Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104, Romans 8:14-17, John 14:8-17, 25-27
This is a teaching sermon. It’s a catechetical sermon. I am not aiming to inspire or convict you, but, on the other hand, you might find the doctrine inspiring on its own. It’s the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
But first, for a moment, please think about your body. Your head, your chest, your arms, your belly, your legs. Where inside your body is your person, your personality, your inner you? In your chest? In your head? Behind your eyes? In your brain? In your mind? Behind your mind? Is your person more intimately you than even your mind? Would that be your soul? Are you a soul, and is your soul the seat of your person, your unique and intimate self, more you than your body is you?
The intimate personhood of God is what we call the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God’s soul. The Holy Spirit is not an afterthought to the Father and the Son, not the Harpo to Groucho and Chico, but the purest essential inner God—if there is a God, and if this God is the one who raised Jesus of Nazareth up from the dead. In our gospel lesson Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples on the night before he died, and he kept his promise fifty-three days later, at Pentecost, in our first lesson. Pentecost is fifty days after Easter, seven weeks plus a Sunday, and we celebrate the Holy Spirit, that third person of God who while always third is yet most intimately God.
The Holy Spirit is easily and frequently misunderstood, especially by Christians. The Holy Spirit is misunderstood as one-third of God, so that when you have the Holy Spirit inside you have one-third of God inside you. But the Holy Spirit is the whole of God–in the person of the Spirit, just as the Father is the whole of God in the person of the Father and the Son is the whole of God in the person of the Son.
This is the mystery of the Holy Trinity which tests our logic and which makes no sense to Jews and Muslims and Unitarians. But the orthodox Christian claim is that when the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles at Pentecost, it wasn’t just one third of God but the whole of God who came down upon them, and into them, and out into the world in front of them.
The second misunderstanding is to take the Holy Spirit as more of a What than a Who, as not a person but a force. Well, after all, the Holy Spirit is revealed in fire and in wind, and is described as an energy, the original energy, and sometimes the life-force. And it’s true we don’t experience personality in the Holy Spirit in the same way that we experience God the Father as a personality (not always a nice one!) and that we experience God the Son as a personality (a nicer one!). It’s hard to attribute personhood to someone who doesn’t show much personality, like the Holy Spirit.
Yet the orthodox Christian claim is that the Holy Spirit is a person in her own right, and this must be if the Holy Spirit is the soul of God, God’s most intimate self, God’s unique self, just as in your case as a human being. The world experiences your person in terms of your body and your actions and your history but you yourself experience your person in terms of your inner soul that no one else can see. So if the Holy Spirit is the soul of God, then the Holy Spirit is a person.
Of course, if this analogy works, it may be that we are just projecting our own experience of our personhood as God, as the critics of religion claim, or it may be that the Holy Spirit really is the original person behind the universe from whom all personhood and other persons and personalities derive.
To be a person, you have to be living. If you’re dead you’re not a person any more, not actively so. And this remarkable thing that we call life, this unaccountable force and distinctive energy that is shared by all living things and only by living things, this is claimed by orthodox Christianity to be a gift to the universe especially by the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord and Giver of life, according to our Nicene Creed. And where the Holy Spirit gets this gift to share is from out of God’s own life.
In some religions, the gods are the personifications of the energies of the universe. Hinduism says as much. We experience the energy of life, and we project it as divine, and we call that God. But Christianity turns it the other way around, that God projects the universe and the Holy Sprit shares God’s life with the universe that God projects. It’s like an author who projects a novel, and the author gives to her novel the gift of story, and just as the author is the boss of her novel so the Holy Spirit is the Lord of life. The question is how much freedom do the characters have.
Imagine the novel as a living, open book, and that the author can speak to her characters, so that they can lead their lives within her story. The Holy Spirit is such a speaker. Our Nicene Creed says that the Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets. Here too is personhood—that we speak. A person is a creature who can make meaning out of words and share those words with someone else. The persons who cannot speak only prove the rule by what we say of them. A person rightly speaks.
Of course many other living creatures communicate with sounds and even complex signals, but again, that proves the rule, when you consider the incalculable difference between the sounds of animals and the speech of human beings—from baby talk to nursery rhymes to poetry to daily gossip to great libraries to the calculations of astrophysics to the gazillion bytes of code that we pour into the universe.
The universe is full of information, because the Holy Spirit speaks, and because we are persons too we take that information and we answer back and elaborate and expand on it, and in so many languages that Jesus never spoke. As Jesus says, “You will do greater works than these!”
So it’s no wonder and yet a joyful wonder that the Holy Spirit reveals herself on Pentecost as speech within her fire, for she is a person with great energy. And, characteristically, the Holy Spirit speaks through the speech of other persons, and not in her own voice. The Holy Spirit is polite and even self-effacing. This is characteristic of love, is it not, as a loving mother wants her children to do works that are greater than her own.
If the Lord Jesus had not ascended, and remained on earth, he might have done great works, but instead, always the gentleman, he yielded his presence to the Spirit for the Spirit’s turn, so that the Spirit might do greater works precisely within you who do your works, as humble and broken and fragmentary as your works might be.
They are broken but the Holy Spirit is your Advocate on your behalf. Your Advocate with God is God’s own self. A mystery. The Advocate is your lawyer, your solicitor, your counsel and advisor. The Spirit tells us what to tell the world on God’s behalf and also what to say to God. And when we cannot find the words The Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. You have this Holy Spirit in you, and she is not confined to your directing her. She does more in you than you can track or trace. She takes responsibility for you, for she is the Lord and Giver of your life.
Let me close with a whole different set of images from our second reading, Romans 8. It’s easy to miss that St. Paul is using Exodus imagery. The Children of Israel were led out of slavery by the Glory Cloud of God, which St. Paul identifies as the Spirit of God. But in their freedom, as they journeyed through the desert, they could not shake their spirit of fear, and they kept begging to fall back to Egypt and the security of slavery, and surrender their inheritance, the Promised Land.
But now, since Pentecost, you are not the Children of Israel but the adopted Children of God. and your are given the same Holy Spirit inside you that was in God’s natural child, Jesus. So, if for Israel the Holy Spirit led them as a cloud up there in the desert sky, so now the Spirit is inside you leading you through the wilderness of human history and development, until you arrive at your inheritance, the ultimate Promised Land, which is the whole redeemed creation.
And as community of Jesus who are the children of God journey through history, the Holy Spirit inspires us to a freedom beyond the freedom from slavery to the positive freedom of children, of play and creativity. Oh, the generosity and love of God to us, that we should have room within God’s plan for our own play and creativity. Oh, the love of God for us, that we may do greater works than even Our Lord himself.
O Lord, how manifold are your works. In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. May the glory of the Lord endure forever, may the Lord rejoice in all his works. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live, I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please God, I will rejoice in the Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul, Hallelujah.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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