The Spirit is Within You (Yes You)

Romans 8:1-9a, 26-27

Luke 4:1-12

“The Spirit also helps us in our present limitations. For example, we do not know how to pray worthily, but God’s Spirit within us is actually praying for us in those agonizing longings which cannot find words. Those who know the heart’s secrets understand the Spirit’s intention as they pray according to God’s will for those who love God.”

My father, who is a Physics teacher, teaches his students about how energy moves in waves. In one lesson he demonstrates a phenomenon of sound waves known as “sympathetic resonance.” He takes two tuning forks which are both tuned to the same pitch. He mounts one tuning fork on a wooden box and sets that on his desk, the other tuning fork he strikes with a mallet causing it to ring, touches the base of the fork to the wooden box, then mutes it. What happens is that the mounted tuning fork, the one which was untouched, continues to ring. The energy waves of the activated fork moved through the box to rouse the other. That’s sympathetic resonance.

You can demonstrate the same thing with two guitar strings tuned to the same pitch. Pluck one, mute it, and the other string will continue to vibrate, even though it wasn’t touched. You might say that the apostle Paul applies this same phenomenon to heart strings in his letter to the Romans. Paul doesn’t have the vocabulary or science of “sympathetic resonance” but the way he describes the Holy Spirit moving through creation and through us is very similar. The Holy Spirit is like the energy waves of God’s will, the vibrations that resonate with the image of God we bear.

Because we are created in the image of God, there is a part of us that is tuned to God, we contain that which has sympathetic resonance with the will of God. All we need to activate that of God within us is for the energy of God, the power of God, to flow through us. Last week we read about Jesus telling his disciples “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit flows through you.” We see in the Pentecost scene a demonstration of this phenomenon of God’s power moving through an entire crowd, uniting them beyond the barriers of language, culture, and creed. God is the activator, the energy, the source of being.

Paul’s teachings on sin and flesh have to do with another sympathetic resonance: that of evil. The human condition, Paul explains, is also sympathetic to sin. We are so easily roused by wrong doing and seduced by selfishness. To “set our minds” on the flesh, as he puts it, is to tune our hearts, minds, and being to sin, and we will suffer on account of this. “Tune yourself to God,” Paul says, “and you will have life and peace.”

We feel the dissonance between these two frequencies, of sin and Spirit, and it is the source of suffering. “We are so interconnected with all of life that we cannot help but be touched by the pain of all that suffers…We are literally inundated with news of suffering from all round the globe—[murders and bomb blasts, terror attacks, starvation and sickness, disaster and destruction caused by human hands and acts of nature]—and it cannot but affect us…[especially] those who have deliberately opened their hearts to humanity as one family in God.”[1] We are far too weak to bear the weight of this pain on our own, and so, Paul says, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness.”

Many of us deal with this pain by dampening our strings, by not allowing ourselves to vibrate, by numbing ourselves to the suffering of others, or even, numbing ourselves to our own suffering. But avoidance is not the solution to this suffering. Though we see attempts at this by people who use their faith as an excuse to deny the evidence of science, to refuse to accept facts, to belittle reliable journalism, or to justify not caring for all people or all of creation. This is a way of numbing by only listening to that which says what we want to hear. And, I hate to break it to you, but that is more often the frequency of sin. This is the frequency that resonates with what we want to hear, resonates with our desires, our lust, our opinions.

This is the frequency spoken by the devil to Jesus: the temptations to self-service, to worldly wealth and power. But Jesus was not led to the wilderness alone, he went “full of the Holy Spirit.” Perhaps “wilderness” is a good way to describe the dissonance between the frequencies of sin and Spirit I was talking about earlier. Jesus shows us, in his response to these temptations, the true power of prayer: prayer helps us when we are in the wilderness, distracted by the dissonance of lust and love, to discern the energy of the Holy Spirit and tune the choices we make to the frequency of God.

The task of prayer is not to drown out the noise of creation’s suffering, it is not to tune our perception to bolster our own opinions or that which we already believe, but to learn to listen to and discern what Paul calls “the groaning of the Spirit” within us. Through our attentiveness and compassion, we give voice to the movement of the Spirit within us. We need to experience the dissonance between the way of the world and the will of God, and even if we can’t change it, we need to at least acknowledge it as dissonant. Learning to recognize and distinguish that which is out of tune is how we tune our lives to resonate and respond to the energy of God.

Prayer is how we practice distinguishing between the lure of sin and the call of the Spirit. Walter Wink says that our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to pray, but precisely the opposite, that we think we do. “We think it is something we do. It is not. How would it be, if we do not even know how to pray as we ought? We learn to pray by stopping the attempt and simply listening to the prayer already being prayed in us.” We learn to pray by muting the vibrations of our will and paying attention to the vibrations of God within us. This takes practice and patience, but know this: before you even begin this practice, “God has already initiated [your] prayer.”[2] God has sent the Spirit, and it dwells in you. It is moving you and shaping you in the likeness of God, and it is groaning against your resistance.

The Holy Spirit is like lava beneath the surface of the earth, Wink suggests. “It is trying to erupt volcanically in each of us. It does not have to be invoked, but merely allowed; not called to be present, but acknowledged as present already.” The tongues of flame from the Pentecost story fit well with this fiery metaphor, and in that story we see a community giving voice to the groaning of the Spirit, bringing the will of God into speech.

That same Spirit, the Holy Spirit and energy of God is within you. Yes you. You are capable of giving it voice in your life, your love, your compassion. Learn to listen for it, learn to distinguish its groan from the boasting of sin.

I heard an interesting article on the radio about a music therapist who had started a choir for older adults with hearing loss. She was training them to sing together, to literally vibrate their vocal chords at the same frequency. The choir director gave her members homework listening to and distinguishing pitches. The goal of this choir is to train its members’ ears to recognize and focus on particular frequencies, a skill necessary to follow one particular voice despite many other noises. Frank Russo, a professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto, and one of the organizers of this project, explains how “voices and speech…[have] a frequency trail that we can follow, but it’s often buried under a din of noise.”[3] For example, we are trying carry on a conversation with a friend in a busy coffee shop but the barista is grinding coffee, music is playing overhead through the speakers, and dozens of other conversations fill the airwaves. Russo says we can train our brains, through pitch training, to better focus on the frequency of our friend’s voice.

In the same way, we can train our minds and our hearts to better focus on the frequency of God amidst the din of sin. We can learn to listen for God in prayer. We can reduce the distraction of sin. We don’t do this on our own, remember what Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit flows through you!” We can only do this because the Spirit already dwells in us and moves us and its presence prompts our practice of prayer.

Philip Yancey describes the task of prayer in a similar way, not as us “bringing requests to God that God may not have thought of, then talking God into granting them”, but asking “God to open [our] eyes so that [we] can see [others] as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God already directs toward [them].”[4] “When [we] catch a glimpse of another person through the eyes of God, [we] feel a prod to respond as a part of Christ’s body—God’s incarnate presence—on earth.”[5] This is how “the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” It activates us to behave in the world in unison with the will of God. Jesus perfected human life in unison with the will of God, a way of life which, he taught us, brings the Kingdom of God close. Jesus and calls us to follow him in Godly, kingdom living and sends the Holy Spirit to activate us for this task. In this, not only does the Spirit intercede for us, but we, through the Spirit, are able to intercede for the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God into this world.

The Spirit dwells within you. Yes you. All of you. And all of us, together, the church, are the Body of Christ. Let us pray for one another that we could come to see the beauty of God in each, and feel the energy waves of God’s Spirit inspiring us to walk in unison with God’s will to build up the Kingdom of God together.

[1] Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers.1992, Augsburg Fortress Press. Minneapolis, MN. P. 305

[2] Ibid. 106.

[3] Siegel, Robert and Andrew Hsu. “Like Brain Boot Camp: Using Music to Erase Hearing Loss” from All Things Considered. NPR News. FM 88.9, (May 31, 2017, 2PM ET).

[4] Yancey, Philip. Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference? 2006, Zondervan. Grand Rapids, MI. 303.

[5] Ibid. 304.