Ruach

Propers: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

From the very first verses of the very first book of our Bible, the Holy Spirit of God is there: hovering, moving, creating; breathing forth life into our world; bringing existence to birth.

The Hebrew term used here is ruach, which is rather fun to say. Ruach means wind and breath and spirit and life. It is the creative, dynamic, generative power of God. It is God moving over the waters, God breathing into Adam, God not only giving life to the world but also giving the world the power to create new life. And not incidentally, ruach is female; it is a feminine noun. The waters of creation are, after all, the waters of new birth. Women bring forth life.

See, there are many names for God in the Hebrew Bible, many titles, but the one par excellence—the name given to Moses when he asks, the name so holy that we translate it “Lord” so as to avoid its casual use—is Yahweh. And Yahweh means “I am, I was, I will be.” Yahweh is existence itself, Being itself. Only God is truly real. The rest of us are only real, can only be, insofar as we are grounded in Him, drawing our existence in every moment as a gift from God.

How does that happen? How does God pour out His infinite existence into the vessels of this and all possible worlds? Why, through His breath, His Spirit, His life. Jesus is the Word of God, the Logos, the logic behind it all. But the Word can only go forth, can only be made manifest, by the power of the Spirit, the power of living breath. Your words stay trapped in your head unless you speak them out into the world.

And this is how God creates: through His Word and His Spirit; His mind made manifest. God gives of Himself to create us, out of His love for us all. And so, from all eternity: God is, God knows, God loves; and these Three are One. Savvy?

The Holy Spirit, then, is neither an angel nor a demigod but God Himself as love, God as the creative power of selfless self-giving forever poured into our world. God is the breath in our lungs and the life in our veins and the gift of existence itself. Everything that is good and true and beautiful comes from God and leads to God and is ours by His Spirit. Just as Christ is God-With-Us, God as one of us, so is the Holy Spirit God within us, around us, and through us.

And this is all quite real. The whole point of the Christian understanding of God as Trinity is that all Three—Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit—are equally truly God. It’s not as though the Father were the real God, with Word and Spirit as His helpers.

God beyond us, God beside us, and God inside of us, inside this community, are not three gods but One God in Three Underlying Realities. And this is not some heady theology removed from real life, but rather this is how we all encounter God. This is how we meet God every single day: in Word and in Spirit: in mind and action; in living, and understanding, and in loving one another, and all that God has made.

To know God as Holy Spirit is to affirm the wildness, the superabundance, the dynamism of life, of everything good in our living and loving and giving. Everything is grounded in God; everything is breathed into reality by His Holy Spirit. And that’s exciting! How wondrous to see God at work in the world, blowing like the wind where She will! In the Spirit, God is forever doing something eternally new.

The Spirit brings forth cycles and pulses and rhythms. The Spirit brings forth life. Little wonder that globally the fastest growing Christian traditions are Pentecostal, dedicated to the Holy Spirit, determined to experience God in the now. It is the Spirit who gives us new life in our Baptism; the Spirit who makes bread and wine into Body and Blood; the Spirit who sanctifies sinners and together makes us into Jesus for a world in need of Him.

And not for nothing is the Spirit female. I’m just going to throw that out there. People worry about this, about feminine imagery of the divine, for fear that we might make for ourselves a Goddess who would rival the one true God. But the Bible’s not so squeamish. There are female images for God in our Scriptures from the very start: sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected. They aren’t always popular, but they are always there. And they’re not wrong.

The Syriac Church, which still speaks a version of Jesus’ native tongue, refers to the Spirit as Jesus’ Mother. After all, “by the power of the Holy Spirit He was born of the Virgin Mary.” The Spirit grants not only birth but the birth-giving power itself. Of course, God does not have gender; God is far beyond such things. But if it is proper to call God our Father—as it most certainly, assuredly is—then it can be no less proper to imagine God as a woman hovering over the waters of Her womb. I mean, it’s right there in Genesis.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is preparing us for His apparent absence. In the context of John’s narrative, this takes place during the “Farewell Discourse,” the teachings Christ gave to His Apostles on the night before His death. We are reading this, in the life of the Church, on the last Sunday before Ascension, when we celebrate the Risen Christ returning to Heaven. More on that next week. But He assures us that we will not be abandoned, that He will not leave us orphaned.

He will send to us the Holy Spirit “who will teach us everything.” And here He calls Her the Advocate, the Paraclete—which in English sounds like a bird, I know. But in Greek, a paraclete is your defense attorney: a lawyer as your advocate in court. And this is significant because the other guy, the prosecuting attorney, is named the accuser, which is a literal translation of “satan.”

Satan accuses us before the court of Heaven, accuses us of all our hateful sins. But the life of God within us, the Spirit of Christ within us, She is our sure defense. The Holy Spirit will guide us and guard us and give us Her life, always and forever. The Spirit makes the Church. The Spirit makes us into the Body of Christ. The Spirit brings us to Jesus in the Sacraments. And the Spirit resurrects us by the mighty Word of God. With the Spirit as our Mother, we shall never be alone. And She shall lead us ever more deeply into the truth, that we may all grow and learn.

So where may we encounter the Holy Spirit of God today? We encounter Her in Baptism, in the forgiveness of our sins. We encounter Her at the Lord’s Table, where She gives us Jesus Christ. We encounter the Holy Spirit in the Word of God rightly preached, and the Sacraments rightly administered. We encounter Her in this community, in we sainted sinners, drawn from every tribe and tongue and nation, all to be made one in Jesus Christ. We encounter Her in the need of our neighbor, in the cycles of seasons, in the breath in our lungs. She reveals the glories of the Creator to us in the wonders of His Creation.

Every moment that we live, every heartbeat like a drum, is telling each of us: “You are loved, and you are loved, and you are always ever loved.” Because if God stopped loving any one of us even for a moment—if God ceased for the briefest instant pouring out the Spirit of His Being into you—you wouldn’t just end. You would never have been. You would not even be a memory.

Existence itself is a gift. Existence itself proves that God is with you and knows you and loves you, and that these Three all are One. And yeah, the world is broken. And yeah, it’s all messed up. That’s why Jesus had to come. But God the Holy Spirit is with you in whatever may befall: making you into Jesus, making you one with God. And by His promise, by His Blood, She will heal all this world; She will bring us home in Him.

For the Holy Spirit of God is an infinite act of love. By Her very nature, She brings liberty, life, and hope to birth. Love will never give up Her children. Love will never leave us orphaned. Love will never let us go.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

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