The Lord and Giver of Life
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This is a translation of the homily for Pentecost (year III) in Husnes Church in Kvinnherad, Norway, Sunday 8th June, 2025. The readings are as follows: Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-11; and John 14:23-29. When quoting Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version (RSV), corrected to British spelling, unless otherwise noted.
Collect of the day (translated by yours truly):
Let us Pray:
Holy Spirit, our Giver of Life, we give you thanks and praise. You sent your Fire over the disciples on Pentecost and gave them wisdom and power. We pray: Keep the faith and love burning among us, so that we may boldly preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, our Lord, He who with you and the Father lives and reigns, one true God, world without end. Amen.
This year marks the 1700 year anniversary of the Nicene Creed, composed at the first council of Nicaea, in modern day Turkey, in 325. There, they formulated the universal and catholic belief in Jesus Christ, that He is fully God and fully man, of one being with the Father. But not much was said of the Holy Spirit, except this: “And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit.” But after the council some groups of people formed and was given the nickname the Pneumatomachi, from the Greek Pneumatomákhoi, “those who battle against the Spirit.” They held that the Spirit is not God.1 And therefore there came an addition to the creed in 381, at the first council of Constantinople, emphasising the divinity of the Holy Spirit: “And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.”2 Later, the Western churches added the Filioque (“and the Son”), that the Spirit proceeds from, or rather, through the Son.3 But the main point is that the creed maintains that the Spirit is God, that He is worshipped, and that He makes us alive. Today I will try to reflect on this, from today’s readings.
From December until now, the Church has celebrated three important feasts of Christ: Christmas, Easter, and the Ascension. These are all feasts that reveal to us who Christ is, and what He has done for us: that He, who is God, became man, lived as a man, suffered, died, and rose again as a man, and returned to sit at the right hand of the Father.4 And through this, He laid the foundation for us to be transformed. He atoned for our sins and reconciled us to God. But then we come to Pentecost. Pentecost is often called the birthday of the church. And this can be a good image, but only partially. Because the point is not that we should focus on ourselves, but on God, and therefore it might as well be called the Day of the Spirit’s Revelation.5
Pentecost is the day when the Spirit was revealed to the Apostles and the first Christians, but also the day when the Spirit revealed the truth to the Church, the truth about Christ. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel: “The Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Jesus calls the Spirit the Counsellor, for He reveals what Jesus has said to us, and comforts us. But He is also called the Spirit of Truth, as He guides us into all Truth. This is what Pentecost is all about. In our first reading, we have heard the story of the Tower of Babel. We read about those who tried to build a tower that reached to heaven, but God prevented them from doing so by giving them many different languages. The point of this story is that no ordinary person should have absolute power. But then, on the day of Pentecost, after Jesus had returned to heaven, we see that this is changed, as we heard in the second reading. People heard the words of the apostles in their own languages. “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” they asked. “And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” Here, we see that the story of the Tower of Babel is turned upside down. For the point of the Apostles is not that we should reach up to God by our own power, but that God comes to us. God became man in Christ to atone for our sins. And after Jesus returned to heaven, as we celebrated on Ascension Day, He sent the Spirit who came to lead us into the truth, both the truth about Jesus, as Saviour, and the truth about us, as sinners in need of salvation.
We often think of the Father as the one who sends the Son, and of the Son, of Jesus, as the one who saves us. But the Spirit is often forgotten. But as I said, it is He who is the Giver of Life, it is He who has spoken through the prophets. It is He who inspires us, and who makes it so that we can accept what Jesus has done for us. Yes, as St. Paul says in Romans 8, we are “in Christ,” yet he also maintains, in the same chapter, that this is and remains the work of the Spirit. It is He who is the Giver of Life.
One who has taught us much about this, is Basil of Caesarea or St. Basil the Great. He and two others we called the Cappadocian Fathers, as they came from Cappadocia, which is in modern day Turkey, and is one of the places named in the story from Acts in the second reading. They lived during the fourth century, and were active some decades after the council of Nicaea. And it was partly because of their work, and particularly the work of St. Basil, that we got the formulations on the Holy Spirit in 381. It says there that it is the Spirit who is the Giver of Life. Yes, Christ has objectively reconciled us with God, but we need faith to grasp this. And this is where the Spirit comes in. It is through the Spirit that we are made partakers in God, it is through the Spirit that we receive faith, and He is given to us through the means of grace, especially through baptism.6 Every baptism is like a mini Pentecost which gives us life and inspires us to renewal. St. Basil puts it this way:
If there is any grace in the water, it does not come from the nature of the water, but from the Spirit’s presence, since baptism is not a removal of dirt from the body, but an appeal to God for a clear conscience [1 Peter 3:21]. The Lord describes in the Gospel the pattern of life we must be trained to follow after the (baptismal) resurrection: gentleness, endurance, freedom for the defiling love of pleasure, and from covetousness. We must be determined to acquire in this life all the qualities of the life to come.7
We only get to share in this through the Spirit, and He can only do this because He is God, because only God can give life, only God can save, only God is holy, and thus only God can give us a share in holiness. And when He is allowed to work in us, to faith, He can also create something new, as St. Basil says. He says that the Spirit says that we “must be determined to acquire in this life all the qualities of the life to come.” But what is it? As Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel, it’s about love: “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words; and the word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.”
The Father has sent the Son, who atoned for our sins. But Christ sends us the Spirit, who is the one who makes this a reality in our lives. God dwells in us, and then we can live in love. When we are justified by faith, we also receive this love, as it says in Romans 5:1-5:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
By the Spirit, who makes the work of Christ real in our lives, we receive peace in our hearts, not the peace that the world gives us, which is only the absence of conflict, but the inner peace that transforms us, re-creates us. By Christ, and in the Holy Spirit, we also ascend to heaven, but not by our own efforts. For this is the opposite of those who built the Tower of Babel. Instead of preaching that we can reach up to God by our own works, the Apostles preached that God is the one who came to us and who now draws us up, by grace. By the Spirit we are allowed to share in Jesus’ ascension, as we read in Ephesians 2:6: “[God the Father] has raised us up with [Christ], and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” But this is given to us by the Spirit. In v.18 it says that through Christ we “have access in one Spirit to the Father.” We need the Spirit, who makes us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). But this is and remains a gift. We cannot do this ourselves. This was given to us in baptism, where we received the Holy Spirit, who creates the faith that saves us.
And in the Spirit we can live the life we are called to, in thanksgiving and prayer. But this is not just a one-time act. You cannot be baptised again, but you can always look back on your baptism. When we are filled with joy, we can look back on baptism and thank God for the blessing He gave us there. When we labor and are heavy laden, we can also look back on baptism and take to ourselves again the promises we received there, that God will strengthen us with his grace to eternal life and that Jesus is with us always, to the close of the age.
But this does not have to be abstract. One of the most central places where we can receive the grace we received in baptism again and again is in the Eucharist. As a priest, I read the words of Christ, which are effective, but they work through the Holy Spirit. And therefore we have a prayer in our Eucharistic prayer called the Epiclesis, which is a Greek loan word meaning «invocation.» We invoke the Holy Spirit, we pray that God the Father might send us His Spirit: «Send your Spirit over these gifts, that we may receive Jesus Christ in the bread and wine.» This kind of prayer is quite new in our church, but it expresses in a very good way that it is precisely through the Holy Spirit that the word and the sacraments are effective.8 And we have received this from the Eastern liturgies, including the liturgy of St. Basil. And this opens furthermore for the Spirit to transform us, through the Eucharist. In the Holy Spirit, through Jesus, we may come before God the Father and receive the grace that is given to us there. We are allowed to eat the bread of life and drink the cup of salvation. For the Spirit reveals Jesus to us, but not only in the Bible. He also reveals Jesus concretely to us here and now by making him truly present in the sacrament.
As you go forward to receive the Eucharist, consider that this is the work of the Spirit in our lives, concretely. Here we share in the sacrifice of Christ, here we become one body. Pentecost is the fiftieth day of Easter. It is the day we celebrate that the Spirit has been given to us, the one who convinces us of our sin, but also of God’s grace, which has no limits. Through the Spirit, Easter is made a reality not only in history, but also in us. The Spirit points again and again to Jesus. And thus we can say that Pentecost, which happens again and again every time someone receives the Holy Spirit in baptism, and every time we receive the Eucharist, is the fulfilment of Easter in our lives. And therefore we can now cry out in the Spirit: “Abba!” “Papa!” “Our Father!”
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.
St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), ch. 11:27; 21:52 (pp. 47-48, 81-83, here: 48, 81, cf. pp.9, 12).
For the words of the creed, I am here using the translation found in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds., Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Fortress Press, 2000), 19-20, 22-23. I have made one change, from “Life-giver” to “Giver of Life,” as I find that a more beautiful and poetic expression. For the text, in Greek, with German and Latin, and introductions, see Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, vollständige neuedition, ed., Irene Dingel (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 45-50.
All this can be seen in both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. See Book of Concord, eds., Kolb and Wengert, 19-20, 21-23; Die Bekenntnisschriften, ed., Dingel, 37-50.
I first saw this expression (in Norwegian) in a text by Dag Øyvind Østereng, but I cannot find the source at the moment. I think it was in the newspaper Dagen but I cannot find it. He called it Åndens åpenbaringsdag.
From a Lutheran perspective, this is formulated in Confessio Augustana (CA), art. V: “So that we may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments was instituted. For through the Word and the sacraments as through instruments the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God in those who hear the gospel.” For the translation of CA, with introductions, see Book of Concord, eds., Kolb and Wengert, 27-105. Also see Die Bekenntnisschriften, ed., Dingel, 65-225.
St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, ch. 15:35 (pp. 57-60, here: 59).
This is also basic Lutheran theology. Yes, we emphasise that the word is effective, but it is so through the Holy Spirit (CA 5).