“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you”
Whitsunday is the day we celebrate Pentecost, the outpouring of the Spirit of God onto Jesus’ confused and beleaguered disciples to empower them for the Church’s work in the world. It is the day when Ezekiel’s prophecy is fulfilled: people of all nations are made holy and God places a new spirit within each one of us to make us his people. That was God’s gift to Jesus’ first disciples, and it is God’s gift to us today too.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus describes this gift of Spirit as the Comforter. But actually, I think many Christians, perhaps especially in our own age, find what I have just described quite terrifying! That’s because the way in which human beings usually deal with the whole idea of God is through some process of externalisation. That is to say we remove the divine from our immediate experience and locate it in objects or concepts to which we can contrast ourselves and decide whether or not to submit.
Look at the history of Christianity in Western Europe since the Reformation. Two dominant strands emerged, one (Catholicism) locating the divine in an ever removed ritualised practice of the mass which was essentially the domain of the priestly elite. And the other (Protestantism) locating divine power and authority in the written word of Scripture which stands over each believer.
And it’s no surprise that over the course of this period the doctrine of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, was increasingly under-prioritised and neglected. The first two persons of the Trinity, the Father and the Son, are both quite easily externalised. God the Father is removed from us, standing over us as an unapproachable figure of power and authority. God the Son is externalised as an historical figure whose teaching and example we fix as something to be observed and learnt from. Even the modern Protestant emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus implies distance – the same distance that other people are external to us.
These caricatures of Father and Son are themselves wrong, but easily perpetuated. The Holy Spirit, however, may never be externalised. The Spirit is sometimes described as “the beyond that is within”. As Ezekiel prophesies, the Spirit is the divine at work within us. That is initially frightening. It throws into question a lot of what we’ve come to believe about the autonomy of the human self and rational human agency. It’s frightening because the doctrine of the Spirit says, “this whole God business is not something I can get a full grasp on, it’s not something I can make independent and entirely rational judgements about. It is something that is bound up within my own being. It’s going on within me even before I acknowledge it.”
So this already starts to raise questions about the way in which we in our own age – and particularly in our liberal Anglican tradition – seek to externalise the activity of God. We are tempted to externalise God and faith into concepts and verbally expressed ideas which we delude ourselves to be purely objects of our cognition and discussion. This cognitive emphasis goes right back to Cranmer who, as expressed in today’s collect seems to think the predominant theme of Pentecost is one of “teaching” and “right judgment”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the last person to be down on intelligent discussion of what we believe. But I too need to recognise that when it comes to faith, the spirit is already at work in my heart, with his sighs that are deeper than words. I need to recognise that growing in my faith is not a process of better articulating words about God – or even in the first instance of making better judgments – but of getting myself in tune with the holy desires that the spirit is already willing within my heart.
This week, I’ve been at the Hay Literary Festival where I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about what it would mean for contemporary literature to take God more seriously. But a very pertinent questioner asked the Archbishop what it would mean for the Church to take God more seriously. He thought for a moment and said that we would be more silent. And he quoted that line of EM Forster in A Passage to India where Mrs Moore laments “poor little talkative Christianity”. So many words said, but so little truth conveyed about the reality of God.
That’s why music is such an important part of our worship, giving us the ability to transcend mere words into melody and harmony that seem to give voice to the sighing of the spirit and awaken within us the heart of desire for God’s kingdom.
But, of course, music too can be an externalisation. Music too can become a mechanism for the avoidance of what God has placed within us. Today’s Morning Service on Radio Four began with the words “Welcome to St Paul’s Knightsbridge on the Feast of Pentecost when we celebrate the music of Joseph Hayden.” No we don’t. We celebrate the extraordinary transformation of our lives that God is enacting through the gift of the Spirit to the Church. And I’m sure Hayden can help us appreciate that. But let’s not miss the point. Let’s not allow music to be another externalisation of the divine.
And it is perhaps only in silence, when we are forced to look into our own hearts, that we really cannot escape from the initially frightening truth that the Holy Spirit is the beyond that is within, that what we need to do in prayer is not to make connection with some distant being put to attend to the movement of the spirit in our lives and in the world around us.
The slogan of that externalised kind of modern Christian faith is found on the wristbands and bumper stickers so popular in America: WWJD, “What would Jesus do?”, that conditional implying that the Christian life is merely a response to externalised ethical codes and historical analysis. But the question we’re confronted with on the Day of Pentecost and in the silence of our own hearts is “What is the Holy Spirit doing within me…, now…?”
Where is God prompting me to support those in need?
Where is God opening me up to healing and reconciliation?
Where is God enlightening me about the purpose of my life and the priorities of his kingdom?
Those do initially seem like frightening questions. But the more we patiently and quietly address them in the silence of our hearts, the more we know that this Holy Spirit, at work within us, truly is the Comforter – the one that comes to us in love to heal and to renew. And perhaps we also come to know what St Augustine realised, that the God in which we believe is not entirely external to us, but is indeed closer to us than our own hearts.