One of the most difficult understandings regarding “faith” and “grace” and “salvation is that they all require passive stances on our part. That is, there is nothing any of us can do to “get” faith, or to “earn” grace or to “deserve” salvation. Nothing we can ever do will result in our obtaining faith or grace or salvation. We neither deserve them, nor do we have a “right” to them, nor is there any act whatsoever that we can perform that will supply them for us. Regarding these three dynamics, we are like helpless putty in God’s hand, since God is the sole and only source of faith or grace or salvation, and they come to us ONLY as free, totally unearned gifts to us from God.

But what can give us hope is the knowledge that God very much WANTS to give us those gifts – as soon as we truly want them enough and as soon as we are ready and willing to receive them. And I remind you that the one solitary thing God needs from us in order to bestow these gifts is our own desire to have them. God cannot force them on us; we are free, always, to reject them.

As I thought about the sermon for today, I began to realize that in today’s feast we have liturgically come to the ultimate step in God’s self-revelation.

All of this began, of course, with God’s pouring out a bit of the Divine Self that overflowed into the creation of human beings – an act that continues and is repeated for each of us as we become fully human. Just in our very existence, God has revealed a significant bit of Godself, and it was an incredibly deep and mystical insight that gave those ancient and primitive writers of Genesis the insight to declare that we humans are made as a “shadow” of God. (And, as I’m sure I have pointed out in the past, the Hebrew word tselem we usually translate as “image” has “shadow” as it’s first meaning.) If we can ever come to see ourselves as we truly are, we will recognize that we are in ourselves reflections of God, shadows of Godself --- that we are, in ourselves, earthly revelations of God. Every human being is a theophany, an epiphany, a manifestation of at least some dimensions of God’s own nature. So our creation itself could be described as God’s first “incarnation” – the first general bonding of divinity with all of humanity. (And I have always felt that we missed out on something by not having a liturgical celebration of Creation itself – we have no liturgical feast of the Creation – and we ought to have.)

But anyway in God’s eternal eagerness to manifest Divinity, he had to go further: and so God sent into the world not only a shadow of himself (in the creation of all humanity), but God brought himself into this creation in the person of his divine Son, Jesus. And this spectacular second incarnation happened in order to reaffirm and reiterate our own hitherto shadowy (and almost universally ignored) union with our Creator: to provide a model by which we could see plainly before our eyes the actual union between God and humanity in the hypostatic union of Divinity and Humanity in the person of Jesus. And in that incarnation, we were not only reminded of our own divine origin, but also given tools, directions, and means by which we could claim and manifest that union in ourselves.

But even that was not enough! God wanted to make our union with him yet more accessible and comprehensible, and so today we celebrate the beginning of God’s third and last incarnation – God’s final self-manifestation in the gift of the Holy Spirit to extend beyond space and time the divine link between us and God – the link we usually call Holy Mother Church: the spiritual extension of the divine presence into all places at all times, the Mystical Body of Christ, made available to us finally by the Holy Spirit.

I can never remember which of the Fathers described this process as an hour glass: in creation, God shared his divinity with the whole human race, making all humans to be priests of creation; then, from among all people God narrowed things down to the Jews with their law and their prophets who were God’s “priests” to humanity; and then among the Jews God narrowed things still further into the singular presence of Jesus, the center point of God’s revelation -- which then spread and widened out again with the Twelve and then the rest of the disciples, and then incorporating the Gentiles, and eventually all humanity – reiterating the act of Creation itself once again.

Now Sister Monica is going to talk about the whole Trinity next Sunday – and our commemoration of Trinity Sunday is like the cherry on the top of the divine dessert. But today we concentrate on the third revelation of God: the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the assembled Church – and I want to remind you that Holy Scripture does not describe any private visitations of the Holy Spirit – rather that Spirit is manifested always within and among communities of believers – from the first Pentecost on.

But I also want to remind you that any access you and I have to God now, in the present, is access to the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who initiates, receives, and responds to our prayers; it is the Holy Spirit who confects the Sacraments; it is the Holy Spirit who guides the Synods and Councils of the Church; it is the Holy Spirit who reveals the depths of meaning in Holy Scriptures; it is the Holy Spirit who gives life to our monastic community; it is the Holy Spirit who issues calls and vocations to our life; it is the Holy Spirit who reveals mystical dimensions of the Godhead to us in our still prayer. All of our commerce and interaction with God now in our day is commerce and interaction with the Holy Spirit.

And the gifts of faith and grace and salvation that I spoke of at the beginning are all gifts of the Holy Spirit. Grace is given to all of us; faith is given to some of us; salvation is given to those who want it. And it is all from the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy Trinity.

So, in a sense today’s celebration is the celebration of our entire relationship with God – because every single dimension of that relationship is between us and God the Holy Spirit who, on this day, over two millennia ago, brought his presence to the Church --- and remains with his assembled Church forever.

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