Ablaze

Fire Druid, by Somniodelic Workshop

   

Proper: Whitsun Pentecost, 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.

Welcome to the 50th and final day of Easter. For 40 days, according to the narrative of the New Testament, the risen Christ appeared to individuals, couples, small groups, and crowds. He was not as He was. His conquest of death had transformed Him, or perhaps more truly revealed Him, so that He need not abide by the same restrictions of space and time which so shackle we mortals here below.

Yet Jesus hadn’t changed into something or someone else. Rather, He had become more fully Himself, become what He had been from all eternity. We recognized Him in His calling us by name, in His breaking of the bread, in His passing of the peace. We still do. And once we saw Him as He is, we could never be the same.

After those 40 days—40 being a number symbolic of new life and new birth—He ascended into Heaven, there to reëstablish order, to hallow the holy, to throw wide the gates of the Kingdom of God to all of humankind and to the whole of His Creation! The Resurrection was just the beginning. He had descended into Hell, there to conquer death with life; then He ascended into Heaven, as our one true King and Priest; so that now all the barriers betwixt the living and the dead, the secular and the profane, the damned and the divine, have all been done away with, dissolving into Him, into His reign of love.

Thus shall Christ hand the Kingdom over to His Father, that God at the last may be all in all. All of this has been accomplished in eternity. Christ’s Kingdom is the reality, beyond, beneath, before our own. And from His throne He judges history in the light of truth—not just on one day at the end of time, but He judges and reveals and redeems every moment, every second of existence, from beyond time.

Only Christ can resurrect the past. Only Christ can right the wrongs we’ve wrought. And I take great comfort in that: in the understanding that salvation isn’t just the end of history, but the transformation of our history into what it should have been. We shall atone, for each mistake and every sin. But the atonement isn’t punishment. It’s the opportunity to heal what we have harmed, to resurrect what we have slain. Only such an astounding mercy can bring about true justice, and a happy end to all of history’s horror.

But meanwhile—while Christ is up fixing the sun, as it were—His Apostles and other followers are left down here on Earth, where time still spools out moment after moment. And as He goes, as He ascends, Jesus says, “I will not leave you orphaned.” He will send an Advocate, the Holy Spirit, who shall reveal, and remind, and bring to us His peace. So the Apostles wait. For nine days they wait, and as they wait, they pray. This is the origin of the novena, the tradition of praying a prayer for nine days.

This actually brings them to the next holiday on the calendar. What we call Easter, Jews and most Christians today call Passover, or Pascha. After a week of weeks—49 days following Passover—the Old Testament celebrates the Festival of Weeks. This is one of three pilgrimage festivals for which Jesus would’ve gone to Jerusalem in every year of His life. It was known in Hebrew as Shavuot, which simply means Weeks; or in Greek as Pentecost, which means 50, as in, the 50th day after Passover.

Originally a celebration of the wheat harvest, by the time of Christ, Pentecost had become associated with the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt Sinai after the Exodus; as well as with the sheer variety and diversity of faithful Jews from every culture, tongue, and nation, along with God-fearers and proselytes converting to the faith.

And on that day, at that festival, suddenly the Holy Spirit rushes upon the Apostles as wind and tongues of fire, alighting upon them, burning within them, so that they are transformed. Out they rush, no longer hiding, no longer afraid, proclaiming the Good News of Christ’s conquest of sin and death and hell in every language under the heavens. For once again, Jesus sweeps away any barrier that would separate His people from His mercy, even barriers of blood and soil, ethnicity and culture.

This, we’re fond of saying, is the birth of the Church. And birthing in the Bible is a violent affair. Back in seminary, an old professor of mine liked to say that we treat the Holy Spirit as the “shy member of the Trinity,” yet here She is anything but. The Spirit, wondrous as She is, comes rushing on us wildly, driving us out in wind and in flame, storming the Church into being, such that all Heaven breaks out.

Now, I speak of the Spirit a lot, and for good reason. “Spirit” means wind, and breath, and life. In Hebrew, the word is feminine, associated with relationships and the power of creation. The Aramaic liturgy of the Syriac Church—who worship in the mother-tongue of Christ—addresses the Holy Spirit as “Mother.” In Greek, the word indicates a higher form of life, more durable, substantive, and pure than the fragile life of flesh here below.

The Spirit of God is the Life of God, the Breath of God, the Power of God—which is another way of simply saying “God.” The Spirit is as fully truly divine, as fully truly God, as are the Father and the Son; for She is the Spirit of the Father, the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And now She dwells in us! At Pentecost, the Life of God, the Life of Christ, now lives inside of you. If the Church is one Body, with Christ as our head, then the Spirit must be our soul. She brings us to life. She unifies. She manifests, for us and for all, the presence of Jesus Christ. And when we are one in Jesus Christ, then we are one with God.

We speak of Christ as the Word of God, but in order to be spoken, in order to be voiced, that Word must have a Breath, in order to make it real, to send it out into the world. The Word and the Spirit never work alone. You will never encounter Christ without His Spirit, and you will never encounter the Spirit without Him. Christ proclaims in our Gospel today that He and the Father are one. By the Holy Spirit and Her Sacraments, the Church is made one in Christ. Thus we are welcomed into Trinity, into the Three who are One, into unity with the Union who is God.

God the Father has no image; His Image is the Son. God the Son is an image; the Image of the Father. But we have many icons, many images, of the Holy Spirit. Flame is a favorite, a fire that refines, that purifies, that immolates only our dross. Water is another, the waters of Baptism and birth. And of course the wild wind, the most basic meaning of spirit. But historically, the icon par excellence of God the Holy Spirit is the Blessed Virgin Mary—not as though Mary were the incarnation of the Spirit, for Christ is the Incarnation. But in that the Spirit shines so clearly, so purely, through her as light through a windowpane.

Mary is the type of the Church. What God promises to her, He promises also to us; and through us to the whole of His Creation. So then the Church is also an icon of the Spirit. As the Spirit manifested the Word in Mary’s womb, so now the Spirit manifests the Word in all of us. We have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, living in us all, a tiny deathless flame that even now ignites the cosmos. As we are called to be Christ together, so we are to bear forth the Christchild into our own generation. We too are to be mothers of the Lord.

Because this is the point of the Church! We are commissioned to announce the Good News of the Kingdom of God, of Christ’s conquest of sin and death and hell, of His Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven, thence to rule the whole of space and time in mercy, truth, and love. That is the eternal reality, the divine victory, to which we must witness here below. We are called to be foretastes of the feast to come, together being Jesus for a world in need of Him. We are heralds of eternity, ambassadors of Heaven, a beachhead of the Kingdom here in time, knowing what is to come, knowing what Christ has won.

For while we yet live in a fallen, broken world, the immortal Holy Spirit dwells within us. She is the fire of God, resurrecting all there is and all there was and all there ever could be. And She is Jesus Christ inside of you. Go forth, ye resurrected, and set the world ablaze. Go forth and give them Jesus every day.

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

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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