God of Bones and Fire

"I am back." The Morrigan, by Somniodelic Workshop

  

Propers: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, AD 2025 C

Homily:

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

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

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

The word “spirit” in the Bible means wind, and breath, and life. In Hebrew, spirit is feminine, and tends to have associations with relationships, morality, awareness, and emotions. In Greek, it connotes a form of life both higher and more durable than the earthly. Down here everything changes, everything decays, but the spiritual is above that; immune to the ravages of time.

From the beginning, the Bible describes God as speaking all things into being. Now, in order to speak, one first needs an idea, a word—what it is that one wishes to say—and then you need to breathe it out into the world, to voice it, to give it life. And so God speaks, God creates, God makes Himself known, by His Word and His Spirit. The Word is the revelation of God, the mind of God, His self-expression; and the Spirit voices it, makes it real for us, by imparting to that Word the breath and life of God.

Yes, it’s an analogy, but analogies are true. They are truths that point beyond themselves to the one Truth who is God. This is how He shows us who He truly is, in ways we can begin to understand.

As Christians, we believe that the Word of God, the mind of God—through whom and for whom all things are made—is revealed most fully, most truly, most completely, in Jesus Christ; not just in what He says and does but in everything He is. For us, the Word of God cannot be merely a voice from the heavens, or a vision in the night, or a sacred text engraved on golden plates. It’s Him; it’s a person; the Word of God incarnates in this Man, in His flesh and His blood, His body and His soul. He is who God is.

This is what I try to hammer home on every Sunday: that Christ is God incarnate. When we want to know what God is like, how God would act, what God would ask of us, we as Christians turn to Jesus Christ; not to the Bible per se, but to Christ revealed in the text. Everything we do here is to make us one in Jesus. We read the stories of His people, the stories He knew as a child. We sing the Psalms He sang, and pray the prayers He prayed. We listen to His teachings, follow His example, and even consume His Body and Blood.

That’s what everything here is about—that’s what the Church is, at heart—because the Gospel, the Good News, is only this: that when we are one in Christ, then we are one with God.

And all of this is done, this miracle, this mysticism, through the Holy Spirit. The Word and the Spirit always work together, always make the Father known together, because She is the life who manifests His Word. She is the breath who voices the thought that is Jesus. The Church is the child of the Spirit. When first we come to Baptism, we drown within those waters. The Old Creature, the Old Adam, subject to sin and to time and decay, dies. And we are filled with new life, spiritual life, the life of Jesus Christ.

Baptism gives us His Name and His Spirit, so that the breath of Christ is in our lungs, the life of Christ is in our veins. Oil is the sign of the abundance of that life. And then we are gathered to the Table, to the Altar of our Lord, where we receive the bread and wine, which by His promise has become the Body and Blood of Christ, for us. And when we have the Name of Christ, the Breath of Christ, the Body and the Blood of Christ, what does that make us? Who does that make us?

It makes all of us together Jesus Christ for all the world. We are His Body now. We are His hands and His feet and His voice. We are to go and do as Jesus did, as Jesus does through us: to proclaim the Good News, in word and in deed, that Christ has risen, death is defeated, in Him the old order is passing away. Behold, He makes all things new!

It is the Spirit who does all of this: the Spirit who is the life of God, the life of Jesus Christ. The Spirit calls us together. The Spirit proclaims His forgiveness. The Spirit baptizes. The Spirit brings to life Jesus’ words of institution, calling down heaven to earth. The Spirit makes us one. The Spirit raises the dead. And She does all of this, in all of us, in every single day. As once the Spirit manifested the Word in Mary’s womb, so now She manifests the Word in every one of us; that thus we may be “little Christs” for a world in need of Him.

And just to make this crystal clear: the Holy Spirit is not an angel. The Holy Spirit is not a subordinate, or a derivative, or a demiurge. The Holy Spirit is God, just as Christ is God. It makes no sense to speak of His breath, His life, His voice as though She were not Him. Moreover, the Christian understanding of God as Three in One is based on a very simple calculus: that only God can join us to God. Only the infinite Creator can divinize Creation in Himself; imparting to us the divine life of God in Word and Spirit.

In Jesus Christ, God came down to live as one of us. And now His Spirit dwells as wind and fire in this world: redeeming, saving, purifying: God alive in us.

Confirmation is a funny thing. Sometimes we call it a Sacrament; sometimes we call it a Rite. In the Eastern Church, Baptism, Confirmation, and Communion are all conferred at once, with a little piece of the Body of Christ placed on an infant’s tongue. In the West, we draw it out a bit, typically imparting the gifts of Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation years apart, at differing stages in life.

We baptize the very young in order to emphasize that it is God who grants the gift, God who makes the promise, God who chooses us when as yet we were helpless and unaware. Confirmation comes later, after the age of reason, when we affirm our Baptism and receive the further promise of the seal of the Holy Spirit: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, the spirit of joy in God’s presence.”

And then traditionally we slap you—liturgically, you understand, symbolically—so that you have courage, and remember this day. The Spirit fortifies us for the road ahead, and for the Cross that each of us are called to bear.

Remember, then, the life of Christ within you; the fire of the Holy Spirit, who forever burns yet never harms; whose love smelts our impurities by conforming us to Christ; so that when God sees us, He sees us as we truly are and were always meant to be: as His beloved children, sharing in His Spirit, sharing His own life; born to be gods in God. This, at last, the Lord shall say, is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones. For from the side of Christ you have been taken.

You, my brothers and sisters, are temples of the Spirit. You are keepers of the flame. You are the Bride and the Body of the Christ. And every breath you take is now the Breath of God in you. Imagine that. Imagine the Spirit of God alive in you, set out to save the world. For Christ now dwells within your very bones.

This is the promise that kills us where we stand. This is the promise that raises us up from the dead.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ 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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Nidaros Lutheran

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