Chances are, if a good many of us were asked when we became a Christian, we would reply with a shrug...would say with John Baillie, 'I cannot remember a time when my life seemed to me to be my own to do with as I pleased...a time when I did not know that the ultimate source of the authority which my parents were doing their fallible best to administer and under which they stood no less than I was God.'We were held in the faith of the church as David Douglas Grove, Jr. was held this morning and will be held all his growing up years: baptized at a time when we were not able to remember; immersed in Sunday School without much of a say; told to sit still in worship or else; sent off to communicants' class (as we called it back then) because it was time; expected to attend Sunday night fellowship no matter what; dormant, perhaps, during our college years and early adulthood until, with the birth of a child, faith came full circle. Suddenly we found ourselves readied to do to our children what was done to us, for Christ's sake...and for theirs.
I am reminded of Erma Bombeck's astute observation concerning Christian formation: "In church the other Sunday," she wrote, "I was intent on a small child who was turning around smiling at everyone. He wasn't gurgling, spitting, humming, kicking, tearing the hymnals, or rummaging through his mother's handbag. He was just smiling. Finally his mother jerked him around and with a stage whisper that could be heard in a little theater off Broadway said, 'Stop that grinning! You're in church!' With that, she gave him a belt and as the tears rolled down his cheeks added, 'That's better,' and returned to her prayers."
Our presence in the pews is surely a testament to the Holy Spirit's persistence given the vagaries of Christian socialization. That Christ's church has survived our minimalist view of sanctification, has weathered the questionable pronouncements of parental authority projected heavenward, has endured our meanderings in and out of the pew: that the church has survived all this is not our doing, but is a gift of God.
And yet, I am left to wonder on this Pentecost Sunday, when we are given a story of rushing wind and tongues of fire and lives turned inside out by the gospel, I am left to wonder about the likes of us who have no memory of life outside the context of the church. I wonder, despite our unremitting church attendance, if faith has ever really taken hold of your life and mine...if faith will ever really take hold of the life of David Douglas Grove...and if so, how?
"The New Testament," writes John Leith, "does not focus on the problem that arises when we attempt to describe the origins of the Christian life in the person who has been born, in the providence of God, into the fellowship of a Christian home and the Christian church. In general the New Testament assumes a radical shift in one's personal existence rather than growth into Christian maturity...."
How else could it have been after the resurrection? For the journey from Jewish existence to Christian confession had to be nothing less than a radical turn: from a life ordered by laws righteously followed, to a life reordered by grace unmerited. The journey from a Gentile culture to a Christian community could be nothing less than a radical turn from a culture in love with itself and its needs, to a discipleship ready to leave self behind and follow Him who had come to save. The journey from Roman citizen to the martyrdom awaiting those who dared cry "Jesus is Lord" rather than Caesar, was no less radical than the turn from death to life.
So as regards the faith that is in those of us who have never known otherwise, what has this book full of folks whose lives were radically changed by an encounter with Jesus Christ...what have they to do with us who shrug, when asked, about our Christian beginnings, with us who are slow growing Christians?
The clue to the beginnings of the Christian life, whether marked by rushing wind or by nothing particularly memorable, is that elusive person of the Trinity, the One whose gender is least suggested, whose image is but wind, and whose work remains a mystery to most casual believers. The clue to the beginnings of the Christian life is the Holy Spirit. Four things to say of the Holy Spirit and our slow growing faith on this Pentecost Sunday.
The Spirit, first of all, connects our lives, personally, with Jesus Christ, whether that be a radical turn or a slight detour. In the baptismal service, we talk about being engrafted into Christ--a slow-growing image. When and how that happened to you and to me, God only knows. "For churches that practice infant baptism," writes John Leith underlining our dilemna this morning, "the usual pattern is for persons to grow up in the life of the church experiencing no radical change, with no point before which they were not Christians and after which they are." The Sunday School classes we can barely remember, the interminable worship services through which we were made to sit, the fellowship attended under protest, the confession of faith made because we were of age. To be sure these mundane means, used of the church to make us nominally religious, may also be the graceful means used of the Holy Spirit to engraft us into Christ, to grow us up slowly into faith, to hold us even when we bolt and run. It is the spade work, without which we could drift mindlessly into secularity...but through which we are introduced, again and again, to Jesus Christ. As Reynolds Price put it, we are those who have "taken prior pains to know him....My own luck here," he says, from the perspective of a chronic illness, "was long prepared, from early childhood."
Then, in the second place, the Holy Spirit "elicits faith from our hearts." A common image used by theologians is the experience simply of waking up...an essential experience, according to John Calvin, if we are to live in faith rather than be nominally religious: "As long as Christ remains outside us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us."
As those who were raised in a Christian homes and participated in all those normal religious activities, some of us still would say there came a time when we woke up in faith...when all these stories we had learned about Jesus became the substance of life's meaning and purpose...when the concepts of mercy and grace and forgiveness became the only truth on which our broken lives could lean...when our days and nights were not our own to do with as we pleased, but we began to live in reference to the One who gave them to us. This was not our own doing, my friends. Given the promises made by parents and church to us before we were awake, we were those who had slowly been placed in the way of grace by the working of God's Spirit, until that same Spirit had Christ take root in our hearts and minds, eliciting faith.
Then, in the third place, there is what is called the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Part of being born into a Christian family or being raised in the community of faith is being given the words of scripture. In a sense, they are just words. We may read them, study them, even memorize them. But until God's Spirit intercedes between the words on these pages and the details of our lives, God has not spoken. Until we ask of the gospel, as those first Christians asked on Pentecost, "What does this mean?", we will not be readied to hear a Word from the Lord. Until the Spirit intercedes between God's speaking and our hearing, bearing testimony to these words become God's word to us, we might just as well be reading Shakespeare of a Sunday morning.
Though immediately, on the heals of our asking after the meaning of these words we have heard from infancy, comes the question concerning our response: given what we have heard from God, what shall we do? Here, for those who have already been baptized as infants, there remains but one thing to do, according to scripture and by way of the Spirit's power, namely: Take, eat. Do this in remembrance of me. The Holy Spirit provides the power by which the sacraments, throughout our lives, promote and confirm the faith which has taken hold of us. Through the Spirit, these simple, everyday words and actions become the means of God's grace.
Yet how often to we go through the motions, we who have done this in remembrance of Him as long as we can remember? And even in relation to the sacrament of baptism, how often is water dripped on a child's head because it was dripped on ours? There is the sweetness of the baby and the day and the family gathered, but little room for the Spirit's power to enter our lives anew.
"The sacraments properly fulfill their office only when the Spirit, that inward teacher, comes to them, by whose power alone hearts are penetrated and affections moved and our souls opened for the sacraments to enter in. If the Spirit be lacking," warns Calvin, "the sacraments can accomplish nothing more in our minds than the splendor of the sun shining upon blind eyes, or a voice sounding in deaf ears."
God's Spirit moves in our hearts to keep us alive to the presence of God anew as a child is baptized, as the bread is broken and shared, as the words of scripture are read. Of a Sunday morning, though the preacher may not be on and the elders may be stumbling over the baptismal font, God's Spirit is seeking to keep you awake to God's presence by means of word and water and wine.
Finally, because we who cannot remember a time when we were not in the church's nurture also cannot remember a moment when we arrived at faith's final step, the Holy Spirit continues the work of sanctification in us until we lie to die. Hence, whether you have been turned clean around in your tracks to follow Jesus, or whether your parents headed you in that direction from the day you were born, Christian maturity is always a work in progress. Daily, the Holy Spirit is moving our hearts to fashion us in the image of Jesus Christ. Theologically this is called sanctification: the transformation, in the twinkling of an eye or in the interminable steps of slow growing Christian, the transformation of human life into the image of Christ. That is what God is up to, with you and with me, as we sit on these hard pews or tremble in this high pulpit. It is never finished. God is never through with a one of us, until God brings the good thing he started to completion in the day of Jesus Christ.
Hence that ancient prayer, which has been said for centuries over the heads of adult communicants before they first were invited to this table...has been said over heads which have known a radical turning...and over heads only slightly bowed: "Defend O Lord this Thy servant with Thy heavenly grace that she may continue Thine forever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more, until she come unto Thine everlasting kingdom." In the midst of rushing winds, do I pray this for you, lest we slow growing Christians be lost in the rush of Pentecostal winds, lest we slow growing Christians miss the power of that Spirit working, even now, in our hearts. Thanks be to God!