Pentecost Vigil; Basilica of the Sacred Heart.
I am the proud sponsor of a pipe. Not a
pipe you smoke, or a pipe that carries water or oil, but a pipe of a pipe
organ. A church I used to be a member of, long before I entered seminary, was
installing a new pipe organ and, as part of the fundraising efforts, they
offered the opportunity for people to pay to sponsor a pipe. Larger pipes were
available for larger donations, and smaller ones for those with less resources.
I was a student at the time, so I ended up sponsoring one of the higher-pitched
E♭ flute pipes.
Now, when I paid my money, there was an attached promise that not only would I
get a certificate (which I got), but that when the organ was ready to be
played, there would be an evening reception for all pipe-sponsors, at which we
would be allowed play our pipe. As far as I know, that happened, but I’d
already moved a long distance away, and never got to go.
I really haven’t spent the last seventeen years of my life mourning
this, don’t worry, but the memory came to me this week as I was praying with
these readings, as I was thinking about how what air flows through makes such a
difference to how it sounds, what it, in some sense, says. And this image, this
kind of image that you can see and hear and even feel if you imagine putting
your hand on a sounding pipe, has been something that’s been good to pray with
because of how it makes concrete what Paul says about prayer in our reading
from his letter to the Romans.
Paul says elsewhere that the Spirit is inside us, that the Spirit
dwells in us, that we constitute a temple, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And
that’s so much of what we celebrate this Pentecost, that we have received the
gift of the Holy Spirit, given in baptism, strengthened in confirmation. That
this gift is not something frail and fallible like ourselves, but that this is
God’s gift of self, that God, in the person of the Spirit, gives Himself to
dwell in us. This indwelling is very different from God’s gift of self in the
person of Christ, it reveals a very different face of God’s love for us, but it
is no less profound, no less total, than the gift of Christ’s incarnation,
cross and resurrection.
And the Spirit does not just hang out in us, inert. No, God is always
active. The Spirit is always at work. And the activity of the Spirit that Paul
highlights in our reading from Romans is that the Spirit prays. God, in the
person of the Spirit, prays to God, in the person of the Father. The importance
of that prayer is why modalism is so horrid a heresy. I’m straying a little bit
into next week’s feast here—the Trinity—but modalism is the heresy that states
that God isn’t really three distinct persons; rather God operates in three
different modes, sometimes in a fatherly way, sometimes filially, sometimes
spiritually. But what the Church teaches is that God, while one, is three
persons, and that those three persons are in relationship with one another.
When Christ prays, when the Spirit prays, they are really praying to another
person, it’s not just God talking to Himself.
Now, if the Spirit prays to God the Father with these “inexpressible
groanings,” and the Spirit dwells within us, then the Spirit’s prayer passes
through us. Recall that Spirit, pneuma in Greek, just like ru’ach in Hebrew, means
breath or wind as well. Just like that E♭ flute pipe I
sponsor, the Spirit blows through us in prayer and that helps determine the
sound those murmurs make, what, in a sense, they say. God places as a medium
through which the Spirit’s prayer to the Father blows. And the Spirit’s prayer
starts to sound like us.
And we need that, because, as Paul says, we don’t even know what to
pray for. Faced with this awesome ability we have to address our Creator, left
to our own devices, we would stumble about searching for something worth saying
to the God who already knows everything in our hearts. And Jesus certainly
taught us how to pray beautifully. Jesus modeled perfect prayer for us, but imitating
a model can be really hard. Unaided by grace, we are dead in our sins, and the
lungs of the dead don’t start breathing just because you show them perfect respiration.
But when another starts filling us with breath, breathing through us, that’s
when life becomes possible.
On Pentecost, we’re not just celebrating another gift, we’re
celebrating that God, who eternally is perfect loving relationship, takes us,
puts us in the middle of that relationship, and prays through us. That move God
makes enlivens us, awakens in us a capacity to join in that prayer, to
harmonize our voice with the Spirit’s, and should also move us to conform all
of our relationships to that Spirit-Father relationship in whose midst we now
stand. In John’s Gospel, we heard that rivers of living water flow from within
whoever believes in him, and John tells us that that means the Spirit. We live
in a thirsty world, and the gift we have been given in the Spirit is a gift
that has been given us to share. That Spirit-breath, of prayer, of love, of
divine intimacy, that flows through us, overflows. May all the world hear how
good it sounds.
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