Veni Creator Spiritus

Scripture: Pentecost (Whitsun), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome, brothers and sisters, to Pentecost—the 50th and final day of the great Easter celebration! Today we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to dwell within us.

Let us all keep in mind that the Holy Spirit is God. He is not God’s sidekick or God’s junior partner. He is not simply an angel or messenger from God. The word “spirit” means breath, or even life, and that’s what the Holy Spirit is: He’s the very breath and life of God.

He is not, however, God the Father, who is utterly transcendent and unknowable. Neither is He God the Son, who took on our flesh and became one of us. No, the Holy Spirit is unique. The Holy Spirit is God running wild throughout His Creation, coursing like the wind, surging like the waters, blazing as a fire. He takes form, but never just one, and never for long. He is protean, mercurial.

The Spirit hovered over the waters of Creation. The Spirit filled the lungs of Adam and made him into a human being. The Spirit burned in the fiery bush before Moses, raised up the dead for Ezekiel and the prophets, and descended as a dove upon Jesus Christ at His Baptism in the Jordan River. The Spirit blows as the wind wherever He will, invisible but affecting, bringing life and breath to all the universe—gently pushing, or sometimes roughly shoving us along paths as yet untrodden. The Spirit is the wild God, the working God. Before the Gospel came to the shores of America, Native tribes referred to God as the Great Spirit; I wonder if this was not the Holy Spirit, the God they met pulsing and alive amidst the forest, preparing all His children to receive the Messiah.

This goes to the very nature of who God is. Christians believe that God is love; we’ve all heard that, haven’t we? But real love, mind you, is not simply an emotion, not sentimentality. Real love is sacrifice. Real love means pouring yourself out for your beloved. So if God is love, He can be One, but He cannot be unitary. There is within God’s very self both the lover and the beloved. Before all worlds began, there was God, and within God, the Father poured out all His love to the Son, and the loving Son in return poured out everything He is back to the Father. This is the dance of the Trinity, the eternal love shared within the one true and living God. It is both total motion and utter rest, perfect passion and perfect peace.

So powerful is this relationship between God the Father and God the Son, that the very love they exchange—the breath and life and selflessness that eternally flows from Father to Son and back again—that love, that Spirit, has a life, has a Personhood, of His own. The relationship itself, the communication, is the Holy Spirit of God. And so we have the image of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—God as a family—forever Three and forever One. The Lover, the Beloved, and their Love.

Of course this means that even though Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct, they never truly work alone. We call God the Father our Creator, but God the Son and God the Holy Spirit were equally involved in Creation. All Three together wove the Incarnation, when the Son took on flesh within the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And all Three used their power to break the spine of death and raise up Jesus victorious on that first glorious Easter morn. So we see that the Holy Spirit has been with us from the beginning of the Scriptures. Yet today, at Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Spirit in a far deeper and more intimate way.

You know the story so far. In Holy Week we relived our Lord’s Passion and Crucifixion, His death on the Cross, descent into hell, and triumphant Resurrection. After this, for 40 days, the Risen Christ appeared to His Apostles, bearing the scars of His sufferings along with the marks of new and eternal life. As the 40 days drew to a close, He had to leave this world in order to return to His Father in Heaven. But He promised that at His Ascension He would send us another Paraclete to be with us always, and that the coming of this Paraclete would be far better for us than Jesus remaining on earth in the flesh.

Now, Paraclete is a legal term, a court term. It literally means someone who stands by you, who defends you. The Paraclete is our Helper, our Advocate, our Lawyer, if you will. Jesus has come as our Savior; now He says that He will send another. Astonished at this promise—for who, indeed, could take the place of Jesus?—the Apostles spend the next nine days after the Ascension in fervent prayer, waiting for the new Advocate to arrive.

Keep in mind that Easter coincides with the Old Testament festival of Passover. And 50 days after Passover, God’s people Israel celebrated the festival of Pentecost, when Moses brought the 10 Commandments down from Mt. Sinai. And so, just like at Easter, Jerusalem is filled with pilgrims from all surrounding lands.

On the 50th day following Christ’s Resurrection, nine days after His Ascension into Heaven, the Virgin Mary and the Apostles are gathered in the same upper room in which they had shared with Christ the Last Supper. Suddenly the room is filled with the rush of great winds, which is how the Holy Spirit appeared to Elijah. Tongues of flame alight upon the heads of those present, just as the flames of the Spirit burned yet did not harm the fiery bush before Moses. And the Apostles abruptly find themselves graced with the gift of tongues—the ability to speak many languages, to overcome the boundaries between peoples and cultures. And out they rush into the busy streets, timid souls made fearless by the Holy Spirit, out to preach the Good News of salvation to all the nations of the earth!

This makes perfect sense, when you think about it. The Holy Spirit is, in His very essence, communication between the Father and the Son. Little wonder that He would manifest Himself by allowing the human family to communicate as one. What happens here is a reversal of the Tower of Babel. The old story in Genesis is that humankind was punished for sin by having our languages confused, that we would have to divvy ourselves up and spread out over the face of the earth. Here that confusion is undone, and God the Holy Spirit makes humanity one again. For indeed, where there is division there is sin, and the Spirit comes to forgive sin.

What has happened here? What does this story of Pentecost mean? Well, first up, it means that Satan, the Accuser, has been replaced by the Holy Spirit, our Advocate. No longer does the devil whisper our sins before the Throne of God, but rather we have Christ our High Priest, and the Holy Spirit our Paraclete, interceding for us with sighs and groans too deep for words. Understand what that means: God is defending us before God.

But even more miraculous than that is the fact that the Holy Spirit has come to dwell not just with us but even within us. In Pentecost, we lowly sinners have been included in nothing less than the dance of the Trinity, which is who God is. God’s own life and breath lives now in us. The love of God poured out from Father to Son lives now in us. The Spirit of Christ Himself, who gave us not only His very Body and Blood but now even His breath and life, lives now in us.

That’s insane! I mean, it’s amazing, glorious, miraculous—but insane! Because what that means is that you and I are now part of the life of God. Follow me here. God made the world in love. When the world fell into sin, God Himself entered the world as Jesus Christ in order to save it. He took on our hands and feet, our pains and fears. God became Man. And now, through the miracle of Pentecost, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—now we are the continuation of that miracle. We are the continuation of God’s Incarnation and Resurrection. We have become both Christmas and Easter. No longer does Christ work on earth with a single pair of hands and feet, with a single tongue to preach—but with two billion!

Because, brothers and sisters, when we are given, through the grace and mercy of God, the Body of Jesus Christ, the Blood of Jesus Christ, and now the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ—what does that make us? It makes us Jesus, still at work in this world. God lives in us now. Our bodies, our lives, are nothing less than the literal temples of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the soul of the Church, unifying and animating us all.

The world cries out to God for salvation. And God has chosen to send us. That should both swell our hearts with honor and fill our souls with terror—for clearly we have not lived up to this infinitely noble calling. We have not been Jesus Christ for an oh-so-needy world. Yet fear not. The Holy Spirit Himself dwells within us. He intercedes for us. He forgives us. And He fills us up to overflowing with the very life of God eternal. All He asks in response is that we share this same infinite grace with the world.

Come, Holy Spirit, Creator blessed / And in our hearts take up Thy rest.

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