Sermons

+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the chief jobs of a clergyperson–whether a priest in a sacramental church or a minister in a more reformed church–is to teach the faith. This seems like it should be one of the most noncontroversial claims one could say about an ordained person’s responsibility, but I often fear we don’t do a very good job of it. I don’t know whether this can be blamed on the anti-intellectualism which too often distrusts expertise in our culture or on clergy being too lazy to do it or perhaps too poorly educated themselves or some combination of these factors. In any event, it seems to me that there is a pretty serious problem with basic biblical and theological literacy within the church.

This catechetical crisis becomes apparent any time a survey comes out about what American Christians actually believe. You’ll find shocking numbers of professed Christians who don’t believe in Christ’s divinity or sinlessness, who believe metaphysical claims that are closer to Buddhism or Gnosticism than to Christianity, and who have views of human nature which are incompatible with the doctrines of original sin and the means of salvation. A 2018 survey, and this is the reason I bring all this up, found that fully 59% of US adults believe “that the Holy Spirit is a force, not a personal being.”

As I’ve already said, I think much of the blame can be lain at the feet of clergy, because, while important, lay-folk tend not to hold full-time, paid positions in which getting one’s theology straight is (or should be) a work requirement. So, let me first apologize for my profession and for myself where I have fallen down on the job in this regard, and second, attempt to dispel this popular misconception about the nature of the Holy Spirit on this great feast on which we celebrate His descent upon the Church.

So, the Holy Spirit is not merely a force. He is a personal being. We may get into the nitty-gritty of Trinitarian theology next week, on Trinity Sunday, but the classical way of explaining the Godhead is that God is three hyspostases in one ousia, three persons of one substance or being. This gets complicated; like I said, we may get into the weeds next week if you’re up for it. The point is that the Holy Spirit is just as much a person as the Father and the Son. Just as the Father is not merely some abstract “ground of being” but a person with whom we can be in relationship, just as the son is not just the universe’s ordering principle, but somebody with whom we can speak as a Lord and Savior, so is the Spirit not just an animating force, but one with whom we can relate and pray and gain support as one would with a friend or sibling.

Perhaps part of the reason we have not recognized this is because the way we pray has been codified in such a way as to sometimes obscure it. I am not saying this is an altogether bad thing; public worship should be done decently and in good order, and the prayers with which we’ve become so familiar tend to do a good job of highlighting what we call the “economic Trinity.” We typically pray to God the Father, through or in the name of God the Son, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. This suggests, quite rightly, that in the mystery of Salvation, we are brought into and instructed in the relations of the persons in the Godhead. We have some, though fewer, prayers which we direct to the second person of the Trinity, Jesus himself, and I suspect these are more common in our private and particularly our extemporaneous prayers than in our public liturgies.

Few and far between, though, are prayers addressed to the third person of the Trinity. Our Communion hymn this morning is one of those prayers, the Veni Creator Spiritus. In our Sacraments the Holy Spirit is invoked, but invariably by a request that the Father send the same (whether upon the Bread and Wine, the Ordinand, the husband and wife, or whatever) rather than by praying to the Spirit directly.

There is no reason that I can think of, though, why we ought not pray to the Spirit directly, and that’s really the point of this rambling homily. Jesus tells us that the Spirit is our Counselor. We’d not have much trust in counsel (therapeutic or legal) if we didn’t have the opportunity to talk with its provider. Paul tells us that the Spirit prays on our behalf “with sighs too deep for words.” We’d not trust a mere force or principle to be our advocate before God or the world; we’d trust a person who is trustworthy, and this the Spirit of God is.

I am not here advocating for superstitious enthusiasm, but I don’t think our primary danger (at least in our context) is to be found in sectarian revivalist movements. Transport me to a snake-handling community in Appalachia and I might feel differently. A genuine appreciation for pneumatology, the theology of the Holy Spirit, and an authentic devotion to the same Spirit can only lead to good, because he is God. In that vein, I would like to conclude with a prayer drafted by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy–the Roman Catholic group responsible for translating the Latin texts of the Mass into our language–and pray that we grow in devotion to God as he is revealed in the Spirit:

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful.
And kindle in them the fire of your love.
Come, Holy Spirit, and they shall be created.
And you will renew the face of the earth. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Many of you know that I find historical shifts and counter-intuitive anomalies in the church calendar particularly interesting. We find ourselves today smack-dab in one of those peculiar periods of the liturgical year in which we may find some topical and tonal confusion. Historically today was called “the Sunday after the Ascension” part of the ten day season of Ascensiontide and the lessons would have more explicitly gestured toward that peculiar period between when Christ left the earth and when the Holy Spirit came to the Apostles on Pentecost.

The contemporary approach, chosen by the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the Revised Common Lectionary, have suppressed this “mini-season” in order to emphasize the unity of the fifty days between Easter Sunday and Pentecost. No longer are we supposed to snuff the paschal candle after the Gospel on Ascension Thursday. No longer is our Gospel reading for today an explicit reminder of the coming of the Holy Spirit after the Lord has slipped the surly bonds of earth. Even the name of the day has been changed, from “The Sunday after the Ascension” to “The Seventh Sunday of Easter.” You’ll note that our hymns this week and even the bulletin cover art have a distinctly Ascension theme, but that because your rector gets to choose those things as opposed to what is set out by authority in the prayerbook.

This is all fine, and not worth getting bent out of shape over, but I think it’s worth highlighting because the sense of transition and liminality of the old season of Ascensiontide tracks so well with what we so often experience in this life and particularly in this moment of our common life as we transition slowly but surely to something more like normality after the strangest (and, for some, most difficult) fourteen months of our lives. The modern suppression of a fulsome Ascensiontide notwithstanding, we find ourselves is one of those periods in the church year where we wait and watch for what comes next, like the season of Advent or Holy Saturday.

I wonder if the Apostless feelings during the ten days between Christ’s Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost might be a bit like what we are experiencing these days. We remember what life was like before and we know something new is on the horizon which will be fundamentally different, but we can’t quite imagine yet what that will be like. The apostles muddled through; they even managed to replace their fallen member, with some confidence that things were going to get better but without the pudding’s proof having yet been tested. (As an aside, I don’t know about their internal politics, but I hope those dioceses that managed to go through the process of electing a bishop during the pandemic took some lessons and gained some confidence and hope by looking at the story of the calling of Matthias, which we heard this morning).

In any event, there is some remarkably Good News for us, for the church, and for the world in this “in-between time.” The point of Christ’s ascent into heaven is not that we are left down here to carry on without the benefit of his presence and just work it out amongst ourselves as best we can. I’ve seen some remarkably bad “hot takes” on social media this week suggesting that to be the point, and they always lean into this sort of semi-pelagian, “work it out for yourself now” message. Aside from being biblically and theologically false, I think just looking at human history shows that what happens when we put all our trust in man’s goodness and ingenuity is usually pretty disastrous.

The point is not that Christ has abandoned us to work it out for ourselves. The point is that Christ has been glorified and seated at the right hand of the Father. No longer limited to a single place and time, no longer wandering ancient Palestine, he has deposed the rulers of this old world: death and sin and the devil. He now rules over all. He is, as the prayer I say privately after every celebration of the Eucharist, alive and reigning from his throne of glory in heaven, on tens of thousands of altars, and in the hearts of hundreds of millions of faithful Christians throughout the world.

We await the Spirit to come and comfort us, but in the meantime, we have an advocate who is always with us and is Lord of all. Thanks be to God that he has given us the victory and will come again to judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with his truth.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“No longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends.” Jesus says this to the apostles on the night before he was given over to suffering and death. He had washed their feet and shared supper with them, and finally, in the midst of his last discourse with them, he surprises them yet again with this wonderful affirmation of their relationship. But what did it mean for the disciples, and what does it mean to us?

In all honesty, this used to make me a bit uncomfortable. I’ve got plenty of friends. I don’t need another friend, I thought. I need a master, a Lord.

The problem here, though, was not that Jesus was turning a profound relationship into something frivolous. It was, rather, that I was minimizing the profundity of friendship. True friendship isn’t trivial. Christian friendship is a very weighty thing. It goes beyond “being buddies”. It is, at its heart, a serious commitment like all Christian relationships. Let’s look at a couple of those relationships as a means of understanding how Christian friendship is similar in intent and effect.

In prebaptismal and premarital counseling I always try to make it a point to say that the relationships which are realized in these sacraments are essentially reflections. They are reflections of God’s perfect love for all humanity and of the perfect love held within the Godhead through the mystery of the Holy Trinity. So, a marriage and its concurrent obligations as made explicit in the nuptial vows is a reflection of God’s love for us and of the love which defines God’s internal relationship. To paraphrase St. Augustine, the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love they share. The Sacrament of marriage is, ideally, a mirror off of which the light if God’s love is broadcast to the world, or perhaps a window, into which we can peer and see God’s love.

Likewise, Baptism is not only about the objective regeneration and adoption of the child, whereby he or she is forgiven and made a child of God. It is also (at least in the case of infant Baptism, which is normative) a means by which parents and godparents commit themselves to a relationship with the child which reflects God’s love. A parent’s chief responsibility is to establish a relationship with the child in which God’s perfect love can be seen. It goes beyond the tangible support a parent gives his or her child – meeting basic needs – to include the intangible: spiritual and emotional support, a moral example, a home full of prayer and Christian education (which is, after all, primarily the responsibility of the family, not of the institutional church, which can only do so much to support them in it).

So, how is this like friendship? Well, it’s not if friendship is merely sharing common interests and indulging in leisure together. These are important aspects of a friendship, but they are not the defining qualities of a Christian friendship. Rather, it is openness and love and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own well-being for another. That’s how Jesus defines friendship in this morning’s Gospel anyway:

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you… This I command you, to love one another… Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus embodies Christian friendship- he reveals his Father’s will, he deeply loves those whom he calls friends, and he quite literally lays down his life for them.

Our responsibility, then, is to do the same. We do the same for Christ, our friend, and we do the same for our brothers and sisters whom God has given us to be our friends. We open our hearts and our intentions to God, neither do we hide them from our friends. We love God by serving him, and we love our friends by doing the same. We are ready to sacrifice ourselves – our petty desires, our comfort, even our lives if it comes to that – for God and for those whom he has given us to love.

Are our friendships reflections of God’s love? For that matter are our relationships with spouses and children a reflection of God’s love? Are we open in those relationships? Do we behave lovingly? Are we prepared to sacrifice ourselves for those other people? These are questions we must prayerfully and dutifully ask ourselves all the time. And so, I leave you this week not with answers but with questions, which can be rather disappointing, but at least in this case potentially more profitable. May God give you the will to ask them and the grace, strength, and courage to commit yourselves again to those relationships, knowing that the hardest but most important thing we can do is to be mirrors for the light of God’s love.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.