The Holy Ghost
WHITSUNDAY, COMMONLY CALLED PENTECOST
In my former life, I served and worked with churches all over the world, from every imaginable denomination, helping them embrace and care for orphans within the context of their local indigenous parish. I remember attending a service one time at a church in the northeastern part of Africa. A guest preacher and evangelist came forward and was handed the microphone. He had a 'word' from the Lord for the people. With passion and great verbosity, he began speaking in his mother tongue.
I didn't know what he was saying, but he would intermittently pause and brusquely blow into the microphone as if he was attempting to blow his audience out the front door. He did this several times and then finally sat down. Later, I asked the lead pastor, "what did he say?" "He was prophesying over us, speaking and exhorting us by the Holy Spirit!" "Why was he blowing at us?" "He was sending the holy spirit to us!" Needless to say, this well-intentioned "prophet" had an understanding of the working of the Holy Spirit that I had never encountered and haven't since. In my humble opinion and from various anecdotal experiences, I've found the doctrine of the Holy Ghost to be the more elusive and least understood Person of the Divine Trinity.
Perhaps this is why, in part, history has witnessed the rise of various Christian sects who have, at times, overemphasized the doctrine of the Holy Ghost on the one hand and, in other parts of the Church, have all but relegated the Holy Ghost to practical irrelevance. In hindsight, perhaps the reformation disputes concerning the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion could have been avoided by seeing from Scripture that all sacramental action is always brought about by the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost.
On this fiftieth day after Easter, we, along with Christians throughout the centuries, are celebrating the feast of Pentecost or Whitsunday. Why does our prayer book call it 'Whitsunday?' I'm glad you asked! Historically, Christian baptism occurred during Easter, primarily administered at the Great Easter Vigil (as we did this year), and at the end of the Paschal season, on the Feast of Pentecost.
Eventually, Pentecost became a more popular time for baptism than Easter in northern Europe, and in England, the feast was commonly called White Sunday (Whitsunday) for the special white garments worn by the newly baptized. In The First Prayer Book of Edward VI (1549), the feast was officially called Whitsunday, and this name has continued in Anglican churches right down to our American 1928 Book of Common Prayer.
Every year, we celebrate this feast, the day the promised Holy Spirit, the gift of Heaven, was given to Israel, to the Apostles. And today affords a wonderful opportunity to better understand how the Divine Person of the Holy Ghost comes and works within a people, the Church, and personally in the life of a Christian. But first, let's begin with a basic understanding of the Holy Ghost, His Divinity, and Personhood.
The Holy Ghost is His proper name as given by Jesus himself in the concluding chapter of Matthew's Gospel, in which He discloses to the apostles the fullest expression of God's name, who is Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (Mt 28:19). In the King James version, Scripture uses Holy Ghost and Spirit interchangeably, ghost deriving from the Old English word gast and the other from the Latin spiritus. So, we are not speaking of two different Persons but the same Person of the Trinity.
A right doctrine of the Holy Spirit must start with his divinity. The Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Divine Trinity (which we will celebrate next week on Trinity Sunday), is God. In Today’s Epistle, we find the origin of His coming to the apostles to be from above, from Heaven. Luke says that "When the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from Heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting."
Heaven announces Pentecost with a great sound booming down as the rushing of a mighty wind. In Luke's account and many others, Holy Scripture reveals the Godhead of the Holy Spirit, not as a created being, but the God of Heaven. The One whom the Father has sent into our hearts, the Spirit of his Son, is truly God. The Creed confesses of his being of the same substance with the Father and the Son, for the Spirit is inseparable from them, in both the inner life of the Trinity and his gift of love for the world. Remember, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi (we pray what we believe), and what we pray of and about the Holy Spirit is revealed from Holy Scripture, which is always the basis of prayer and liturgy.
Scripture testifies to the Divinity of the Spirit. In his 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul says, "Know ye not that ye are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" In Mark's Gospel, our Lord warns His hearers against blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, as worse than attacks on Himself who is God incarnate. And in Acts, the Apostles warn that to lie to the Holy Ghost is to lie to God (Acts 5:3-4). We are right to worship the Holy Ghost and open ourselves to his presence, for he is God of God and Light of Light.
In addition to being Divine, he is also a Person; he has personhood, not in the modern sense or how we understand the individual. He can be grieved. Jesus speaks of Him as the paraclete or comforter. His presence is personal, bringing comfort to a child of God as a mother comforts a child. There is only One God, yet distinctly three Persons. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost aren't mere aspects or facets of God, but different persons, distinct enough to love one another, for The Trinity is a divine community of three who perfectly love each other.
On the day of Pentecost, when the seven weeks of Easter had come to an end, Christ's Passover is fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, manifested, given, and communicated as a divine person: of his fullness, Christ, the Lord, pours out the Spirit in abundance, thus fulfilling Jesus' promise heard in today's Gospel to pray to His Father "and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth."
Today, I want to primarily consider the coming of the Holy Ghost to a people, His being poured out from Heaven as a communal receiving, not negating the reality of the Holy Spirit's personal ministry in the individual life of the believer, but rather to contemplate the ministry of the Holy Spirit within the Church. We often approach theology beginning from the "I." "What does this mean for me? How does the Holy Spirit work in my life?" The ministry of the Holy Spirit in the believer's life is important but contemplating Divine grace and action must always begin with the "we," the people of God.
Scripture testifies of the Holy Ghost as a communal gift that fell upon a people, in particular, the Apostles. This communal receiving of the third Person of the Holy Trinity is the first safeguard against drifting into unhelpful and unhealthy ideas about Him and a slight check on our narcissistic leanings. "When the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from Heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting." Scripture records the gift of the Holy Spirit coming from Heaven with a great noise and mighty wind falling upon the company of the apostles upon "them" not "him" or "her" filling the house where "they" were gathered.
And tongues of fire sat upon "each of them" in one collective action, as is depicted by the beautiful painting on the cover of today's bulletin. Luke says that "they" all, in one Divine action, were filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues- not in an unintelligible babble but in various and intelligible languages of men because at the end of Luke's account, those who heard the Apostles proclaiming the Good News in these various tongues marvel in that they understand in their own languages. By wind and fire, the Holy Ghost falls upon a community, a people.
The Holy Spirit is the great unifier, reuniting that which was scattered, unifying what was separated by the fall- man separated from God and man separated from each other. First, at Pentecost, the Spirit regathers the fragments of Israel. As the Book of Acts progresses, the Spirit breaks down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile and then between the many peoples of the world by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit has come to fulfill our Lord's prayer, "that they may be one, let them be one, even as we are one" (Jn 17:11, 21). As at the beginning of creation, the Spirit has come to bring the words "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26) to its goal. The reality of perfected humanity was two made one, the man and the woman, in harmonious unity. This is the image of God: communal love. The dissolution of this unified love is exactly what the Spirit has come to reverse; his ministry brings wholeness and healing to fractured humanity, a world at odds with each other and its Creator.
The communal receiving of the Spirit isn't at the expense of the individual. St. Luke notes that the tongues of fire "appeared, and it sat upon each of them." The unity of the Spirit has been given personally and to each one in his own way. The coming of the Holy Spirit doesn't destroy the "I"; rather, it restores the "we." And this new "we," this new humanity, is created by the Spirit, the new Temple, where the Shekinah glory resides on earth, for, "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" (1 Cor 3:16).
The Church of the new covenant is not confined to one nation but is equally open wide to members of every nation. For we are the bride of Christ, we are the body of Christ, a visible, tangible, and divinely created people. A heavenly society with known membership, given order, officers, rules, and powers of discipline for the Gospel's proclamation to a dead and dying world.
Pentecost is the reversing of Babel, where one people with one voice declare "the wonderful works of God" to every tongue, tribe, and nation. And why? To prophesy. To announce the good news of the Gospel, to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and King, redeemer, savior, and the only way to everlasting life. You see, the power of the Spirit is given to the Church for the empowerment of its mission. The mission of revealing Jesus Christ to a fallen world is to reconcile sinners back to their Father, to breathe life into dry bones.
The indwelling Holy Spirit brings the presence of Christ and His mission into the life of the Church, which is the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The third Person of the Trinity brings each of us into communion with the Father through faith in His Son and prepares us to go and reconcile the world through the proclamation of the Gospel.
The gathering of Christ's body on the Lord's Day is not merely our collective worship but our collective proclamation. In the offering of the Holy Communion, we prophesy with one voice and with one accord. St. Paul says that "as often as [we] eat this bread and drink this cup, [we] proclaim the Lord's death until he comes:" the Divine death by which we now live, the good news, mysteriously and powerfully manifested in the Eucharist by the power of the Holy Spirit. Through the proclamation of the Word and administration of the Sacraments, the Holy Spirit works within the Church for the life of the world, but unity must precede the receiving of the Holy Spirit.
St. Luke tells us that "they were all together in the upper room." They were gathered, unified, with one accord. Unity was the condition laid down by Jesus to receive the Holy Spirit's gift, and this is a profound truth for us today. Friends, disharmony, and discord frustrate the Spirit; it grieves Him. The power and life-giving Spirit moves freely and bears much fruit amidst a people at peace with one another, brothers and sisters who gladly give themselves in love.
But this unity is first established in loving Christ, "If ye love me, keep my commandments I will pray to the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever." You see, loving God and loving one another is our priestly duty. Love keeps the offerings of the new Temple, the Church, pure and acceptable to God. Unity, harmony, and peace are necessary for our Gospel proclamation to go forth as a powerful storm and transforming fire.
Friends, love opens the door for the Spirit to reside in the Church. Hear the words of our Lord who said, "If a man love me, he will keep my words; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." Pentecost reminds us that we are not only recipients of the promised Holy Spirit but also members incorporated into the Apostolic fellowship with Mary and all the Saints. And we, beloved, have been called to continue the Apostolic mission imparted by our blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as one people, with one accord, and always in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen+
