Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Pentecost (May 31, 2009).
Readings: Ezekiel 37: 1-14; Psalm 104: 25-35, 37; Romans 8: 22-27; John 15: 26-27; 16: 4-15.
I’m preaching a somewhat abbreviated sermon today, in order to allow time for delegates to report on our 2009 diocesan synod. Synod occurs around the same time every year, the weekend prior to Pentecost. The timing is auspicious, since it allows us to reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit, whose festival this is, in guiding the deliberations of the church.
There are some who would claim that the Holy Spirit is an utterly concocted Christian creation – a clumsy accretion pegged onto a faith tradition already struggling to define how the Son and the Father are one God, not two. But concerning the Trinity, I will have more to say next week! In fact, however, the Spirit of God reflects a belief with a lengthy lineage. In the beginning, in fact, a ruah – a wind, breath, spirit, or even a form of temperament from God, moves over the waters before God gives the initial command forming the order from chaos we call creation – “Let there be light!”
Breath, of course, is the traditional sign of life. Ancient texts – including the Bible – speak of death idiomatically as the breath leaving someone or something. We are reminded perhaps of King Lear holding up a feather to the lips of his dead daughter, Cordelia. But we also see this understanding made explicit in that stirring story of the Valley of the Dry Bones from Ezekiel, which we heard as our Old Testament reading.
Given all this, it should be no shock that later theological reflection personified this life-giving breath as a vibrant and active dimension of God. In Proverbs and books of the Apocrypha – those texts in between the Old and New Testaments – Holy Wisdom is described as being with God at creation. Portrayed as Woman Wisdom, she proclaims, in Proverbs 8, that “I was …at the first, before the beginning of the earth…when God established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above…when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him like a master worker; and I was daily his delight.”
By the time of Jesus, it was common among Hebrew scholars to view the Spirit of God active in the world as a sort of natural Torah, or natural law – in this way, it was felt, the laws and statutes of God were universalized. No one was free of the judgement or mercy of the Almighty, since the operations of creation itself, and the natural and proper limits of human behaviour, were all ordained by the Creator. Thus it is that Paul writes in Romans, that those who have never even heard of God, but who behave righteously, “show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience …bears witness.” With this perfectly orthodox Hebrew belief as his guide, Paul can make the logical progression, as he does in our reading today from a few chapters later in Romans, to speak of the Spirit animating that same heart, pleading with the Father to guide us onto the paths of righteousness. This is a gift available to everyone.
And so, finally, Jesus’ announcement of the coming of the Advocate, Helper, or as he finally describes him, the pneuma tais altheias – the Spirit of Truth – comes not as a clumsy appendage, but as a spiritual “aha!” moment. Note the Greek word for “spirit” – pneuma – has the same multiplicity of meanings as the Hebrew word. It, too, can also mean “wind” or “breath,” in other words, that which gives life. We are perhaps reminded of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus earlier in John, when he says “the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes – so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus explicitly connects the spirit which makes life possible with the Holy Wisdom which reveals the mind and will of God. And that Spirit, says Jesus, will act as his agent in the world to, quote, “take what is mine and declare it to you.” As Paul rightly noted, it is the Holy Spirit, this active dimension of God, which keeps our faith from being a dead letter. It is the Holy Spirit which prevents Christianity from being a religion of fundamentalism and literalism. As the New Testament scholar Harry Maier once exclaimed to a class I was a part of, “the Holy Spirit didn’t go to sleep nearly 2000 years ago, when the canon of Scripture was closed.”
And that brings us to something as prosaic and apparently far removed from Jesus’ farewell discourses, as our 2009 diocesan synod. Synods can be cranky and boring affairs at times; but they can also provide occasions of remarkable – dare I say breath-taking – profoundness. They are gatherings where the Spirit happens. Synods are places where year after year, the Spirit has demanded ever-widening inclusion, knowing that the creation of God has no bounds, but is as limitless and diverse as the universe it inhabits. Synods are places where the mighty – the elders and leaders of the church – have been rebuked by the Spirit, as once again this year the drafters of our budget were urged to go back and find money to fund youth and societal ministry.
The Spirit is not asleep, anymore than she is a clumsy and late add-on to an ancient religious tradition. The Spirit is God, the God who sanctifies that which is created; the God who makes holy that which others consider of no account; the God who leads us into the fundamental truth of her love manifested in all of it. May the Holy Spirit continue to be our guide, so that we can carry on the ministry of Jesus in our own time and place. Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009
