A popular speaker at many Baptist gatherings, Molly T. Marshall is Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation at Central Seminary. Marshall brings theology alive with her incisive inquiry and a deep desire to encourage other Christians in the task of faith seeking understanding.
This May, Judson Press releases her newest book, Joining the Dance: A Theology of the Spirit. In this excerpt, Marshall discusses the work of the Spirit “winnowing” through the world’s chaos and disorder, calling those who move in the Spirit to discern, test, and above all, rail against the injustices of the world. Marshall suggests “the goal of the Spirit is to winnow in order to produce a great harvest of justice and peace through the lives of those empowered by the dynamic presence of God.”
    (Excerpt from Joining the Dance is copyright Judson Press, 2003.)

Winnowing the Harvest

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
—1 Corinthians 12:7

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything.
—1 Thessalonians 5:19-21

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.
—1 John 4:1

Introduction

In Joining the Dance, the work of the Spirit is explored in universal and particular ways. [I argue that] the Spirit not only vivifies all of creation, but also indwells and empowers certain communities and individuals for more discrete tasks. The Spirit is ever bringing newness in creaturely life and human structures, which provides avenues to participate in God’s great mission with the world. [Now] we explore ways that the Spirit continues the perichoretic dance, drawing us into the movement of the triune life of God. By delineating varied manifestations of spiritual power, we will discover further the Spirit’s rhythm.
Scripture exhorts believers to exercise discernment in characterizing the work of the Spirit. Liberally scattered throughout the hortatory sections of the Bible are cautionary notes about “testing the spirits” in order to avoid facile conclusions about the activity of the Spirit. All that purports to be “spiritual” may not be in keeping with the ways of God as Spirit, but determining this can prove elusive. Sometimes subtle and other times unmistakable, the Spirit lists her way in the world.
[I suggest] the metaphor of winnowing to help us discriminate between authentic and fraudulent claims for the activity of the Spirit. To that end, we will study the Spirit’s gifting for service, our task of discerning the spirits, and the work we share with the Spirit in liberating from oppression and laboring toward the reign of God. The goal of the Spirit is to winnow in order to produce a great harvest of justice and peace through the lives of those empowered by the dynamic presence of God.

Liberating from Oppression

The winnowing work of the Spirit not only sifts the lives of Christians, but also labors toward the liberation of all oppressed. Those who are evil cannot endure the relentless wind of the Spirit, which drives the chaff away (Psalm 1:4). Thought to carry weight in the world, oppressors really have “lightness of being” when confronted by the powerful gale of God’s Spirit.
Lee Snook writes of “the rhetoric of reversal” when describing how the Spirit is overcoming evil in the world. This reversal takes the form of converting the human heart and mind “from twisted forms of love that consume the good, misrepresent the truth, and use beauty to mask abuses of power.” Our world is groaning under the burden of oppression, born of insatiable self-interest. Economically privileged Christians preoccupy themselves with trivia and ignore the “weightier matters” (Matthew 23:23). Tonghou Ngong David, a native of Cameroon, writes in poetry,

Amid the new, we are pushed to the corner,
We are Left Behind!
(What a mockery of a movie,
That looks above and abandons us next door!)
Our women and children die of fever,
AIDS ransacks our frail bodies,
While the world flies on….

Pharmaceutical companies reap astronomical profits at the expense of our elders and the poor everywhere. Developing nations decimated by HIV-AIDS have little or no access to the drug therapies that are currently proving effective. The global proliferation of war strangles economies, leaving little for health and education needs. The oppressive hegemony of debt paralyzes countries such as Nicaragua, Haiti, and Guatemala. Desperately poor, they indenture their finest resources to the rapacious appetites of North American corporations. And, in the words of long-time ABC missionary Dr. Gustavo Paràjon, the “avalanche of the North against the South” continues.
Closer to home, we read daily of corrupt corporate executives who have put personal profit above ethics. They have deliberately lied about their company’s finances and left others to clean up scandalous practices that filled their pockets while jeopardizing the financial future of their employees. Government policies, even in a democracy, too often increase rather than ease economic oppression of the vulnerable in our society.
Racial minorities continue to suffer oppression in a nation where the color of skin still matters more than the content of character decades after the prophetic leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. Suspicion shrouds young African American men, and often they feel defeated from the outset and live out the self-fulfilling prophecy of their discrimination. Women remain vulnerable to life-threatening abuse; children often are treated as expendable commodities. Sexual minorities face ridicule and revulsion, rendering them fearful of making their truth known. This litany of oppression hardly exhausts the global groaning of the human family, not to mention the piercing cry of all creation.
Where is the “reversal” of which Snook writes occurring? How is it happening? How is the power of the Spirit at work? Answering these questions forces us to move beyond the traditional ascriptions of the Spirit’s power. The Spirit is not just the inward work of God as advocate or intercessor, comforting and sustaining and transforming us within the body of Christ. The Spirit does not only indwell leaders of the people of God and the community of faith gathered around the cross. The cosmic work of the Spirit labors for the liberation of the world, even creation itself.
The Spirit is at work in all forms of power in the world, but the Spirit cannot work unilaterally, because of the freedom granted to those whom God is beckoning to dance. The space in which God lets creation “be” is not overrun by divine determinism; it is a space for the dance partners, divine and human, to practice their steps that they might move in the rhythms of redemption.
The Spirit, as God’s radical immanence, breathes through all structures—political, economic, educational, scientific, and so on. Nothing is too “secular” for the Spirit’s winnowing work. Moreover, there is no special “religious” matrix where the Spirit can work in an unhindered way; the Spirit strains to find breathing room there as well. Listing through these varied instrumental means, the Spirit must tack through recalcitrant persons, pernicious systems, and even opposing powers.
Throughout the world, hopeful persons care for the sick, distribute food, educated children, accompany the aging, and work to change public policy, all in the power of the compassionate Spirit, who revives their energies and makes fruitful their sowing for the future. The power of love subverts the power of oppression, slowly but inexorably.
Sometimes the presence of the Spirit is evident in allowing persons to retain their humanity amidst life’s squalor. The Spirit bubbles forth in laughter, even in the most degrading circumstances, and eases the pain of the present trauma. Humor, that grace of the Spirit, wells up when tears seem more in order. Even “gallows humor” is a form of protest; while it makes light of tragic situations, it also issues a reminder that things are not the way they ought to be.
    Lee Snook, veteran theological teacher who spent many years in Zimbabwe, writes about “destabilizing laughter” as a sign of the Spirit. He contends that the power of the joke “aimed at exposing…pretensions of power and authority” is a form of the power of the Spirit—winnowing power, I believe. The Spirit does not hesitate to poke fun at ecclesial structures whose self-importance renders them inhospitable to lively currents. Satirizing stiff forms of institutional authority is the Spirit’s ironic work; this kind of humor is usually lost on those who prize tradition even when it stultifies spiritual life. God’s work in the church is deadly serious, they contend—sure enough, it does die when the ebullient laughter of the Spirit is silenced.
    How does the power of the Spirit in the church work in tandem with the Spirit’s movement in the world? In our day there is a greater need for the church to perceive the ways in which the Spirit is at work beyond its regulated structures. Nicholas Healey suggests a new receptivity on the part of the church to the liberation occurring elsewhere:

“Since the church can at times learn from the work of the Spirit working in what is non-church, it seems reasonable to propose that the church should make a habit of listening to the non-church, of trying to discern the Spirit’s action in its challenges, of seeking out its wisdom in case Christ’s word is spoken there.”

To whom should by the church listening? Any structure of movement where persons are finding recovery, hope, and the stirrings of a new beginning is worthy of being heard. Whether it is in Alcoholics Anonymous, support groups for the HIV-infected, divorce recovery workshops, stimulating activities for handicapped persons, art therapy for children, or the privacy of the therapist’s office, God’s Spirit is seeking to move persons toward renewal of life. Spirit is the source of energy, the force field, for these action groups, these so-called self-help groups (actually, the Spirit is the helper par excellence, striving to make all things new). Christ’s word is spoken when people are called from death to life; the Spirit’s action is evident when healing of mind and spirit occur through compassionate companions.
The church has not always spoken words of grace to the broken, as such persons seem to represent failure or sin, and some Christians fear being tainted by association. Ideas of Christian perfection or a distorted theology of “reward and punishment” leave little room to welcome those who have not flourished (the “weak”) in the same way as the successful (the “strong”) within the flock. Because suffering persons remind everyone of the frailty of the human condition, they often are sequestered and succumb to what Moltmann calls a “social death.” It is little wonder that persons seeking compassion and healing gravitate toward less judgmental contexts, where the Spirit may be more at liberty to life oppression. The Spirit may also need to move toward more receptive channels, where winnowing occurs more freely. When the church observe these other fields as places where the Spirit is moving, may it repent and covert to a new humility and expansiveness.
Peter Hodgson suggests that this labor of the Spirit in liberating oppression is also for the “perfection (or freedom) of God.” He links the liberation of the world with the completion of the unfolding of divine life. Through the Spirit, the triune figuration of God will renew the whole creation. The winnowing will be complete, and the God of the harvest will gather the wholesome grain into the garner forevermore.