Love, Truth and Fire: Sermon Preached on 19th May 2024 (Pentecost)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

Pentecost is the Feast of the Holy Spirit. So, let me talk a little this morning about the nature of the Holy Spirit, because it is one of the truly distinctive things about Christianity. We share our faith in a loving, fatherly creator with Muslims and Jews, and indeed many traditional religions around the world. This seems to be something that human beings grasp quite instinctively.

The idea of the Son, Jesus Christ, God made human, has some very profound and perhaps intellectually difficult implications, but is something human and therefore not beyond us.

In contrast, there is something fundamentally otherworldly and inhuman about the Holy Spirit. Because there is no obvious human comparator for what the Holy Spirit is, we must attempt to shed some light on its nature by analogy. Here’s the odd thing—we need to remember that this very otherworldly, very inhuman, being is God, and as we human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the Holy Spirit in all its strangeness and unbiddability is also something that we are made in the image and likeness of. Deep within us, often beyond the horizon of our senses, is part of our nature that is as uncontrollable and difficult to comprehend as the Holy Spirit.

So with all that in mind, let’s explore some of the things we do know about the Holy Spirit.

Firstly, the Holy Spirit is love, and therefore God is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that flows mutually between the Father and the Son, Love as a person in its own right. Love, therefore has a character, and a will, all of its own.

This love does not only circulate between the Father and the Son, but flows out into the Church, into the world, and the whole universe. The Holy Spirit breathes life into the universe, as present in the distant galaxies and the depths of the ocean as it is in human beings and in the love that flows between us. The Holy Spirit can feel alien, but it touches us when we embrace our children or our lovers. As love, this otherworldly being is the thing that most defines us as human, and most clearly reveals that we are indeed made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, what makes us truly ourselves is that which seems most impossible for us to grasp.

The Holy Spirit is truth. Truth in a world of lies. Beautiful and God given as it is, the world is ruled by the Devil, the Father of Lies. Jesus says it right out in today’s Gospel reading, “the ruler of this world has been condemned”. That is why Jesus had to go away from his closest followers, to die on the Cross to fix the breach in the relationship between humanity and God opened by our self-will. This is the human rebellion against God that the Garden of Eden story depicts so beautifully in myth. The victory over the Devil, and sin, was already won on the Cross, but it will only come to fruition when Jesus returns in glory. In the meantime the Father has sent the Spirit to lead us into Truth.

The Holy Spirit is wind and breath. In both Greek and Hebrew, the word for Spirit is very simply the word for breath. We don’t notice our own breathing unless something happens to make us aware of it. So the Holy Spirit is always with us, sustaining us and the world even when we don’t notice. The Spirit breathes and blows where it wills. While the Holy Spirit is in intimate relationship with the Father and the Son—the love that each has for the other—it is not in their control. It is entirely free.

That says something profound about the nature of God. The free will that God gave to us human beings, even knowing that we would sometimes abuse it, reflects the free will and refusal to coerce at the heart of the nature of God Himself, reflected in how each person of the Holy Trinity relates to the others—bound together by love into a unity so profound that it doesn’t require command or control.

The Holy Spirit is fire. The nature of the Holy Spirit is not passive, but relentless and consuming, and if we are honest, a little frightening. The Holy Spirit is a great fire of truth fanned by its own wind setting fire to the lies it can be far too easy for us to go along with. If we’re honest, what frightens most is that the Holy Spirit will set us aflame so that we can longer hide away in privacy, but are forced to go out into the world, like the apostles at Pentecost, to confront it with God’s truth.

That’s why the Holy Spirit is so relevant for our own times—which I’m sure we’ve all heard called a post-truth era. A time when we are all far too content to live in our own little bubbles, with the newspapers, programmes, or social media feeds which only ever tell us the things we want to hear, surrounded by others in their own bubbles. Our technology makes it too easy for us to rest cosily with warm, comforting deceits that prevent us seeing the true nature of the world, and the true nature of God. Most of all, the technology gives us an illusion of control over the world around us, coupled with a myth that each of us can have absolute autonomy.

It should be obvious that none of us can have control over a world where everyone has absolute autonomy. I often think that the contradiction between these myths of autonomy and control lie at the root of the anger and intolerance that has suddenly overcome this country and other Western societies since the turn of the century.

The Spirit instead blows where it wills, in perfect freedom, respecting others’ freedom, even if they choose to be burned in the flame. Ultimately it is not control but the relentless pursuit of love and truth in freedom that builds the Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Finally, remember the state the disciples were in when that first great eruption of the Holy Spirit happened. They had been hiding in a room full of fear, but had also been praying constantly, as we heard in last week’s reading from Acts. Before the Holy Spirit could send them out into the world, they had to prepare themselves through a closer walk with God in prayer.

On this Pentecost, in this fragile world of 2024, this need for prayer is what speaks to me. There is a lot of good will, even in a post-Christian society, for the Church as a simple agent of good works. Of course we should do good works. But if that’s all we do, then we are prone to falling for the Devil tempting us into believing that we can fix the world if only we had the power. But the world already has been fixed—not by us, but by Christ’s saving work on the Cross. For us to know what God truly wants us to do, we need to recommit ourselves to prayer, to asking for His guidance, to listening for His voice, so often heard in the rustling of the wind, and just sometimes in an eruption of fire. Ask the Son, and He will send the Holy Spirit to us, and even in this world of fake news, telephone scams, and internet propaganda, the Holy Spirit will lead us in deeper truth, and might even set us on fire.

And now praise, glory, and honour be to the God who is love and the God who is fire, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Top banner image: Design for the left side wall of Holy Spirit Church in Düsseldorf, Koloman Moser (1907).