Right there in the Bible it says, “I will pour out my Spirit on everyone.” In our neat, family-kitchen-thinking we may imagine this to be a pouring like pouring a glass of milk from a pitcher. But I think that mental image is much too tidy for us to use as a mark of the work of the Holy Spirit. I think there are much better ways to conceive God’s Spirit being poured over his people. Think of other ways we generally use the word “pour”:
- When we have been estranged from one another, our emotions all bottled up, when we have suffered the emotionally constipating effects of a heart filled with sorrow and anxiety combined with a mind and mouth that refuses to allow us to share what consumes us from the inside, when after that the dam has finally broken and in tears we have been able to tell another human being about the fears and emotions that have been eating us alive, have let go a torrent of hurt and heartache, we call that pouring your heart out.
- When we are ahead of the other team 65 to 3 and there is only one minute left in the final period, and we score yet another touchdown, and the coach sends in the play from the sideline telling his team to go for 2 extra points instead of 1, the fans turn to each other and say, “Wow, they’re really pouring it on!”
- When the sky turns not grey but black, the lightning creases the thunderheads, the thunder cracks like a volley of canon fire, we run for cover, saying to each other, “We’d better hurry; any minute it will be pouring down rain.”
Pouring, as it is used in the second chapter of Acts, has nothing to do with pouring into a glass from a pitcher. It is more like pouring into the glass from Niagra Falls. Either way the glass gets filled, but by the second method there can never be any doubt about whether there will be enough.
Pouring out his Spirit, God gives to people the power of his love not in sufficiency, but in superabundance. There is enough, there is more than enough of God’s Spirit to empower the work of the church. It is not a zero sum game. God’s Spirit is available in such plenty that to be touched by it can mean being overwhelmed by it and changed completely and absolutely.
The late Clinton Marsh served for years as president of Johnson C. Smith Theolgical Seminary in Atlanta, and was once moderator of our Presbyterian Church. Jokingly, he characterized himself as one half Presbyterian, and one half African American. Several years ago at the meeting of the General Assembly we heard Dr. Marsh say he hoped the Spirit would change us so that, if we could not be one half Presbyterian and one half African American, some of us could at least develop a little better suntan. The Spirit, poured over the people, drenches us, changes us, so that we are not the same people we once were.
Dr. Martin Marty has served for decades as a contributing editor of Christian Century magazine, a journal highly respected among clergy and lay leaders. He also once taught second grade Church School — one wonders which is the greater honor! He tells a story that shows the pouring-out of the Spirit can even come upon 8 year-olds, demonstrating that the Spirit is alive and working in places we might never expect. His story is about an 8 year-old boy who once attended his classes. Stephen was a special child, and by the time he had reached second grade, his progressive mental disability had become obvious to his friends. Dr. Marty said that one of his greatest concerns in teaching Stephen’s class was whether the other eight students could hold on to their love for Stephen as they came increasingly to realize he was different. In April of that year, he asked his students to bring to class a small object they could hide inside one of those plastic egg-shaped containers that some products are packaged in, something that represented the gift of new life. But because he was afraid Stephen might not have understood, he placed all the unmarked containers in the center of the table, and asked Stephen to open them, one at a time.
The first one held a crocus, and one of the students erupted with the pride of possession, saying, “I brought that one!” Next came a rock which Dr. Marty thought would surely be Stephen’s, since rocks don’t symbolize new life. But one of the other students shouted, “That’s mine! The rock has moss on it, and it has just turned green again!” A butterfly flew from the third container, and another student beamed that her choice had been the best so far.
But the fourth container was empty. Dr. Marty thought it had to be Stephen’s and was going to move quickly to the next egg, but Stephen objected and said, “Don’t skip mine!” You know how second graders can be; they all shouted with one voice, “But it’s empty!” “That’s right,” Stephen said. “The tomb was empty. New life for everyone!” Stephen knew.
That Summer, Stephen died. At the grave, mourners found eight small egg containers. All of them empty. The story is true. So is the mystery, and Stephen knew.
What Stephen knew was that when God’s Spirit is poured out, there is no controlling it. The black, the white, the blind, the lame, the healthy, the sick, the disabled, the frail, the husky, every one can be drenched in the Spirit. It was poured out on all believers without discrimination. There’s more than enough. There’s no limit to the power of God’s Spirit to reach us and make us understand, even by means we might never have anticipated.
The disciples were drenched in the Spirit that first Pentecost day. Not dribbled, not sprinkled, aerosolled, misted, dampened, daubed or dipped, but drenched. They were overcome with the power of God’s Spirit, poured out upon them. May God drench our fellowship with his Spirit from this day forward.
