The ‘original’ version of this was given at the Lynnville (IL) UMC on May 15, 2005. THIS has been rewritten a fair amount, but the basic ‘message’ has not changed!! The Scripture include…

John 7: 37-39, Acts 2: 1-21, and 1 Corinthians 12: 3-13…

          In the very late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s Barbra Streisand was in her ‘rock-and-roll’ period and released at least two albums that were very much rhythm-and-blues-and-rock oriented… and it was during this time that she became one of my favorite performers. I have several of her albums, made eight-track and, later, cassette tapes of them over the years, and now have most of those same songs on CD. And one of my favorites has always been a song called ‘Space Captain’.

          In it, she tells, to a hard, throbbing beat, how her spaceship once flew close to this planet and now they are all trapped here until they learn to live together in peace. In fact, the second verse goes… “Lost my memory of where I’ve been… we’ve all forgot that we could fly. Someday we’ll all change into peaceful men… then we’ll return into the sky… learning to live together… learning to live together…”… and so on…

          I’ve often wondered just how someone could forget that they could fly!

          In the third book of ‘The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy’, Life, The Universe, and Everything,’ author Douglas Adams gives us the Guide’s take on flying… “The ‘Guide’ says that there is an art to flying… or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss!” Later on in that same book we find our hero, Arthur Dent, trying to run down a mountain that is collapsing underneath of him.

We read… “He ran with the fear of death in him, under him, over him and grabbing hold of his hair.

          And suddenly he tripped again and was hurled forward by his considerable momentum. But just at the moment he was about to hit the ground astoundingly hard he saw lying directly in front of him a small navy tote bag that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage retrieval system at the Athens airport some ten years previously in his personal time scale, and in his astonishment he missed the ground completely and bobbed off into the air with his brain singing.”

          In other words, he forgot to fall!

          “What he was doing was this: he was flying. He glanced around him in surprise, but there was no doubt that that was what he was doing. No part of him was touching the ground, and no part of him was even approaching it.”

          Now, I’m not proposing that any of us here could fly around if we could just finagle a way to forget to fall after we tripped over something… in fact, most of us are at the point where much of our concentration is on NOT tripping or stumbling in the first place! What I am proposing, however, is that it is truly amazing what we DO manage to forget over the course of our lives!

          I worked with a smart-mouthed ‘kid’ once who was telling about the older mechanic who had worked there when he started. They were having ‘words’ when the older guy said, “I’ve forgot more than you’ll ever know about Case tractors!” “That’s the problem,” retorted the youngster! “You’ve forgotten it!” Now, I grant you, when I first was told that some forty years ago, it was almost funny, but it has become decidedly less so over the years!!

          Our minds tend to retain those things we find of particular interest and lose track of those things that are less so. Now, what those things might be are, generally, different from individual to individual… one of you might be especially good at keeping track of the bloodlines of your livestock or even pets, while I can tell you the torque specs and sequence for installing a head on a Case diesel engine. Some can recite the winners and scores of every baseball game played since ‘ought-8’ while someone else can list each of the ingredients for a pineapple-upside-down cake. Still others might rattle off names of movies and who starred in them while others can point to any automobile and tell you the make and model and the year it was built. And for each one of those things that I’ve mentioned, and countless other things that some people might remember, there are just as many others who wouldn’t have a clue… nor care… about any one of them! And each of our verses this morning address a subject that I think many, if not most, of us have forgotten… the Holy Spirit.

          In the book, ‘Fahrenheit 451’, Ray Bradbury describes a world where books are not only forbidden, but it is the job of the firemen to find and burn them. One fireman, however, by the name of Montague, begins to question why and rebels against the system. One thing he learns is that it was not the government that banished the books and knowledge in the beginning… it was the apathy of the general public that made books and reading superfluous… nobody cared what was in them nor wanted to take the time to find out. It was only after books ‘fell-out-of-favor’ that the government saw and seized the opportunity to control what knowledge the public did learn. Enough fact was mixed in with the new ‘knowledge’ to make it all sound feasible, but no one remembered, anymore, what was or wasn’t fact, and so the proffered knowledge became their reality. For example, Ben Franklin was still listed in the history of the fireman as being the first fireman… but the brochure then went on about how firemen had always used special methods to safely use kerosene and other methods to destroy all manner of unacceptable reading materials. The inference was that Ben Franklin was the first to burn books… and no one knew enough to challenge that idea! And yes, the Bible was on that list. Oh, there was still a religious organization, but its purpose was to promote certain products and/or programs that ‘Jesus would support!’

          People, we are not so far from that very thing happening in our world today! I once read an article about teaching Bible classes in our schools which included the following excerpt of a Gallup poll of scriptural knowledge among 1002 U.S. teens.

• 17% thought “the road to Damascus” was where Jesus was crucified.
• 22% thought Moses was either one of Jesus’ 12 apostles, Egypt’s pharaoh or an angel, rather than the man who led Israel out of bondage.
• 68% couldn’t identify who asked “am I my brother’s keeper?” (Cain, after he murdered Abel.)
• 28% didn’t realize that ‘do not divorce’ isn’t among the Ten Commandments.
• 53% couldn’t say what Biblical event occurred at Cana (Jesus turned water into wine.)

How did you do on those questions? And asking that question leads me back to what the over-riding common factor of all of today’s verses is and ask… what do you know about the Holy Spirit?

We have heard Jesus say, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”  And that “By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.” We read how, “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” I also read that, “… to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.”

          Each of these deal with the power of the Holy Spirit… and yet how many of us have just seemed to ‘forget’ that he’s about… we forget that the Trinity consists of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost! Somewhere over the course of time, we have downplayed the importance of that third party… and so it is that we have also come to consider his importance less and less… we just plain forget! Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty… I just don’t remember ever being taught very much about the Holy Ghost at any point of my growing up, or since, for that matter! And that is a real shame, for we are told over and over again that it is the Holy Spirit that gives each of us our gifts, just as he determines… we are told that, “…no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit”… and that, “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.” We have forgotten all of these things!

          We have forgotten many things over the centuries. Indeed, we have forgotten so much that we don’t even remember what we have forgotten!

          I’ll tell you what else we have forgotten! We have forgotten about the young girl in town who’s struggling to raise a child all alone… we have forgotten about the family who has lost their income due to a mine closing or a plant moving out of state… we have forgotten about the orphans in Sarajevo, the tsunami victims, the starving in Africa, the poor in South America! They are not a part of our world, and so we don’t think about them… and if we don’t think about them, for us they don’t exist! We forget them!

          And because we have forgotten about all of these people crying out in hunger and pain and grief, we have forgotten the importance of maintaining our support for them through our giving of our Time and Moneys!!!

          We have forgotten that! We have forgotten that Jesus himself intended for all of us to be and act as one body… the Body of Christ… in all things!

          And that is exactly what Paul is saying in these verses from 1 Corinthians this morning… “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.”

So, let’s all read our Bibles. Let’s all rediscover who and what the Holy Spirit really is, and how he relates to us and our relationship with God. If we who profess to be Christian begin to study and learn and follow all that it means to be Christian… who knows… maybe someday we will discover we really can fly!