School of the Spirit: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Pentecost, May 23, 2021 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 15:26-27

How do you usually feel when you come into church on a Sunday morning (or, in more recent times, when you happen to tune in from home?) How do you feel right now?

Excited? Encouraged? Or perhaps a bit tired? Burdened by the events of the week? Maybe on some especially challenging days you feel a little like those Israelites mentioned today in Ezekiel, the ones only recently brought back to life whose bones are dried up, gasping for the breath of life. (When my alarm clock goes off at 6, I usually feel exactly like that, but I never was an early morning person.)

What I find remarkable, and beautiful, and inspiring about you, however, is that you nonetheless come here each week, whenever you are able. You step through these doors and let your body and your heart and your mind get caught up in the words and the patterns of the liturgy. Despite all of the other things vying for your attention and your energy, you are here, in this place, doing this thing that nobody really requires you to do. Why is that? What is it that draws you here, to this particular church, whether for the first time or for so many times that you’ve lost count?

When asked that question some of us might say: the people; the beauty of our traditions; the music; the opportunity to rest and pray and reflect on our lives. At least some of those things are important for most of us here, but I would also offer that there is something even deeper at work, something we don’t tend to talk about very much in the Episcopal Church, but something that we ought to name and claim, especially today, on Pentecost:

You are here because of the Holy Spirit. We are participating in this liturgy, right this very moment, because the Holy Spirit has drawn us here. You are here because God’s Spirit is within you, and that Spirit is like a moth to flame, like a river returning to its source—this Spirit longs for communion with the Father and the Son, and has placed that same longing in you–a longing to know and be known, to hold and to be held.

‘Deep calls to deep,’ the Psalmist says, ‘at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.’

And we are here, deep under the waves of liturgy, treading among the shafts light in these baptismal waters because we somehow know, under the ebb and flow of the prayers and the silences, that there is TRUTH here, a truth that is deeper than our institutional stumbles, a truth deeper than our human failings. A pattern of living, revealed in the ancient pattern of the liturgy: a pattern that contains a truth you will not find anywhere else, nowhere else in the world except within the enactment of this living Word. In the liturgy, unbroken in its offering since the time of the apostles, are the tools that teach us how to live out our daily life as God meant it to be lived. 

This is Spirit-driven, Spirit-led work.

“Jesus said to his disciples, “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.”

This promise is fulfilled in the Pentecost account recorded in the Book of Acts, when the disciples were transformed by wind and flame from somewhat hapless followers of a beloved teacher into the undaunted, fervent agents of Christ’s mission on earth. And it was not just the Son of God, but the ongoing work of the Spirit of God that drew them into the lives THEY were intended to live—it was the Spirit that animated their mortal bones and caused them to prophesy and to see visions and to dream dreams. It was the Spirit that sustained their dedication far beyond the typically fickle, faltering enthusiasm we tend to give even the most worthy causes of this world.

And that same Spirit of truth, that same Spirit that swept over the waters at creation, that same Spirit that descended at Jesus’ baptism and at your own, that same Spirit is still calling out to you, still guiding you, still animating THIS community and THIS liturgy, still saying YES: God desires for you to be close, God desires for you to take your proper place in creation, God desires you to live in fullness, God desires you.

You. 

God desires you so much, in fact, that God has made a home within you; God has fed you with his own flesh; God’s holy breath is on your breath as you offer up these ancient and eternal prayers week after week.

In short, we are here, friends, not because liturgy is just a nice ritual to enact on a Sunday morning, but because liturgy at its must fundamental is the very pattern of the Holy Spirit’s movement through creation, and we are being carried aloft on the Spirit’s wings, learning, day by day, how to fly heavenward. 

I share all of this with you because I sometimes observe that, if we talk about the Holy Spirit at all in our church, we don’t tend to talk about the Spirit in connection to our experience of liturgy. Maybe it’s because we are so often focused on the Father and the Son, or maybe it’s because we think that too much talk about the Spirit might open the door to a level of exuberance to which we Episcopalians are not generally accustomed. 

But be assured that the Spirit IS here, in candlelight and in quiet gesture and in the swelling note of song, the Spirit is here in the silence of your prayers and in the outstretching of your hand towards Christ’s body, and we should be encouraged, emboldened even, to name God’s dynamic presence in our liturgy, and to say to the world, to our neighbors and our friends and those who have fallen away from faith: COME, see what is TRUE. COME, see what the shape of love is. COME, see how God teaches us to embody, in this liturgical gathering—in this school of the Holy Spirit—the essential vision of a sanctified life: gratitude, praise, confession, lamentation, reconciliation, offering, receiving, communion, contemplation, joy. COME, and see, and live.

We ought not be timid or bashful about this. Because one thing I know is that there are countless people—some of whom you probably know quite well—who are desperately longing for the type of life we seek and strive for here. A Spirit-driven, Christ-shaped, liturgically-enriched life. There is no greater gift that we can give than to invite others into the practice of their truest, most beautiful humanity. 

So when you think about why you come here, week after week, and what it is about the liturgy that draws you in, what it is that inspires you to give your heart over to Jesus, day after day, remember, it is , in part, because you are doing something essential here, something more than engaging in a pastime, something more than exercising personal taste. We are seeking and claiming LIFE. True life. Eternal life. Love-infused life. 

The tongue of flame, and the wind, and the dove, and the water, and the bread, and the blood, and the unbroken song, and the unbroken prayer and the unbreakable bond: in the liturgy these things are present, they are given.

In the liturgy, the Spirit guides us into all truth.

In the liturgy, these tired bones–yours and mine–can live.