You can be baptised but have little experience of the Holy Spirit. We know you can be baptised and have little experience of the church - compare the numbers in our baptism registers with those in our service registers! Yet those of us who come to Church still need encouragement to welcome the Holy Spirit and today’s Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is such an encouragement.
In the second reading we heard of the predicament of the Samarian Christians. ‘Peter and John… prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus). They laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 8:15-17).This passage is often read at confirmation services where the Bishop does what Peter and John did - lay hands on those baptised invoking the Spirit. We receive special anointing of the Spirit at baptism, confirmation and ordination but need to experience what God has given us.
How do we wake up to the Holy Spirit?
Scripture gives us two answers – by looking outside of ourselves and inside of ourselves.
Our Lord welcomed the Holy Spirit from above as in today’s Gospel. Elsewhere he speaks of the Holy Spirit flowing from within as in John 7:38: ‘Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water’.
Scripture records how Moses’s faith lit up when God kindled a flame in the burning bush and yet Paul advised Timothy to ‘rekindle the gift of God which is within’ (2 Timothy 1:6).
Sometimes we need to ask God to give us a vision of himself outside of ourselves so we get humbled into receiving his love. Other times we seek a release from the stuff within us that’s blocking the flow of that love.
If we have been baptised God is already at work within us. In Timothy’s case Paul reminded him that he’d laid hands on him for the Holy Spirit to come years ago. Wake up, he said, to what God has given you. Stir up the gift – in another translation.
I always think of sugar in the bottom of an unstirred cup of tea. Does that fit your life this morning? God’s inside of you but your life needs sweetening by a bit of a stir? Or, to use another image, that of a gas fire, is it a matter of recognising the pilot light is lit within you but you need to turn the gas on and let the Holy Spirit really take hold of you?
Come, Holy Spirit, and awaken us! You are God in the present moment, make God more present to us, stir us up within, ignite our faith and our prayer on this Feast!
Today Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Christ which means the Anointed One. To be a Christian is to share in the anointing of the Anointed One. As we heard in the Gospel: ‘Jesus Christ will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire’ (Luke 3:16).
How do we wake up to the Holy Spirit?
I remember as a student meeting a special priest who had holiness and integrity. Just a few choice words now and then from him were like commands from God - the Holy Spirit zapped me through those words and got me praying - and you know, the more you pray the more you want to pray! Then the more the Spirit burns within us, the more others around us are drawn to the fire of God’s love. Our thirst for God - and the Spirit gives you a thirst for God - infects others. When we pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’ - and I recommend doing that as part of offering your life to God first thing every morning - we see spiritual needs and opportunities and the hand of God working in our lives hour by hour.
Brother Roger of Taize once said something that’s at the heart of church growth and revitalisation by the Spirit. He said: ‘When the church becomes a house of prayer the whole world will come running!’. It is so. As another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, said three centuries before him: ‘Holiness is the church’s greatest influence’. The Holy Spirit who works through scripture and the pulpit works to make the bread and wine extraordinary so that you and I can be extraordinary - the Holy Spirit makes us so. That extraordinariness links to both suffering and the supernatural.
When I see joy on the faces of Christians near to death - I think of my friend Eve - it is the Spirit. When I hear people speaking in tongues, I recognise a supernatural gift of the Holy Spirit. Speaking in tongues is a love language commended as an aid for private prayer by St Paul though its public use can have extraordinary impact. I commend praying for this gift if your prayer life is in the doldrums.
An awakening to the Spirit, a releasing of the Spirit, an unblocking of his flow – this is the invitation and challenge of today’s Feast which links in with suffering and experience of the supernatural. There is ‘one baptism for the forgiveness of sins’ and it confers the Holy Spirit. A gift though when given needs to be received. For Christians to seek the renewing power of the Spirit – we do so as we receive Holy Communion every Sunday - is a matter of seeking to be more fully what we are meant to be in Christ in terms of spiritual empowerment and nothing less!
We want to be people who know their need for such empowerment! Meanwhile the Spirit is waiting to confirm to us the same words spoken to Our Lord at his baptism: ‘You are my Son, [my Daughter], the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’ (Luke 3:22). Come, Holy Spirit!
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