Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire and lighten us with thy celestial fire. Amen.
In this morning’s text from Acts, St. Paul is on one of his missionary journeys, this time going through Corinth and then Ephesus when he encounters some fellow followers of Jesus. And so he asks them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They said, “No, we hadn’t even heard that there is a Holy Spirit?” And then St. Paul goes on to describe the difference between the baptizing that John the Baptist was doing at the Jordan River and the Baptism that we take part in when we are Baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What’s intriguing about this passage is the response – “We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
Sadly, this is a response that might be heard in many churches and traditions today, ours included. Yes, we invoke the Holy Spirit in most of our prayers; but, if we’re honest, the Holy Spirit just gets tacked on formulaically to the end of a lot of our prayers. We easily speak about the blessings that God the Father has bestowed upon us. We pray “Our Father.” And Jesus, rightfully and understandably so, gets a lot of attention in our prayers, readings, discipleship, and stained-glass windows. But the Holy Spirit? Sometimes it seems like we are one of those followers that St. Paul encountered – we’re not even sure there is a Holy Spirit. Or, if we’ve heard about the Holy Spirit, we have no idea what the Holy Spirit is all about.
Even in classical theology, we’re not sure what to do about the Holy Spirit. I’ve heard some very intelligent theologians speak about how we can understand the Trinity as the Father being the Lover, the Son being the Beloved, and the Spirit as the love between them. The problem with that metaphor is it clearly diminishes the Holy Spirit to be something less than a person. And the result is that we don’t know how to relate to something that isn’t a person, even if we know that “personhood” is only a metaphor with God. The Holy Spirit gets reduced to a feeling. Or sometimes the Spirit is described in terms of breath or wind or fire. And while there are Biblical warrants for these images, these are best seen as supplemental metaphors for the Spirit, not primary ones. It would be like using the metaphor of the vine or the door as the primary images of Jesus – if we only talked about how Jesus has hinges and a doorknob. Well, essentially that’s what we’ve done to the Holy Spirit – relegating it to being a metaphorical wind. And this is understandable – the Spirit is untamable, and in denominations that are predominately filled with people used to being in control, focusing too much on the Holy Spirit would lead to more disruption than most of us would find comfortable.
Now, this isn’t the case for all Christians. I’m sure you’ve heard of Pentecostals, a movement within Christianity that began about 100 years ago – they certainly have a much more robust view of the Holy Spirit. But, of course, it is possible to over-emphasize things, and that’s a trap that some fall into as well. Too much emphasis on the Spirit can easily turn into a competition over who has the most gifts of the Spirit and who has truly received the Spirit and who hasn’t. The solution to underemphasizing the Holy Spirit is not to suddenly overemphasize it – that’s just trading one problem for another.
So how can we better worship the fullness of the Holy Trinity without acting as if we have never heard of the Holy Spirit? Well, our worship, adoration, and obedience to God is always rooted in who God is and in response to what God has done. Who, then, is the Spirit and what is the work of the Spirit?
The Nicene Creed gives us a short response to these questions, and it is an understanding of the Spirit that allows us to properly praise, know, and follow the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the giver of life. That’s the takeaway – if all you remember of this sermon is that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life, then I’ve done what I’ve hoped for in this sermon. Because how we receive, understand, worship, and follow the Spirit all come from that Creedal claim that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life. And this morning’s Biblical texts help us to see how this is so.
The first way that the Holy Spirit is life-giver is seen in Genesis. The Holy Spirit is what gives life to all that is. Before there was life, Genesis tells us that the earth was a formless void of chaos. And then a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. This wind is the Holy Spirit that stirs the waters and brings order out of chaos and life out of nothingness. And the voice of the Father says, “Let there be light.” We know that speech is vocalized breath, so the very act of Creation comes through the Spirit.
Later in Genesis, when life is breathed into humanity, that life-giving breath from God is the Holy Spirit. Simply put, without the Holy Spirit there is no life. We are alive because the breath of God breathes in us. And this is why even death, which is certainly real and painful, does not have power over the Holy Spirit, the giver of life. As the Eucharistic Prayer from the Burial rite puts it, “Life is changed, not ended.” Even at the grave, the Holy Spirit can and does breathe life.
We’ve already seen the link between Baptism and the Holy Spirit in the readings from Acts and Mark, and St. Paul makes it quite clear in Romans 6: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” The Holy Spirit is that giver of new life. Before life began in Creation, after death, and at every point in between the Holy Spirit is the one who gives us life.
Another way that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life is in the way in which the Spirit mediates God’s presence in our lives and in our world. We all know that it’s one thing to be alive and it’s something else to be truly alive. Trees and worms are alive, but I’m not quite sure we want to say that they are endowed with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Yes, the Spirit gives life to all things, but the Holy Spirit, dwelling in us, does so much more than simply give us an EKG or EEG reading.
As we see throughout today’s readings, the Spirit is an animating voice and that voice speaks in us. As we have seen, Genesis testifies to this. And Psalm 29 sings about the powerful voice of God that shakes the earth. And as we saw in Acts, when that same Spirit that carried the voice of God dwells within us, a power that is beyond us is given to us. Those disciples who had not heard of the Holy Spirit begin to speak in tongues and to prophecy. Now, what it means to speak in tongues, that would be the subject of an interesting discussion, but is not the purpose of this sermon. But what we know from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians that even “if I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” The tongue given to us by the Holy Spirit is not the tongue of gibberish or a noisy gong, rather it is the tongue of love. True life is lived in the love of God, and the Spirit fills us with this love.
The Spirit also animates us by making us prophets. Again, another exploration would have to consider what prophecy does and does not mean. But at the most basic level, prophecy is rooted in the linguistic idea of being an interpreter. A prophet is someone to whom the truth of God has been revealed and they then relay this truth to those around them. To be clear, this means that for a true and faithful prophet, the message is never their own, it always God’s message. Prophets do not give people a piece of their mind. Prophets do not put people in their place. No, the prophets role is to speak in those tongues of love to those who have forgotten that love is actually their native tongue. So much of what passes for prophecy in today’s world is just virtue signal and participating in the cancel culture. But that’s not prophecy. Prophecy is about calling people in love to return to the way of love that has been abandoned.
This is what the Holy Spirit does – commandeering our voices, our actions, our lives to be the call of love to our broken world. Again, St. Paul in 1 Corinthians writes that “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” Prophecy without love is nothing, but prophecy done in love, out of love, and for love is the greatest of things – greater even than faith and hope. By using our voices to speak as prophets of love, the Holy Spirit is the giver of life because, as St. Irenaeus put it around the year 180, “the glory of God is a person fully alive.” When our voice is used to do the will of God, we are fully alive and then we can say that the Spirit is the giver of true life within us.
Going further on this theme, the Spirit empowers to live lives that matter. When John the Baptist speaks to the crowds, he tells them that one more powerful than he is coming. Well, that more powerful one is Jesus and it is into Jesus that we are baptized. Mark records that as Jesus is baptized, the heavens are torn apart. In other words, something new is breaking into the world. And it’s not like when the heavens were torn apart if you had been there and looked up that you’d be able to see further than the Hubble Space telescope or something like that. No, it’s more that the curtain was pulled back so that we can see what is deepest and truest about the world. They say that knowledge is power and in Jesus we have seen the fullness of God, so that means we have access to the most powerful thing in all Creation – Jesus.
Jesus tells us that he came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. It is the Holy Spirit that makes good on that promise. The Spirit gives us access to that life because the Spirit that we are given is the very Spirit of Jesus. Forgiveness, generosity, humility, courage – we do not muster these things up in ourselves, but rather these things are the manifestations of the Spirit of Jesus in us.
And with the power of Jesus in us, the Spirit is also the giver of life by sanctifying us, that is, making our lives holy. Because the Spirit dwells within us, when God looks upon us, what God sees is what God saw at the Baptism of Jesus – God’s beloved son or daughter, with whom God is well pleased. The New Testament speaks of how we are clothed in Christ. Well, that clothing is the Holy Spirit. When God looks at you, God does not see a failure, a sinner, a person who could do better, a person who doesn’t do enough. No, when God looks at you, God sees a beloved child with whom he is well-pleased. That is not up for debate – it’s clearly what Scripture teaches us about the Holy Spirit and our union with Christ by the power of the Spirit.
The real struggle is whether or not we’re able to see that belovedness ourselves. This is what sanctity means – not being better than other people, not being holier than thou, not being perfect. Sanctification is about knowing, believing, trusting that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life, and in particular, your life. We are all the recipients of the gift of life from the Spirit. We are empowered by the Spirit to speak in tongues of love. We are gifted by the Spirit with a grace that never leaves us.
We do need more of an emphasis on the Holy Spirit, and a great place to start is by remembering that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life. The thing to understand about the Spirit as the giver of life is that it is always true. It is not that the Spirit gave us life in the past or that the Spirit will give us Resurrection life later, rather the Spirit is always the giver of life, in every moment. Similarly, Baptism is never something that happened in the past. None of us were baptized, we are baptized. And that subtle difference makes all the difference because it testifies to the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives as the giver of life.
