Come, Holy Spirit, and speak of your wonderful works through us. Amen.
This sermon will function something like a “101” on the Holy Spirit. God, seen as a loving parent, an artist, a creator is something we can start to imagine. God, in coming to us as a Son in Jesus is something we can relate to in our humanity. But God as Spirit is a bit harder to sort out – so God helps us unlock more stars on Duolingo, and is fire, and whispers in our ears? But, then, if you’ve never heard the voice of God, or feel cold and lost, or struggle to remember when’s the right time to say “whom” instead of “who,” we might be confused about what the Holy Spirit is all about.
In the reading from Acts, we heard “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” But what does that mean? This sermon will have two parts. First, we’ll consider what the Spirit means in terms of a definition – how do we understand the Spirit? And then we can ask again, “What does this mean,” thinking in terms of implications.
Towards the back of the Prayer Book, we find the “Outline of Faith” which says the Spirit is “God at work in the world and in the Church even now.” But that’s sort of like looking up the word “invest” in the dictionary and finding the definition “to make an investment.” Doesn’t really get us far. So, the first thing to say about the Holy Spirit is that if you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is and does, don’t worry, the Church has had 2,000 years to think about this and we still don’t have a clear definition.
What we can say though, and this is what the Creeds teach us, is that the Holy Spirit is a part of the Holy Trinity. Next Sunday, on Trinity Sunday, we can consider more fully what that means. On Pentecost though, it means that the Holy Spirit is God, just like Jesus is God. So, the Spirit isn’t something extra, but essential.
The Creed refers to the Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life,” and that might be the best definition we muster. What makes us alive, what makes us human, what makes us capable of love is the gift of God’s very life in us. In Genesis, when God creates humanity, what makes us truly alive is when God breathed into the dust of the earth that had been formed into a human shape.
A question and debate that is happening in most fields right now is – what is the proper, if any, role for AI? When we were in DC a few weeks ago, we went to the National Gallery and saw lovely works by Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, and Tanner. But there was no wing dedicated to AI produced artwork. Or if I told you that this sermon was written by ChatGPT, which it most certainly was not, you’d probably be morally repulsed. It’s hard to put our finger on it – but there is a difference between something that is created and something that is produced. It’s not about biological processes, it’s that AI just isn’t “alive” in the way we are. There is something differnt about you writing a poem and having a computer come up with one. I would put forth that that something is the Holy Spirit.
Hildegard of Bingen puts it this way, “Holy Spirit, the life that gives life: You are the cause of all movement. You are the breath of all creatures. You are the salve that pardons our souls. You are the ointment that heals our wounds. You are the fire that warms out hearts. You are the light that guides our feet.” In other words, the Holy Spirit is all that we know. Us talking about the Holy Spirit is like two fish talking about what it means to say that water is wet.
God, and we know this to be true because of Jesus, is radically and gracefully self-giving. In the Spirit, God gives us what we cannot create, acquire, or earn for ourselves – life itself, love, the sort of peace that the world cannot give or take away, audacious hopes and dreams, and mercy that is not tied to retribution. The Spirit gives us the very gift of existence which comes from the heart and being of God. One scholar calls what I’m pointing towards “resonance” – and it’s an experience I pray that you’ve been blessed with recently.
Resonance is when you find yourself feeling more alive than usual, or with more hope than is warranted given the situation, or more love than is evolutionarily required, or more trust and clarity than you would expect, or being overcome with a sense of the beauty that surrounds us, or a sense of relief in knowing that all shall be well. This isn’t the result of our curated efforts to live our best lives now or just a happy coincidence, that feeling of resonance is when we are aware that the Spirit is alive in us. The Holy Spirit gives us the gift of life – not just a pulse – but the sort of life that puts a skip in our step, a song on our lips, or a smile on our face.
Now, this, I realize, might not be much more of a helpful definition than the one we started with. The Holy Spirit makes us alive, great. That’s not exactly the sort of information that most people typically use their otherwise free Sunday mornings to get. So before moving to the implications of the Holy Spirit, I’ll offer one further definition, or visualization, for the Holy Spirit: the Spirit is the one who reaches forth their hand to you and says, “Shall we dance?”
The Spirit is how God communicates with us, as if to say, “Now put your foot here. Okay, now move it there. Hold on, I’m going to spin you around. Now come close and rest in my love for you.” Sometimes the dance will be something like that sort of romantic dance, at other times it will be salsa, tango, who knows, maybe even the Macarena. And when we’re dancing, we’re alive.
Back in March, when four of us visited our friends at the Cathedral in Kenya, we did a lot of dancing as we were welcomed to homes, schools, and churches. I remember saying to our group: “When we dance, we smile, and when we smile, it’s awfully hard to be worried or angry. Maybe we should dance more often back home.” There’s some video evidence out there to confirm that I did not find rhythm in Kenya, but that dancing reminded us of the joy of being truly alive.
That dance is what the Holy Spirit invites us into. No matter whether or not you’ve ever been asked to dance before, regardless of if you know the steps, have the right clothes, or hear the music – the Spirit is reaching out to each of us, and all of us, inviting us to dance. Maybe that’s not what you’ll find in any theological dictionaries, but that’s who the Spirit is – the one who invites us into the dance of truly being alive.
And, to the other question before us – what does this mean in the sense of “what then?” Well, to stay with this metaphor, it means that the Church is the discothèque, the club, the ballroom. What the gifting of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost means is that God, in us, has created a beloved community through which God will be known and will act.
One of the central images in the Bible for the relationship between us and God is the Temple. The story of Creation in Genesis uses language evocative of the Temple – because the Garden was a place where humans and God came together. As the people journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land, they encountered God in what was known as the “Tent of Meeting.” Once they were established in Jerusalem, that place became the Temple. One of the most radical things about Jesus is that he compared himself to Temple when he said, “This Temple will be destroyed and in three days, I will raise it up.” Jesus was the joining together of humanity and divinity.
Jesus has now ascended to the throne of God – which we celebrated two Thursdays ago on the Feast of the Ascension – and the point for today is that God has not abandoned us. That joining together place has not disappeared, we can still encounter the living God, but that meeting place is no longer a garden, tent, temple, or person – it is us, the Church. When we say that we are the Body of Christ, this is what we’re saying. The place where we are joined together with God in beloved community is in the Church – and I don’t mean in a building or institution, I mean in our relationships.
The Church a place where it’s okay to not be okay, where we can take our belonging and belovedness for granted, where we are assured that we are always loved and already forgiven, where we can take the risk of being honest, generous, and merciful. The Church is a place where welcome and relief are offered to all. And through Scripture, Sacrament, song, and fellowship, God meets us in one another. For reasons understood only by God Almighty, God has chosen to live within us, to be known through us, to be present in the midst of us.
When we commissioned the Pentecost icon several years ago, this was the vision we gave to the artist. I remember telling him – “Whoever walks in the doors of this church, we want them to see themselves in Pentecost, because everyone belongs here.” Kelly, the iconographer, through the creative gifts of the Spirit, did just that. That icon of beloved community is teaching us if we want to be closer to God, we have to get closer to one another. It teaches us that we belong to one another and are accountable to one another. It teaches us that communion with God is found not only at the Altar, but also in acts of forgiveness, compassion, and generosity.
This is one of the reasons we’ve been praying the Prayer of St. Francis weekly – it’s a prayer that we need to have in our bones because right now, our society is fractured and full of suspicion, hatred, and pain. That prayer reminds us how to be the Body of Christ, it rehearses the steps that the Spirit would have us to take: that we seek understanding, that we strive to love, that we think about giving more than receiving.
What this means, particularly in these turbulent times, is that the Church stands in relief to the incessant blaming, degrading, and dividing all around us. We, the Church, are how God has chosen to be present to the world. Now, one way to view this is as a crushing burden, but it’s not. We don’t have to get things perfect – because it’s actually our imperfection that the world needs to see more of. For too long, the Church has focused on rules and morality, when the world just needed a witness and example for how to say, “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you.”
In Acts, we heard that the speaking of these various languages allowed for “God’s deeds of power” to be communicated. Other translations put it as “God’s wonderful works.” And I like that translation more. Beloved, God is doing wonderful and amazing things all around us and Pentecost shows us that God will help us in getting that message across, we just have to be open to being used as instruments of God’s peace. This is why we’ll show up later this month at the Juneteenth and Pride festivals. Our presence and sponsorship aren’t about marketing or advancing our brand, it’s about witnessing to the wonderful things that God is doing among us. Whether it’s at these festivals, or at school, or in the neighborhood, our culture is starving for a word of hope, a word of relief. And thanks be to God, that’s exactly what the Spirit has given us to declare.
This not about patting ourselves on the back, it’s about celebrating the life that the Holy Spirit is making possible among us. This is a parish that is unapologetic of our welcome of all people – not because we’re such nice people – but because we know that God has welcomed us. This is a place where we have hard conversations about justice and race. Hardly a month goes by where someone doesn’t reach out to me to learn more about how the Spirit has enabled us to do this work. We are blessed with partners in mission throughout the community and the world. As your Rector, I am privileged to see how you care for and support one another. I am continually amazed by your dedication to this Parish through the investment of your time, your energy, your prayers, and your financial giving. Again, this isn’t saying “Look at us,” it’s saying, “Look at God,” because the gift of the Holy Spirit means that we are the Body of Christ, instruments of God’s grace and peace. When you serve, give, or pray, know that you are dancing with the Spirit and witnessing to God’s wonderful works to a weary world.
There is a wonderful, sacred, and life-giving dance happening to the tune of God’s love. In gifting us the Spirit, we are given a partner to lead us in that dance that all might come to know that they also belong in the beloved community of God.
Come, Holy Spirit, and help us to take your hand in the dance. Amen.
