Who will get your vote? At this Pentecost-tide us Gnus are challenged: do we want the Holy Spirit to be our leader? Today we celebrate his coming down on the Apostles and the formation of the early church. But does he/she get our vote today, or do we opt for safer and more predictable pairs of hands? Let’s look at his track record. And what about his manifesto? Surely that’s the Bible? Or is it? Other faith communities rightly or wrongly think it is.   And don’t forget, it’s usually only the opposition that read manifestos in order to pick holes in them.

Well according to Genesis 1 the Holy Spirit seems to have been involved in creating everything – pretty impressive! But if Jeremy Paxman were to interview him (as he did Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May on TV this week), he would certainly challenge him on some of the following:  “Holy Spirit, did you or did you not come upon Samson and empower him to kill a 1000 Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey?”(Judges 15:14ff). (The donkey was dead to start with otherwise us Gnus would I have been up in arms, for the donkey is a close kinsman.) “This doesn’t cast you in a good light. It could amount to attempted genocide in European Court of Human Rights.”  If we were spokespersons for the Holy Spirit, (and occasionally some of us Christian claim to be), how could we defend that action? Next Paxman type question:  “Did you or did you not come upon Saul, Israel’s first king, and overpower him, so much so that Saul took all his clothes off and lay on the ground stark naked? Is this, by any standard, socially acceptable behaviour for a monarch or anyone else for that matter?” (1 Samuel 19:24)  If we vote for the Holy Spirit how are we going to explain these last two and other such misdemeanours  to your average Gnu on the street? Or do we say that they have been misreported? I cannot speak for humans. They are probably too intelligent to register such problems. Perhaps us Gnus should live in hope that “intellectual stability” will eventually settle upon us, as President Hassan Rouhani of Iran said recently about another part of the world. Some well-intentioned folks try to help us dull-witted ones by giving us a simple rule: If you want to know whether the Holy Spirit is at work in any given situation, check it against his behaviour in the Bible. Many Gnus are left confused because some suicide bombers believe that they are being prompted by God.  And alas, Samson your archetypal suicide bomber is found in the pages of the Old Testament and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Judges 16:27-30 tells us how the captive Samson prayed to God for strength to take revenge on the Philistines. It seems his prayer was answered. He managed to pulled down the central pillars of a crowded temple; he well and truly brought the house down killing about 3000 people. After all, they were Philistines, so that should be OK?  Had Samson been radicalised by the Holy Spirit? If we vote for the Holy Spirit is he going to encourage similar acts of violence and murder that devastate our lives and communities?

At this point we could throw up our hooves in horror. Is the Old Testament worth bothering about? Is it irrelevant and unreliable in establishing the credentials of the Holy Spirit or of God? Is it really God’s Manifesto? We preach from it. My little Gnudren, we need sensible answers. We call the Bible The Word of God and described it as divinely inspired. What do we really mean? The average Gnu on the street is a busy person with little time to waste unravelling fanciful language.

The behaviour of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is consistently better. He descends and rests on Jesus at his baptism as an affirmatory sign. He directs and empowers Jesus life. For the many people this life seems to have the qualities that were intended for all human beings. He also epitomises what God is or should be when in human form. And, incidentally, Jesus loved and used the Old Testament. So there is some serious thinking that needs to be done. Yes, the Holy Spirit gets my vote – he is worthy of leader of all Gnus and all creatures on God’s earth. His behaviour is much improved ! 
But at this time of national elections, we do well to recall the first episode of Blackadder The Third. It is titled, Dish & Dishonesty. This presents us with the scenario of rotten boroughs in the second half of the 18th Century. In these, candidates could be returned to parliament by a very small electorate, because only a handful were allowed to vote. In this case, the borough of Dunny-on-the-Wold had an electorate of only six: “three rather mangy cows, a dachshund named `Colin’, and a small hen in its late forties.”  On 19th May 2017 more than 40 million turned out to vote in the Iranian General Election. Admittedly the candidates for presidency had to be approved by the senior cleric body, so it wasn’t democracy as we know it, Jim; and certainly not as recently witnessed in the election in the United States of America. The winner in Iran, a moderate, was provoked to observe that there was a powerful neighbour whose population had never seen a ballot box.

It seems from the pages of the New Testament that God is continually in General Election mode, (and you think every 4 years in USA is bad enough!). The eligibility for candidature is open to everybody, and not filtered by any selection body. One needs only apply. Suspiciously, the electorate is even smaller than that of the Dunny-on-the-Wold. It numbers just one, or possibly three, depending how you look at it. Some say God’s General Election is rigged and that only certain people can be elected. Some go so far as to say that God has fixed it so that 144,000 will have special priority. But this is a small minority view.  In this election everyone, who wants to, can stand. And against all the rules the electorate, God, has voted for everybody by putting a cross by everyone’s name, without spoiling the ballot paper. (It’s must be one mother of a ballot paper!) How bizarre is that! It must have taken ages to fill in the ballot paper!  But it is said that he can do such things quickly and multitask at the same time. This certainly is not electioneering as we know it Jim. If you have applied for candidature, on behalf of the returning officer, let me confirm, you have been elected. Happy Pentecost! (Will we ever get away from dodgy elections?!)