Sermons
20th May 2018, Pentecost, morning
by Revd Chris Palmer
Who saw Harry and Meghan’s wedding yesterday? Well, those of you who did will have seen Bishop Michael Curry preaching about love. Love has the capacity to change the world. Love is like fire. The power of fire basically enabled human civilisation. If we could truly discover the power of love, it would be similarly revolutionary.
I was immediately struck by how appropriate these themes are for Pentecost. Fire is a common image for the Holy Spirit – right from the beginning of the church, when the Spirit appeared as tongues of fire on the heads of the disciples. But perhaps more profound, though more difficult to grasp, is all the language we get in the church fathers about the Holy Spirit being the love of God.
God the Father loves God the Son. God the Son loves God the Father. And the spirit is the love that unites them. There’s a hymn that starts ‘Love of the Father, love of God the Son…’; it’s a hymn about the Spirit. The bible tells us that God is love, not merely that God loves. God is the relationships he, she has. And if God is relationship of love – then the church has traditionally identified that divine love as the Holy Spirit.
But God doesn’t stop at loving himself, herself. God’s love is shared in and with creation. God brings the world into being through love – through the spirit. God enters into relationship with the world, and the being of God that unites God and his creatures is Holy Spirit.
One theologian talks of the Spirit as unitive being. The love of God unites and bring together what is divided and makes them one. The marriage service starts with this quotation from the bible: ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.’
A famous spiritual book of the 1970s is Bishop John Taylor’s The Go Between God. That is his title for the Holy Spirit: the go-between God. The God who is the connection between all living beings. So, the Spirit is not merely the love that unites God to his creation, but also the love that unites creatures to one another. If my relationship with you is represented by the formula 1+1, the Spirit is the + sign that unites us. The spirit is not merely in me and in you – the spirit is between us, the force that unites us.
And he’s careful to say that this is true of any authentic human relationship. Christians do not have a monopoly on the Holy Spirit. When Christians enter into dialogue with those of other faiths in a way that is open and generous and enquiring, the spirit is speaking in both conversations partners and between them.
I found myself saying something a bit like this on Ascension Day (How many of you were there?) And like a terrible, ego-centric preacher, I’m going to quote myself. I have to say, I kind of took myself by surprise writing this that afternoon. ‘The exaltation of humanity in the Ascension tells us who we are, not what we possess. The same is true, of course of eternal life, of the Holy Spirit, of our being regenerate in baptisms, and fed in the Eucharist. These are not possessions or trophies; they are rather God making us, God doing humanness.’
It seemed to me profoundly important to say that it’s not that I am a complete human being by nature without God, and that the Holy Spirit or eternal life are somehow an added extra – like optional extras when you buy a new car; rather, they are the essence of true humanity. To live without the Holy Spirit is to be less than human. God does humanness not only in making us or becoming incarnate, but in engaging the world in love, in Holy Spiriting.
And another way of putting this is to say that I am not a complete human being as an isolated organism, observable by a biologist. My humanity subsists in the relationships I have, which are not an optional extra to my humanity, but its very essence. And God is the go-between in our relationships. God is doing humanness, as well as doing spirit-godness, in our relationships. When we relate badly to others – when we are spiteful, abusive, or negligent – then really we are failing to relate, failing to be human, and are denying the godness, the spiritness of our humanity.
Last Sunday we launched a lay leadership project, inviting people to see the ways God is calling us to living Christian vocation, leadership, in our daily lives. We used an exercise, This Time Tomorrow, inviting everyone to tell others what they would be doing at midday on Monday, and to see this Monday – and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday – living as much as a context for Christian discipleship as Sunday and worship and fellowship in church. We asked people questions like, ‘What is God teaching you there?’ ‘What might God want you to be involved with there?’
These questions make even more sense when we appreciate the spirit potential in all human relationships. These questions make even more sense when we believe that the fundamental vocation of human beings is simply to be human. Now, I want to emphasise that I don’t mean this in a reductionist way, as if our vocation is merely to be human, rather than to be a disciple of Jesus, rather than to living in relationship with God. I want to say with great passion, that authentic humanity is loving and being loved by God, that authentic humanity is following Jesus – these are not optional extras. That was the point of that Ascension Day sermon – that our being exalted with Jesus, that our being regenerate in baptism, fed in the Eucharist is God doing humanness.
And as an expression of this, authentic humanness is about how we relate to (for example) our children – when they’re playing beautifully and when they’re making us late in the morning; that authentic humanness is how we relate to friends, when they are filled with celebration, and when they are in pain; that authentic humanness is about how we love in our place of work, through treating colleagues or clients with dignity; that authentic humanness is about how we relate to vulnerable people in areas of war by working and campaigning for their liberation – and so on.
The go-between of all these relationships is Holy Spirit. I might say – not flippantly – that there’s nothing religious about the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is wholly secular, wholly worldly, wholly flowing through encounters in which God is not often named.
And the call of Pentecost is to release Holy Spirit, to release love, to release true relationship. That is about being radically and willingly open to change. Love looks like it does in Jesus dying on the cross; love is self-giving, generous, and sacrificial – another theme of Bishop Michael’s sermon yesterday. We cannot claim that these qualities only apply in certain contexts – like our personal relationships – but not in diplomacy, business, or local politics.
Holy Spirit is already within and between us. We work pretty hard some of the time to suppress Holy Spirit, with our resentment, greed, or pride. But Holy Spirit is never coercive – it takes two to have a relationship, and Holy Spirit is only free when two willingly consent to love – the spirit is never a party to some kind of spiritual rape.
So we are asked: Will we love? Will we liberate Holy Spirit in our lives, church, world, homes, schools, workplaces? Will we be human? Will we invite others to be human with us?
