Sermon for Pentecost, 4:00pm Choral Evensong
“The Spirit helps us in our weakness”
“The Spirit helps us in our weakness,” St. Paul tells us, strengthening us in our prayers and in our thinking, strengthening us in heart and mind. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit as the Comforter, the strengthener, we might say. Isaiah, too, signals this twofold aspect of the Spirit’s strengthening work. The so-called sevenfold gifts of the Spirit speak to the spiritual reality of our humanity in terms of our reason and our will.
In 1662, at the time of the Restoration after the bitter English civil war which saw bishops and the Prayer Book outlawed for fifteen years, the Prayer Book was restored with a few small but important changes. Provision was made for a service for Adult Baptism, “For Those of Riper Years,” as it is quaintly expressed. There was also an addition made to the liturgy for The Ordination of Priests. It was the Bishop of Durham’s, John Cosin’s, translation of a medieval hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus. “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,/ And lighten with celestial fire./ Thou the anointing Spirit art,/ Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart…” What are those gifts? The gifts of the Spirit are taken from Isaiah in our lesson this evening: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord,” to which the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint, had added a seventh gift, piety or devotion. The concept of the seven gifts of the Spirit belong to the spirituality of the life of the Church. The seven-fold gifts have to do with ourselves as spiritual and intellectual beings, tasked with thinking and doing, knowing and loving, we might say. And all by the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost who keeps us in the communion of God himself.
This is the great wonder and mystery of Pentecost. We do not need to be defined by the world or by our self-preoccupations and actions but by the God whose love and grace are poured out upon the Church in the wonder of Pentecost. We are to know and feel that love and spirit even in the midst of a broken and troubled world where we are too much with the world and too much with ourselves.
Paul’s profound words are familiar from the Prayer Book Burial Office as one of the lessons often read at funerals. They recall us to “the grandeur of God” to put it in the words of the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the face of “the bent world” of sin and folly, of destruction and death, we are reminded of our life in the Spirit and of ourselves as spiritual creatures called to love and learn and to love and serve. Nothing, Paul emphasizes, can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Such is the meaning of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We are strengthened in the love of God in Christ Jesus, strengthened to pray “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire/ and lighten with celestial fire.”
“The Spirit helps us in our weakness”
Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong, Pentecost
June 8th, 2014
