The Cycle of the Spirit

Lections: Reformation Sunday, AD 2025 C

You may find the accompanying children's sermon here.

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.

Any religion worth its salt begins as an encounter with the divine. The finite glimpses the infinite. The mortal experiences eternity. And everything is changed.

Once you taste the transcendent—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—once you touch the God, who is Consciousness, Being, and Bliss, you cannot go back; not fully, not entirely. You are forever altered. And like the cave-dweller in Plato’s allegory, who has basked in the blazing sun, you must now return to explain somehow the light to those in darkness.

The tools at our disposal prove inadequate. We are forced to use our words to speak of the One beyond all words. How does one repackage mysticism? How do we pass on our experience of God? Because we cannot keep Him to ourselves; that’s not how love works, not how joy works. But it’s no easy task, to help the blind to see. In this we are not prophets, nor even true philosophers. We are but one beggar telling another where he may find bread.

The Christian experience of God begins and ends with Jesus Christ. Two thousand years ago, a Man walked the earth unlike any other. All who encountered Him came away changed. When people met Him, we did not ask, “Who are you?” but “What are you?” We tried to categorize Him: Priest, King, Messiah. But He was more than these, infinitely more. And when He rose up from the dead—well, everything we thought we knew then sailed right out the window, didn’t it? Death, hell, evil itself had no hold on Him.

We were forced to realize that here is God on earth, the ultimate, the perfect self-revelation of the divine: the one Word in whom the Father voices all He has and is. And that revelation proved absolutely terrifying. All that we could do was fall upon our knees in worship. Yet even then, He raised us up, and called us each His friend. To know Christ is to know God. And to be one in Christ is to be one with God. There’s your mystical encounter. There’s transcendence. There is all of God, in a Man upon a Cross.

So how, then, do you and I give this Jesus to the world? Well, that’s the neat part: we don’t. Not really. Certainly not on our own. For Jesus never left us. He is with us in His Spirit. He is with us in His Church. He is with us in His Word and in His Sacraments. He works through us, often in spite of us. For if we are one with Christ, then people meet the Christ in us. The beggar is given his bread, more than he could ever eat, and so he shares his bread with others. Does he not then in Spirit become the giver as well as the beggar? Is he not at once both the sinner and the saint?

Christ comes to us today in precisely the ways that He promised. He comes to us in our Baptism, when we are drowned in the waters of the Font, so that the old creature, the old Adam inside of us, dies. And we rise with the life of Christ burning deathlessly within us. That’s who the Holy Spirit is: the Life of Christ, the Breath of Christ, and so the Breath of God. Thus we are joined to Jesus’ death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and to Christ’s own eternal life already here begun. And so we are Christians.

The Font then leads us to the Altar, to the Table of our Lord. Here we receive the New Covenant, the New Testament, the New Passover at which Christ Himself is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Here He holds up bread and says that “This is now My Body.” He holds aloft the chalice, stating, “This cup is My Blood.” And at this point it is simple, mystical calculus, one that you have heard me preach so many times before.

For when we take within ourselves the Body of Christ, the Blood of Christ, the Spirit and the Name of Christ, what does that make us? Who does that make us? It makes us Jesus! Not each individually, but all of us together, as the Church, the community called forth, who is both His Body and His Bride. And then we are sent out, to be Jesus for the world.

And we’re not going to do a perfect job. Theosis is a process. But that’s why we come back, every week, returning to the Font of our rebirth, confessing our sins, drowning them in those waters, and being reknit into Christ through His forgiveness. Called together, sent forth, dying every evening, rising every morning: this is the pulse of the Church, the cycle of the Spirit flowing into and out of the lungs of Jesus’ Body.

And all of this is mercy, mind you; all of this is grace. We did not, could not, earn this terrible, glorious, inestimable honor. Jesus didn’t come to us because we were better than anyone else. He came to us because we need Him, and because He’s who He is. And through us, Jesus reaches out to others, spreading from person to person like a benevolent infection: the Life of God the Son within our souls and in our veins. This, my brothers and sisters, is the Kingdom of God. It is within you, and all around you.

This is the promise, the Good News, which God has made to us and all of us. We discern it in our Scriptures. We sing it in our hymns. We teach it in our classes. We preach it from this pulpit. And we taste it at this Table. The Church is always reforming because we are always returning to Christ, forever returning to Christ: to His death and resurrection, to His justice and His mercy, to His love and to His life. And we will never stop proclaiming His Good News to all the world!

For lo, He is with us always, unto the end of the age.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026