Manifestrix
A Hymn to the Holy Spirit, by Timothy Rees:
Holy Spirit, ever dwelling in the holiest realms of light,
Holy Spirit, ever brooding o'er a world of gloom and night,
Holy Spirit, ever raising those of earth to thrones on high,
living, life-imparting Spirit, you we praise and magnify.
Holy Spirit, ever living as the Church's very life,
Holy Spirit, ever striving through us in a ceaseless strife,
Holy Spirit, ever forming in the Church the mind of Christ,
you we praise with endless worship for your gracious gifts unpriced.
Holy Spirit, ever working through the Church's ministry,
teaching, strengthening, absolving, setting captive sinners free,
Holy Spirit, ever binding age to age and soul to soul
in communion never ending, you we worship and extol.
Here ends the reading.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.
Orthodox Christianity confesses belief in the Holy Trinity. This is our experience, our conviction, that God is Three in One and One in Three. In this we are not alone. Classical pagans understood God as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Hindus worship God as Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. Muslim mystics speak of God as Consciousness, Being, and Bliss, while modern neopagans write of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.
In the time of Jesus, Second Temple Judaism embraced such concepts as the Wisdom of God, the Word of God, the Spirit of God. Wisdom was how the infinite, transcendent, hidden Father reveals Himself to the world in a twofold manner; through the Word, which is His mind, His logic, His law; and through the Spirit, which is His breath, His life, His love.
How can we know the Most High God? Not by climbing up to Him. Only by Him coming down, only by His deigning to approach us in His love, to stoop as it were to our level. We can know God through natural beauty, through human reason, and through divine revelation. All of these are the gifts of God, given to us in His grace.
We believe, as reaffirmed last week, that Jesus Christ is the λόγος, the Word of God come down, the Word of God made flesh. The same Word through whom all things are made became Man, became incarnate, in Christ our Lord. He is the only Son of the Father, the visible Image of the invisible God, the Hidden made Manifest. And this is a radical claim. Because what we are saying is that Jesus is not just a prophet, not just an angel, not some lesser divinity, but God in the fullest, truest sense. Immanuel: God-With-Us.
God is both Father and Son, the unknowable and the known, the origin and the reason underlying all that there is. In one perfect eternal moment, God both is all and knows all. The Being of God we call Father; the Knowing of God we call Son. What the Son knows is the Father. What the Father is, is the Son.
And in that same eternal moment, God is endless Love: the love poured out from the Being of the Father into the Son, and the love perfectly reciprocated, perfectly reflected, by the Knowing of the Son back into His Father. God loves what He is, and loves what He knows, and that mutual outpouring, that bond of life and breath and bliss and joy, is the Holy Spirit, the very life of God. They are inseparable, Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. Such is the relationship that God is in Himself, and the relationship by which He is made known unto us.
The calculus of the Trinity is in some sense very simple: only God can join us to God. Were the Word and the Spirit somehow less than God, less than infinite, then they would be no closer to the Father than are we, and thus no help at all. But if we believe that Jesus Christ joins us to His Father, then Jesus must be God in the truest, fullest sense. And since we know He does so by His Holy Spirit, well, then the Spirit must be God as well. That’s all there is to it.
We typically translate the Trinity as “One God in Three Persons,” but I find that terribly misleading. It makes it sound as though God were a committee of three separate divinities who all just happen to agree. A more faithful translation would be that we confess God as “One Essence in Three Underlying Realities.” But since that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, we shorthand it as One God with Three πρόσωπον, Three Faces.
Faces, mind you, not in the sense of God being some actor concealed backstage, whom we know only through false masks or roles—a heresy called Modalism—but true faces in that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and all these Three are One. Think back to Genesis, when God speaks all things into being. To speak, of course, one needs a word, an idea or a meaning in the mind, and a breath to give it voice, to make it real and send it out. The Father creates through the Word by the Spirit. Together they are God.
The Spirit admittedly remains the shy member of the Trinity, in that we sort of tack Her on at the end and say, “Oh, look, She’s here too.” But it oughtn’t be so. The Holy Spirit is the Life and the Breath of God, fulfiller of the Word, who makes of us all something real. In Hebrew She is feminine, in Greek neuter, and in Latin masculine, a reminder that God has no gender, and that the Body of Christ incorporates male and female alike. Personally I prefer the old Syriac tradition, those who speak a dialect of Jesus’ native tongue, and thus still call the Spirit Mother.
When we confess belief in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come—that’s all Her. That’s all the work of the Holy Spirit. She baptizes. She resurrects. It is the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who takes His words, “This is My Body; this is My Blood,” and makes it so. She gathers us all into Christ, by the preaching of His Word and the administration of His Sacraments. Thus She makes us Jesus!
The beauty of Creation, the wonder of the cosmos, the joy of life itself, is God the Holy Spirit. She is every love poured out between friends, lovers, siblings, neighbors, parents and children, birds and beasts, for She is Love itself, the infinite Love of God.
Christ is the idea and the ideal. The Spirit makes it so, incarnates the Son in the womb of the world, gives to Him flesh and sinew, breath and blood, and so binds us all unto Him. The Spirit explodes the Incarnation to encompass the whole of the Church, and the whole of the world at the last.
The Father is our origin. The Word is our form. And the Spirit makes it so, makes us real. She is inseparable from Jesus, inseparable from the Creator, for She in fact is God. And once you know Her, once you see Her, once you feel Her in your veins, the Trinity ceases to be academic, and is simply the fullness of life in Jesus Christ our Lord.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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