One of the balances that needs to be struck in the Christian life is between two ways of understanding holiness: one on the vertical plane and one on the horizontal. Let me explain what I mean.
We have perhaps been thinking a lot recently, in Ascensiontide, on the vertical plane. Last Sunday we sang “God has gone up with a merry noise”. The God who “came down” at Christmas has performed his redemptive acts of death and resurrection and returned to the heavenly kingdom of his Father. And we, like the men of Galilee, gaze at the heavens as we wonder at the future. Christ has gone up on high and we who are left here on Earth find our spirituality within that vertical paradigm of the God who is over and above us. We offer our prayers and our worship up to God as our spiritual sacrifice. We look to God to comfort and guide us when our world seems godless. We come to church as a means of being drawn up into something more spiritual and holy than we experience in everyday life.
This vertical understanding of holiness is very important. It emphasises God’s transcendence and otherness. It reminds us that the Christian faith cannot be domesticated or reduced to social programs. Faith is mystical, mysterious and personal.
But left on its own, this spirituality is fragmented; it can be individualist and otherworldly to the point of being unreal or irrelevant. So what we are reminded of at Pentecost is the radical breaking in of a horizontal holiness. At Pentecost we are confronted with the idea that holiness is relational, that Jesus Christ came to bring in, not an intense form of personal prayer or private communion with God, but a kingdom, a new way of living together in the world.
This new way of living is entirely dependent on the gifts given to us by the Spirit at Pentecost. For St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, identifying and realising these gifts are how we become holy. Finding your place and your contribution within Christ’s body, the community of believers is what holiness is all about. This is very challenging to exclusively vertical thinking about faith and takes us back to some very fundamental ideas about what the church actually is. For St Paul the Church is clearly not a building, even less is it some kind of “spiritual service provider” run by the clergy. For Paul, the Church is a holy people living together in a holy way. If you are baptised then you are part of the church and you have been given gifts by the Holy Spirit which God expects you to contribute as your means of being holy. We don’t just come to Church to receive some kind of spiritual fix on the vertical plane. We come to share something real on the horizontal plane. Think of St Paul as a kind of first century JFK: “Ask not what your church can do for you, but what you can do for your church”, because Paul had no conception of the Church being anything other than this group of people, this social unit, to whom he was writing. Holiness is relational, and we experience it as we all play our part in our shared common life in Christ.
The 20th century is sometimes described as the century in which the Church rediscovered the Holy Spirit. At the opening of the second Vatican Council in 1962, Pope John XXIII prayed that the Holy Spirit would come and blow the dust off the throne of St Peter, the heart of the Catholic Church, to renew the life of God’s people. And what emerged from that Council was an understanding of the Church that move dramatically away from a vertical understanding of holiness to a horizontal one. That shift has impacted profoundly, not merely on the Roman Catholic Church, but on the whole of western Christendom. Gone was the idea of the Church as a clerical elite who mediated the sacrifice of the mass to a subservient laity. What replaced it was the image of the people of God on a journey into the kingdom of God: the Pilgrim Church.
It was a very horizontal view of holiness and at its heart was an understanding of the Eucharist. The mass was not a sacrifice to be offered by priests on the vertical spiritual plane. It is a drawing together of the people of God into the Body of Christ through the sharing of the bread and wine that are Christ’s body and blood.
The Church of England was, of course, founded with something of this view of the Eucharist in mind. Central to the communion service in the Book of Common Prayer is the aspiration to live “in love and charity with our neighbours”. But somewhere along the line quite a lot of vertical spirituality had crept in to our church too. People started talking in very individualistic terms about “making my communion” (as if communion isn’t always something inherently collective) and with that came a lot of the compartmentalised thinking that is inevitable in that kind of spirituality. If you relate to God on the vertical plane then he need only intersect with your world on Sunday mornings and need not trouble you for the rest of the week.
So the Church was renewed in the 20th century by a renewal in understanding of the Eucharist that flowed from a rediscovery of the Holy Spirit. We can see this at several points of revision in the liturgy. Drawing on the earliest traditions of the Church, the modern rites invoke the Holy Spirit to descend on the gifts on the altar: “grant that by the power of your Spirit, these gifts of bread and wine may be to us the body and blood…”. And the Spirit is even invoked on us the people: “send the Holy Spirit on your people and gather into one all who share this one bread and one cup”.
But the most obvious change in the liturgy was the reintroduction of early Christian practice of sharing the “kiss of peace”. Or in our more English manner, sharing a friendly handshake of peace. This sign of peace is the sign of the reconciling and binding work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not a little break in the holiness of the liturgy a kind of intermission between Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Sacrament. It is of the most holy essence of the Eucharist in the forging of many into one body. I, as the deacon, introduce this with the words “let us offer one another a sign of peace”. But if I were a deacon in the fourth century church in Jerusalem I would cry out: “Embrace ye one another and let us salute each other… for this kiss is the sign that our souls are united and that we banish all remembrance of hurt and injury”.
The origin of the kiss of peace is found in today’s Gospel passage: “Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you’.” And as he did it, he breathed on them. Or, as some translations read, “he kissed them” (Judas’ sign of betrayal redeemed in the imparting of grace) and they received the gift of the Holy Spirit. They received the gift of a holiness that would not be forever over and above them, distant and mysterious, but a holiness that is horizontal, that we encounter with and through others as we grow into God’s Kingdom.
I hope that brief survey of 20th-century church reform has helped explain what I mean by vertical and horizontal holiness. Some of you may know that as we enter the 21st century a vocal minority are calling for a shift back to the vertical. Haven’t our liturgies become a little too accessible and dumbed down? Haven’t some Liberal clerics reduced Christianity to nothing more than a social programme? Don’t we need a bit more mystery and otherworldliness? Well, as I indicated at the very start, it’s about striking a balance and fundamentally it’s about drawing the two paradigms together: finding the absolute transcendence of God within the ordinary interactions of daily life and realising that our interactions with others and our growing in love and service are the means by which the Spirit of God moves on this earth as our hearts are opened and converted by love.
It’s so tempting for the Church to hide away in vertical spirituality, not least because it gives some of us within the Church a feeling of control and superiority. But ours is a world crying out for the horizontal holiness that is realised by people who live in the Spirit. It’s crying out for a fraternalism that will lead us away from the loneliness which Father Stephen preached about last week. Our world is crying out for a community life that will support our fragile families and relationships and our young people for whom this void is being filled by gang culture. And perhaps more than anything our world is crying out for ways of living that aren’t founded on the destructive logic of consumption and domination of resources but on an ecologically sustainable sharing of the Earth for all people today and for our children and grandchildren.
The world needs horizontal, relational holiness and it begins here and in every parish church with all of us who are baptised, which takes us back to St Paul and his rallying cry to the Corinthians. In this Eucharist the Holy Spirit will descend upon all of us to kindle in our hearts, if we are open to it, the fire of God’s love for the world. The Holy Spirit has given each one of us gifts which we are to discern and put at the service of the common good. Will it be helping with the Christian Aid collection next Saturday? Will it be volunteering with the Sunday school or at the summer fair? Will it be joining the Stewardship Scheme? Or will it be calling in on your isolated neighbour on your way home from church? It could be any of these things or many others, for there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit. And it is that Spirit who calls us this Pentecost Sunday to be part of the horizontal holiness that gives life to the world.
Let us pray,
Come Holy Spirit and blow the dust off the thrones of our human pride. Help each one of us to discern the gifts we have been given to share for the common good and in this sacrament bind us who share one bread and one cup into the one Body of Jesus Christ, the Church that gives life to the world.
Amen