December 13, 2020 | The Third Sunday of Advent | Worship

Do not quench the Spirit.

We heard that in this morning’s readings from First Thessalonians, and the word “quench” really caught my attention.

Some translations say “Do not suppress the spirit,” but that doesn’t have the same physical, visceral reaction as the word quench. When I hear quench, I think about the hottest summer day, and I’m probably hiking up at Sequoia, and the way it feels to go from parched to taking that long (and let’s be real, desperate) draw of cool water from my camelback, and the way that feels to go from thirsty to…quenched.

And that’s a good thing, right? We hear quench, and we imagine firefighters working round the clock to quench a blaze that has threatened acres and acres of wilderness, homes, and land. We want things to be quenched. To be unquenched is, at mildest, to be irritated and :::smacks lips::: dry, and at most extreme, to be desperate and consumed.

And yet, as we read this early letter—and believed to be the earliest of Paul’s letters—we hear his advice to those in Thessaloniki to not quench the Spirit.

The Spirit, this holy fire, this wind that sweeps through and tugs and pulls at us, is not to be tamed. It is not to be controlled, it is not to have tractors come in and dig cut lines around our property to protect us from it, we are not to create defensible space from the Spirit!

And yet, we have a tendency to do just that. We have tried over the years to find ways to re-create the exact situation where we last felt the Spirit moving, to find the magic order of songs, prayers, and scriptures, in order to entice it to come into our spaces, but please, Spirit, not at a violent, whipping-thrashing-burning pace, just you know, tiptoe through, tap us on the head like a game of duck duck goose, and head out through the narthex like the rest of us. Don’t cause a scene, or at the very least, don’t cause us to stand up!

But the Spirit needs to be able to move freely. The world is the Spirit’s playground, and in trying to capture the exact ways to predict, call on, and invoke it, we are quenching in ourselves a little bit of the way that we allow ourselves to interact with the Holy Spirit. If we are expecting only to feel the presence of the divine within certain confines—within the church, at a spot in nature where we were overcome by the Spirit once, then we may not be looking for or receptive to the other ways that the Holy Spirit comes to us.

I joke a lot about almost falling asleep and nearly driving off the I-5 while listening to the audiobook version of the theological tome “I and Thou” by Martin Buber, but for as difficult as it was to hear in monotone on my was to class (where it would be discussed that morning!) the thing that really stuck in my brain was that “The Thou meets me through grace – it is not found by seeking” and without unpacking a really wordy theological text in it’s entirety, the Thou is that part of God that we cannot quite put our fingers down on. As soon as we think we know Thou, Thou is already entirely unknowable. However, when we open ourselves up to the possibility of Thou without trying to pin Thou to an entomologist’s board like a coveted specimen of butterfly, we are so much more likely to have an encounter. But even to try and write about this encounter in order to experience it a second time is to dilute the power of it, to quench it.

This can be said of the Spirit.

Okay, so what do we do then? How do we keep from giving Gatorade to the Divine?

The letter to the Thessalonians was written to a people who were not living their best Instagram lives. They weren’t able to move freely because they were not a popular group of people, these early followers of Christ, in a world that was not yet ready for the radical Gospel that threatened to upend everyone’s way of life. They were kind of, like, sheltering in place. They were persecuted, but in a very real way. Not in the fake martyrdom way that people are claiming today because we cannot meet in churches. There were real repercussions for meeting publicly. I mean, yes, it could be argued that if we meet publicly, there are real repercussions as well, but it’s not the same argument. If we meet in person we could likely quench the spirit of those in our company by unknowlingly passing a virus that would harm our beloved community. So it’s not the same, in the OPEN OUR CHURCH way. What we DO have in common with our early ancestors of the church is that we stay home and worship God in small groups in order to protect and care for our beloved community. But it’s so hard, we can empathize with these early Christians because we too know how difficult it is to be cut off from our community, to be doing the things we would like to do as a collective from our own living spaces. To have trouble even knowing how to access the Spirit in these alternate spaces, let alone to let it burn unquenched in us.

So Paul offers to them, and to us, to, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

And just as it must have been for those who received this letter for the first time from Paul, it feels counter-intuitive to us to rejoice always. We are missing family, we have lost loved ones, we are worried about how much longer this will continue to rage on, we are filled with despair when we read firsthand accounts from overwhelmed hospital staff, and we are grieving many, many losses, some physical, some that we cannot even name, we just know that there is something that we have missed out on in our months of careful movement, facial coverings, hand sanitizer, and worshipping from home.

However, Dutch theologian Henry Nouwen said, “Joy is hidden in compassion. The word compassion literally means “to suffer with.” It seems quite unlikely that suffering with another person would bring joy. Yet being with a person in pain, offering simple presence to someone in despair, sharing with a friend times of confusion and uncertainty … such experiences can bring us deep joy. Not happiness, not excitement, not great satisfaction, but the quiet joy of being there for someone else and living in deep solidarity with our brothers and sisters in this human family. Often this is a solidarity in weakness, in brokenness, in woundedness, but it leads us to the center of joy, which is sharing our humanity with others.”

In this light, compassion in this crisis, in sharing and helping others to carry their burdens often lightens our own. It creates community. The opportunities for rejoicing are endless in a time of crisis, as long as we allow ourself to rejoice in the bonds between us, even when things are so difficult that they feel unspeakable.

As we pray without ceasing, we realize that our every action can be a prayer. Prayer is not limited to the times we are able to clasp our hands and bow our heads, but prayer can be active. As we fold the mountain of laundry (I talk about laundry a lot, but when you have a house full of kids, this is the reality!) but as I fold that laundry, my prayer is one of thanksgiving for the people who wear those garments and use those towels. So many towels. As I drive to the office, I am flooded with gratitude that God has given me such a beautiful scenic commute from Hanford to North Fork. Every moment can be a prayer.

And this leads to “Give thanks in all circumstances.” We pray for many things, but our prayers of thanksgiving should always be included. Even when things really really stink. To give thanks in all circumstances is to open a little window for joy to infiltrate into our lives. Even if it’s the worst day ever, we can always find something to give thanks for. We always have our loving God, who cared so much about us that God’s only son was sent to guide us home to God.

If we find that we are regularly rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks, even in the struggle, even in a pandemic, even with a stay at home order, even when all we want is to satiate our own thirst for connection to one another, when we do these things,  then we have done everything in our power to let the Spirit remain wild, magnificent, unbridled, and unquenched.