So When Did You Receive the Holy Spirit?

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you first joined the church? That's a question no one has ever asked me, nor have I ever heard it asked of anyone else. But Paul asks such a question in today's reading from Acts.

I'm not sure what prompts Paul to ask. The persons in question are called both "disciples" and "believers." We are told nothing about them that would indicate any sort of deficiency. Did Paul ask this a lot, or was there something about these particular believers that gave Paul concerns?

If you went around and asked this of everyone in a church congregation, what sort of response would you expect? In my own church experience, I can't imagine people saying they had never heard of the Holy Spirit, as those believers tell Paul. The congregations I've been a part of used the Apostles' Creed with some regularity, and so people hear about the Spirit frequently. But I would not be at all surprised if quite a few people answered with the same "No" that Paul heard.

I have heard the Spirit mentioned in Trinitarian formulas all my life. I've heard the story of the Spirit coming at Pentecost countless times. But as I was growing up in the church, I heard very little about the Spirit connected to the personal experience of anyone I knew. In the brand of Presbyterianism I grew up with, we pretty much left the Spirit to Pentecostals and other more "enthusiastic" sorts.

I'm not sure that the Enlightenment and the Holy Spirit play very well together. The Enlightenment is all about logic and reason, and Enlightenment forms of Christianity tend to explain and make sense of Christian faith. It isn't clear what to do with the unpredictable wind of the Spirit, swirling around where it may, stirring things up and prodding people to do things that don't always seem very reasonable or logical.

I think one of the inherent problems with liberal Christianity, a child of the Enlightenment if there ever was one, is a tendency to proclaim a belief system that is sometimes more philosophy than faith. It is a well thought out and helpful philosophy in many ways, but it may not really be alive. It may not be inhabited by the breath of God.

Did you receive the living breath of God when you became part of the church? If not, when did you? And if you didn't receive the Spirit, or if you just aren't sure, what does that mean?

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