Giver of Life

Propers: Whitsun (Pentecost), AD 2024 B

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.

The Holy Spirit is God. I think it important to state this up front, clearly and without equivocation, because we often give the Spirit short shrift—do we not?—much to our own religious detriment. The Spirit of God is God, not an angel, not an intermediary, not an abstract concept. Only God can join us to God, and as surely as Christ joins us to His Father, so does His Spirit join us to Christ. Thus the Holy Spirit can only be God in the fullest, truest sense.

A Sunday sermon ought not to be a lecture on the Trinity. Not everyone finds theology as bracing as do I. And besides, next week is designated as our Holy Trinity Sunday. Yet if we do not understand that the Spirit is God, from the outset of this homily, then nothing to follow hereafter shall seem wondrous.

Pentecost was a holiday long before the birth of Christ, originally linked, as are so many celebrations, to the agricultural cycle. Passover took place during the barley harvest, typically fodder for beasts, redolent of Israel’s time in the wilderness. But the following seven weeks were a joyful season of harvesting wheat, culminating on the 50th day with an offering of firstfruits. This Feast of Weeks in Hebrew is Shavuot, though we know it more commonly by the Greek word Pentecost, meaning 50.

Over time Pentecost gathered additional associations, as holidays are wont to do. Jews came to celebrate it as the commemoration of Mt Sinai, when God gave to Moses the 10 Commandments: the foundation stones of Israel’s Law and of their covenant with God. At Pentecost, Jerusalem would be filled with faithful Jews from every nation under heaven, gathered together as one, just as wheat is gathered for bread. It reaffirms all the ways—natural, historical, ritual—that God has made His people one and so made them His own.

Of course, for a certain number of Jews, the disciples of Jesus Christ, this particular Pentecost, described in our readings today, has proven rather more wondrous than the norm. During these weeks of the wheat harvest, the Risen Christ has been appearing to the people: to individuals, to small groups, and even to crowds. He isn’t like He was. His wounds have all healed, though He carries yet the scars. He appears and disappears at will. He passes through locked doors. He has conquered death and raised the dead from hell.

Then, after 40 days of ecstacy, wonder, terror, and joy, He ascended into Heaven through a cloud, there to conquer the powers that be, to prepare our home for eternity. And He promised not to leave us orphaned, promised to send to us another Advocate, a Paraclete. And we were to await Him in Jerusalem, until His Holy Spirit poured out upon us in power. Thus on that 50th day, after nine days of prayer, there came the sound of a violent wind, and tongues of fire fell upon the Apostles, and they were filled with the Spirit of our God.

Spirit means wind, mind you, and breath, and life. To be filled with the breath of God, to be filled with the life of God, is to be made into a Temple, to have divinity dwell within you. The breath of God gave Adam life, who’d been a lump of clay. The wind that Ezekiel witnessed raised the dry bones from the dead. Body, blood, and breath become a living, breathing soul. The Spirit makes us real, gives us life.

This all ought to sound quite familiar. At His Last Supper, on the night before His Crucifixion, Christ rewrote the Passover. “This is My Body,” He promised, holding up the bread. “This cup is the new covenant in My Blood.” 50 days later, having harrowed hell and hallowed heaven, He pours forth His Holy Spirit from the right hand of the Father, breathing into us His life. And when we have His Body, His Blood, and His Spirit—then we are Him!

We are the Body of Christ, alive within the world. Alive, because He dwells within us. Alive, because the Spirit makes it so. The Spirit is Life begetting life, Being begetting being, infinite Reality poured forth to make us real. The Spirit manifests all things, creates all things, sustains all things. The Spirit is the love of God, who flows as mother’s milk. The Spirit sanctifies our sacraments, forgives us ours sins, inspires our Scriptures, and raises the Church from the grave to serve this dead and dying world.

If the Father is the unknown God beyond all limitations; if the Son is this same God made known to us in the self-spoken Word who is Jesus Christ; then the Spirit is the wild God who nourishes all things, whose vitality we intuit beneath the surface of our senses. And these Three all are One: three living realities sharing a single substance, three true faces of the one true God. That’s what a Person, a πρόσωπον, is, after all: a face. God turns toward us His thrice-revealed countenance, and whichever way we look we see our God.

The Spirit rather famously has no gender. I’ve been avoiding pronouns in this homily specifically for that. The Spirit is grammatically feminine in Hebrew, masculine in Latin, and neuter in Greek. Theologically speaking, the Father and the Son cannot be gendered either. God is each and both and neither. The Word of God incarnates as a male; this much is true. But even Jesus refers to Himself as a mother hen, as a woman searching for a lost coin, and medieval Christians loved to speak of Jesus’ wounded side as the womb of our rebirth.

Syriac Christianity, one of the oldest branches of our faith, which still speaks in worship a dialect of Jesus’ native tongue, refers to the Spirit not only as female but specifically as Mother. So I find it most appropriate to refer to the Spirit as She—not because I’m some raging liberal, but precisely because I consider myself liturgically traditional. In both Latin West and Greek East, the most common image of the Holy Spirit is the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is not herself God, but in whom God the Spirit dwells most brightly.

The Spirit brings forth. The Spirit gives birth. The Spirit feeds and heals, protects and provides. The Spirit is God Almighty in our lungs and veins and marrow. If Christ is the Mind of the Father, then the Spirit is His energy, His action, the way that He works with His hands. She is the transforming fire who refines our very souls, the electricity who makes of the monster a man. She is life and flame and wind, infinite and free.

The Holy Spirit completes the Resurrection, on this 50th and final day of Easter. For what good would it do us at all, to know that Jesus arose from the dead, were we ourselves not part of His Body, were we not also raised up from His Tomb? She connects us to Him, bonds us within Him, making of us bones and sinews and organs all fastened together with Christ as our Head. We are members of His Body, made one with God in Christ: part of His Incarnation, part of His Resurrection, part of His Pentecost!

We, together, are called to be Christ, to be life amongst the dead. And for that we need the Spirit, for the Spirit is the Life. Christ does nothing without the Holy Spirit, and She does nothing apart from the Word and Son of God. Together they are the Wisdom, the self-expression, of the Father. And as Christ came forth at Christmas, so the Spirit’s revealed today. He became a Man; She becomes a community; two faces, two realities, of a single revelation, that God at the last shall be All in All.

It is appropriate on this day, when we celebrate the Spirit, that the Church bestow upon our youth the Rite of Confirmation. The laying on of hands, and chrismation with blessed oil, binds us by the Spirit in the Body of the Christ. We share Her life together as She flows from hand to hand, from heart to heart, uplifting sainted sinners through our uplifting of each other. Our hands are Her hands are Christ’s.

It is also Christian custom, mind you, to slap newly minted Confirmands—symbolically, liturgically—in order to remind them to be brave, to wage everlasting peace amidst a lost and weary world; a bit like doctors swatting newborns on the butt to make them breathe. This too is the work of the Spirit, conforming us to Christ, preparing us to run the race ahead. For a good Mother gives not only life to the children She loves. She grants to us the strength we need to grow into saints at the last; through life, through death, through resurrection.

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.






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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