Sermon for the Sunday after Ascension, 2021

“The Request for the Sending of the Paraclete”

Sunday after Ascension, 2021

Probably the only truly important thing you need to know about my childhood is that I was obsessed with Star Wars. I knew all the lines of the original trilogy of movies, read all the “Expanded Universe” books, and even had my parents take me and a friend to a convention a state away. I had an impressive--most impressive--collection of R2-D2s, and would have gladly traded my Midwestern suburban existence for the sands of Tatooine or the Cloud City of Bespin. And it now brings me great joy to see my son, Asher, want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like his father. I mention all this because many Christians view the Holy Spirit, who comes into sharp focus in our collect and Gospel reading for this Sunday, kind of like the Force from Star Wars. If you’re not familiar with the Force, Obi-Wan Kenobi defines it as “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” It is a common misconception that this is what the Holy Spirit is like; a recent survey found that only 32 percent of American evangelicals either strongly or somewhat disagreed with the statement, “The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being.” What we need, then, is a better understanding of the person and work of this Holy Spirit.

On this Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost, we look back at Christ being taken up into heaven and exalted to the right hand of the Father, and look forward to the coming of the promised Holy Spirit upon Jesus’ followers. These two pivotal events in the life of the church are, in fact, connected, and we will explore the nature of this connection this morning. Our Gospel passage is taken from the Gospel of John’s famous “Farewell Discourse,” in which Jesus talks about his imminent departure from this world and the coming Holy Spirit who would strengthen his disciples in his absence. Earlier in the Discourse, Jesus had already introduced the figure of the Paraclete, which the King James Version renders “Comforter,” as the “Spirit of truth” who would teach Jesus’ disciples all things and would bring to remembrance all that Jesus

had said to them. In our Gospel passage this morning, we learn additionally that this Comforter proceeds from the Father and will bear witness to Christ. If we read a little further on past our passage, we find at John 16:7 that Jesus actually says that it is better for his disciples that he ascend to the Father because only then will the Comforter come to them. In other words, Ascension and Pentecost are two parts of the same movement; it is only when Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father that the Spirit will come upon his followers. Now, we might find this logic a bit strange: after all, wouldn’t we rather Christ still be present with us on the earth? I think our difficulty in understanding Jesus’ words can be attributed to our lack of clarity about the significance of Jesus’ ascension as well as our often impoverished view of the person and work of the Holy Spirit. We will take each of these points in turn.

First, we need to bring into focus the full significance of Jesus’ ascension. This is not some optional add-on to the story of Jesus’ atoning death on the cross; rather, it completes the story of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection by putting Jesus in his proper place: enthroned as King at the right hand of God the Father. We cannot simply reduce Jesus to our Savior; though he is most certainly that, he is also reigning, now, as King over all the universe. This has profound implications for how we think about our lives as Christians. Because Jesus is King, we owe him not just mental assent to that proposition (after all, even the demons believe and shudder), but also the loyalty and obedience that a king is due. After all, a king does not tolerate competing loyalties, nor does a king accept a profession of loyalty without a willingness to obey him and his laws. In the same way, when we think about what it means as Christians to have faith in Jesus, the recognition that Jesus is King helps us get beyond an understanding of faith as mere belief to a conception that includes the essential ideas of allegiance and obedience. This is what the Ascension, then, is all about.

How, though, does the Ascension connect to Pentecost, the promise of which is at the heart of our Gospel and collect for this Sunday? Because of the Ascension, it might be tempting to think that Jesus is indeed King, but only in a far-off, distant land, unaccessible to us here in this world. Or, perhaps, we might hear the summons to loyalty and obedience to this King and wonder how we could ever fulfill the demands of such a glorious, almighty, and perfect ruler. This, I suggest, is precisely why Pentecost follows Ascension. As the collect explains, we pray that God would send us the Holy Spirit so that, in Jesus’ absence, we would not be comfortless. Indeed, moreover, we pray that God would send us the Holy Spirit so that we too might be exalted unto the same place where our Savior Christ has gone before us. In other words, both our connection to our King and our ability to follow where he leads is dependent upon the Holy Spirit. I also find it interesting that whereas the resurrected body of Jesus was limited to appearing in only one place at any given time, the Holy Spirit can, mysteriously, be present in the hearts of all believers, and in so doing, the Spirit extends God’s empowering presence into each of our lives, giving us the gifts of which our epistle reading speaks. The epistle reminds us, in fact, that we are given the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit not for our own sake, but rather for the good of others, as we rightfully steward these gifts that God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. And so the epistle again brings us back to this fundamental connection between Christ and the Spirit, between Ascension and Pentecost: the Spirit leads us to Christ, who in turn leads us to the Father.

What--or, better, who--is this Spirit? Maybe we can kind of wrap our minds around this Jesus, who was a real human being who lived and walked around on this very earth, but what are we supposed to make of something called the Holy Ghost? The biblical imagery can be confusing; at times it speaks of the Spirit being “poured out” or “filling” someone like it’s a liquid substance. Most Christian art and iconography is unhelpful as well; we are probably most familiar with depictions of the Holy Spirit as either a dove or as fire; note, for instance, the image printed in your bulletin on p. [ ], which portrays the Father and the Son as personal and relatable to us in a way that the Spirit, here depicted as a dove, simply cannot be. As a result, it can be tempting to imagine that the Spirit is not truly personal in the same way that the Father and the Son are distinct divine persons. However, our Gospel passage this morning points to the conclusion that the early church would ultimately reach regarding the full personhood of the Holy Spirit as one of the three co-equal persons of the Holy Trinity. Jesus here has in view how the Spirit will testify to himself after his ascension, a verb that seems to demand a personal subject. Indeed, throughout the Farewell Discourse, we see Jesus using other words and concepts that indicate that this Paraclete is, in fact, more personal than some of the other language in the New Testament regarding the Spirit might otherwise suggest.

It would, in fact, be precisely these chapters from John’s Gospel that would motivate the early church fathers to conclude that the Spirit is, like the Father and the Son, a distinct divine person. Reflecting on how these chapters show the Father, Son, and Spirit sharing identity of activity, St. Athanasius argues that this must therefore entail identity of being: “Seeing that there is such an order and unity in the Holy Trinity, who could separate either the Son from the Father, or the Spirit from the Son or from the Father himself? Who could be so audacious as to say that the Trinity is unlike itself and different in nature?” Likewise, St. Basil of Caesarea would reflect on the church’s practice of baptism, in which we are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, to demonstrate that the Holy Spirit is a co-equal divine person alongside the Father and the Son. Thus, the Scriptures, our liturgy, and the theology handed down by the church all force us to the conclusion Christians that the Holy Spirit is something--or, better, someone--much more personal than the Force from Star Wars. It is precisely because the Holy Spirit is a fully divine person, co-equal with the Father and the Son, that Jesus can say that it is “better” for him to ascend to his Father so that we can receive the Comforter. It is precisely because the Holy Spirit is a fully divine person, co-equal with the Father and the Son, that we can pray that we too might be exalted unto the same place where our Savior Christ has gone before us.

Last week, Father Tony introduced the idea of perichoresis to refer to how the church fathers understood Father, Son, and Spirit as existing in an eternal dance of joy. In particular, Father Tony used the image of Jesus momentarily leaving the dance, coming over, taking us by the hand, and pulling us further up and further in to the perichoretic dance of the Triune God. What this morning’s homily shows us, then, is that God likewise sends the Holy Spirit to us, for the same purpose of pulling us further up and further in to this divine dance, bringing to a completion and perfecting the work that Christ has begun in us. What is required of us, then, is to respond to the Spirit’s invitation to this dance.

 This dynamic is most famously depicted in Andrei Rublev’s fifteenth-century icon “The Hospitality of Abraham,” which is a symbol of the Holy Trinity and is printed on page [ ] of your booklet. In this icon, Father, Son, and Spirit appear as three angels seated around an altar. The three angels are portrayed identically, signaling that the three divine persons of the Trinity share a single substance or essence. Unlike our earlier icon in which the Spirit was depicted as a dove, here there is not even a hint that the Spirit is in any way subordinate to or less personal than the Father or the Son. Reading the icon, we find the Holy Spirit at the right of the image, where he inclines his head and directs his gaze towards the Father. The Son, in the middle of the icon, points to the Spirit, while the Father, at the left of the image, directs both his gaze and his right hand of blessing to the Spirit, suggesting that Rublev’s focal point was not the Son, who is at the physical center of the icon, but the Spirit. For this reason, scholars have concluded that the scene being depicted is precisely where we find ourselves this Sunday: after Christ’s ascension, but before Pentecost. That is to say, the Son is requesting that the Father send the promised Paraclete; the Father, who always hears the Son, fulfills his request by raising to the Spirit his hand of blessing. The Spirit, for his part, bows his head in humble assent, and indeed next Sunday we will celebrate the coming of this Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Note, too, one other striking feature of this icon: Rublev has left open a space at the front of the altar, inviting us to join the circle, the perichoretic dance of the Trinity. In this one image, Rublev succinctly captures both the fundamental end goal or telos of the Christian life, which is to live in communion with the Triune God, as well as the means by which we reach this end, which is the personal indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us. This icon is, I would argue, the perfect visual representation of our collect this morning, as we remember the ascension of Christ, await the sending of the Holy Spirit, and anticipate taking our place in the eternal dance of Father, Son, and Spirit. This mystery, so much deeper and more profound than the pseudo-mysticism of Star Wars, we will continue to unpack next week as we celebrate Pentecost, and then throughout the season of Trinity, and ultimately, indeed, for all of eternity. Amen.