Today is Pentecost, the anniversary of the day nearly 2,000 years ago when the Holy Spirit came powerfully upon the followers of Jesus who were gathered in the upper room in Jerusalem. They were so inspired that they rushed out into the streets and began preaching about Jesus. Some 3,000 converts were made that day alone. Most Bible scholars mark that day as the beginning of the church — the birthday of the church.
Very likely, none of this comes as news to you. You've heard this all explained before. Even if Pentecost is not something you particularly wait for with excitement, you still have some sense of its historical significance for the church.
I would point out, however, that one important feature of that first Christian Pentecost was personal experience. The coming of the Holy Spirit upon those followers of Jesus was a profoundly individual encounter for each one of them. Before Jesus' crucifixion, he had told the apostles that after he left, the Holy Spirit would come upon them, but at that point, the statement was simply information. On Pentecost, they personally encountered the Spirit, and they were changed forever.
Well, what about you? Have you ever had a personal experience of God or Christ that so gripped you that it empowered or inspired you to do something dramatic — perhaps even to make a change in the direction of your life?
In 1997, the Barna Research Group conducted a survey of regular church attendees, asking them if they had experienced the presence of God during the past year. A startling 48 percent said they had not. When asked if they had ever experienced the presence of God in worship, nearly two-thirds responded in the negative.
As a pastor leading worship, those numbers do not make me happy. While on the one hand I know that nothing we humans can do, whether in a worship service or elsewhere, can manufacture a genuine experience of God — that is, it's all up to God — I, nonetheless, find it sad, assuming the survey is correct, that two-thirds of those who regularly attend worship in America leave feeling that they've had no spiritual experience, no personal meeting with the living Lord.
I do wonder, however, if those numbers are skewed because of how we define religious experience. On that first Pentecost, the experience of the disciples was dramatic — ecstatic even. They were overcome with excitement, with enthusiasm, with a power beyond their own. Figuratively speaking, they were set on fire.
If that's what people were thinking of when asked if they had experienced the presence of God in worship, then perhaps it's not too surprising that so many said they had not. Some of us have had occasional experiences like that — perhaps at some emotion-filled moment when we surrendered our life to God — but they don't seem to be everyday (or even every Sunday) occurrences.
But does the fact that such ecstatic experiences happen mean that any religious experience that does not include that depth of feeling doesn't count?
I don't think so.
Most experiences are defined in terms of our five senses. That is, we register the events of life in terms of what we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. For the followers of Jesus at the first Christian Pentecost, at least three of those senses must have been nearly overwhelmed. According to the scripture, there was a sound "like the rush of a violent wind" (hearing), divided tongues "as of fire," appeared among them (seeing), and likely the fire image brought the smell of burning as well.
If people were thinking of something like that when asked if they had experienced the presence of God in church recently, then I'm not surprised so many said, "No."
But theology defines experience in a fuller sense. We believe that not everything humans experience can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. In his landmark book, The Varieties of the Religious Experience (published in 1902), William James, a great American psychologist and philosopher, described the human experience of God in terms beyond the five senses. He said, first, that we humans feel an uneasiness or an inadequacy about ourselves, a feeling that something is lacking, and second, that we find the solution to that by discovering the proper relationship to higher powers, powers that transcend our lives.1
To say it another way, we discover limits to our lives, and then we find help for those limits from forces larger than ourselves. As we become aware of those larger forces, we are having a primary experience of God.
Another way to talk about religious experience is to look at the two ways theology says we can know about God. The first is called "natural knowledge," which is based on the observable world and is available to everyone. Basically this means that we can know some things about God in essentially the same way we learn about other things in the world — from observation and reason. For example, we can look at the world, and say that something this beautiful, this wonderfully arranged, with the orderly march of seasons, and the reliable 24-hour cycle of day and night, must have a creator. We reason that it couldn't be simply the result of coincidence or happenstance.
Science, which examines how things work, shows us the marvels of the world at even more intricate levels — such as the recent mapping of the human genome — and continues to amaze us with how well put together the world is. A modern physicist named Paul Davies goes as far as to say that in his opinion, "science offers a surer path to God than does religion."2
Even the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, argues that natural knowledge points to God. He writes:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse....Romans 1:18-20
But theology also tells us that such natural knowledge — things that can be observed through our five senses and concluded by our thought processes, is not enough to really know God. For that, we need what theology calls "revealed knowledge," or revelation. By that we mean God's disclosure of himself to us — what God shows us of himself through inward, direct experiences of his presence. And Christians say that the personal encounter with Jesus Christ within is God's most direct revelation of himself so far in the course of history.
But today, looking at those passionate disciples of Jesus who rushed out into the streets to preach about Jesus because they couldn't help themselves, we have to ask, how should the our direct experience manifest itself? Or to ask it another way, how should it make us feel, and how should it make us act?
Those who have had emotional religious experiences — and some of us have — perhaps at church camp or a youth rally or in a revival service or even in private, know that the "high" we felt at the time was terrific. It was something we wanted to keep flowing. But sooner or later, there was a letdown, a time when the emotion dissipated and we began to question whether the spiritual encounter we'd had was real after all. I would argue that it was indeed real, but that the emotion was never intended to be an ongoing part of the experience — that the idea all along was that the emotion was merely the "starter set" that was to be replaced for the long haul by faith and trust.
Some years ago, I managed one of our church camps. At those weeklong summer events, many young people had profound and dramatic religious experiences, so strong that when the week was over, many of the teens wept and did not want to leave. Then they'd go home and return to their church the next Sunday, all fired up spiritually, and suddenly feel the letdown. That was because the church services could not replicate the emotional experience the teens had had in the hothouse environment of camp. Some kids began to question whether their church was really Christian and others stared doubting the reality of what they had experienced at camp.
So we began to have a "debriefing" on the last morning of camp, where I would try to prepare the kids for re-entry into their homes and churches. I simply explained that they should not expect the emotional part of their experience to continue at the intense level, and that they should view their churches as working on long-haul faith and trust.
I'm not sure how much that helped the kids emotionally, but the thinking was right. For most of us, if there is emotion involved in our religious experience at all — and there does not have to be — it is at best only the front door to the ongoing life of faith. Depending on our makeup, the emotion may revisit us from time to time, but for the most part, it is intended to be replaced by faith and hope and trust that hangs on even when events in our lives take us low.
Regardless of our denomination, we can appreciate what the United Methodist Book of Discipline says about religious experience:
Experience authenticates in our own lives the truths revealed in Scripture and illumined in tradition, enabling us to claim the Christian witness as our own.... Christian experience gives us new eyes to see the living truth of scripture. It confirms the biblical message for our present. It illumines our understanding of God and creation and motivates us to make sensitive moral judgments.
It "confirms the biblical message for our present." That's the purpose of religious experience. Not to sustain emotion, but to connect us to faith. Even the original Pentecost disciples had to find the faith for the long haul.
What we are saying is that when the feelings fade, we still need to be glad for the experience, for it was that, which for many of us, first opened the door of faith and helped us to see that the Bible and its story is for us — for us personally. What can be learned of God only through the five senses is never enough. Thank God for sixth-sense experiences, ones that open us up to realms we never thought possible.
That's what happened to some 3,000 people on that day 2,000 years ago. They heard Peter and the others preaching in the streets, interpreting scripture in the light of Jesus Christ, and many of those listening suddenly knew that the story was for them. God's word began to become a path for them and they reached out in trust toward the God who had been reaching out to them all along.
That's the long-range goal of religious experience. To make us aware that we are in the presence of God and to cement our allegiance to him.
You may have heard the story of John Newton, the author of such great hymns as "Amazing Grace" and "Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken." In his younger adult years, he was the captain of a slave ship — one of the most despicable, unchristian jobs that humankind has ever devised. He later became a Christian, entered the ministry, and became an ardent abolitionist, working to end slavery.
His conversion to Christ was brought about by several factors, but one was a dream Newton had one night. In the dream, he accidentally dropped a sacred ring into the sea from the deck of his ship. Jesus appeared and saw that Newton had lost an incredible treasure. Jesus offered to dive into the water and retrieve this ring — like the ring given to the prodigal. When he awoke, he knew he'd had a deeply personal, emotional, religious experience. The grace and love of the risen Christ had been for him an amazing grace. The Holy One had touched his heart in a dream.
He did not spend his life trying to recreate the experience, but translated what he had discovered in the dream to an ongoing life of faith.3
And that's the message we want to take away from today's Pentecost service. You may or may not have had a Pentecost-type experience of God that overwhelmed your five senses or one that entered your soul as a kind of sixth sense, but having faith, trusting and obeying, is the continuing form of experiencing God, and the one we need to seek.
1. Explained in Sease, Gene & others' Christian Word Book (Nashville: Graded Press, 1968), p. 110.
2. From Paul Davies' book, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), ix, quoted by George L. Murphy, Toward A Christian View Of A Scientific World (Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing, 2001), p. 25.
3. Morton Kelsey, Set Your Hearts on the Greatest Gift (Hyde Park: Upper Room Books, 1996), p. 55.