October 24th, 2024
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
The day before lockdown started in 2020, the BBC visited the cathedral to record a series of services to broadcast over the following few months. Authenticity was guaranteed by changing the liturgical colours. I felt sorry for our vergers having to condense a liturgical year into an afternoon. So, it seems a bit odd in our journey through the creed to be talking about the Holy Spirit not long before the start of Advent. After the experiment of the Alternative Service Book, it’s a shame that Common Worship has reverted to the BCP’s custom of naming Sundays after Trinity. The ASB named them as Sundays after Pentecost, the Sunday we remember the first outpouring of the Spirit on the church.
The book of Acts is often referred to as a book without an ending. It records the things the Apostles did, but also the beginning of the passing of the baton to the next generation. We are their descendants in a real sense. It is for us to live the life of the Spirit in this time and place, declaring and demonstrating the works of God. It is the person and work of the Holy Spirit that distinguishes Christian faith so markedly from other religious traditions. We make the extraordinary claim that when we submit to Christ as the Lord of our lives, he commits to us. He does this, not in an abstract way, but in the gift of himself. Christians are empowered people. Like other religious traditions we perform religious rituals. We have a code of conduct – albeit one that flows from basic principles and which may have quite different manifestations in different contexts. We have core beliefs. However, our faith is not simply one of duty and rote. It is much more dynamic than that.
I was talking to someone after a confirmation service at the weekend who shared with me a development in a pastoral issue we had both been concerned about. I had been praying about it a lot; as had they. They reported a very significant shift in the attitude of one of the parties that offered the hope of real breakthrough and progress. I confess my faith for such a change had been limited. An objective observer appraised of the situation would probably see something more than a simple change of heart. We both ascribed the change to an external divine intervention. This was a sign of the Holy Spirit at work.
We believe that God still has agency in the world. There was a school of thought in the Victorian period characterising God as the blind watchmaker. He created everything and then left it to its own devices to get on with it. But we believe there are divine interventions that shift circumstances; that change our own entrenched attitudes; that cause unexpected breakthroughs. These are the work of the Holy Spirit – God’s empowering presence as the theologian Gordon Fee described him. Alongside that, we recognise the mysterious ‘non-interventions’, the times when prayer seems ineffective and God seems absent, although our judgement of whether the Spirit is in fact inactive at such times may be flawed. Sometimes the Holy Spirit’s work is accompanied by dramatic experiences or what appears miraculous. At other times it is a gentle whisper or something working under the surface, the fruit of which may only be apparent some time afterwards. God’s interventions in our circumstances seem to correlate with our praying, but they are maddeningly unpredictable.
Our prayer for the spirit’s intervention is not one of bribery, coercion or demand. The ancient pagans thought their idolatrous worship would effect a change by appeasing the gods they thought controlled the unfolding of events. Jesus prayed for the cup of suffering to be taken from him in Gethsemane, but finished the prayer with, “not my will but yours be done”. That prayer to avoid the cross wasn’t answered, but it demonstrates in the deepest silence of Good Friday the most powerful redemptive act of God. It was here that the Spirit effected the redemption of the world.
So, we believe in the Holy Spirit: God’s empowering presence; his active intervention, the one who changes us into the likeness of Jesus and the one who imperceptible steers the world to build the kingdom.
I am very glad indeed we are not in this on our own!
+Richard