Enjoy the sermon!
Does it ever bother you that you can’t see God? That we don’t have a good image for what God looks like? Yes we have some artist depictions of God such as Michelangelo’s from the Sistine Chapel, but most of us realize that God probably does not look like an old man with long flowy white hair. In fact, even though we often use the pronouns “he” or “him” for God, we realize that God is not technically a male. So really we have no clue what God looks like.
Nor do we know what the Holy Spirit looks like. We use symbols such as flames and doves to represent the Spirit as the Holy Spirit came to Jesus in the form of a dove and to the disciples as tongues of fire. But again we don’t know exactly what the Holy Spirit looks like.
Even Jesus we have questions about what he looks like. Yes we have depictions of Jesus, even here in this sanctuary, and often those pictures have Jesus with a beard, and shoulder length brown hair of some shade. But if you scourer the bible, there is never a single description of what Jesus looks like. Not his hair color, eye color, if he was short or tall, muscular or fat, we aren’t even told if Jesus had a beard. And the earliest surviving drawings of Jesus are from 200 years after his death.
Paul reminds us in our first reading from Acts that we ought not to think of God as an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals, that no matter how skilled the artist is, a human cannot accurately draw, sculpt, paint or otherwise depict what God looks like. And Jesus told his disciples that the world does not see or know the Holy Spirit.
And yet Jesus also give his disciples, gives us, two big clues about what the Holy Spirit looks like and what God looks like. First he calls the Holy Spirit the Advocate. An advocate is someone who stands up for another, who speaks on another’s behalf when they are not able to. An advocate is someone who lends a hand and takes a person’s side and doesn’t leave them. So therefore the Holy Spirit advocates on behalf of God, on behalf of Jesus.
And we are told that the Spirit abides in us and will be in us. So what does the Holy Spirit look like? It looks like us! The Holy Spirit looks like us when we stand up for Jesus and tell others about Christ. The Holy Spirit looks like us when we care for the least in this world by caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, supporting the orphaned and the widowed, clothing the naked and visiting the imprisoned. The Holy Spirit looks like us when we obey Jesus’ commandments to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind and love our neighbors as ourselves.
So when do you see the Holy Spirit? We see the Holy Spirit whenever we see a fellow member of the body of Christ. We see the Holy Spirit whenever we see our fellow human beings doing good in this world, advocating on behalf of God or on behalf of God’s children. We see the Holy Spirit whenever we see ourselves. Whenever you look in the mirror, realize that you are seeing the Holy Spirit that abides in you.
Yes normally when you look in a mirror we see our imperfections, our flaws. We focus on the fact that our hair is a mess today, or our nose is slightly crooked, or we don’t like our eyes, or the wrinkles that have developed. Either that or we get so focused on the amazing gift of beauty that we are that you become narcissistic and can’t take our eyes off ourselves. But God has created us, in God’s image, flaws and all. So when you look into a mirror, realize that the Holy Spirit lives in you. That Jesus lives in you. That God lives in you.
I’m going to put this mirror on the door to the sanctuary so that when you leave here today, you can see the Holy Spirit going out into the world.
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