesus is speaking through you, and my faith tells me when that happens, I need to say yes.
She didn’t think that was too weird, or maybe she didn’t and just didn’t tell me. But for the next couple of years, I made these visits to the ICE detention center. And two things happened:
One, it made my life more complicated. Making the time to go to the ICE detention center was a pain in the neck. It was in a neighborhood that wasn’t the safest and was really not fun to go to, and with all the security and waiting around, the visits took a long time as well. And a couple of times someone I got to know there gained their freedom, and my life got sort of entangled with theirs, and sometimes because I’m a pastor here and I invited some of you to help, some of your lives got a little entangled with theirs too, and that was usually inconvenient, sometimes costly. So there was that.
But also, never once did I doubt that the Spirit of God had led me to do this. Never once. Because those visits with the Muslim and Christian and not religious men I saw were raw and honest and very holy. I learned about being a better pastor. My heart got a little bigger. And in ways I can’t fully explain, I realized Jesus is right when he said that he lives in the prisons, that when we visit people who are incarcerated, we are visiting Jesus. And so I felt like the Spirit of God was making my life fuller and deeper, and I’m really thankful for those years.
Can I tell you one more story like this, but very different? A simpler story?
One time this fall, one of my grown kids had been having a hard week.
And one night I was trying to go to bed, but I was worrying about this kid, and I had this strong feeling: I have got to visit the kid.
But I’ve been learning about not trying to fix other people’s problems and when it’s time to trust other people to themselves and to trust them to God and not swoop in and get in the way, so I thought: I’m not going to visit this kid. They can work things out by themselves.
But then the next morning I woke up at 3 a.m. and again at 4 a.m., and each time I felt this deep feeling in my gut – must see the kid. And I asked God to help me figure out if I really needed to go, and I thought: yes, I do.
And so I woke up early, and took care of some things. And when Grace woke up, I was like:
I feel like I need to go overnight to visit the kid.
And she was like:
I think you’re right
and was really supportive.
And so off I went for this surprise overnight visit.
And you know what happened?
Not very much.
I didn’t fix anything or change anything at all, not really.
But our kid was really happy to see me, and I was really happy to see them. And we had a great visit, and I went home. A little more tired, but really, really glad I went.
Did I have to visit our kid? Probably not.
Was the Spirit of God inspiring me to this? I don’t know, maybe not, I can’t prove that, but it felt like it, so off I went.
I wonder what it’s felt like when you said Yes to somewhere you felt like God was leading you to go or something you felt like God was leading you to do.
I wonder what it’s felt like when you said No to somewhere you felt like God was leading you to go or something you felt like God was leading you to do.
And I wonder for all of us who aren’t sure if we’ve ever felt like this.
- Has the Spirit of God ever inspired me to do anything at all?
- What would this be like?
Jesus got in the habit of asking the Spirit of God to inspire him, and it happened for him a lot. And over time, he got a sense of clarity about what the Spirit of God is here for, and so what he is here for, what are the deepest purposes of his life.
Jesus found the answer to this question for him in some poetry in the Bible’s book of Isaiah. After the time in the wilderness, we read:
Luke 4:14-21 (Common English Bible)
14 Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and news about him spread throughout the whole countryside.
15 He taught in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
16 Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been raised. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue as he normally did and stood up to read.
17 The synagogue assistant gave him the scroll from the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,19 and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
20 He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the synagogue assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him.
21 He began to explain to them, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.”
Here Jesus reads the prophecy of Isaiah, where a servant of God is given direction and power for a radical ministry of healing and justice. As Jesus reads the text, he is inspired to see his own meaning and purpose within it. He thinks:
I am this servant. The spirit of God is giving me motivation and power to heal and to set free and to do justice, to usher in another season of God’s favor.
If any of us were to read Bible verses, and announce to our community that it is all about me, that the scripture has been fulfilled by me, people would think we’d lost it. (This is more or less what happens to Jesus too.) But like Jesus, we can find meaning and purpose as we ask God to help us understand how our story relates to some of the big themes and stories we encounter in the Bible. Sometimes we can be inspired by the Spirit of God in lots of other places. I started this sermon telling stories about all kinds of places where I’ve felt like: God is here, and something inspires me.
I wonder where that’s happened for you.
I wonder where it will happen next.
In this season of Advent, before Christmas comes, I wonder if we can get curious about just what it means that the Spirit of God inspired Jesus. And I wonder if we can get curious about just how the Spirit of God can inspire us still, inspire us to be healed or be set free or to find justice. Or inspire us to heal to set others free, or do justice.
I’m going to invite us to three short prayers here as we close.
I wonder where in your life, you need encouragement, healing, freedom, or justice. In that space, perhaps you can pray: spirit of God, inspire me.
I wonder where in some corner of the world, you see a need for encouragement, healing, freedom, or justice. As that comes to mind, you could pray: spirit of God, inspire them, inspire us.
And where it might be in your capacity to play a role to increase encouragement, healing, freedom, or justice, could you pray by yourself or perhaps with your friends or church: spirit of God, empower, encourage, inspire us.