Acts 19:1-7
While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. He said to them, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?" They replied, "No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit." Then he said, "Into what then were you baptized?" They answered, "Into John's baptism." 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, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied—altogether there were about twelve of them.
Do you remember when you were baptized? Most of you probably don’t, since you were just a baby at the time, but some of you do. If you do remember, was it an amazing spiritual experience? Did you feel the Holy Spirit entering you? Did you receive the Holy Spirit? Most people, even when they are baptized as adults, don’t feel the Spirit entering upon baptism. They feel that it’s an important occasion, they are happy it happened, and they feel wet, but not necessarily filled with the Spirit.
So, have you received the Holy Spirit? I’m not sure that just because you were baptized that it automatically means that you received the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t. It’s just that real baptism in the Holy Spirit means making a choice that many Christians never really make. It’s not that they don’t want to make the choice. It’s that most of us don’t know we need to make the choice, and so what happens is that we end up living less of the life that we are called by Christ to live.
How do we make sure people receive the Holy Spirit at some point in their lives? Some churches only baptize people when they are ready to make the choice to be baptized, with the hope that this choice will open the person to the Holy Spirit. In Presbyterian churches, like ours, we encourage teens to make this choice after confirmation class. Unfortunately, there is a problem with that. Many or most times the teens just aren’t spiritually mature enough to really make the kind of choice that lets the Spirit in. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they would become spiritually mature later in life. Many people never become spiritually mature enough to let the Spirit in, and some are very mature early on and let the Spirit in as children.
So what does it mean to receive the Holy Spirit in baptism? I think it means making a foundational choice to give ourselves over to the Spirit and to willingly let the Spirit truly, deeply into our lives. It means letting the Spirit not only guide us to what God wants, but to let the Spirit move our lives according to God’s ways.
I think that for a long time I understood this concept in my head, the idea of receiving the Spirit, but I don’t know that I truly understood it from a deeper life-sense. Where I learned what it really meant was from a member of my previous church, where I served as an associate pastor.
This woman’s story is really fascinating, and shows the difference it makes in our lives when we truly become open to and receive the Spirit. The year was 1990, and I was preaching on the particular Sunday she visited. At that time I preached about once every five to six weeks. I was preaching about faith, and about how we needed it to give us purpose and meaning in life. Then I gave an example of what life without faith is like. I read the congregation a passage from a book that my wife, Diane, whom I was dating at the time, had given me. The book was titled The Search for Meaning, by Phillip Berman. Berman had traveled the country, interviewing people from all walks of life about what gave them meaning. He interviewed well-known people from all walks of life, as well as those who were unknown. Each chapter of the book tells of a different interview and a different perspective of meaning.
In my sermon I focused on an interview with one man, a man named Elisha Shapiro. In the book, Shapiro called himself a nihilist, which means that he didn’t believe in anything at all, not God, not meaning, not morality. Then I read a passage from the book in which Shapiro said, “But me, I call myself a nihilist. It’s part of my art to call myself a nihilist. There is no God, and I don’t feel like replacing him with anything, and I like it that way. It’s a joyful experience, not an angst-filled one. My basic belief, if you can call it that, is that there is nothing that’s constant, whether it’s a more or ethical tenet or whether it’s a physical law. Take for example the statement ‘the grass is green.’ That’s not always true. Nor is the sky always blue. Maybe that’s not true. We don’t know. Maybe it’s all a dream. I like the idea that everything that people cling to that’s comforting or gives them a grounding is subject to change. People change, and nothing is constant….
To me, there really isn’t any significance to life, none whatsoever. No significance. And I find that’s a comforting thing. You’re let off the hook that way. (Laughs.) People feel like that’s a terrible emotional deal. But there is no significance to my existing here. I’m a product of… if I were to try to figure out what I was a product of, the best thing I could guess would be billions of years of coincidences, dumb luck. I enjoy my existence as an animal organism—if I’m not just a figment of my own imagination. If I am in existence at all, I’m just this animal organism running by what makes it run, what coincidentally came along with this package.”
After reading that passage, I said to the congregation that I couldn’t understand how anyone could live this way; how anyone could live without a real sense of faith or meaning. At the end of the worship service the woman I mentioned before, who was visiting our church for the first time, shook my hand at the door as she dabbed away tears. She then asked if she could make an appointment with me. We went back to my office and made an appointment for the following Thursday.
Thursday came and she and I sat down to talk. She said to me, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I had tears in my eyes on Sunday, and why I asked to meet with you.” I told her that the thought had crossed my mind, and that I hoped it wasn’t due to my giving a dreadfully bad sermon. She then went on to tell me her story. She told me how she had grown up in Southern California in a family that was part of the Four Square Gospel church, a fundamentalist church that was highly restrictive and regimented. Growing up, she felt as though she was never allowed to do anything the other children were doing, as though she was a prisoner of her parents’ religion. She couldn’t wait to get out from under her parents’ control.
She met a charismatic and dynamic man after high school—a man who promised her freedom and a life filled with adventure and excitement. She left home to travel with this man, along with a group of others who seemed to be part of his entourage. They lived an exciting life of drugs, partying, and experimentation. But then the life took a downward spiral. The man became more and more controlling. He enticed her to dabble in all sorts of sexual practices with other men, and he turned her into something very close to a prostitute. She found herself trapped in a nightmare. What made it worse was that because of this life, and diseases she picked up, her internal organs were scarred, leaving her with a working ovary on the right side of her body and a working fallopian tube on the other side.
It took her two years to escape his grasp. She moved back home and enrolled in college, majoring in psychology. After graduating she enrolled in a master of social work program so that she could become a counselor working with lost souls like herself. She eventually met a man, a psychologist, whom she married. They moved around a bit as he took on teaching jobs and worked in rehab centers. Their travels brought them to the town where I was an associate pastor. She told me that it had taken her so long to recover from the life with that man who had destroyed so much of her life, and that church was something that helped her tremendously, which is why, whenever she moved to a new town, looking for a new church was always a priority.
She then leaned forward and said to me, “You can imagine my surprise when I came here for church last Sunday, and you gave that sermon, talking about Elisha Shapiro. You see, Elisha Shapiro was the man I told you about.” She then said that she was still living the consequences of that life. All her life she wanted to have and raise children, but because of her internal scarring there was no way to become pregnant naturally. If you know anything about biology, you know that there is no way that an egg can travel across the body cavity to a fallopian tube on the other side. Her only option was in-vitro fertilization, especially since her husband was against adopting children.
She eventually joined the church and became a very active member, and one of our most prayerful members. Over the years she kept trying to have children via in-vitro, but after going through 12 or so treatments without success, at a cost of thousands of dollars, she decided that she couldn’t do it anymore.
A year or so passed. She and I talked over the year about her disappointment, and we even prayed for healing, but nothing seemed to work. She was disappointed and helpless to do anything about it. For a long time we didn’t talk about it. Then, one day, she walked into my office with a big ear-to-ear grin. I asked her what had happened, and she said, “I’m two months pregnant!” I said to her, “But I thought you quit the in vitros.” She said, “I did. This was a natural pregnancy.” I then asked her what had happened. This is the part that continues to inspire me.
She told me that about two months prior, in the midst of despair and sadness, she sat down with God and prayed, “Lord, you know how much I want to be a mother. You know how much I’ve wanted this my whole life. It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. So, Lord, I give you my life. If you want me to become a mother, I will become the best mother I can be, and I will serve you as a mother. If not, I will serve you the best I can in whatever you call me to do. All I want to do is to be yours, so I will follow you and serve you however you want.” She said that it must have been during that week that she got pregnant. She was convinced that she became pregnant because she surrendered to God and gave up her demand that God make her pregnant. She gave up control over her life. It was her saying to God that she was God’s no matter what, and that she was willing to give up her dreams, that seemed to open her to God’s Spirit. Her miracle happened because of her surrender. Seven months later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Two years later, she gave birth to another healthy baby boy. Both of these conceptions were pretty near physically impossible.
I believe that her life shows what it means to receive the Holy Spirit. It means to surrender to God and to really, truly let God be at work in our lives. She showed me that the path to the Spirit is to let go of our demands on God, to let go of our requirements that we will serve God if such-and-such happens. She showed me that the way to receive the Spirit is to say simply and with conviction, “God, I am yours no matter what you call me to do, no matter how you call me to live, and no matter what happens to me as a result. I am yours.”
Amen.
