I once invited a rabbi to speak to an interfaith gathering alongside a priest and an imam. I said to each speaker, ‘Describe the truth at the heart of the universe.’ When it was his turn to present, the rabbi started breathing. Gradually he let his respiration become audible, a bit like you do when you’re running and starting to get out of breath. (Breath) But then he started doing another thing. Without pausing his increasingly noisy exhaling, he began to close his upper teeth on his lower lip occasionally, until it became clear he was beginning to form a word, almost like a person with a stutter seeking a way to say something that wouldn’t cause them to get stuck. (Yhhhh) After a minute or so the rabbi was enunciating two sounds, a Yuh noise and a vuh. (Yhvh) Gradually these two sounds ran together, until the point where he was still breathing loudly in and out, but with each breath a single word became increasingly clear: yuhvuh. He was saying Yhvh, the word Jews don’t pronounce because it’s so holy, but Christians call Yahweh: the name of God. What the rabbi was portraying in unforgettably vivid terms was a process he later described as creation. But to me and I think many of the other Christians in the room it felt like a portrayal of incarnation. Remember the beginning of John’s gospel: ‘In the beginning was the word.’ I’ve come to realise that what he was really depicting was the activity of the Holy Spirit.
That’s because breath is the most common analogy the Bible has for describing the activity of the Holy Spirit. Wind is the most suitable metaphor for something that has tangible power to invigorate and transform, yet can’t itself be seen. And breath is a kind of wind. Breath has a personal source. It’s vital to the constant process of regeneration that takes place in our lungs and heart and veins that turns invisible air into the fleshly reality of our functioning bodies. You’ll have noticed that the middle syllable of the word inspiration maps onto the word ‘spirit.’ What the rabbi was demonstrating was inspiration. Notice the first syllable of the word: ‘in.’ In-spiration is the moment what the rabbi was portraying takes place in us. Expiration is the visible outcome of that inner miracle.
I want to describe tonight the six ways the Holy Spirit works in the Bible. It just happens that these six scriptural ways are identical to the six ways in which inspiration works in our lives. That correspondence I believe to be providential rather than coincidental. Now there’s a danger in describing inspiration in this way. That danger is that the Holy Spirit becomes a way to sacralise and endorse pretty much anything we were going to do anyway, providing a general feelgood glow with no distinction between that which leads to life and that which heads elsewhere. To avoid that danger, I’m going to articulate each of the six ways the Holy Spirit works in a sentence, link each way with its own distinctive moment or theme in the Bible, and illustrate each way in contemporary experience, including my own.
As I’ve reflected on these six ways, I’ve recognised that each one of them is so compelling it feels, once you appreciate it, that it’s the only one – until you perceive another one, which doesn’t diminish the previous one but builds on it – so as we move through the sequence, we find a cascade of glory, like one fountain spurting out of the centre of another. I hope you find the experience of listening to this effervescent springing forth as invigorating as I’ve found discerning it.
Inspiration Happens when the Holy Spirit makes Something where there was Nothing
So let’s start with what seems the obvious launching-off point: creation. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit makes something where there was nothing. The term ‘creation’ actually collectively names four distinct things that superficially sound the same but more subtly turn out to be quite different. You could say the whole Bible story is an exploration of the delicate differences between these four things. Let me name the four different things and explore their nature and differences.
The first is creation from nothing, or ex nihilo, to use its technical Latin name. Both the first chapter of Genesis and the theory of the Big Bang contain the same not-fully-resolved mystery: how did something come out of nothing? This is how we like to think of inspiration: we’re looking at a blank score, and a melody just comes into our head; we’re floundering in a sinking submarine, when suddenly one of the sailors thinks of a way to rescue all on board; we’re plodding along with letters and telephones and newspapers, when amazingly someone comes up with the idea of the internet.
But actually, little if any creation is really like that. It tends to be of one of three other kinds. One is when you put two or more things together and they spark a literal or figurative chemical reaction. The most tender is the meeting of the egg and the sperm that forms a zygote. The most terrifying is the meeting of two hydrogen nuclei to form a helium atom, thereby detonating a nuclear bomb. The most relatable is the encounter between Gilbert’s lyrics and Sullivan’s tunes, between the wealthy motor enthusiast Charles Rolls and the diligent mechanical engineer Henry Royce, between the gifted but hearing-, speech- and sight-impaired Helen Keller and the teacher Anne Sullivan.
A third form of creation, in addition to from nothing or the spark of two things, is reconfiguration. Perhaps most creation, indeed most inspiration, is like that. One person shoves a bunch of furniture into a sitting room, and it feels crowded, clunky and claustrophobic. Another person says, ‘Do you mind if I just take an hour to rearrange things?’ – and behold, with no change of furniture, but with new lighting, some decoration, a couple of cushions and throws and a sofa turned round, you have something that could be in a colour magazine. A football team languishes in the relegation zone with no potency in front of goal and a leaky defence. A new manager takes over and, with the same players, albeit some in different positions, but a new mindset to how to play when the opposition has the ball, suddenly the team become world-beaters. But more generally, isn’t this how representational art always works? When John Constable paints The Hay Wain, he’s reconfiguring on canvas a scene from rural Suffolk. It’s a creative act, brilliant, perhaps idealised, but without question a reconfigurement rather than a replica. Like the football manager, he’s taking existing materials and rearranging them to magnificent effect, while translating them into another medium.
But then there’s a fourth form of creation that’s again slightly different from the three I’ve outlined. And that’s restoration. I remember cooking a nice dinner, and deciding I wanted my plates warm, so putting them in the top oven. But my friend, with whom I was sharing the cooking, didn’t realise the plates were warming, so he switched on the grill and my beautiful pottery plates cracked. But along came another friend who was good with ceramics, and glued the broken plates together; and now I use them again as if nothing happened. Sometimes a restored friendship or relationship can be more cherished and textured than it would have been had nothing ever gone wrong. Restoration is an act of creation; and thus of inspiration. As one priest-poet, beholding his parish, said, ‘God, is this what you’ve given me – all these rocks?’ – before pausing and, in a moment of inspiration, realising, ‘Well then I must make a rock garden.’ That’s restoration.
The Bible weaves together these four kinds of creation. We see creation from nothing in the first chapter of Genesis. We see the magic of two characters coming together in the faithfulness of Peter and the dynamism of Paul, in the breaking down of the dividing wall between Jew and gentile in Ephesians. We see the reconfiguration of the same elements to dynamic effect when Jesus takes humble fishermen and wayward tax collectors and makes them disciples of God’s coming realm. We see the restoration of the broken in the way Jesus restores outcasts to community, and in the way the gospel writers portray Jesus’ healings as metaphors for the restoration of Israel as a whole. The overarching theme is that of conversion, by which the Holy Spirit takes a downtrodden and discouraged heart and locates it in a new story, changing heritage and destiny so much that Paul calls it a ‘new creation.’
Inspiration Happens when the Holy Spirit Reveals Something that was Always True
But those four kinds of creation are collectively just one dimension of the six forms of inspiration. There’s more to inspiration than creation, however talented, thrilling and awesome creation often is. I want to turn now to a second dimension. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit reveals something that was always true. For this, the pivotal story in the Bible is the annunciation; that’s to say the moment Gabriel visits Mary and says the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and she’ll conceive a child that will be God with us. Both Luke and Matthew present the conception of Jesus as a new creation story. It’s difficult for us to get our head round this reorientation. For the gospel writers this moment, when the Holy Spirit comes upon Mary, is the real creation of all things. Jesus is the centre of God’s purposes and the reason for creation, because God’s purpose is to be with us. The humanity of Jesus in Mary and the divinity of Jesus in the Holy Spirit come together, which is why this moment is prior to creation. The two Genesis stories, about the six-day process and the location of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, are to be interpreted backwards from this gospel story.
This is what I want to describe as the second kind of inspiration. I’m calling it the moment when the Holy Spirit reveals something that was always true. What the annunciation story is saying is that Jesus is the reason for creation. He’s not an afterthought or plan B brought in to fix a problem that arose through human folly or fragility: he’s the purpose of all things, because the heart of all things is God’s desire to be with us. That was the explanation for creation, is the reason for incarnation, and will be our destiny with God in eternal life forever. The power of the New Testament is not that it changes the direction of the story, but that it reveals something that was always true, yet previously only dimly perceptible.
We discover this kind of inspiration in a hundred ways in life and literature. Jane Austen’s celebrated 1815 novel Emma tells the tale of impetuous and headstrong Emma Woodhouse, who sets about matchmaking for the unwary womenfolk of the neighbourhood of Highbury. Her meddling is as clumsy as her reading of people’s character and affections is inaccurate, and it takes the whole length of the novel for her to realise that her heart truly lies with the one person who’s held her to account, believed in her, but not been charmed by her whims, which is to say her brother-in-law’s brother, George Knightley. Emma wonders how she could have failed to know her own soul – how she could have been so slow to wake up to the only explanation for Mr Knightley’s close attention to her every action, lamentable as well as commendable? This is her instant of inspiration, her penny-drop moment. Likewise, and just as sharp and transformational, is the second, in Agatha Christie’s celebrated 1934 novel, Hercule Poirot pieces together the extraordinary events on the Orient Express. In an instant he realises every single one of the passengers has a profound motive for wanting to murder Samuel Ratchett. That’s because Ratchett, then known as Cassetti, was in fact the man who many years earlier had kidnapped and murdered three-year-old Daisy Armstrong, a heinous crime that had led to the deaths of both Daisy’s parents and the destruction of a community. What suddenly Poirot realises is that the whole carriage has been carefully configured so as to enable them each literally to put the knife into Ratchett. The satisfaction of the conclusion of a murder mystery is that the detective reveals what was always true, yet hitherto hidden within the outward facts of the story.
Perhaps the most common form of inspiration in this genre of the Holy Spirit revealing something that’s always been true is the territory of vocation. The annunciation story is a moment of revelation of the world’s vocation to be God’s companion. That’s a vocation the world always had, but only becomes fully apparent at the moment Gabriel visits Mary. This is paradigmatic for how vocation works. We usually think of vocation as a prospective thing: ‘What am I going to do when I grow up?’ is the question every young person asks themselves. We assume the answer to this question lies in a moment of almost blind choice made by squeezing your eyes shut very hard and suddenly getting an idea, with a little help from a careers officer and no necessity for a reminder from your parents that the bank of mum and dad is running dry. But true discernment, not just of a career but of questions like where to live, how to spend your free time, and who to trust, is largely a matter of looking back. You ask yourself, as if in a form of the Ignatian examen at the end of each day, ‘What kinds of activities have led to a feeling of profound contentment, satisfaction, energy and joy? What forms of life lift from me the sense of sadness, guilt, bitterness or failure? What types of interactions disclose in me new gifts, hidden skills, forgotten knowledge, unexpected aptitudes?’ And perhaps most subtly and significantly, ‘What path surprisingly and restoratively reincorporates back into my life the moments of loss, bewilderment, dismay or despair I’d previously assumed were beyond redemption?’ In such ways the Holy Spirit shows us what has always been true, but our confusing circumstance, or wilful inability to listen, or fitful impatience to see instant outcomes has obscured from our view.
The name for all these kinds of inspiration is revelation. In some circles people talk about the Bible as if it’s entirely clear, speaks always with one voice, and provides unambiguous instruction for faithful existence today. This isn’t just a misunderstanding of the Bible, it’s an impoverishment of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit works at all three stages of scripture: in the original events described, in the recording of them, and in the performance of the Christian life informed by them. Inspiration refers to all three, but the one that counts most today is the community’s trust that the Holy Spirit is genuinely at work in discernment, and we’re not constantly at risk of a catastrophic wrong turning. That would turn the Holy Spirit from a comforter and advocate and counsellor to a trickster that sets us up to fail.
The two characteristic forms in the life of the church in which the Holy Spirit reveals things that were always true are preaching and prophecy. The point of preaching is to take the old, old story and demonstrate how it is precisely God’s word for today. That requires the action of the Holy Spirit which, like a householder, takes from the storehouse of scripture something old and something new. More spontaneously, prophecy refers to the charismatic practice of being given a word from the Holy Spirit to speak intuitively into a community situation or a person’s life. This can sometimes evoke doubt or suspicion, but when it lands well it can be a profound experience of inspiration. All these experiences correspond to the annunciation of Gabriel to Mary in Nazareth: the revelation today of something that was always true.
Inspiration Happens when the Holy Spirit Strips away the Membrane between Heaven and Earth
Now for the third of the six understandings of inspiration. We’ve explored creation and annunciation. The third moment is the second you realise this mundane existence of waking, eating, working, procreating, and sleeping isn’t the only dimension of reality. It’s only the tangible, present aspect, and beyond it there’s something greater, more dynamic, and more wonderful. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit strips away the membrane between heaven and earth. Abraham gets a glimpse of this when God tells him to go outside his tent and behold the stars in the sky. Jacob articulates the wonder of this when, after he sees a ladder of angels, he says, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego feel the intimacy of this when the realise there’s a fourth figure beside them in the fiery furnace. The disciples sense the power of this when Jesus calms the storm and they say, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’
About 30 years ago, before the days of mobile phones, I was living in Newcastle. On a day off I was longing to find some fresh air. A friend told me he was going to be in the Lake District, so I jumped at the chance to take the couple of hours to drive over and join him for a day on the fells. We’d arranged to meet at a youth hostel, and I duly showed up a few minutes early. There wasn’t any sign of my friend. I ran through all the usual emotions. I started with the head, and wondered if we’d misunderstood the arrangements or I’d got the wrong hostel. I moved onto the heart, and wondered if he’d had an accident and was somewhere stricken and bleeding by a roadside. After 40 minutes I lapsed into the gut and was getting angry and frustrated and let down and cross.
At that moment my friend sauntered by wearing a pair of slippers. He had a warm cup of coffee in his hand. I was speechless. We each looked at each other as if we’d each seen a ghost. And then we both realised what had happened. The youth hostel had an upstairs. He’d been waiting for me there. It never occurred to him I wouldn’t look. If he hadn’t come in search of a cup of coffee, we could have been like that for hours. I was downstairs, and never imagined there was an upstairs. We were both speechless. His appearance at the coffee counter was like a moment of inspiration – the instant the Holy Spirit strips away the membrane between heaven and earth.
The moment in the Bible that crystallises what inspiration means in this third sense is the transfiguration. In the gospel story the three disciples go up a mountain with Jesus and see his face and clothes turn dazzling shimmering white and Moses and Elijah appear either side of him. The story’s telling us two things. It’s portraying vividly how Jesus transcends heaven and earth – he belongs both here and there, and for this fleeting moment the veil slips away, and the disciples see Jesus’ permanent dual reality. But the story’s also saying Jesus is to be understood in the light of the law and the prophets, represented by Moses and Elijah, in other words the whole of the Old Testament, both God’s covenant with Israel and Israel’s attempts to uphold that covenant. The point is that this third kind of inspiration isn’t so much about what we experience ourselves as about what we suddenly perceive about the whole of reality. This third way the Holy Spirit works is to place our lives on an immeasurably greater canvas, to locate us against a tremendously larger backdrop.
In one of our Being With groups, in the informal discussion period at the end, one participant explained his frustration and sadness and how that had motivated him to join the group. He said, ‘I feel so alone – everyone in my life has left or died and now even my beloved pet has gone. Where is my love to go?’ It was a poignant moment. One of the rules of the course is that when someone shares deeply, you don’t all treat it as a problem to fix and pile in with your own experience or proffer a bunch of solutions. You just say, ‘Thank you.’ After a silence, another member of the group said, ‘Isn’t that what it feels like for God all the time? Constantly offering love and wanting companionship, while we find a host of excuses and alternatives to say we’re not available or interested right now.’ Then there was a different kind of silence. A moment when participants realised something had happened. A simple if trusting conversation had discovered another level. The membrane between heaven and earth had been peeled back; our conversation had been transfigured. That’s how the Holy Spirit works. It was a moment of inspiration.
This is fundamentally what prayer is. There’s an intimidating hierarchy about prayer, from people who’re able to sit in contemplative silence for two hours to others who meticulously keep and update intercession lists or seek God’s will in detail for obscure but troubled parts of the globe. But what all kinds of prayer converge on is this same sense of awareness that there’s a whole realm of essence in which the Trinity dwells that’s beyond and so much greater than our mortal existence, and that Christ traversed the two in his incarnation and the Holy Spirit dwells across both, constantly making the one present to the other. Prayer is simply the moment when we open our minds and souls to awareness of that other realm and ask our lives and hearts to be suffused with its wonder and glory. Prayer is the regular practice of inviting inspiration, letting the Holy Spirit breathe through us, as that rabbi did with his heavy inhalation and expiration years ago.
Inspiration Happens when the Holy Spirit Does Unbelievable Things
I remember a student preacher once saying, ‘We worship Jesus because he did unbelievable things. He sent the Holy Spirit, and when we seek to be like Jesus, the Spirit enables us to do unbelievable things.’ I thought then and still think that’s a pretty succinct account of Christianity. What it puts its finger on about inspiration is that inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit does unbelievable things.
The central unbelievable thing around which Christian theology is built is Jesus’ resurrection. This is an event so unimaginable, and so close to the heart of humankind’s most profound anxiety, the fear of death and either punishment or oblivion, that its proclamation opens the door to every other aspect of theology. We could call Jesus’ resurrection the single definitive moment of inspiration in all existence. It’s the moment that does all the previous things – it makes something out of nothing, by bringing life where there was death; it reveals what that was always true, by demonstrating that love is stronger than death; and it strips away the membrane between heaven and earth, by exhibiting in time God’s purpose for eternity. By showing that nothing is impossible with God, the resurrection bursts open our imaginations to begin to envisage myriad other things we’d thought absurd or outrageous that now come within the penumbra of the conceivable.
What is Jesus’ resurrection, and how does it display the work of the Holy Spirit? I suggest there are three levels to an answer to this question. The gospels tell a story by which Jesus is filled with the Spirit, fully divine, and in the thick of debate and controversy, fully human. Inevitably he becomes a threat to the fragile status quo in the Holy Land, and quickly he perceives he is likely to be put to death; but he sees this as the fulfilment of his being with us, not the thwarting of it. We behold the cost of this commitment when we see on the cross he finds himself forced to choose between being with the Father and being with us. He chooses us, and his death seems to create a rupture in the Trinity between Son and Father. But this is the moment of inspiration. The Holy Spirit remains utterly with both Father and Son, and it is the Holy Spirit that brings about the resurrection returning Jesus to life, reuniting Son and Father and reinstating the integrity of the Trinity.
Before moving on I want to note that this characteristic of the Holy Spirit – somehow clinging on to two parties that have been split apart – extends from the Trinity to a more general pattern. Lament is the practice of naming the glory of God and the ghastliness of one’s present circumstance and pleading with God to close the yawning distance between the two. When Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the Comforter, he’s saying the Holy Spirit stretches between us and the Father at these more agonising moments in our existence. Just as on Good Friday the Holy Spirit maintains a connection between the Father and the Son when the crucifixion has sundered the bond between them, so in our own agonies and trials, the Holy Spirit preserves our link with the Father even when we feel abandoned by God and utterly alone.
Another way of understanding the resurrection is to see how it reconfigures the Old Testament story. The Old Testament rests on a tension between its own resurrection moment – the crossing of the Red Sea and liberation from slavery in Egypt – and its semi-resurrection moment – the remarkable return from exile in Babylon and yet the very limited sense of deliverance experienced by the returning Jews in the subsequent 500 years. You can read the New Testament as a story whose authors believed Jesus was completing the unfinished work of the return from exile – which is why there are all those quotations from Isaiah about the lame walking and the blind being given their sight, because these were the motifs associated with the end of exile. Inspiration then means the Holy Spirit making these stories come alive in us – and the way Christians practice that conviction is through the sacrament of baptism, which is the reenactment of the exodus and the resurrection: the two unbelievable things. Baptism is the moment we ask the Holy Spirit to make the story of the Bible come alive in us: in the words of the ninth-century chant, ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire… enable with perpetual light the dullness of our blinded sight.’
But there’s a third dimension to resurrection, and that’s the inspirational realisation that God has done unbelievable things and will continue to do so, most obviously find ways to be with us now and find ways for us to be with the Trinity, one another and the renewed creation forever. In this sense, inspiration names those moments when we behold today a glimpse of God’s forever – when the impossible happens and the fixed locks of our prison of despair are unpicked in ways that defy rational sense or conventional wisdom. There was a relatively peaceful transfer of power in South Africa – how amazing that is, is even clearer now we behold how challenging the transition to genuine Palestinian self-rule will be amidst the bloodbath in Gaza and Lebanon. Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history. There’s still a horrifying 10% of people in dire circumstances around the world, but that statistic is a kind of resurrection.
On a smaller scale we experience relationships that were destroyed by betrayal yet have somehow been restored by understanding, trust, forgiveness and reconciliation. We see children whose lives have been ruined by harm or neglect or misfortune somehow growing into adults of dignity, strength and compassion. These are unbelievable things, and they defy our comprehension. They are inspired, and they are inspiring. They are foretastes of God’s ultimate purpose for us all.
Inspiration Happens when the Holy Spirit Empowers Us with a Force Beyond Us
We’ve reached the fifth dimension of inspiration and we’re only now arriving at the most obvious story about the Holy Spirit in the Bible: which is Pentecost. Pentecost is the definitive moment when God takes all the heritage of what the scripture describes and Jesus makes possible, and brings it into present-day reality in the life and experience of Christian believers. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit empowers us with a force beyond us.
I recall two occasions thirty years ago within a couple of months of each other. In one, I’d been invited to preach at an ecumenical service back in the era when I left preparing sermons till the afternoon beforehand. I spent all day before the evening service stressing about what I was going to say, writing nothing down, and feeling confused and downhearted. I couldn’t get my head round the task or the approach. So I arrived at the church with nothing on paper and no idea what was going to happen. Yet when it was my moment to speak, I stood up, and to a degree I’ve never known before or since, I was given words, and recalled stories and found illustrations and built arguments and spent 20 minutes feeling like the line in Isaiah where we’re told those who wait on the Lord shall mount up with wings as eagles, or the moment in Dumbo when the young elephant loses the feather but can fly anyway. Looking back, I guess I’d spent all day waiting on the Lord. I certainly felt borne up on eagles’ wings that night.
A few weeks later I invited a parishioner to share a game of tennis. I’ve never had a tennis lesson, but I’d learned to play over the years, and back in the day had a decent serve if a fragile backhand. But that afternoon, from about half-way through the first set, again something amazing happened. I started hitting the lines with every shot. I felt my movement was perfect. I began to hit the ball harder to see if I could control it even if I gave it more spin and power. It seemed I could. For the rest of that match, I won practically every point and couldn’t put a foot wrong. It’s never happened again; but something empowered me, filled me with life … and inspired me. I felt my body taken over with a skill not my own, galvanised by an external force.
Perhaps more significantly, 18 months ago in North Carolina, towards the end of a three-month study leave reading about how seventh-century Greek Orthodox and fourteenth-century French Franciscans and a twentieth-century Swiss Presbyterian understood the incarnation, I sat down to try to crystallise my thoughts about the cross. Without my usual careful planning, I simply perched at a small table and wrote 10,000 words in two days, hardly rising from my chair. It was an exhilarating experience of being moved by a force beyond me.
Pentecost describes that kind of experience, in my ecumenical sermon and my top-spin backhand and the flow of my theological argument, multiplied across a large number of people in lifegiving and transformative ways. The Holy Spirit turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, intensifies the impact of the mundane so it becomes remarkable, and equips people to do things way beyond their existing capacity and imagination. Rather like I did with creation at the start, I want to suggest there are a number of ways this can happen. I’d like to make four distinctions that show the variety of the way inspiration happens.
Sometimes inspiration is conscious; other times it’s not. At the ecumenical service and on the tennis court it was very conscious, indeed unforgettable. But maybe more often it’s unconscious. Perhaps the most helpful pastoral conversation of which I’ve ever been on the receiving end is one of which my pastor has no recollection at all. When, more than once, I’ve thanked him profusely, he’s brushed it off and gaslit me and said I must have imagined half of it. The Holy Spirit was working through him, yet he was unaware.
Sometimes inspiration is the result of setting up good, healthy regular activities; other times it’s about one-off moments of wonder. Church, in the sense of a community of people who worship together, build one another up in faith and devotion and service, and try to be a blessing to their community, is mostly characterised by regular events. Ministry in that sense is about creating environments where long experience has proved the Holy Spirit is likely to show up. A eucharist is like that. But regular events constitute a kind of training for spontaneous or special moments. Likewise a sculptor might spend years working with stone, but then feel a need that a certain subject is best rendered in bronze. It’s not that one is inspired and the other not: it’s that inspiration can be slow and regular or sudden and surprising. It’s only when we’re suddenly aware of the Holy Spirit appearing that we begin to realise it’s been at work all along.
Sometimes inspiration comes with intent; other times it happens regardless or even despite our intent. Paul talks about inspiration as the experience of I – ‘though not I, but the grace of God that is with me.’ That’s what we could call intent. Yet remember when Joseph confronts his brothers at the end of the dreamcoat story, they can no longer pretend they didn’t try to kill him many years before, and they’re terrified he’ll take merciless revenge. But Joseph, appreciating that the remarkable sequence of events had led to his whole family being saved from famine, says, ‘You meant it for evil; God meant it for good.’ Joseph’s saying the brothers’ plottings were the opposite of intent but the Holy Spirit worked through them anyway. How many of us can look at things we did for at best mixed motives that ended up having fabulous outcomes? The best pastoral advice I was ever given was, ‘Don’t wait to act until your motives are perfect; if you do something for six reasons and just one of them is good, the Holy Spirit can work through that one.’ How many people who’ve become undoubted blessings to whole neighbourhoods or nations were actually conceived in circumstances that don’t bear close scrutiny? How many medications that have changed the lives of millions for good came about as an unexpected result of a misjudged investigation? I recall my mother saying, ‘All my best recipes came about when I mistakenly misconstrued what it said in the cookbook.’ That’s how unconscious inspiration often works.
Sometimes inspiration is simultaneous; other times it works by delay. The caricature of charismatic experience is that a minister prays for healing and a troubled person walks away in a state of health and wellbeing like never before, or that a worshiper speaks in tongues and reaches an ecstatic state, thus inspiring all nearby that a power beyond human comprehension is alive and active. But more often there’s some kind of slow-action process going on. A schoolteacher wonders why she spends hours rehearsing songs with a class; but 40 years later when one of those children, now grown up, is regaining consciousness after an accident and poised between life and death, a childhood friend sings one of those songs by the hospital bedside and the ailing patient recognises, smiles, and starts to turn the corner to recovery. That’s slow-burn inspiration. It’s just as important, just as powerful; just as transformational.
So those are four distinctions that show the breadth of the empowerment of Pentecost. It’s perhaps the most tangible form of inspiration. But as I hope I’ve shown, it’s by no means the only one.
Inspiration Happens when the Holy Spirit Works through Surprise and the Stranger
We’ve reached our final dimension. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit works through surprise and the stranger. Here’s a sentence for you. The Holy Spirit is Jesus out of control. My point is not that the Holy Spirit is Jesus drunk, deranged or destructive. It’s that we have a human tendency to turn everything into a form of control, and Jesus and church are not immune to that phenonmenon. But the Holy Spirit won’t let us do so. As Jesus says, the Spirit blows where it wills. As is often observed, ‘If you want to make the Holy Spirit laugh, you say, “These are my plans.”’
The most significant way the Holy Spirit subverts the church’s incessant desire to turn it into an instrument of control is by working through people and things the church ignores, opposes or despises. Over and again the Old Testament gives us stories of how God acts through the agency of unregarded women, feared or antagonised foreigners, or those excluded because of some kind of uncleanness such as leprosy. Think of Melchizedek, who comes from nowhere to bless Abraham; Ruth, who, though a foreigner, stays close to Naomi and ends up becoming the great-grandmother of David; and Cyrus, king of Persia, who becomes so pivotal to God’s way of bringing Israel home from exile that he’s given the title messiah.
Of all the dimensions of the Holy Spirit’s activity, perhaps this one is the most pertinent to where the church finds itself today. It sometimes feels as if the church is only interested in one half of the Spirit’s activity, the half that works in time-honoured and predictable ways, affirming the church and its sacraments and ministrations, thus allowing Christians the assurance of sensing the Spirit is working through them. Meanwhile it feels like the church is neglecting, overlooking, ignoring or downplaying the way the Spirit is alive and active beyond the congregation, in surprise and the stranger, lest that activity dismantle the church’s self-importance or humble the church’s self-righteousness.
When we say the Spirit is at work in the world, we’re talking about three kinds of activity. One refers to moments of inspiration that evoke awe and joy. When a team of scientists works round the clock and eventually finds a covid vaccine; or an Olympic athlete sprints to breaks a world record; or a ballet dancer pirouettes in exquisite harmony with her partner, the musical score, and the tenor of the narrative; we rise to applaud, because such people have been driven to the limits of human potential, and it’s marvellous to behold. Another refers to parables of grace. When a person who’s been attacked and almost killed by a troubled knife-bearer testifies he bears his attacker no grudge, when a firefighter rushes to the top of Grenfell Tower to rescue a trapped flat-dweller, when an asylum-seeker steps off a sinking Channel boat to give the other travellers a better chance to survive the crossing, we see people who have no stated Christian faith offering a perfect witness of how the Holy Spirit makes icons of Jesus out of humble human beings. In the words of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, these are examples of the way grace perfects nature, working with the grain of who we are to draw out the gifts that bring blessing and life.
There’s no special reason for Christians to bristle about either of these kinds of Spirit-inspired activity. But the third kind is a bit different. The third kind is where the world is offering the church a gift that the church has to reshape itself to receive. Now it’s a fundamental conviction of mine that the Holy Spirit is giving the church everything it needs to be all that God wants it to be. Yet so much of the time the church experiences its life as scarcity – not enough people or money, not enough revelation, harmony or prosperity. At the bottom of this sense of scarcity I believe is the lurking but never-articulated anxiety that there is, in the end, not enough God. But I believe the truth is the opposite: there is, on the contrary, too much God – so much, indeed, that, in our fear of being overwhelmed, we develop elaborate devices for protecting ourselves from being drenched by the Holy Spirit. And so it is that the church gets into the habit of dismissing the gifts God’s sending it that are intended for its renewal. So the reason the church experiences its life as scarcity is that it has become adept at turning away the things the Holy Spirit gives in abundance.
It’s widely understood and profoundly regrettable that the church has at worst strongly resisted and at best struggled to embrace the gift presented by lesbian and gay people. It’s often recognised how this has hurt lesbian and gay people; but less often perceived how much it has impoverished and depleted the church. The Holy Spirit has given the church everything it needs in talent, imagination, resilience, faithfulness and goodness, and the church has turned it away. Likewise the Holy Spirit has bestowed on the church the abundant gift of those who are deaf, disabled and/or neurodivergent, and yet again, the church has treated such people as a problem to be managed or a predicament to be pitied or a troublesome element to be excluded. Thus if the church experiences life as scarcity it has only itself to blame. One of the best feelings in the world is to experience the joy of a team in which the soprano and the tenor each have vital and precious things to bring that enhance the possibility of the whole ensemble. It’s even better when you discover at a moment of anxiety that you have more members of your team than you realised, and the previously unrecognised members have vital and transformative gifts and skills to turn floundering into flourishing.
The scriptural story that epitomises this understanding of inspiration is that of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, who, in the Acts of the Apostles, comes to Peter with a vision of gentiles becoming part of the church, a vision that coincides with a similar vision Peter has just had. While Peter struggles with the huge transformation of thinking this requires, the Holy Spirit persuades Peter that if these people are called by God, it’s not his business to turn them away. Cornelius represents all the gifts the church has to receive from the Holy Spirit in the form of surprise and the stranger. Acts is all about the Holy Spirit going ahead of the church and persuading its leaders that their job is not to protect God but to keep up with God’s imagination. The continuous thread of the story is that the church thinks it must keep its traditions and be suspicious, for example of incorporating gentiles without circumcision, or relaxing its food laws – but testimony from those who’ve seen the Spirit at work transforming hearts and raising up disciples and turning the world upside down is finally irresistible. The cautious apostles are always in danger of ending up on a different side of the argument from the Holy Spirit. The whole book of the Acts of the Apostles could be renamed ‘The Book of Inspiration.’
Conclusion
Of course I hope that anyone could hear this lecture and be moved to reflect on the work of the Holy Spirit in the world and in their life. But I confess I’ve had three kinds of people in mind as I’ve shared these remarks. The first is charismatic Christians. If you believe the Holy Spirit came into your heart at conversion, and does signs and wonders through words of prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues, you’ll have seen that I’ve referred to such things tonight. But I trust in setting out these six forms of inspiration I’ve demonstrated that the Holy Spirit is about so much more than that, and may have persuaded you that it’s so much more exciting and transformative than that.
The second group I’ve been especially talking to is Christians who, perhaps because some charismatics talk as if the Holy Spirit belongs to them, have assumed the Holy Spirit is slightly embarrassing and best avoided. If that’s you, I hope I’ve shown you tonight that the Holy Spirit pervades your life and is God constantly empowering, cajoling, surprising and transforming you, and I hope I’ve offered enough examples to encourage you to think the Holy Spirit really is God speaking to and inspiring you to move you to love and praise.
The third group I’ve been addressing specifically is those who aren’t at all sure they’d call themselves Christians, perhaps especially because God is so often portrayed in such narrow and judgemental terms, and because Christians seem so self-absorbed and so keen to configure the world such that they appear as better than others. If that’s you, what I’ve set out to do tonight is to demonstrate that our human notion of inspiration and the theological notion of the Holy Spirit are more or less the same thing, because inspiration names the moment when we glimpse and/or experience the way God creates, reconfigures and surprises the world. And so whenever you’ve had or perceived a moment of inspiration, you’ve had an experience of the Holy Spirit. Which means the Holy Spirit has been at work in your life since your life began. Which I hope is a rather wonderful, empowering and inspiring thing to discover.
As I close, I want to recognise the significance of giving this address in St Martin-in-the-Fields. For this is a setting widely admired precisely because for many decades it’s been a community of inspiration. Let me just read once more those six portrayals of the Holy Spirit. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit makes something where there was nothing. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit reveals something that was always true. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit strips away the membrane between heaven and earth. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit does unbelievable things. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit empowers us with a force beyond us. Inspiration happens when the Holy Spirit works through surprise and the stranger.
It’s my hope, and a hope that has in many ways been realised, that St Martin’s be a community where all these kinds of inspiration come true every day. And by joining this series tonight, you’ve become part of that. Thank you for being an inspiration.
