A Sermon for Trinity 19
October 6, 2024 at Holy Communion
Ephesians 4:17–32, Matthew 9:1–8
“Deep calls to deep” (Psalm 42:7). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
One of the most important educational experiences of my life was a hospital chaplaincy internship I took in Halifax, but the first time that I applied for it I didn’t get in. A year later, when I was admitted, I was able to ask my supervisor what had gone wrong in my interview the previous year.
One of the issues was that, when I was asked what “spiritual care” meant, I gave the answer, “Spiritual care involves giving people the sacraments and talking with them about Christian teaching.” That’s an answer that might get you a B+ at a Christian high school, but it’s not what they were looking for.
Once I was in the program I understood. In the same way that “physical care” is care for the physical body, “spiritual care” is care for the spirit. It isn’t the means of treatment that is spiritual, but the object of treatment. Your care for another person isn’t spiritual just because you open a Bible, but because you use your Bible to speak to a person’s inner life. Every human being is spiritual, because every human being is *spirit*. Spiritual care means helping people to go beneath the surface and experience healing in the inner self.
Our readings are full of language about the inner self, and, among other terms, it uses that same word, “spirit.” In our Epistle St Paul tells us to be renewed “in the spirit of our mind” (Ephesians 4:23). This means, he says, “putting on the new self” (v 24). Earlier, he said that we need to get over the “ignorance” caused by the hardness of our “hearts” (v 18).
He uses three words—”spirit,” “self,” “heart”—but he means the same thing: the foundation of what we are. The inner self is the person we are even before our conscious experience of thinking or feeling, the person we come to know through introspection and mysticism, the person who is either bathed in the light of God or mired in darkness.
Our Gospel uses similar language. The scribes, we hear, “speak *within themselves*” that Jesus is blaspheming, and Jesus says that they “think evil in their hearts” (Matthew 9:3–4). Their spirits—their hearts, their life “within themselves”—are hard, and therefore they are unreceptive to the work of God.
Our Collect prayer uses both the words “spirit” and “heart.” But in this case we mention our heart and God’s Spirit, as we pray, “that *thy Holy Spirit* may in all things direct and rule *our hearts*.” There is a parallel between God’s spirit and ours. God is spirit, scripture says (John 4:24), but man is also spirit (1 Corinthians 2:11). We ask for God’s Holy Spirit to renew our hearts because there is an affinity between spirit and spirit, between God’s heart and ours.
The way we typically tell apart the human spirit and the Spirit of God in the Bible is by using the word “holy”: God’s Spirit is “the Holy Spirit.” But “holy” is just an adjective, not a proper name. “Holy Spirit” means “the spirit which is holy,” so of course the Spirit of the holy God is the “holy Spirit.” But the human spirit also becomes holy when God touches it. That’s the entire point of our Collect, and of Paul’s preaching that we need to be “renewed in the spirit of our mind.” The “new self,” St Paul tells us, is “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24). We become the likeness of God we were intended to be in the beginning when God makes our spirits holy.
So, although most Bible translations obscure this, there is in fact an ambiguity in many New Testament passages about whether the word “spirit” is referring to the human spirit or the divine spirit. Even, for example, the repeated phrase “receive the Holy Spirit” could mean, “Receive into yourself God the Spirit, the third person of the Trinity” or it could mean, “Receive holiness into your human spirit; be transfigured from natural to spiritual man.”
Or it could mean both at the same time. When your spirit is touched by the holiness of God, you are no longer profane spirit, the old self, but you are now a holy spirit, a new self. God takes you for his own dwelling place. He makes yourself into his self. The barrier between you and God breaks down, for the truth of your spirit is from then on the Holy Spirit of God. The breath in your nostrils is the Breath which proceeds from the Father.
St Paul even gives a hint of this in our Epistle: the problem with hardness of heart is that it causes “alienation from the life of God” (v 18). When our hearts are renewed, that alienation is overcome, and the life of God becomes our life. We become intimate with God, God living in us and we in him. As Paul says elsewhere, “it is God who works in you” (Philippians 2:13) when you live close to God.
It is perplexing that St Paul gives us so little direction about *how* to “be renewed in the spirit of our minds.” The only piece of advice he gives is this: “put off your old self” (Ephesians 4:22). The implication is that, as *we* put off the old self, *God* gives us the new self. After all, Paul doesn’t say, “Renew yourselves in your spirit,” but “be renewed”: God is the one who renews. But he only renews those ask, and there is no genuine way to ask except to prepare yourself to receive.
There’s a parallel to this in our Gospel. Jesus asks the scribes why they “think evil in their hearts”: that’s the old self. He doesn’t tell them what to do about the hardness of their spirit—but he does show them when he says to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven” (Matthew 9:2). God releases us from the old self by forgiveness. All the scribes need is for Jesus to call out their hardness of heart so that they can know themselves. Then renewal is available to them in an instant through repentance and knowledge of God’s forgiveness. Forgiven, the new self grows up from the ground of the heart like crocuses in the spring.
What I learned back in my chaplaincy internship was quite true: renewal happens when the deep things of the human spirit are pointed out, given space to breathe, and unbound. You will be renewed in your spirit—and your mind through your spirit, and your actions through your mind—when you find the hard places in your heart and let them go. Then God will live in you, and you in God.
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