[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, Pentecost, May 28, 2023]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
Seven weeks of seven days have passed since the great Passover of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This is the Jubilee Day of His Holy Resurrection. Ten days ago He ascended to be seated at the right hand of the Father, that is, to bring redeemed Humanity’s place to live in the presence of God, leaving us with the promise that as He takes Humanity to be with God outside of the crucible of Creation so God will come within Creation to infuse Humanity with Himself, leading us into all truth.
Two thousand years later we still commemorate these great events, as we have done every year. We read the account in the Acts of the Apostles[1] in which the Disciples in the upper room on the Fiftieth Day were suddenly infused by God the Holy Spirit indwelling them much as each Person of the Holy Trinity indwells each other, sharing with them a fundamental mystery of what it means to be God. Our liturgical colour here in the West is red, symbolizing those tongues of fire the Disciples saw in their common vision in the upper room. We encourage the faithful to wear red, a relatively recent custom, but still a unifying one. We employ fire imagery throughout our homilies, our readings, our decorations, even during Coffee Hour.
For some of us, the fire imagery is a little too hot to handle. This parish sustained great loss due to fire almost nine years ago, and we are still recovering from it. Nôtre Dame de Paris still has years ahead of it to recover from theirs. Our sister congregation in Douglas, St. Stephen’s, suffered total loss of its building only last week due to deliberate malice, likely due to what they stand for, but that investigation is still ongoing. Fire is a powerful image, both for energy and motion, but it has its darker side.
The coming of the Spirit and the action of the Spirit has also been likened to the power of the wind. The Disciples that same morning heard a sound as a mighty, rushing wind.[2] Our Lord in His late-night discussion with Nicodemus said, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”[3] When the Cosmos was still disorganized, chaotic, and unformed, “A wind from God swept over the face of the waters,”[4] and when the Earth was still a wreck from the flood, “God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided,”[5] telling us the rôle the Spirit takes in bringing order out of chaos. The breath of life in Ezekiel’s prophecy of the restoration of Israel is a wind.[6]
Yet wind also has its downside. Scripture is full of images of the destruction caused by wind, wind is used as a tool of judgement, or even emptiness. Tornadoes are the scourge of the Midwest and south in our nation, destroying church buildings, homes, and the like. Hurricanes and typhoons and gales damage or wipe away rooves or even whole buildings or towns. Wind is a powerful image, but also it has its darker side.
So let us turn to the image of water. At Jacob’s Well in Sychar, Our Lord tells St. Photini that He will provide Living Water so that any who partake of it will thirst no more.[7] Later on He tells the same thing to a crowd at Succoth celebrations in Jerusalem, referring specifically to the work of the Holy Spirit.[8] The Prophet Jeremiah refers to God as a fountain of living water that His people has forsaken.[9] Both the Prophets Ezekiel and Zechariah speak of the living waters flowing from the seat of God in Jerusalem over all the earth, restoring life wherever it goes.[10] The Spirit is present also in the waters of our baptism, where we partake in Christ’s Death and Resurrection.[11]
Yet destruction is present even in water. Floods destroy every year. Torrential rains wreak havoc. Here in Arizona, in the desert, flash flooding is a deadly reality that we always need to be on guard against. Great bodies of water, the seas, the oceans, the ancient concept of the Abyss, are metaphors for the great chaos of uncreation. Water is a powerful image, but it indeed also has its darker side.
No physical image for the work of the Spirit we can devise will ever be perfect. For every positive we have there is a negative lurking around the corner. Why is that? Why is there darkness shadowing the light? A Manichaean, or for that matter anyone from any dualist tradition or philosophy, will state that it is to keep the balance between Dark and Light, Creation and Chaos, Being and Non-being, Life and Death, Good and Evil, because the Universe, the Cosmos, is all about retaining balance. Even among us, within the Church, many of the Faithful harbour that opinion.
There is a word for that opinion. Heresy.
A popular Catholic author once wrote, “The Shadow…can only mock, it cannot make: not new real things of its own.”[12] Every positive I have given above, Light, Creation, Being, Life, and Good, are characteristics we attribute to God. I will impress upon you that Dark, Chaos, Non-being, Death, and ultimately Evil are not things of themselves but the absence of their supposed counterpart. If I am permitted to go somewhat Thomistic (an occupational hazard for a Dominican), even creatures that we consider inherently evil possess “goodness” in that existence is in itself good. Even they derive their being from God, the Ζωοποιός,[13] the Giver of Life. It is their acts or agencies that deny God, that embrace nothingness, that are evil. So it is with the downside of every image of fire, wind, or water that we employ. When these are used to impart life, affirm good, effect creation, bestow light, and validate being, we see the agency of God and His Providence. When we see death, evil, destruction, darkness, and annihilation, we see evidence of what we call the Fall.
The Fall. The insertion of Death, Sin, and Corruption into the fabric of Creation. The Fall is nothing more than the separation of created order from God, beginning with the primordial acts of will of certain beings whose first and defining act of will was either to focus on God their creator as their destiny or to supplant God with themselves as their destiny. Every bad thing cascaded down from those initial breaks in unity of will, in those manifestations of pride. Then comes along a new, corporeal, and rational creation whose destiny is to work with God in righting the ship and these initial agents of negation go out of their way to drag this new creation, Humanity, off the path. Yet God comes among Humanity, takes on its Nature, and redeems it in the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ to reverse this trend, to effect a recapitulation of Humanity, to restore it to its original purpose and thus resume the work of restoring Creation to what it should be.
Sound familiar? We have only been talking about it for the past two thousand years.
In the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, we have seen the redemption, reconciliation, and recapitulation of Humanity as God’s stewards of creation. In Christ Jesus all creation will come to be made new. In Him the long defeat[14] of Death, Sin, and Corruption is overwhelmed by Christ’s destruction of Death by His Death and Resurrection. In this light, we see the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as the first fruits of that victory, where the old negative images are supplanted by the life-giving actions of the Holy Spirit through us and throughout Creation.
We have heard, “By their fruits you shall know them,”[15] that is, whether a prophet is speaking either as an agent of the Holy Spirit or an agent of Corruption. Every action of the Spirit reconciles, refines, restores, redeems, and refreshes. The Holy Spirit as a fire bestows energy, zeal, and drive. The Holy Spirit as water provides life, refreshment, and renewal. The Holy Spirit as wind drives away wickedness and shadow, breathes life into our lifeless souls, and pushes us along the path we must go. The Holy Spirit moves across the face of chaos and restores order and purpose.
The Disciples in that upper room prayed for the Holy Spirit. The Lord Jesus had promised them before His Ascension that He would send a Comforter, an Advocate, an Encourager, a Friend to them if only they would let the Spirit in. That they did, and on that Fiftieth Day after the Resurrection, on the first day of the Octave Week of the Resurrection a great wind blew fire into them and swept them out in a flood into the world to bring the Good News and Testimony that God had not abandoned His creation and that He would lead any who would believe in Him into the truth of that restoration.
The long defeat is all around us. The evidence of Sin, Death, and Corruption is overwhelming, but where we let the Spirit in the hope that Evil and Darkness will no longer afflict us in the end the good fruit of the Kingdom of God springs forth, and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it.
Come, Holy Spirit.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Acts 2.1-21 [2] Acts 2.2 [3] Jn. 3.8 [4] Gen. 1.2 [5] Gen. 8.1 [6] Ez. 37.9 [7] Jn. 4.10-15 [8] Jn. 7.37-39 [9] Jer. 2.13, 17.13 [10] Zech. 14.8, Ez. 47 passim [11] 1 Pet. 3.21 [12] Tolkien, J.R.R., “The Tower of Cirith Ungol,” The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Collector’s Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1987, p. 190. [13] The Nicene Creed [14] In a letter to Amy Ronald on December 15, 1956, discussing his attitudes behind the LOTR Tolkien wrote, “Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — thought it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of a final victory.” (Tolkien, J.R.R., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien, edd., Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Boston and New York, 2013, Letter #195.) The ‘long defeat’ refers to the struggle of good against evil as described by Galadriel in meeting with the Fellowship in Lórien. (Tolkien, J.R.R, “The Mirror of Galadriel, “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Collector’s Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1987, p.372) [15] Mt. 7.16