Will you pray with me?  Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts
be acceptable in your eyes, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

As most of you already know, this Lent, Old South will begin a process of intentional discernment in which we will seek to find, to discover the vision that God has in mind for Old South here in the first decades of the 21^st century.  The way we will do that discernment is to invoke the Spirit of God, to ask the Spirit to come and be with us, and to make plain to us God’s vision.  And since we will need to be well-acquainted with the Spirit for this process, I thought I might spend some time reminding us of who the Spirit is.

Listen now for the word of God.

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was s formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.”[1]

And again, “…then the Lord God formed a man from the soil, and breathed into his nostrils the breath, the spirit, of life; and the man became a living being.”[2]

And again, “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.  God led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry….Then God said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: “Thus says the Lord God: come from the four winds, o spirit, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”’  I prophesied as God commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived...”[3]

Again, “John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming….He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit…”[4]

And finally, “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly from heaven there cam a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting….All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.”[5]

It was there at the beginning, brooding over the creation of the world.  It breathed into dust and made it us.  It breathed the dry bones to life.  Its new life was promised by John at the Jordan, and whooshed upon the grieving disciples after Jesus was resurrected and ascended into heaven.  It’s there all throughout the long history of the people of our God, blowing breath, and life, and freedom into all that lie trapped by death, or fear, or the way things have always been.  It turns nothingness into the universe, dirt into humans, “good enough” into “better than we imagined”, and grieving, fearful ones into the church.

The action and story of the Holy Spirit of our God blows all throughout the story of the people of our God.  It is like a breeze, invisible, easy to miss, a current of grace blowing along down through the ages, ruffling and caressing the lives of the people and pushing, pushing like a wind against history, bending it in God’s direction.

An apocryphal story from the Middle Ages illustrates the lengths to which some have gone to apprehend the blowing of God’s Spirit in their lives.  One day, King Alfred of Wessex in England was sitting at court when some of his men came to him to tell him that three Irishmen had drifted up on the shores of Cornwall.  They were in tiny boats without rudder, sails, oars, or supplies.  The Irishmen were brought before the king and asked where they had come from and where they were going.  They said that they had set out from the shores of Ireland and been drifting in the Irish Sea for seven days.  When asked why, they replied simply that they had “stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where.”[6]

It is a weird and wonderful image.  Three saints—a touch touched, perhaps—set out to drift on the open sea to find where the Spirit will blow them, for no reason other than the love of God and the desire to let the Spirit of God control their lives.  We don’t’ know what happened to them after meeting Alfred, or if they ever found out why God had blown them to Cornwall.  All we have is their words and this tiny bit of their story, and the reminder that, if one is to realize the work of the Spirit, one must do some fairly strange things—or at least do things that take us away from our ordinary, busy, productive lives long enough to notice which way the wind is blowing.

For you see, the Holy Spirit is subtle.  It’s easy to miss.  Easy to mistake for something else.  Like chance, or our own brilliance, or drunkenness.

In the Bible the word for “Spirit” is always also the word for “breath,” and for “wind.”  In Hebrew, it is ruakh.  In Greek, pneuma.  The Spirit is invisible save for the effects it has on the things it encounters.  Like wind that you only know is there because of the rustling of the trees or the feel of it on your skin, or the fact that your boat started in Ireland and ended up in Cornwall.  The Spirit has no form of its own, no way for us to tell it exists except by its effects on the lives of the people whom it touches.

And the Spirit is always there.  Always giving life.  Always moving.  As subtle and powerful, silent and as necessary as the very breath you’ve been drawing without noticing it all through this sermon.

It is easy to miss, isn’t it?  As easy to miss as our own breath, though as important.  As easy to mistake as what happened with the disciples at Pentecost.  And it takes work, it takes practice, it takes time to notice it, to feel it, to believe it’s really there.

The Lent, when we begin our discernment process, we will be seeking to discern where the Spirit of God is blowing us in these days.  And while in our quest to sense the Spirit’s movement, we will not step quite as far off the shores of sanity as the three Irish saints in the story, we will do something that is in some ways even more out of the ordinary: we will form a conspiracy.

We will form a conspiracy.  But fear not; it won’t be secret, and it won’t be nefarious.  It will be a different kind of conspiracy, the kind that the founders and first practitioners of the Congregational Way formed whenever they needed to seek God’s guidance in ordering their lives together.  You see, the word comes from the Latin word con, or “with,” and spirare, “to breathe.”  To conspire is to breathe with, so in our discernment process, we will form a conspiracy.  We will seek to breathe together with each other, and, we hope, with the same Spirit of God that breathed over the face of the waters.

We will ask God to be with us, and then we will wait together on the Spirit, trusting that it will show up, as it always has, as John, and Jesus, and God promised that it would.  And in our own ways, we will be as radical and as counter-cultural as the Irish saints:

We will not rush.  We will breathe together.  For once, we will engage our hearts before our minds.  And we will breather together.  We will invoke the Spirit of God and search for it in the testimony of those around us.  We will breathe together.  It will be hard, for we will ask hard questions and our anxiety and our hope will rise within us, and we will long to take a vote, and to act.  Instead, we will breathe together, as God breathed at the beginning, and at the beginning of Old South Church in Boston, as each one of us breathed at our own beginnings.  We will breathe together, and trust that the God whose breath resurrected our Lord, who blew through the Boston Tea Party and who blows through our lives still, will be there.  We will breathe together, as one body full of Spirit, and we will not rush, and we will not know the end until we are there, but we will trust that a loving God will get us where we need to be.  We will breathe together in…and out.  In…and out.  In………..and out.  Amen.