Jesus breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
We church-going folk sure love to be nice. We love to be warm. We love to be welcoming. When we talk about spiritual concepts like “grace,” we focus on the happy part of the term: the good gladness that washes over us when the Creator fashions us from clay and breathes life into us and sets us on this green earth to live, to laugh, to love.
When we talk about the Holy Spirit, we like to focus on the loveliness of that Spirit, who blows through this community like a warm and invigorating breeze. We might imagine the Spirit’s fire brightening our nights with cozy amber colors, all of us gathered around a snug campfire. Maybe we could toast marshmallows over the Spirit’s golden flame.
“I’m not that into Jesus,” someone once told me, years ago. “I’m more about the Spirit,” they said. It’s easy to see Jesus as off-putting, complicated, and historically problematic; and isn’t it the evangelicals who focus on him so much? Meanwhile it’s easy to see the Spirit in any way that suits us, a kind of divine blank screen onto which we can project our happy dreams, our escapist fantasies.
“There’s a real spirit to this place,” people will say. “Do you feel it?” And when they say that, they usually mean that we’re extraverted and enthusiastic, or we’re loving and generous. And often enough they are right: we are those things, at least some of the time, and the Spirit makes it all possible. Unlike the provocative and vexing Jesus, whose miracle stories beggar belief and whose story of suffering can just, well, bum us out, the Spirit seems easy, breezy.
But even if we just glance at the Gospels, particularly the Resurrection appearance that we just heard, we see that Jesus, who came from the Father and is going back to the Father, breathes the Spirit into his followers, reminding us of the creation story when God breathes life into Adam, the first human. Once again we are reminded that it is impossible to speak truthfully or meaningfully about one Person of the Holy Trinity without speaking about the other two.
If we domesticate or soften the Holy Spirit, we not only misunderstand the nature of God, we also miss out on the deeper grace, and the more profound glory, that we receive from the Holy Three. When we praise them, and pray to them, together, that is when we are challenged, and changed. That’s when our faith pierces us like a strong wind. That’s when our hearts are set on fire.
Let’s spend a bit more time with wind and fire, the Holy Spirit metaphors that on the surface seem so gentle and benign. Earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus himself teaches us to imagine the Spirit as a “wind that blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” But wind can be destructive, even catastrophic. The Spirit’s wind doesn’t just gently flow around us. Her tornado strips us of our easy defenses and facile explanations. She blows away the flimsy tarps of defensive denial that we anxiously wrap over hard truths, like the fact that we routinely participate in systemic evil that harms other people. Her north wind can blow cold, biting cold, driving us out of our places of comfort and safe retreat.
And the Spirit’s fire — it’s not just the quiet flicker of a lit candle. The Spirit’s volcano can and will sear us painfully, burn us badly, refine us bracingly so that we repent, reform, and get stronger.
Now, listen again to what Jesus says after he breathes the Spirit into his followers: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
That is a lot to say. The Spirit gives us power, control. She authorizes us to forgive sins, and not forgive them — we are now gatekeepers in this community. We are called and qualified to make judgments about one another, and about other people. But before we take up this task, we should know more about what, exactly, the “sins” are that we are forgiving, or not forgiving.
In the Good News according to John, “sin” is understood in a particular way. For John, to “sin” is not to do something immoral or against the rules; it is not a mistake or a bad choice; sin is not simple wrongdoing. For the community that gave us John’s Gospel, sin is defined as a failure of relationship.
Some context will be helpful. The people who created John’s Gospel were thrown out of their synagogues because of their belief in Jesus. This deeply traumatized and isolated them. They banded tightly together, and focused keenly on the importance of group cohesion, togetherness, unity. This led them to reflect theologically on sin not as a simple bad behavior (I stole your lunch money, shame on me), but as a willingness to break relationship, to break the community, because of an important disagreement (I stole your lunch money because I am not in community with you).
And so, if you “believe in Jesus” or “believe the Good News” in John’s community, you’re not just affirming an intellectual belief. You are bonding with them forever in love. And if you reject the Gospel, then, well, you have sinned, but not because you hold to a taboo idea. You have sinned because you have broken your membership in Christ’s Body.
We aren’t all that different from John’s community. Sure, we are 21st-century people trained to understand religious belief as an intellectual exercise, a cognitive thing. “What do you think?” we will often ask each other, in a discussion about faith, or God, or evil, or the notion of life after death. But this faith community — our faith community, here in present-day Seattle but descending from the very first Christian communities that grew up around the Mediterranean twenty centuries ago — this faith community does not hand newcomers a faith statement and ask them to sign it. We don’t have you check boxes next to belief statements and commit to full agreement. “Belief” is always more than that. Belief is relational: to believe means to break bread with us, to abide with us, and to follow Jesus with us.
So now let’s look again at the words of Jesus: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Understanding what John’s community means by the word “sin,” we see that the Holy Spirit, breathed into us by the Risen One, gives us authority and power to forgive the sin of a broken relationship. We don’t just say, “I forgive you for stealing my lunch money.” We repair the breach; we mend what is torn; we work with one another and with people who have left our Body to come back together, to embrace, to abide, to be one.
And — we can also say No to that. (This part of today’s Good News isn’t easy and breezy, and maybe not very pretty.) Sometimes the painful breach needs to stay in place. Just ask anyone who escaped an abusive or otherwise death-dealing marriage, and now has an ex in their life who does not behave ethically or safely. For that person, “retaining the sin” of the other person means keeping them out of their life, for good reasons.
And finally, if we step back and reflect on the wind and the fire of the Spirit, it all begins to come together. Jesus breathes the Spirit into us, the Spirit wind who blows away the structures and systems that damage human beings, including the structures and systems that you and I have grown fond of because they keep us comfortable, or wealthy, or safe, no matter that our neighbor is cast aside, thrown outside. Jesus fires the Spirit into us, the scorching flame that sears our consciences and drives us into crucial conversations with those we too easily call our enemies.
Jesus breathes the Spirit into us, and we are strong now, even frighteningly strong. We are conscious now, keenly aware of what we’re up against, what we want in the world, and who we follow: we follow the crucified and risen Christ, the Friend of friends who binds our community together and forms us into apostles so that we can keep doing the work of binding and bonding; keep doing the work of conversation, confession, and reconciliation; keep doing the work of repairing the breach.
I will close with words from the poet William Alexander Percy. One of his poems begins with the famous phrase, “They cast their nets in Galilee,” and you can find it in our hymnal at hymn number 661. Percy speaks of God’s peace, which on the surface sounds pleasant, soothing, lovely, like the gentle breeze or flickering flame of the Spirit. But God’s peace is hard won; the Gospel demands the hard labor of love; the Spirit-led peace breathed into us by the Risen One is not an easy peace, but rather a conscious and painful engagement with strife. We won’t always make peace with everyone. Our faith demands great maturity and forbearance from us.
Here is the final stanza of Percy’s poem:
The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.
Yet let us pray for but one thing — the marvelous peace of God.
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Preached on the Day of Pentecost (Year A), May 24, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
John 20:19-23