From the Rector
Dear Friends in Christ,
This Sunday is the Feast of Pentecost. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the Holy Spirit to be the most difficult of the persons of the Trinity around which to wrap my head.
The Father is relatively simple. It’s Jesus’ Father and, by his invitation, ours too. It’s a creative force—the One at whose command things came into being.
Jesus is who he tells us he is, the Son of God. The Gospels testify to who he is and the lives of the saints bear witness to his message of loving peace and self-offering.
The Spirit, though, has always given me a bit more trouble. I can understand a God who creates and a God who comes to save. Perhaps because I can anthropomorphize it, the Father and the Son are easier to “see.”
Those first two “do” stuff. That’s what Gods do, right? They get stuff done.
The Spirit….sustains? Equips? Blesses? Moves over the waters?
That’s all harder to see in the same way. But it’s essential, isn’t it? It’s crucial that we get to see a glimpse of the Spirit at work in God’s action.
Imagine your grandmother making a meal and slamming it down on the table. She’s fed you, certainly!
Now imagine her stirring slowly. Tasting. Adding just the right amount of the right ingredients and tasting again. Imagine her humming or singing a favorite song. Imagine her putting it gently down in front of you or calling you to the table with some nickname you pretend to be embarrassed by but secretly love. It’s all done with love.
She’s fed you—in so many more ways than the obvious one.
That feels like the Spirit to me. The Spirit gives a sense of the deeper movement of God. Sustaining, equipping, and blessing—even moving over the waters that become something different through that lens of love.
We can certainly get a sense of God at work in covenants. The new and the old alike are a sign of love. We can get a sense of God doing his saving work in Christ as the story of Good Friday and Easter unfold.
But we come to realize the Spirit guides and shapes how we see and know those mighty acts. Whether it’s the movement over Creation. The baptism in the River Jordan. Or whether it’s Pentecost itself, we come to see the deeper heart and soul of God revealed in the swirl of the Spirit.
It’s how we come to know people, too. Sure, we know them by what they do. But it’s their warmth, their fire, the heart, and their soul we truly remember. We come to know people not just by what they do, or what they look like, but by who they reveal themselves to be at the heart-to-heart level.
God gives us a glimpse of his heart and leaves it with us on Pentecost. He leaves us his Spirit that it may be ours—that we all may be one in his own sustaining love.
Yours in the Spirit’s peace,
—Fr Robert