Holy Spirit & Julie Andrews

Bring up the Holy Spirit and we can get into hocus pocus pretty quickly.  Not that the Holy Spirit doesn't have some of that.  But there's a lot of the Holy Spirit that is supernatural in a mundane sort of way.  For example, three big chapters on the Holy Spirit are in I Corinthians 12-14.  Note that the famous chapter on love, chapter 13, is in the middle of that.  So rather than hocus pocus we have living in self-giving love as being full of the Holy Spirit.  

As Americans we don't realize it, the way fish don't realize they are in water, until we are in other cultures, or they are commenting on ours, that we are highly individual based in our outlook.  When it comes to the Holy Spirit the first way we think of it is how does he fill me?  In the Bible, however, while filling me is legitimate, an equivalent or greater concern is how the Holy Spirit fills us.  Ie, the group, the congregation.  

I got to thinking about how Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music story entered an unruly and stern family.  Let's throw in that the bathrooms were dirty and the children said self-pitying things all the time.  Or the children said uncharitable things about others.  She, of course, would love and discipline and model and sing.  The family members might not like her saying, "No," to them or saying, "No more of that," to them.  They might not like being sent to their rooms because they continued.  But eventually Julie Andrews got the sloppiness out, the encouraging in, and love flowing.  

The Holy Spirit in a congregation is the same way.  He might help the session send someone to their room.  That doesn't sound very spiritual, does it?  But it is.  He might help one member say to another member, "We don't talk that way in this church family."  He might help us prize encouragement.  He might help us hug and smile at everyone in the church family.  He might help us be brave or to sing.  He might be a lot like Julie Andrews in the Von Trapp family.