Two Kinds of Believing
There is safety in the merely mental, and the theoretical. Things get riskier when we involve our volition and action. It is one thing to theorize something is believable and bringing us to assent intellectually with it. It is quite another to come to belief as an act of will. To submit entirely is to trust with risk and vulnerability.
If you and I were divers on a team, trained to dive from the high platform, we would have experienced enough perhaps to dive from the cliffs in Acapulco. Perhaps we would then believe we could make our first dives and survive them. It is reasonable to believe we could, in theory. A whole different level of belief is involved as you choose to leap. You, go first. Your leg muscles launch you out into the air, giving yourself over to the force of gravity that takes you past rocks to the waters of the Acapulco Bay. The waters may be those of the Pacific Ocean, but your heart would not be feeling muy pacifico.
Our second scripture reading for Sunday is from the Acts of the Apostles. It brings us to an occasion when Paul was in Ephesus and meets some who have come to belief in Jesus through the baptism of John, a baptism of repentance. There are about twelve of them, and Paul asks them if they received the Holy Spirit when they came to belief. They replied, “No, we were not even told there is a Holy Spirit.” They apparently then make a new decision, to leap into the realm of the divine, allowing the Spirit to come within them. Notice the passage:
—Acts 19:1-7
Paul said, “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them. —Acts 19:4-6
They had been aligned with the Lord Jesus, and then Paul gave them the avenue for choosing full spiritual connection with Christ, bringing the Holy Spirit to reside within them. They risk becoming living agents of God’s action in the world. Their subsequent decisions and activities can then be in congruence with what God is up to in the world. So right there in Ephesus, twelve new disciples are spirit-filled, witness to speak and act boldly in the name of the Lord.
We have a choice too. There is this distinction: we are already baptized in the name of Christ, indeed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The question for us then is, are we by an act of the will, daily recognizing and submitting to the Spirit within us. Nicky Gumbel, the priest at Holy Trinity, Brompton, in London and Director of the Alpha Program teaches on this. He explains metaphorically that at baptism the Holy Spirit comes to abide within us in an absolute and permanent way. It is like a pilot light in your furnace flickering reliably there. You are the one who can set the thermostat, by your prayer, your own volition, so the cathedral of your furnace experiences the full emblazoning Spirit. You can risk praying for the fullness of the Spirit in the morning, or at any moment, even now. You can “hear” the deep whoosh, the engulfing of your soul.
I am toggling back and forth with the metaphors, but I would assert choosing the fullness of the Holy Spirit is not exactly like cliff diving in Acapulco: life in the Spirit is more ominous. It is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God. We are thereby in connection with the Creator of the Universe, the One in whose hands are life and being itself. It should be for us, quite an invigorating even frightening leap for us to choose to allow the Holy Spirit to rule our hearts.
It is the twelfth day of Christmas. Tonight is Twelfth-Night, the Eve of the Epiphany. An epiphany is a showing, a revealing about the things of God. Light dawns on us and we see the nature of the divine. Will we let the Sun of Righteousness blaze in us? Let this day be for us a day to say yes to the Spirit. As the hymn (#510) has us pray, “Come Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove, with all thy quickening powers; kindle a flame of sacred love in these cold hearts of ours.” There is belief, and then there is belief. We can choose our full life in God. We do not have to sit in a place of mental and theoretical assent to the existence of God. We can choose to dive into the full, dynamic reality of life in God.