Tag Archives: desire

God’s Wind/Breath (And what do we want?) (6th Sunday of Easter, 5/10/2026)

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Readings

If the resurrection of Jesus is a crisis for the world and its institutions—a theme that ran through last week’s readings—the ascension of Jesus is a crisis for the disciples. Since the Feast of the Ascension is this Thursday, it’s worth listening to what Jesus might have to say about it.

The Ascension is a crisis for the disciples and for us. We know where Jesus is: at the right hand of the Father. That’s the center (we’re not one ones centerstsage). Where does that leave us? (“Jesus went to heaven; all I got was this t-shirt”?) Doesn’t this leave us orphans, left to ourselves to figure out how to put our identity and calling into practice?

It’s precisely in the context of this fear that Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit, the Counselor, the Spirit of Truth. The very breath of God, which gives life to all creation, which inspired the prophets, now will be the means by which the Father and the Son take up residence in the Church and in every believer. As Jesus says, “we will come to him and make our home with him.”

Now, of the three Persons of the Trinity, the Spirit is the One that often remains a sort of blur. It helps to go back to the Hebrew, where ruah, the word we translate as ‘spirit’ is used for both breath and wind. Few things more intimate than breath; few things more powerful than wind. Ruah, spanning everything from the softest breath to the strongest wind—that’s not a bad image to keep in mind when we speak the word ‘spirit’.

The Spirit, in the words of our Catechism (BCP 852, 3rd Q/A), “leads us into all truth and enables us to grow in the likeness of Christ.” That is, the Spirit enables us to receive the Word of God and the Sacraments, and transforms us over time into the image of Christ. The Spirit functions as a sort of catalyst in the chemical sense, not adding anything to the chemical reaction, but making it happen.

How am I supposed to recognize the presence of the Spirit in my life? Pentecostal and charismatic Christians emphasize the extraordinary gifts, such as speaking in unknown languages. We don’t discount these gifts, but we don’t demand to see them in order to recognize the Spirit’s presence. Again from the Catechism (4th Q/A): “We recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit when we confess Jesus Christ as Lord and are brought into love and harmony with God, with ourselves, with our neighbors, and with all creation” (BCP 852),

That’s a useful answer because it makes clear that the Spirit enables not just my relationship to God, but a thick web of relationships that extend to all creation. As the ecologists remind us, everything is eventually connected to everything, and the Spirit is concerned with nothing less.

It’s also an answer that needs some unpacking, because confessing Jesus Christ as Lord and achieving harmony with ourselves and our neighbors don’t always converge in the short term. Paul’s witness in Athens (our first reading) is met with scoffing, and the backdrop of Peter’s letters (our second reading) is that faithful witness regularly meets with persecution. This doesn’t mean that we stop confessing Jesus. It does mean that because our desire is for that “love and harmony,” there’s no place for arrogance in our witness. Recall Peter’s words from today’s reading: “Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”

If we have been baptized, we have received this gift of the Holy Spirit. This is the confidence that we have as Christians: a loving Father before us, Jesus Christ our brother beside us, and the Holy Spirit among and within us, enabling us to respond with Jesus to the Father.

Let’s continue in the Catechism (top of p.853): “Q. How do we recognize the truths taught by the Holy Spirit? A. We recognize truths to be taught by the Holy Spirit when they are in accord with the Scriptures.” The Spirit is not going to contradict the Scriptures. The Spirit is going to stretch our understanding of the Scriptures, show us the inadequacies of our current ways of reading Scripture—recall the Spirit drafting Peter into preaching to the Gentiles. If my understanding of the Scripture isn’t getting stretched I’m probably not paying attention.

So far the Catechism. But what of personal experience, on which our culture puts a great deal of value? There doesn’t seem to be much about personal experience in these lines from the Catechism. Isn’t there more to say?

Well, yes. Recall the second lesson. Peter is talking about the Noah story and says: “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience.” That phrase “an appeal to God” reminds us of the central role of desire in our Christian life. The Christian life is a life marked by desire.

My baptism is not simply something in my past, but equally the definition of my identity now: a desire to live, to live as a human being, to live as Jesus lived (from our tradition’s perspective, three ways of saying the same thing).

We think of God as characteristically telling us what to do. But God equally characteristically asks us what we want, what we desire. A knitter will save a lot of effort if she decides at the start whether she’s knitting a scarf or a stocking cap, rather than figuring it out later. We save a lot of effort—God knows—if we decide what we want, who we want to be sooner rather than later—and stick to it.

Staying clear on this desire in this sense is easier said than done in our culture, which specializes in inciting in us unlimited contradictory desires. We periodically fall for it—so confession is a regular part of our worship. So we need to be in the habit of asking ourselves: are my decisions and patterns of life nurturing and protecting this desire, or letting the world sidetrack it?

Meanwhile, Jesus in the Gospel speaks of guarding his commandments or words. Do we desire to experience the Spirit working in our life? Obey Jesus. It’s a cycle: the Spirit enables us to obey Jesus; obedience opens us to the power of the Spirit. Is there a limit to the effects of this cycle? It would appear not. In last week’s Gospel reading we heard: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”

This is one of the reasons why our tradition speaks so frequently of the importance of a daily encounter with Scripture. How are we supposed to guard Jesus’ words if we don’t know them? If I’ve got the NYT on my Smartphone, I probably want the Daily Office there too.

A final observation. In our world, as in Athens in Paul’s time, there are plenty of philosophic and religious traditions about God. How to distinguish between the true and the false? Recall Jesus’ answer to this question. It’s not simply: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” but (from John 8) “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Follow Jesus’ teaching and see for yourself what happens. If the bumblebee started by trying to puzzle out the aerodynamics of its flight, it’d never get off the ground. So in following Jesus: walking on the water doesn’t look like it’s going to work—until we’re doing it. And this is a lesson some of us have to learn over and over. And this is simply another way of saying what we’ve heard in today’s Gospel: guarding Jesus’ commandments, Jesus’ words, opens us to the life-giving and transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

With Jesus’ ascension we are not left orphans. The ascended Jesus has sent us the Holy Spirit. Keeping Jesus’ words, we open ourselves to that Spirit’s presence and power. Alleluia.

About those “unruly wills and affections of sinners” (5th Sunday in Lent, 3/17/2024)

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Readings

This morning’s collect:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

It would be hard to improve on that collect as a guide to our lessons—and I’m not going to try. Rather, we’ll look at the collect, and then use it as a lens for looking at the lessons.

First, notice where the collect ends up: joy: “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” God is seeking nothing less than our joy. C.S. Lewis nails it in The Screwtape Letters in Screwtape’s description of God:

“He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it: at His right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore’. Ugh!” (Letter XXII)

Particularly as we approach Holy Week, we need to remember that the sorrow and suffering of Holy Week are on the way to something else: our joy and God’s.

To get to joy there’s work to be done, and that occupies the rest of the collect: “the unruly wills and affections of sinners.” Our wills and affections are “unruly” not only because they may run counter to God’s rule, but also because they’re very imperfect indicators of even what we really want. The British ethicist Oliver O’Donovan recently took this up: “We cannot take any of them [desires] at their face value. ‘It wasn’t what I really wanted!’ is the familiar complaint of a disappointed literalism. To all desire its appropriate self-questioning: what wider, broader good does this desire serve? How does it spring out of our strengths, and how does it spring out of our weaknesses? Where in relation to this desire does real fulfilment lie?”

Strange, isn’t it? In most areas our culture encourages us to be suspicious; three of our great secular “saints” are the masters of suspicion: Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. But when it comes to our desires that same culture encourages no suspicion. When a desire says “Jump!” my only appropriate response is “How high?” With a little more wisdom, when a desire appears, we might well ask “Well, what’s that about?”

Our collect asks God to “order” these desires: “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise.” Both love and desire are in themselves good; if they can just be properly connected to appropriate objects! And, as the collect recognizes, loving God’s commands and desiring what God promises are not bad places to start.

Our first lesson, the promise of salvation in Jeremiah, deals with the people of God as a whole. God will make a new covenant. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” How this will happen is not explained. And while the New Testament (“the New Covenant”) picks up Jeremiah’s language, it is reticent about claiming too much. In the light of the history of the Church, that’s probably fortunate. That said, the collect’s “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise” sounds very much like the interior change we need.

Our psalm continues the same themes. As you may recall, all of Ps 119, the longest of the psalms in the Psalter, is dedicated to the praise of the Law. The bottom line, again, is joy (note “delight” in vv 14, 16). And because of the joy and for the sake of future joy the psalmist immerses him- or herself in the Law, treasuring it, meditating on it, probing it, putting it into practice. (In passing, notice that the psalmist is assuming a certain amount of simple memorization, a practice that has too much fallen out of fashion in our tradition.)

In our New Testament lessons we watch the concerns of the collect play out in Jesus’ life. While there’s no suggestion that Jesus shares our sinfulness, it’s clear that even for Jesus obedience is not effortless. Hebrews tells us: “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.”

Again, in the Gospel Jesus looking toward to his own death says “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” The other Gospels describe Jesus wrestling with the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane; this is John’s Gethsemane scene. “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’?” This is how the collect’s “Grant your people grace to love what you command” plays out.

It has to do with the Father’s will, it has to do—and this is essentially to say the same thing—with the sort of world the Father created: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” This applies to Jesus’ followers; it applies equally to Jesus. Again, Jesus does not send us down a road on which he has not already walked.

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.