All Saints’, Dorval
May 30, 2021
Last week, on Pentecost, we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit. This week is Trinity Sunday, when we remind ourselves that we worship one God.
Someone coming into a church for the first time, with no context, might take a while to figure that out. If you were casually listening to our liturgies and music, you might assume that we worship a god called God, and that god’s semi-divine son called Jesus, and (depending on the church) maybe a goddess figure called Mary, too. And you might get a vague sense of a concept called the Holy Spirit hovering around the place, but it’s probably going to take quite a long time to figure out that both Jesus and the Holy Spirit are actually God.
We almost did, in fact, end up worshiping a god called God and God’s semi-divine son Jesus. That’s known as the Arian heresy, and it was extremely fashionable in the fourth century. Our Nicene Creed was written in response to it, which is why the Creed goes on at such length about how Jesus is actually the same as and equal to God the Father, who begot him.
Father, Son, and Spirit are all fully God. Not because someone made an abstract decision that that was how it had to be, but because that was how Christians, since the first days of Jesus’ earthly life, had experienced God’s presence with them.
The Spirit, though, still gets short shrift a lot of the time. Probably in an attempt to rectify this omission, our readings for Trinity Sunday emphasize the role of the Spirit: Paul writes, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God”; Jesus, speaking to Nicodemus by night, invites him to be reborn of water and Spirit. Even the constant repetition of “the voice of the Lord” in the Psalm could, arguably, be interpreted as allusions to the Spirit, one of whose primary roles is, after all, to speak.
When the Spirit is opposed to “the flesh” as it is in the readings from Paul and from John’s Gospel, it can make us nervous: after all, we worship an incarnate God, a God made flesh, don’t we? We don’t want to forget or abandon or denigrate our bodies, which were wonderfully made by God.
And I don’t think we have to. We can attend to both body and spirit, which are, after all, an indivisible unity, both of them essential to our lives and identities – almost in the way that Father, Son, and Spirit are all God, distinct yet inseparable. And part of that is paying attention the way the Holy Spirit works, which is so often much subtler than the ways we encounter the first two Persons of the Trinity.
But the reason we often don’t notice the Spirit is because the Spirit is precisely that which allows us to encounter God. We often pray for God the Creator or God the Redeemer to do things “in” and “through” God the Spirit – because God the Spirit is the medium, so to speak, by which finite creatures can perceive and relate to the Infinite at all. We often image the Spirit as wind, as fire, as water – all things that we barely notice: breath, electrical power, the water from the tap – until they’re shut off and the situation rapidly becomes an emergency. The Spirit is that invisible force that we swim in, like a fish in the sea, but without which none of what we do would be possible at all.
But the Spirit is there, inspiring (which literally means “breathing into”) us, awakening us, enlivening us, strengthening us. She has been there from the beginning and will be there to eternity, together with the Son and the Father, the Three coequal and coeternal.
And yes, the Church is increasingly coming to realize that if the Son is “he,” then the Spirit is “she” and should have been named thus all along. The Hebrew word for “breath” or “wind”, ruach, is the word used for the wind from God that blows over the face of the waters in the very first verses of Scripture, and it is a feminine noun in Hebrew.
The Wisdom books of the Apocrypha, between the Old and New Testaments, are written in Greek; the Evening Prayer group was blessed by hearing many excerpts from these books during Lent. In them, Wisdom – personified as the gracious lady Sophia, which of course is “wisdom” in Greek – assists God in creation, and delights in all its wonders, as well as inspiring the faithful soul to seek God’s wisdom and discernment. As soon as Christian theologians began to think about the Holy Spirit, they saw her in this figure of Divine Wisdom.
Last week, on Pentecost, we sang a hymn, “She comes sailing,” written in 1987 by the Rt. Rev’d Gordon Light, retired bishop of the Territory of the People, our partner diocese in the west. It’s not a hymn that’s much known in the American church, and it blew my mind when I first encountered it. You can be a lifelong feminist Christian and still be overwhelmed by singing a whole hymn where all the pronouns used for God are feminine.
This week, I listened to an episode of a podcast (hosted by my longtime friends Stephen and Stephanie London, clergy in the diocese of Edmonton) in which Bishop Gordon spoke about his life and music, and mentioned that he had written this hymn after being reprimanded at a church gathering for writing another one that was full of “Lord” and “Father” masculine imagery for God. If only all of us could respond so beautifully and constructively to rebuke!
However, the easy and poetic way in which Bishop Gordon’s words portray the Spirit as feminine, is only part of what’s worth noting about this hymn. The other part is how it retells the whole of the Christian story in terms of the Spirit’s action. In the first verse, Creation; in the second, the poets and prophets of God’s chosen people; in the third verse, God born into human flesh in Jesus; in the fourth verse, Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his ministry; in the fifth verse, his death, resurrection and the sending of the Spirit after his ascension to heaven. The Spirit was there, moving, being God, all along.
I was thinking about this last week after we sang the hymn, and the Holy Spirit promptly interrupted my attempt to cook dinner by inspiring me to write a sixth verse. Because the version in the hymnal ends with Pentecost and the birth of the church, with the implication that our task now is to carry on that work by following the Spirit’s guidance in our own lives, following her as she flies on.
And that is absolutely right, and a good and joyful thing! But that’s not how the story ends.
We know how this story ends, and the Spirit is there too, just as you would expect her to be.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. … And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.
The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. (1-3, 5, 17)
That’s from the 22nd chapter of the Revelation to John, the very last book of the Bible, the happily-ever-after of the entire cosmos. And there she is: “the Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come.’”
The Spirit breathes and broods over the waters at the beginning of time, and at the consummation of all things, she calls us to partake of the waters of life. She is there, in the eternal dance with the Father and the Son, drawing us into the life of God.
Amen.
The new sixth verse:
At the end of countless ages, her living waters flow
As the Bride joins in her song to call us home:
To the city where she lights the sky, where trees of healing grow,
And creation sings for ever, “Spirit, Come!”
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