Homily for Whitsunday

Come Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of thy faithful people: and kindle in them the fire of thy love.

This week I want to continue the theme that I began last week, leading to next Sunday’s celebration of the Most Holy Trinity. I want to show how the dogma of the Trinity is no mere academic afterthought but stands at the heart of Christian life.

This morning, on the day of Pentecost, our worship is naturally tuned to the gift of the Holy Spirit. And this is where many of us pause and find themselves wondering what exactly we mean by the Holy Spirit. It’s hard enough to get a grip on the unity of the Father and the Son, but there, at least, we have a more concrete history to work with. With the Holy Spirit we have only a sudden demonstration of divine power.

The power that we see on Pentecost is not the power of the Holy Spirit if by that we mean some power other than the power of the Father and the Son. This is central to what it means for the Church to confess that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are one God. Any Trinitarian theology that seeks to separate certain aspects of God’s work risks compromising some aspect of God’s nature.

There was a trend, a few decades ago, to replace “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” — the idea was an attempt (I do not really say whether it was well-meaning or not) to have a more gender-neutral name for God. But this iteration, along with other attempts made over the years, replaced persons with functions. And to divide functions or responsibilities, so to speak, lessons the divinity of each, because it would mean that each person possessed some ability that the other two lacked. If, to get around that problem, we assert that these three functions are simply the one God in different aspects of his work, we then collapse the distinction in persons that Scripture and tradition alike insist that we affirm: and in this case we never have access to any one of the persons, just a vague God — more of an impersonal force — standing somewhere behind all the appearances.

What, then, do we have left, if we are not permitted to think of the Holy Spirit in terms of certain divine acts in the world? Do we have any access to this person at all, apart from the mere dogmatic proclamation of Church creeds and councils?

The Spirit does do something that the Spirit alone can do. And to think of this we have to think again about what it means to speak of three divine persons. Three what? as the fathers often ask. Not three Gods. Not three divine attributes or qualities. Not three natures. Not three individuals. Not three personalities. Three hypostases, in the Greek terminology, three concrete ways of being; this the Latin tradition translates as person but with the emphasis that we do not mean a person as in a play who merely assumes a role. But how to distinguish the persons or hypostases from one another? Their only personal properties, what are unique to them, are their internal relations one to the other. The Father is Father because he eternally generates the Son. The Son is Son because he is eternally begotten of the Father. The Spirit is the Spirit in because he eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son.

This is heady stuff, I admit, and I’m trying to get at it in a brief way. Stay with me.

There are a variety of ways, traditionally speaking, to think about the Spirit’s personal distinction from the Father and the Son. But one of the most enduring images in the West is the idea that the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. The Spirit is the way in which the Father and the Son are united.

Any distinct role that the Spirit has in creation must be grounded in the distinction that the Spirit has in relation to the Father and the Son. And so, if the Spirit, as a divine person, is, in some mysterious way, the unity and love between the Father and the Son, it makes sense to say that, in relation to us, the Spirit has a similar role, because the only ways we can apprehend the persons of the Trinity in their distinction rather than simply in their unity as God is to encounter the relation: the Spirit unites us in love to God and to one another.

And this is exactly what happens on Pentecost. In the Spirit, human divisions collapse; in the Spirit, the apostles find a new unity both with each other and with Christ; in the Spirit, the love of God, made visible in the incarnate Son, is spread abroad to the ends of the earth.

In Baptism, we are made partakers of God’s love in the Holy Spirit. As the Lord says in the gospel for the Pentecost Vigil: “Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.” The Holy Spirit unites us in love to the Son, who unites us in love to the Father, who is himself the source of all being and love.

If we receive, in the Holy Spirit, the gift of love: it is precisely this triune love, and not another, that we receive, and to which we are drawn.

True life, true being, is love, because God is love. But what this means is not, as some would have us think, that God, and hence true life, is reducible to the kind of quest for self-fulfillment that passes today for love — nor does it mean that the love of God is niceness, or even the idealized romantic love that so much of our culture has long celebrated, where two lovers fade into each other in a sort of zen-like oblivion that denies the reality of anything or anyone daring to interfere.

God’s love, the love that we are baptized into, has a definite form and direction: its form is the cross, and its direction is the Father. On the Cross, God the Son tells us what he already knew before the creation of all worlds: that to be something fully means to give it away. The Father gives himself to the Son, the Son gives himself to the Spirit, the Spirit gives himself to us — but he can do this not because he needs to, but because this self-giving in time echoes his self-giving back to the Father and the Son in eternity. And we, having received this love, are drawn in love and joyful desire to its source. But we can only get there if we follow the same path. To be what we are in freedom means to give ourselves away: like the Spirit, like the Son, like the Father.

As we pray, today, for the comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit, we do well to remember that this Spirit, this well of living water flowing out of our souls, can in fact be quenched and dried up. The Spirit himself is ever-living and ever-present, but if we want the Spirit for ourselves we have to know that this Spirit is not, fundamentally, for ourselves. Maybe we don’t all have to be Peter, running out to the crowds with a bold message, but we can certainly start with the evangelical opportunities that God has given us, whatever those are. And it’s important to say that this doesn’t always mean serving or fixing something;sometimes it means having the humility to receive the Spirit’s gifts from others, to stand in a position of weakness, like the crucified Lord, with nothing to offer but love.

May we stay, today and always, firmly grounded in the love of the triune God, not a substitute of our own making.

Come Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of thy faithful people: and kindle in them the fire of thy love. Amen.