The Holy Spirit As One Of The Trinity

May the Spirit of God infuse my words and all our lives that we may come from here bursting forth with God’s purpose.  Amen.

Today we have four readings from four different books in the compact library we call the Bible.  Next week we will have another four readings from this library.  And the next.  And the next ….

Sometimes, in the seasons which we call Ordinary Time, three of these readings march through our library picking up near where we left off the last week.  Sometimes, like the seasons of Lent and Advent and on feast days like today, these readings are grouped loosely around some theme.  In both cases, the psalm is chosen as a reflection on one of the readings.

Today’s theme is the Trinity.  Today’s readings all try to help us understand the mystery of One God in Three Persons.  Since we spend most of the year reading and talking about Jesus and God, they all focus our thought on the Holy Spirit.  Each of them does it from a different perspective.

Wisdom literature like we find in proverbs is some of the oldest recorded thought about God.  In ancient Hebrew thought, Wisdom is birthed by God made out of God’s own essence.  Wisdom comes before creation and either assists with creation or is delighted by it like a child looking on in wonder.  Wisdom is always female and is looked at as the mothering part of God.  Wisdom was seen as being active in our lives, helping us to understand our purpose in the world and giving us good advice on how to live.  As I understand Wisdom, Wisdom is less powerful than God but uses what power she has all the time.

Next we move on to the Gospel of John.  Does anyone remember the first words of the Gospel of John?

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  This is one way the Greek culture interpreted Wisdom in John’s community.  What follows is the Word “became flesh and lived among us.”  So Jesus is Wisdom in a human body.

John also talks about the Spirit of truth which is another view of Wisdom.  John understands the Spirit of truth as a messenger, continuing to bring God’s word to the disciples after Jesus’ ascension.  The Spirit of truth does not have knowledge of its own, it merely bring the words of the Father, through Christ, to the disciples.

Finally we have the reading from Romans.  This is the first time we directly refer to the Holy Spirit.  In Paul’s understanding, the Holy Spirit is a gift from God.  It serves as kind of a conduit connecting us to God’s love.  Like wisdom, it continues to advise us and encourage us to live a life according to God’s plan.

But wait, we have two more descriptions of the Holy Spirit yet to come today.  When we recite the Apostle’s Creed, we are saying how we understand the Trinity.  In that creed we give three lines to describe God and eleven lines to describe Christ.  How many lines do we use to describe the Holy Spirit?  … One … “I believe in the Holy Spirit.”  Period.  Not very helpful is it?

The last spot we describe the Holy Spirit is in the Eucharistic Prayer.  Today we use Prayer 3 with the Trinity preface.  In this prayer we say “you reveal your glory as the glory of your Son and the Holy Spirit: three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one Lord, one God.”  We also talk about the activity of the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit that sanctifies, or makes holy, both the Eucharistic gifts and us.

These last two reflect current thought about the Trinity.  The Apostle’s Creed, which was written  and rewritten starting somewhere between the second and fourth centuries and ending around the seventh century, is so vague about the Holy Spirit that it would be hard to disagree with it.  Our Eucharistic prayer today is much more specific.  It gives an equal position to all three persons of the Trinity, including the Holy Spirit.  It gives us some ideas about what role the Holy Spirit plays in our lives and in the activity of God.  It doesn’t say a thing about how the Holy Spirit does its work or the gender of the Holy Spirit.

Are you confused yet?  … I definitely am.  We have several descriptions of the Holy Spirit which are at the least inconsistent and maybe even contradictory.  Either that or the Holy Spirit has evolved from Wisdom into one of the Trinity.  So how do we choose?  Which one is right?  Three of these are directly from this library and the other two are based on it.

This is where we see the grace of God.  We don’t have to choose.  All of these descriptions are probably in some way right.  They are all examples of people, human beings with all of our frailties, seeking to understand their faith; trying to understand what the Holy Spirit is doing in their lives.  They are all images which can help us to find the Holy Spirit in our own lives.

My favourite way of looking at the Holy Spirit goes a bit like this.  Jesus told us that the good news, the Gospel, would continue to be written in our hearts.  The Holy Spirit’s job is to help us release that good news into the world and she won’t give up until she succeeds.

Thanks be to God.

What's In A Name - part 2

Ramblings from the Rector

 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1-4 NRSV)

What’s in a name?  Just over twenty years ago many of the churches in this diocese were asking this question.  At the bishop’s direction, the diocese was adjusting parish boundaries.  Both of our parishes, Holy Faith and Touchwood Trail, were formed around this time.  Both parishes held meetings, prayed, and deliberated, and finally chose a name to carry them into the future.

Some of the churches that formed these parishes are now gone, yet their legacy and memory are carried on.  I am going to list them now and I ask that you offer a prayer for each.  With each church closed, we feel a new loss, a new pain, and we reach out with compassion to those for whom the loss is personal.

Christ Church – Abernethy

St. Mary (the Virgin) – Cupar

St. George – Ituna

Holy Trinity – Kelleher

St. Michael and All Angels – Lipton

All of these churches are gone, but they are still part of us.  We still remember them.  We still carry on their traditions.  We still minister to those who called them “my church.”

Over the past two months we have been talking about another change of parish boundaries.  We have been celebrating the coming together of two parishes to share ministries and become a new community in Christian unity.

We have been looking at possibilities for the name of the new parish.  But even more importantly, we have been looking for our calling as a new parish.  We have been asking the Holy Spirit to come among us and inspire us.  We have been praying.  And we have been listening.  We were looking for an ideal of Christian ministry that would bring us into a new future together.  And on the Day of Pentecost we came together with the Holy Spirit and voted.

This is the ideal you chose:

Finding new expressions of worship and faith that would help us bridge the gap between our current traditions and the spiritual and worship needs of our communities. Setting our parish on a path of study and renewal.

Not only was this the clear choice of our adult members, our seventy-five percent of our younger members chose the same ideal of Christian ministry.

Our choices of parish name came from this ideal.  You chose the name “The Teachers of the Faith.”

I know that this was not everyone’s choice.  No matter how we chose or what we chose, it would not be everyone’s choice.  I ask that in this time of chance we all respect this.  Whenever there is change there is both the pain of loss and the uncertainty of a new beginning.  And so I once again ask you to pray:

Gracious God, please help us all to believe in UFO’s.  Let us find unity even when we are not in agreement.  Help us to forgive the hurts that we have received and to reach out in compassion to those who are suffering.  Guide us as we move forward together so that we may discover how we can engage in outreach which aids your mission in our communities.

Teachers of the Faith

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

This week we are continuing our exploration spiritual directions for our new parish.  Our concentration this week will be Teachers of the Faith.  Teachers of the Faith is a very large category in our list of those we honour in our church year in the Anglican Church.

They start with Justin and Irenaeus in the 2^nd to 3^rd centuries and continue with Hilary, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and Leo the Great in the 4^th and 5^th centuries before we reach our more modern saints Gregory the Great (7^th century); Anselm (12^th century); Thomas Aquinas (13^th century); and the return of Francis de Sales (17^th century).

All of these lead up to the two men I am going to talk about today: the only two Teachers of the Faith that we commemorate who are truly Anglican: Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker.

Thomas Cranmer 21 March

Archbishop of Canterbury, 1556 — Commemoration

March

Thomas Cranmer was a Cambridge scholar who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 and guided the Church of England through its first two decades of independence from the Papacy.

When he assumed his office he was already committed to protestant views, but political conditions forced him to keep his sympathies a secret. For over a decade he studied the issues which divided not only protestants from Catholics, but also the protestant movement itself. His studies bore fruit when the political situation allowed him to begin serious reformation of the liturgy. He had a large hand in drafting The Book of Common Prayer, which was authorized in 1549. Three years later he oversaw a second edition of this Book, which he revised in such a way as to make its protestant doctrine unmistakable.

Soon afterwards he and his Prayer Book were overtaken by events when Queen Mary I came to the throne and restored England to communion with the Pope. Cranmer was imprisoned and endured a long, humiliating trial for heresy, at the end of which he recanted his protestant opinions in hopes of clemency. The Queen refused to hear his pleas, and he was burned at the stake on this day in the year 1556. As the flames licked around him, he thrust out his right hand — the hand which had signed his earlier recantations — so that it might be the first to be burned; and that was the posture in which the onlookers last saw him, as the fire engulfed his body.

Richard Hooker 3 November

Priest, Teacher of the Faith, 1600 — Commemoration

November

Richard Hooker was an English priest who died in 1600, and we remember him today as a theologian who defended the Church of England and its choice of “the middle way” between Roman Catholic and Puritan ideologies.

Hooker entered Oxford University in 1567 and for eighteen years devoted himself to scholarship and reflection on the subtle points of theology. He became deputy professor of Hebrew, was ordained to the priesthood, and appeared to be set on a purely academic career. But his learning, moderation, and commitment to the Church of England brought him to the attention of the authorities, and he was appointed Master of the Temple, an office of great prestige because it made him the chief preacher to the legal community of London. He held this post for six years, then resigned to become the rector of a parish near Salisbury. A few years later he moved to a rectory in the diocese of Canterbury, where he died at the age of forty-six.

He was a quiet man, loving to his wife and children, glad in his piety, and happy in his ministry. But the Church remembers him primarily for the one great work that he wrote — a majestic study entitled Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

This work was addressed to a group of English protestants who were nicknamed Puritans because they sought to purify the Church of England according to their own narrow reading of the Bible. Against this movement Hooker argued for a more liberal outlook, which coordinated the testimony of Scripture, the course of Christian history, and the values of human reason, in order to defend the English Church as a communion for all the people, not just a small group of “saints.” The experience of our tradition has confirmed his teaching, and today we honour his work as a true cornerstone of Anglican history.

When I first started looking at the Teachers of the Faith, I had in mind some kind of scholarly professor holding lectures about Anglican theology.  I was wonderfully surprised when I read about them to find out that this doesn’t describe them at all (well maybe some of the older ones like St. Thomas Aquinas).  What I found is that there are three key terms to describe a Teacher of the Faith.

1: The three-legged stool of Anglican theology.

How many of you have heard of this?  How about scripture, tradition and reason?  Anglican theology is supposedly based on a balance of these three.  Just like a three-legged stool with one leg too short or too long, it won’t stand properly unless all are considered equally.

2: The via media or the middle way.

The Anglican Church is neither protestant nor Roman Catholic.  We are somewhere in the middle.  Or more correctly, we are many places in the middle from almost Roman Catholic to almost protestant.  Just as we are many places between conservative and liberal.  But if we get too far from the middle, we stop being Anglican and become something else.

3: Renewal.

This is the one that really surprised me.  I knew about the three-legged stool and I knew about the via media, but I didn’t expect to find renewal.  Both of our Anglican Teachers of the Faith, and many of the others, worked very hard to find new ways of expressing their faith through worship and in their lives which did not stray from that middle path.  They carefully studied the scripture, their tradition, and the culture or their time and brought new expression to the church which set it on the path to the tradition that we currently enjoy.

So if we were to dedicate our parish to the Teachers of the Faith, it would commit us to studying our tradition, the scripture and our local culture.  We would be called to find new expressions of worship and faith that would help us bridge the gap between our current traditions and the spiritual and worship needs of our communities.  It would set us on a path of study and renewal.

I continue to hope that this decision will not be an easy one.  It should require prayer and discussion and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  So I pray:

Holy and Gracious God, be with us as we do our best to discern where you are calling us as a new parish.  Give us your support and your guidance that we may know our part in your purpose here in our communities and how you wish us to show our love for you in our lives.  This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.