Embracing the Holy Spirit in Ordinary Ways

The following appears in Issue 26 of The Mockingbird magazine, now available! Sign up for a subscription here.

Exhausted by an unrelenting focus on the extraordinary, a growing number of Evangelicals in North America have called for an embrace of the ordinary in everyday spirituality. They are pushing back against the idea that for Christians to be truly spiritual, they must have regular momentous religious experiences. Extraordinary Christians are supposed to prove the legitimacy of their conversion by getting busy with additional, more meaningful activities than classic spiritual practices.

In his book The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (2004), the historian D.G. Hart described North American mainstream religion since the 18th century’s Great Awakenings as “Pietist” or “Revivalist Protestantism.” This form of Protestantism focuses on dramatic conversion experiences, but it is also “inherently activist”:

[F]or its adherents, the Christian life is one of perpetual motion as converts, secure in their salvation, seek to take their faith to all corners of the globe and to all spheres of human existence.

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It is not good enough for the believer to be a pilgrim in the wilderness, who grows in faith and love by drawing daily strength from the preaching of God’s Word, for example, or from participation in worship and the mutual consolation of brothers and sisters in the local church. Instead, crusaders take upon themselves the added burden of proving the genuineness of their conversion by perpetually accomplishing extraordinary things for God through successful evangelistic campaigns or attempts to morally transform society.

Charles Finney, the leader of the Second Great Awakening, hoped to replace the conventional religion of preaching and teaching with a more extraordinary spirituality where attendees came forward to receive intense prayer and undergo a dramatic conversion. Finney would leave a pew or bench available at the front of the church where congregants could sit and weigh their commitment to Christ. This came to be known as “The Anxious Bench.” John Nevin, a Reformed pastor and critic of Finney’s revivalist Christianity, observed the contrast in North America between “two different religions,” namely “the system of the Bench” and “the system of the Catechism.”

In her Theology of the Ordinary (2017), Julie Canlis warns of what happens when the extraordinary form of Christian spirituality is pushed as the replacement for the ordinary:

Without a theology that values slow growth over dramatic change and the “ordinary” as essential to our spiritual maturity, we are in danger of living in a burned-over district or a burned-over spirituality.

Her reference to “the burned-over district” is to an area of New York where, during the 19th century, revivals focused so much on intense and over-the-top conversion experiences that many people eventually burned out and over.

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When the activist impulse of Pietistic-Revivalist Christianity meets the North American consumerist push for quick results and high yields, spirituality becomes a perpetual burden on crusaders, who eventually crash and burn. In this scheme, the Holy Spirit becomes a burden too, because true believers have to prove, through performance, that they have received the Spirit. Parents begin to think, for example, that it is not good enough to care and provide for their children. They must do extra things in the community or at church to please God and prove they are truly spiritual.

Not only does this pressure to perform over and above the call of duty lead to burnout, but it also fails to appreciate that God does extraordinary things precisely through ordinary servants like parents working in their everyday callings. More tragically, God’s children can begin to second-guess if they are really Christians. Raising one’s personal holiness bar higher and higher becomes a test of a believer’s assurance that God loves them in Christ. At least in practice sanctification seems to determine one’s justification (not, as it should be, the other way around).

But an existential problem remains: How can the believer be assured that she has ever done enough to be a good Spirit-filled Christian?

The Reformer Martin Luther, who championed Paul’s teaching of justification by grace apart from works, did not actually deny that Christians follow Christ as “example.” But he also noted that this good work is not what makes one a Christian. For that, we need to receive Christ as God’s “gift” of salvation:

Christ as a gift nourishes your faith and makes you a Christian. But Christ as an example exercises your works. These do not make you a Christian. Actually they come forth from you because you have already been made a Christian. (“A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels,” in Luther’s Works, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann)

Mamma Andersson, Holiday, 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 78 3/4 x 55 1/8 in. © Mamma Andersson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildupphovsrätt, Sweden. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

We receive Christ as Savior by faith alone first, so that we can then follow Him as Servant in ordinary acts of love for our neighbors. The order is important. You have already been made a Christian. Justification empowers sanctification. People experience spiritual burnout when they reverse this order by making their obedience the barometer that measures the genuineness of their faith in Christ and the assurance of their salvation by God’s grace.

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When it comes to the Spirit, the order is also important. Before we can see the Holy Spirit at work in the ordinary terrain of our lives, we must appreciate the Spirit as God’s gift. In A Shorter Guide to the Holy Spirit (2016), the priest Anthony Thiselton sees a key distinction in Paul’s letters between the Holy Spirit as “the cause of holiness” rather than “a reward for holiness.” When Paul asks the Galatians, “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” (Gal 3:2), he turns on its head the standard rabbinical tradition he had received as a student.

The pressure of achieving an extraordinary spiritual life aligns closely with a view of the Holy Spirit as a reward for holiness. In what Gerhard Forde calls “adverbial theology,” our holiness becomes the measuring stick to find out whether we “really, sincerely, truly … believe.” Worrying over the adverbs turns the gift of the Spirit into the burden of trying to figure out if one has ever obeyed or accomplished enough for God to be truly spiritual. Once we accept that the Spirit is pure gift and not received through human effort, we can stop performing and instead rejoice in what the Spirit is already doing through His servants in humble ways. The Spirit gets His hands dirty, so to speak, in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, where His ordinary saints attend to the struggles and hopes of their neighbors.

Think of a potter. When she picks up a lump of clay, her hands become slick and muddy as she molds the material into its desired shape and function. A skilled craftsman can turn a piece of dirt into a beautiful vessel that can serve good ends. Like a potter, the Sculptor Spirit shapes jars of clay and broken vessels like us into the likeness of Christ the Servant, who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45). The Holy Spirit takes our less than perfect lives and graciously forms us into Christ’s vessels of love in the world. Sanctified by the Spirit, we too roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty to share joys and burdens with suffering neighbors. But more often than not, we do so through our God-given callings in ordinary spheres of life, such as the home, church, school, work, and community. It is with these ordinary materials that the Spirit fashions extraordinary wonders.

Theologically, we may believe all this. Yet we still prefer the Spirit to do extraordinary things in and through us. We desire a higher spirituality, not an earthy one. We are not content with the good works God teaches us to do in His commandments, but are tempted to seek after special works that are not commanded by God. There is nothing new under the sun. At the end of his teaching on the Ten Commandments in his Large Catechism, Martin Luther warns against the search for “a higher and better way of life and status than the Ten Commandments” (Kolb and Wengert, eds). He counsels people easily distracted by showy works invented by humans to focus instead on the common and unassuming works God has laid out. Indeed, if we only could do ordinary things well, there would be no time left to seek after special feats.

Just concentrate upon them [the Ten Commandments] and test yourself thoroughly, do your very best, and you will surely find so much to do that you will neither seek nor pay attention to any other works or other kind of holiness.

Canlis observes that, in Luther’s day, pilgrimages to holy sites had become special symbols of one’s holiness. To those seeking the spiritual life in special works today, she recommends the Reformer’s advice to focus instead on those ordinary means God has already established for us to enjoy: His Spirit’s extraordinary works among us.

Let every man stay in his own parish. There he will find more than in all the shrines. In your own parish you will find baptism, the sacraments, preaching, and your neighbor.

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Standing next to and above the altar at my church is a towering wooden cross. When seen from the pews, a dove hovers over a baptismal font to the left, appearing to descend at an angle from the side of the cross. It is a very Johannine image of Jesus as the Spirit-baptizer who, upon His being glorified and lifted up on the cross, “handed over the Spirit” to the church (Jn 19:30).

In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and it is upon Him that the Spirit remains and through Him that one is baptized with the same Spirit (Jn 1:29, 33). The Spirit and the cross go together. Inseparably united to the incarnate Son whose glory is revealed in his crucifixion, the Holy Spirit flows to us from the Son’s sacrificial self-giving unto death in order to lead us to faith and life in Him. In the piercing scene after His crucifixion, when the soldier thrusts his spear into Jesus’ side, we get a picture of Jesus as the living Temple from whose bloody side flows the living waters of the Spirit of life to all who trust in Him (see Jn 19:34, 7:37–39; see Eze 47:1–2, and Zech 14:8). As patristic scholar Raniero Cantalamessa beautifully puts it in The Holy Spirit in the Life of Jesus (1985):

When we invoke the Spirit, we should not, so to say, look up to heaven or anywhere else; the Spirit comes not from there but from the cross of Christ. This is the “spiritual rock” from which living water pours over the Church to quench the thirst of believers … The Spirit … on the cross found an outlet, a wound, and became a fountain gushing to eternal life in the Church.

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Who is the paradigmatic character who receives the Spirit, the living water, from Jesus in John’s Gospel? As in many other places in the Gospels, she is an outcast, a marginal character. I’m thinking of the Samaritan woman in John 4. Being a Samaritan alone would have made her less than holy in the eyes of the Jews, not worthy of God’s blessings to His people Israel (see Jn 4:9). On top of that, her broken family life would have made her less than lovable in the eyes of the world, an object of shame (see 4:16–19). There is nothing extraordinary about this woman. She is spiritually depleted and thirsty (see 4:13–15). Will Jesus see her in the same way as the others? Will He shame her like the rest have?

Spot illustration by Melisa Gerecci.

Or will Jesus love the unlovable? Will He shower her with His Spirit? Will He use broken vessels for His purposes? The good news is that Jesus has promised to give this living water that flows freely from His wound to spiritually depleted and thirsty folks even today — people like the Samaritan woman. These are ordinary people who struggle with everyday responsibilities and are not easy objects of love. Parents with mental health issues, spouses working on communicating better, students navigating through self-worth issues, pastors guiding congregations waning in numbers through a difficult merger, or migrants who look and speak differently trying to make ends meet for their families in a new land. Even today, Jesus loves and empowers ordinary, humble pilgrims to worship His loving Father (Jn 4:20–24) and be His witnesses in their communities (4:28–30).

The paradigmatic believer is not some spiritual superhero or crusader, but a broken pilgrim like this woman who listens to Jesus in His Word and follows Him in service to others. From her story, we learn not to look for the Holy Spirit and His power up above somewhere, or down in our hearts and minds for that matter. Rather, the Holy Spirit Himself teaches us to look for His power in Jesus, who comes to us with His Spirit in His Word, sacraments, and His suffering saints. Like the Samaritan woman, we gratefully embrace the Holy Spirit’s extraordinary works in our lives as He sanctifies us in ordinary ways, in the unassuming hearing and sharing of His Word, and in serving our fellow neighbors.

Spiritually worn out, depleted, thirsty? Hear Jesus’ gracious invitation to you: “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will fill you with my Holy Spirit!”

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A few weeks ago, I was visiting my daughter in college. Strolling around the bookstore to get some merch, I came across a school logo that beckoned students to lead extraordinary lives. Since I was writing this article at the time, I felt moved (by the Spirit, I’d like to think) to make a comment to whomever was within earshot. I said something like, “‘Leading extraordinary lives.’ Wow. That seems like a lot of pressure! How about just living ordinary lives well?” My wife, daughter, and student cashier heard my rambling and with shy smiles on their faces nodded their heads.

Dare we imagine a world where the pressure to be extraordinary is removed? What would it mean to live ordinary lives well?

In such a world, people celebrate God’s merciful work in the lives of His servants. In such a world, people acknowledge that mothers, bakers, and candlestick makers can concretely fulfill God’s command of love through God-given callings. In such a world, people are no longer judged or shamed for failing to go above and beyond the common works God has laid out for them. They no longer wonder if they have done enough to please God, to be assured in His love, or to have received His Holy Spirit. In such a world, people praise God for the gift of the Holy Spirit who gently shapes broken, humble people into likenesses of Christ.