Exaudi Homily

[Ezekiel 36:22-28 / 1 Peter 4:7-11 / John 15:26-16:4]

Today may be the seventh and last Sunday of Easter, but the readings and liturgy are already tilting wildly toward the Feast of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is everywhere!

In the first reading, Ezekiel foretold the heart-transplant that God would effect in his people. Out comes the heart of stone and in goes a heart of flesh. Which is to say, that the problem with us is that we are not fully human, not the way God intended for us to be. And the only way to become fully human is for God to effect a change at the very center of our willing, our desiring.

This change he promises to effect through sprinkling clean water upon us (think Baptism) which sets us free from our false trusts (our idols) and humanizes us by the gift of the Spirit - the Spirit who causes us to WANT to walk in God’s statues and be careful to obey His just decrees.

And the last bit is important too: “You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers.” I think that’s bigger than the promise that Israel would dwell in Palestine again after her exile - the land given our fathers is this world as God originally gave it: our Paradise where we walked with God and He with us, where He was our God and we His people, and everything was gift from the hand of the Lord and rejoicing and praise and love. THIS is the Spirit’s work in us - He teaches us to live again even in this world as a bit of paradise restored. He even transforms its heartaches and sorrows into gifts as He humanizes us and helps us bear each other’s burdens. So a very tasty bit on the Spirit from that first reading.

And then onto the Gospel where again the Spirit gets top billing. Our Lord announces: “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me.” The Spirit that comes from the Father and is sent by Jesus - that Spirit has one thing He wants to talk about and it’s not Himself: He wants to talk about Jesus! He wants to bear witness about Him and all that is ours in Him. He wants to open our eyes to see that there’s more in Jesus than in all the world outside of Him. St. Paul would put it like this in 1 Corinthians 2:14: “But we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, that we might know the things freely given us by God.”

The Spirit bears witness to the life and love and forgiveness and hope and salvation that is in the Son of God, the Man born of Mary, the man hung on the Tree and raised from the dead, the Man now ascended into heaven and even at this moment sitting - in our human flesh - at the right hand of the Father. The Spirit witnesses to the Man who is fully MAN, the Spirit shows us that to be HUMAN is to live under the forgiveness this Man brings and in communion with Him, He who alone IS fully human, fully alive.

“And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.” The Spirit comes and starts witnessing about Jesus and those who receive the Spirit start witnessing about Jesus, about all they have seen and known in Him. The Spirit inside you wants to talk, but not about Himself or about you, but about your Jesus.

But our Lord tells them in advance that this world - which rejected Him, His life, His love - this world will not welcome their witness. Indeed, the days are coming when, He says, when whoever kills you will think he’s offering up worship to God! “They will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.” Anyone who comes to know the Father of our Lord Jesus by the work of the Holy Spirit KNOWS that the Father is not served by making others miserable, by bringing hardship and grief to their lives. THAT’S the world’s way, the way of our hearts of stone that go their own way and not the Lord’s.

Rather, the Spirit’s way is what St. Peter pointed out in the Epistle for today. “The End of all things is at hand.” The End, here, means, the fulfillment, the culmination of all things, the perfect humanity that stood forth in the man Jesus Christ, who is also the Eternal Son of God. He is the End as He is the Beginning, Alpha and Omega. And since He is the end, the telos, the purpose of all things, the Apostle urges us to be self-controlled and soberminded for the sake of our prayers. For praying together in the Spirit and with Him, our Great High Priest, who sits at the right hand of the Father and never ceases to intercede for us - that is the very meaning and joy of life itself! And so in place of the hatred that would silence the witness to Christ, he urges “Above all, keep loving one another, since love covers a multitude of sins.” If we live in union with Christ, then His life must be our life, and His life doesn’t expose and shame, but gracefully covers the wrongs done and pleads for forgiveness for the enemies.

“Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.” If we live in union with Christ, who has opened up His Father’s home to us and made it our very own, we must open up these earthly homes we call our own to each other and extend the same sort of welcome to one another that our Father in Christ by the Spirit has given us. We’re practicing for eternity!

“As each has received a gift use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” The gifts are manifold, but they are all there for the others. The Spirit puts them into you for the benefit of all - and the mark of a heart of flesh and not of stone, the mark of heart touched by the Spirit of God, is a life lived for others and not merely focused inward upon yourself. This holds with those who speak and those who serve - both bear witness by the Spirit to the life that is joyfully lived in communion with Christ under the forgiveness that is in His blood.

“In order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” THAT’S the driving force of the Spirit’s witness and work within us! That we are swept up into the doxology, the endless praise. That is the joy of God’s people. From this we fell in paradise. To this the Son came to restore us. For this the Spirit would now work within us so that we dwell in the land that God originally gave to our fathers - a paradise of plenty, where all is experienced as gift from the hand of the loving Trinity, where all is praise for His goodness, where all is love that covers and pardons.

So it’s no wonder that the collect of the day has us crying out to the Risen and Ascended Lord: “Send us the Spirit of truth whom You promised from the Father!” With the Spirit comes all the unpacking of all the gifts intended for us in the Son to the glory of the Father - and that is how we share in Christ’s own divine life. Amen.