[Sermon delivered on Pentecost, Sunday, May 19, 2024, at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, AZ]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
To say that we really do not understand God is an understatement. Despite all that has been revealed to us about the Being, the Nature, and the Persons of God, or rather, because of all that, God is fundamentally incomprehensible. The eternal Being, who not only is outside time and space but has both created and owns time and space and moves through it, cannot be fully appreciated, observed, or understood by any creature who is part of that space-time continuum. To understand fully would be to contain the uncontainable, to apply time to the timeless, to grasp the ungraspable. Certainly, we can be aware of God, as we can be aware of the Cosmos, the air around us, the ground upon which we tread, but we cannot know God. However, as Christians of a certain orthodoxy, we also are aware of God as Persons, three of them in fact, but again, do we really understand those Persons? Fully, no, but because the Holy Trinity is personal, we can enter into relationship with each Person of God. The Son, as revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord, we often find most approachable; He did, after all, become Human and take our Nature upon Himself, and those who knew Him told us as much as they could about Him. The Father also commands awareness, awe, and respect; the Son while among us testified about Him, and the Father has been known to speak directly to people on occasion. But what about the Spirit? The Spirit is for us a paradox. We understand the Spirit the least even though we encounter the Spirit the most of all the Persons of the Most Holy and Glorious Trinity. Perhaps it is time to explore and deepen that relationship.
Well then, where do we start?
Many Christians on Sundays and other days of the week utter these or similar words, which you may recognize:
“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.”[1]
The Nicene Creed makes a great starting point to explore our relationship with the Spirit. For instance, the very first thing this Creed asserts is that the Holy Spirit is the Lord, a loaded phrase in our context. While the word “Lord” implies a master/servant relationship, in this case between the Holy Spirit and us, the word is also a Hebrew euphemism. It infers that the Spirit is Master because the Spirit is God, because Lord, or אֲדֹנָי (Adonai), is a stand-in of ancient practice for הַשֵּׁם (Ha Shem), itself an alias for the Holy Name of God (יהוה), a word not lightly pronounced. Taken together with, “who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified,” the Creed and the Church assert that the Holy Spirit is well and truly a Person of the One God.
Not only is the Spirit God, but we also call the Spirit “the Giver of Life.” The Spirit as a Person of the Triune God has an active role in the creation and sustenance of the Cosmos. For as the Father created all from nothing and the Son spoke the Word of Creation, “the Spirit moved across the face of the waters,”[2] that is, the Spirit brought Order from the Chaos. As we read in the psalms,
“You send forth Your Spirit, and they are created, and so you renew the face of the earth.”[3]
The Spirit is God, the Spirit plays an active role in both the ordering and maintaining the Cosmos, the Spirit is all around us, the Spirit constantly interacts with us, not as part of creation but as the master of creation.
The Creed also tells us that the Spirit is capable of relationships, particularly by denoting the relationship of the Spirit (who is a Person of the one God) with the Father (also a Person of the One God). Now, those of you who know me relatively well are fully aware that I could go down a rabbit hole about the filioque[4] and that like the rest of the Eastern Church I would rather chew off my right arm than repeat it. So let us avoid that controversy and instead point out that this clause echoes our reading from the Gospel today, where Our Lord says:
”When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.[5]
Here we see that the Spirit, who is God, who is constantly with us as the Giver of Life, who comes from the Father in a timeless progression without beginning and without end, comes and testifies on behalf of Our Lord Jesus at His specific request to the Father.
This is important. A relationship implies communication as well as presence, but when the Spirit spoke, the Creed and the Scriptures tell us it was through the Prophets. These men and women (yes, surprise, women, they are mentioned all through the Scriptures) frequently brought messages to God’s people arising from conversations with the Spirit. Yet that implies a relationship with a few, but today, instead of only to a few, the Spirit speaks to many. Moses once lamented,
“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”[6]
Well, be careful what you wish for. God heard that prayer. Speaking to the Prophet Joel, the Spirit promised:
“Then afterwards I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”[7]
And so it happened that a couple of thousand years ago, seven weeks after Passover, on a festival known as the Feast of Weeks, on the fiftieth day (in Greek πεντηκóστη ‘ημέρα) after the Resurrection of Our Lord, God’s promise came to pass, and the Spirit hit Jesus’ disciples like a freight train. Instead of having a relationship (of sorts) with a few, the Spirit comes to rest on all of God’s people. Moses’ prayer, Joel’s prophecy, Jesus’ request is fulfilled. Among us. If we want it.
So, what does this mean? Even in the nascent Church the Holy Spirit did not (normally) talk with the followers of Jesus conversationally. There were still prophets and those who exercised this greater gift, but now instead of providing life, the Spirit provides LIFE. What do I mean by that? Let us start with the Seven Spirits of God, characteristics of the Spirit as manifested in this same Spirit’s interactions with us as expressed by the Prophet Isaiah:
“The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.”[8]
The people of God, desiring a relationship with God, reach out to the Spirit asking for all of these, for the presence of God Himself, for wisdom, for understanding, for direction, for power, for knowledge, for the respect and true worship of God. St. Paul frequently enjoins us praying and living in the Spirit, that is, inviting the Spirit into our prayers to add the Spirit’s perfection to make up for and supplement our inadequacies, or in his words, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit,”[9] that is, to frame our lives with the fruits of the Spirit, that is, with “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,”[10] all of this seeking, and building, a relationship with the Holy Spirit, who also seeks to build a relationship with us.
My dear family in Christ, this is why we ask the Spirit in our Baptism to die to our old natures and rise again to our new nature in Our Lord Jesus, why we ask the Spirit at our Confirmations to indwell us and be with us, why we ask the Spirit at every Mass to transform the Bread and the Wine into the very Body and Blood of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and in so eating the Holy Sacrament become part of His Body, His Resurrected self and the fellowship of other believers, of the people sitting around you who with you will receive today, because just as Jesus came among us to bear witness to the Father and His Gospel, so He sends the Spirit from the Father to us so that along with the Spirit we become Prophets of the Most High and bear witness to the Father and His Gospel in our words, in our actions, and in our lives. By allowing the Spirit to transform us into the likeness of Christ Jesus our Lord, like Him we will be sent:
“…To bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn…”[11]
Because the Spirit of the Lord God is upon us and has anointed us.[12]
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed
[2] Gen. 1.2
[3] Ps. 104.31
[4] For those who are unaware, in the Ninth Century the West widely adopted the phrase, “Who proceeds from the Father and the Son,” into the Creed, which has excited well over a millennium of wrangling almost as contentious as the Christological controversies of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries.
[5] Jn. 15.26
[6] Num. 11.29b
[7] Joel 2.28-32a
[8] Is. 11.2
[9] Gal. 5.25
[10] Gal. 5.22-23
[11] Is. 61.1-2
[12] Ibid.