9. Charisma: Gifts of the holy spirit

The place where I learned my first lesson about Biblical interpretation was not in the rational confines of academia, but in the midst of the ecstatic worship of a Charismatic church. This is the story of how I got from there to here.

As a kid and adolescent, I never really doubted that the Bible was the true Word of God, or that the theology I had received from my family and church were anything but the one truly Biblical form of Christianity. I wasn’t deterred by scientific observations such as evolution that seemed to be in conflict with the Bible. Nor was I swayed by other religions that claimed to have a claim to the truth.

When I sat in church on Sunday, the future did seem a little bleak to me, as even if I was as good as I could possibly be, I was just going to be consigned to boring old Heaven, wearing robes and playing harps on a cloud all day. I would be singing these same old hymns for eternity. But it sure seemed better than eternal torture in the confines of Hell.

SEEKING THE KINGDOM

The first inkling I ever had that there was something more to all of this came by way of the Holy Spirit, who I was introduced to by my dad. After my folks split up, my dad moved east with my stepmom to start a new life. With everything that had happened—divorce, financial struggles, midlife crisis--I think he had been feeling pretty far away from his creator in those days. But soon Dad stopped messing around and found a new church.

At first, they started going to their local Nazarene church. I liked that church a lot. I went to the summer camp and worked at their Vacation Bible School. I made some really good friends. I fell in love with the prettiest girl there, and even though she didn’t return my affection, she would favor me with a smile every once in a while.

During VBS, every day the music director would lead the kids in a little melody he wrote for a Bible verse—Matthew 6:33 (KJV)—which is as close to a “life verse” as I have. Whenever I read it, I can still hear him singing:

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.

At the time, I thought the message of this verse was that if I focus on following God’s rules, then God will give me a reward when I die and go to Heaven. With the verse taken out of context, I missed the section leading up to it, preamble in which the writer talks about how the birds and flowers don’t worry about how they will be fed or what they will wear, they just go about their business of growing and singing and being beautiful, and God gives them everything else.

For most of his life, I think my dad also thought about the verse that way as well, as a promise of an eventual reward for good behavior. Having been born in the Great Depression and coming from a repressive theology where even a gold ring or a convertible car were deemed “too worldly,” he may have gone through the first half of his life being told to feel guilty for wanting nice things on this side of Heaven. But I knew he wanted more.

FINDING THE CHARISMA

When I came back the next summer, my dad had a bright little glint in his pale blue eyes as he told me about the new church they had found. It was the first time I heard the word in this context: Charismatic.

The name of the church stems from the word “charisma,” which in the original Greek means gift. In this case, it meant specifically the “gifts of the spirit” mentioned in the Bible. The word could also refer to the ministers in this church, who hearkened back to Pentecostal tradition and to the historic Black Church as influences for showy sermons, rhythmic music, and ecstatic experience. And all of this was thanks to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

In the Bible, Jesus tells his disciples that although he himself is going back to Heaven, he is leaving behind the Holy Spirit, who will both comfort and empower. He also tells them that through the Holy Spirit, they would do more amazing things than he did. They would be able to cast mountains into the sea with the power of their faith.

Now, running around with my dad had always been a lot of fun. We often rode around in his pickup truck, listening to music and telling jokes and stories, finding adventures where we could. One of our rituals was going to all the local comic book stores, where he would spend his hard-earned pay to keep me in Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes comic books.

But learning about the gifts of the Holy Spirit turned the volume up even higher. Now there was a possibility that I could have superpowers myself.

ENTERING THE WORSHIP

When I first walked into that office-building-turned-church, I was thrilled, and a little scared, as the throbbing music and drone of people talking in tongues swirled around me.

A far cry from the dry tradition I grew up in, the Charismatic church was a church about magic. There were healings, and deliverance, talk of demons and spiritual warfare. Ministers talked about amazing miracles that got them out of scrapes with demonic forces in faraway places. There was praying in tongues, miraculous languages through which the Holy Spirit gave secrets to mankind.

The Charismatic church was also about prosperity, about how God would multiply our seed (in the form of tithes and offerings) and that blessings would proliferate in our own lives. The ministers drove flashy cars and lived in opulent houses, not in opposition to the way that God wanted them to live, but as a sign that they were living a Godly life. As the Gospel of Luke, chapter 6 verse 38 (KJV) puts it:

Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom.

And the Charismatic church had dancing. Full-body, out of the seat, up and down the aisle, tambourine-waving, closed-eyes, shouting up to Heaven dancing. Moving our God-given bodies to God-given music in one of the few ways that we could give back to God: through our worship and praise.

For many in my dad’s new church, this form of worship was a release. A form of therapy, almost.

SEARCHING FOR THE TRUTH

It was sort of wonderful to see old time Baptists and Holiness people creeping cautiously out from behind the oppressive systems of belief that had held them back. Women who were allowed to feel beautiful again. Men who could aspire to success without remorse. People who felt like they were in power on this Earth, that Satan was under their feet, that religion was something to celebrate, and church something to look forward to, not an oppressive payment we had to make to God in order to hold off his wrath.

For me, it did more than that. It not only showed me that there was more to Church than I had ever imagined, but that there was more to the Bible than I had ever known. In fact, it showed me that it was possible to spend your entire life reading the Bible, studying it from cover to cover, and never realize that you didn’t understand it at all.

I thought the church I grew up in had taught me the entire story, about sin and salvation and obedience and holiness. But we never had magic. We never had miracles. We had prayers for peoples’ healing, but we also knew that sometimes—maybe even often—God’s answer to those prayers was no, and so we took comfort in looking for God’s lesson in the suffering.

But in the Charismatic church, we were empowered to demand healing, to declare things so and speak them into power. We knew that the apostles weren’t just men talking the talk, they were superheroes walking the walk.

So when I went back home to the Nazarenes, I walked around like someone with secret knowledge, somebody who knew there were codes and stories in the Bible that we had missed, that no one around me knew.

I wondered what else we had gotten wrong. I pored through the pages of the Bible to find out what it really, really, really said.

I imagined what secrets it held, if I only read and interpreted it the right way.