About 3000 years ago, a man named David, King of Israel, was laying in a field at night, gazing at the stars. He was awed by how vast the night sky was – more stars than he could count. Yet, what came to his mind is that God’s love for humans exceeded God’s love for the vast expanse of the heavens. However awesome the nighttime heavens are, God is more concerned about humans than the infinite space of the cosmos. David found the heavens awesome, God apparently finds humans more awesome than the cosmic universe. Humans, tiny and frail and sinful were still God’s focus and God’s first love. David sang:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have established; what is a human that You are mindful of him, and mortals that You care for them?
Yet You made him little less than God, and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! (Psalms 8:3-9)
What is a human?
3000 years ago, King David was humans as beings created to know and worship God, and to be crowned by God with glory and honor. Humans were created to be faithful stewards of God’s creation, to work with God to co-create the world into God’s kingdom.
Humans were created to have continual communion with God. We were meant to be God’s continual point of contact with all of creation. God was to live in our hearts (Deuteronomy 30:14). We were created to have this inner spiritual lives – in our hearts (Luke 17:21, Romans 7:22) so that the entire creation would be blessed by God through us. Humans are awesome to God, for humans were created with a heart large enough to be a home for God to dwell on earth.
It is this inner spiritual life – the heart which is meant to be heaven – which makes us human, which makes us unique among all God’s creatures, which makes us unique in all the universe. Our hearts were meant to be a temple for the Holy Spirit.
And because our hearts are capable of being such a vast expanse we often feel an emptiness in our hearts which we try to fill with things other than God. But it doesn’t work and so our cravings create problems for us as we look in all the wrong places to find something to fill our hearts. Some fill their hearts with everything or perhaps anything except God – with food, alcohol, pornography, mindless entertainment, politics, internet debates, voyeuristic news about celebrities. All those things we can’t seem to get enough of come to displace God in our hearts. And then we wonder why we are spiritually ill!
If we want the Holy Spirit to abide in our hearts, we have to make room in our hearts for the Holy Spirit. We have to push out all these other things that compete in our hearts for space. Sometimes the waste is so deep we need a shovel to dig out even a little room for God’s Spirit
Our hearts are capable of being a temple for the Holy Spirit, which God readily gives to us. As we celebrate Pentecost we realize God is offering completely of Himself to us – to abide in our hearts so that we can each make God present in our lives for the good of the entire cosmos.
And in the Acts of the Apostles, which we read for the Feast of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-11), we see God’s Spirit comes upon the apostles in the forms of fiery tongues. A flame which kindles divine illumination in us – a Light capable of driving out all darkness from our hearts.
Jesus use a vert different image in the Gospel lesson for Pentecost (John 7:37-52, 8:12) – not fire but water. He speaks about a spring of living water that wells up in the heart. This is flowing water, moving with vigor and vitality bringing life and power to all it touches. Christ’s imagery brings to mind a passage from the Holy Prophet Ezekiel:
Then he brought me back to the door of the temple; and behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east); and the water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. Then he brought me out by way of the north gate, and led me round on the outside to the outer gate, that faces toward the east; and the water was coming out on the south side. Going on eastward with a line in his hand, the man measured a thousand cubits, and then led me through the water; and it was ankle-deep. Again he measured a thousand, and led me through the water; and it was knee-deep. Again he measured a thousand, and led me through the water; and it was up to the loins. Again he measured a thousand, and it was a river that I could not pass through, for the water had risen; it was deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be passed through. And he said to me, “Son of man, have you seen this?” Then he led me back along the bank of the river. As I went back, I saw upon the bank of the river very many trees on the one side and on the other. . . . And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” (Ezekiel 47:1-12)
For Ezekiel, the spiritual water to which Christ refers begins flowing at the altar and flows out of the temple and away from the temple. And the further Ezekiel gets away from the temple, the deeper the waters become. And for us there is an image of the Holy Spirit moving through time and space, away from the original outpouring at Pentecost. Low and behold the outpouring gets greater, deeper the further we move away from the temple and that original pouring forth of the Holy Spirit.
Almost in every generation leaders have complained that things are worse now than in previous generations. You can see that in almost every century Christians write that the earlier Christians in previous centuries were more devout and faithful. Yet the Church continues to grow, and Ezekiel’s vision is that instead of the water trickling down to nothing, it is getting ever deeper. And these deep waters of the outpouring of God’s Spirit are giving life up and down the banks of the river. Things aren’t getting worse – they are changing without a doubt, but the spiritual spring flowing from Christ is increasing not decreasing.
And it is we Christians who have to make our hearts capable of bearing this outpouring of the Holy Spirit so that we can bring the divine life to all of creation. We have a God-given role to fill in creation – we have a God-given obligation to fulfill our role. The entire creation, not only all of the people of the world, but the entire created world and cosmos are waiting on us to make it possible for them to participate in God.
Fraternized 