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The Fading Echoes of His Presence

Pentecost, Year B : 27 May 2012

Sir Ninian Comper was the great Anglo-Catholic architect of twentieth century Britain. At first sight his churches can often appear curiously traditional, quite like the Victorian gothic so familiar to us. But the more you look closely at the altar area, the more you see what is strikingly original about these buildings.

Comper thought that the point of a church is to enclose the altar - that the altar and its surrounds should be a lantern that lights up the rest of the interior. He achieved this effect by pushing the altar forward so that the people could surround it on three sides, and by topping off and surrounding the altar with a gold painted baldachino or ciboria. There was a sense of wide open uncluttered spaciousness throughout the church in the areas where the worshippers were, with their focus being drawn to a framed and focused traditional altar, where the priest often celebrated with his back to the people facing a Roman style crucifix and six candlesticks. Well before the liturgical movement insisted on pushing altars forward and stripping them down to bare simplicity, Comper had created worship in the round in a way that combined a very traditional and beautiful altar area.

In just about every church that Comper built or renovated there was a recurring motif. Just above the altar, on whatever surface was available, he would have painted in beautiful symbolic form the seven gifts of the Spirit. It was a way of saying that the sacrifice of the Mass, the most powerful form of prayer the Church engages in, has the capacity to release into our lives these transforming gifts. When we use our imagination to call to mind that Pentecost scene where the Spirit descends on the apostles with wondrous gifts our reaction tends to be - "Well that’s great, but it is miles away from our actual experience of church life now." It is as though our beginnings were framed by an event of striking power, but that since then we know only the fading echoes of his presence as our Lord the Holy Spirit recedes into distant memory.

Christians have tended to react to this perception in one of two ways - either they write down their expectations of what the Spirit will do in their lives, or they try and hype themselves up to artificially produce the experience of Pentecost. This is why the Christian religion in the west tends to oscillate between a cold formalism and a wild, anarchic revivalism.

That, of course, is not what God wants for the Church, and it is not an accurate perception of the Spirit’s role in our lives. So sorting ourselves out on this score involves asking ourselves in what way was the Spirit available to the human race before the day of Pentecost, and then, what extra dimension of his presence was disclosed after that amazing event?

In the Hebrew Scriptures the Spirit is most powerfully present when it rests on the prophets of Israel, and sometimes on its Kings. The inspiring presence of the Spirit addresses a problem in Israel’s life, often a political problem, and it gives a particular individual the motivation, inspiration and the penetrating insight to speak to this situation with devastating clarity. But what are given are gifts to get this job done, not the actual personal presence of the giver. It is the same with the Spirit’s inspiring influence on the artists, craftsmen and musicians who adorn and staff the Temple at Jerusalem. God is working in their lives at one remove, adding an x factor into their operational capacity, but not his intimate internal presence.

The day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts was a one off - it is highly unlikely that the Church will ever see again this remarkable combination of visual phenomena, and amazing linguistic gifts providing instant translation services. But what is present here, that wasn’t there before, and that is now permanently available to Christian believers is the fully realised personal identity of the third person of the Holy Trinity. In other words God has revealed more of himself, given us more personal information, and this other identity that we hadn’t known about before, can now be present inside us as an overlapping reality with our personal identity. Now it is not just gifts that are given, as in the Old Testament dispensation, but God himself as an intimate internal presence. We get the real thing, and not just tokens of his activity among us.

But if this great leap forward has occurred in humankind’s relationship with God, if this was such a remarkable display of spiritual power, then why aren’t its consequences more obviously displayed in the affairs of our world? There are two very good reasons for this.

When Jesus came into our world and took a human nature he deliberately set his Divine privileges aside and assumed the limitations of our way of being. He wanted his presence among us to be utterly credible. We speak of this as his kenotic presence, his self-emptying way of being in the world. The Holy Spirit operates in this kenotic, self-limiting way also. It is in the nature of Divine love that it always seeks to convince and not to coerce, to persuade and not to push, to draw and not to drive. Divine love always respects our freedom, our independence, and our right to say no. It wants our yes to be genuine, to be unforced, and to be whole hearted. So God’s way of relating to us will never be to overawe us with displays of spiritual power that leave us no choice but to glumly obey. For this reason the Spirit’s presence in our world is mysterious and elusive - it is hidden in the nooks and crannies of human existence - it operates with a light touch on our human deciding. There isn’t a hint of command and control in the Holy Spirit’s way of drawing us towards God - bossiness isn’t his personal style. The Spirit is therefore present in our world to the extent that people are willing to invite it into their lives. Human responsiveness is the key component to its ability to disclose itself. Our openness is what God is counting on for the Spirit to become an effective presence in people’s lives.

The sheer power of the Holy Spirit is the other reason why it must limit itself for now. Our world, and everything in it is open to the action of the Spirit. There is no such thing as inert and dead matter. The very stuff of the world is open to Divine connection. If the Holy Spirit were to blaze out in its full glory, its full radiance, its natural power, then everything in our world would be transfigured, would be transfused with this weight of glory. This is of course what will happen at the end of time, at the parousia, at the second coming, when the new heavens and earth will arrive, and everything will utterly change as God becomes all in all.

So the Holy Spirit holds back for now, permitting this time of God’s patience to continue so that the human race has enough time to respond to God’s gracious invitation to come home to him. The Holy Spirit accepts this limitation so that the present ordering of our world can continue in its familiar form as the arena of our invited consent to God’s life giving ways for us.

The Holy Spirit is a mysterious presence in another way too. Jesus, the Word of God, and the second person of the trinity we now know well, having disclosed himself through a human life, and the pages of the New Testament. We might also add that the Holy Spirit makes him known as his interpreter, and as a spiritual presence. But the Holy Spirit, while arriving in all his fullness on the day of Pentecost, is not so known in all the contours of his personality. Just as the Jewish people waited for the Messiah to arrive, and wondered what he would be like to personally know, so in a sense we are waiting for the end of time, the parousia to know the Holy Spirit in the fullness of his personal identity. And remember the Holy Spirit tilts time towards that future last day of the world when the full weight of his glory will light up every nook and cranny of creation. For now he concentrates on making the Father and the Son known to us, and on drawing us into their loving communion with each other. His is a humble, hidden role, pointing away from himself towards them.

Meanwhile his gifts are given to us to make God known in all the world. And they are not just transforming gifts that we passively await so that they will magically get everything done without us having to do anything much. As the Spirit lights on us to speak the of works and the wonders of God we are expected to meet God half way - to respond with audacity and the courage to take spiritual risks. And that is what God expects us to do this morning - to acquire the Holy Spirit, and then to get off our chuff and do something with it that is out of our comfort zone.