Readying for the Holy Spirit

I have never been a big fan of Eugene Peterson's The Message, although one of my sons is somewhat fond of it. I recently learned that my friend Cole Palmer's father was Peterson's roommate at Seattle Pacific University at some point in history. When my friend Dave Rhodes was giving away books as he downsized his life in order to be able to travel around the country in his RV, I claimed a bunch of them for our nascent church library. One of them, Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, was one title I was pretty sure I was not interested in enough to read.

But eventually it worked it way to the top of the box, and when I was recently stranded somewhere without anything else to read, I thumbed through it. Petersons' style, overall, is a little too informal for me, and is reminiscent of many of the twentieth century "stream-of-consciousness" writers like Faulkner. Not only is Peterson informal, he is somewhat mystical. Like most Reformed folk, I mistrust the subjectivity of mysticism. But in his chapter on how Jesus prepared the disciples for the coming of the Holy Spirit, there were some jewels. Here, for example: 

"The conversation is rambling and unsystematic. This is not what we ordinarily think of as good teaching. But Jesus is not making things clear, smoothing out ambiguities; he is making them vivid, pulsing. What the conversation does is immerse us in the presence of another, the presence of Jesus readying us for the Spirit. We are soon listening more to who he is than what he says; we are drawn into this seamless web of relational attentiveness, leaving and sending, sensing within ourselves the pervasive, soul-permeating continuity between the absent Jesus and the present Spirit.

And there is also this about the conversation. It is exceedingly spare in imperatives. Jesus is not telling us how to practice spiritual formation, 'how to do it' - he is telling how it is done. Spiritual formation is primarily what the Spirit does, forming the resurrection life of Christ in us. There is not a whole lot we can do here any more than we can create the cosmos (that was the work of the Spirit in creation), any more than we can outfit Jesus for salvation (that was the work of the Spirit at Jesus' baptism). But there is a great deal that the Spirit can do - the resurrection community is the Spirit's work. What we can do, need to do, is be there - accept the leaving and the loss of the physically reassuring touch and companionship. Be there to accept what is sent by the Father in Jeus' Name. Be there, receptive and obedient.  Be there praying, 'Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word" (Luke 1:38)."