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The Holy spirit is Moving to Nourish

Reverend Michael Hesse

(Fourth in a series of six sermons on the Holy Spirit is Moving)

Let us pray, remembering once again the Collect of this day. Gracious Father, whose Blessed Son, Jesus Christ, came down from Heaven to be the true Bread which gives life to the world, evermore give us this Bread that He may live in us and we in Him, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen.

Today is the fourth in our sermon series entitled the Spirit is Moving. On the first Sunday of Lent, Father Rob preached on the Spirit is Moving to Convict. In the week that followed, I preached the Spirit is Moving to Equip. Then last week, Father Rob preached on the Spirit is Moving to Purify. This morning I would like to share some thoughts on how the Spirit is Moving to Nourish us.

When I was a little boy I developed a creedal statement for myself in relation to food. It is a creedal statement that's been passed on, I suspect, by children from one generation to next for God alone knows how long. The creedal statement goes like this: "Life is uncertain, eat dessert first." Any of you have that same creedal statement when you were little? How many of you still have that same creedal statement today?

Then I grew up and as I went to school I found out that's really not a particularly good idea. They taught me all about balanced diets and the four food groups and the pyramid for food eating. I learned much to my dismay, and later on to my delight, that while desserts are really, really fun and they add great spice and zest to the meal, that if I wanted to grow up and have strong bones, healthy bodies and a mind that worked I needed to feed myself properly. It occurs to me that there are some analogies that are pretty similar in our journey in faith.

When it comes to things of the Spirit, a lot of us want dessert first. We want all of those sort of outward manifestations to be happening in our lives and around us. The idea of falling under the power of the Spirit seems kind of appealing or operating in the gifts, speaking in tongues, or having an interpretation or singing in the Spirit, or having a prophetic word or a word of knowledge for somebody's life, is very appealing to a lot of us. The idea of power ministry is a great spark of interest in the world around us. People gravitate to where they see God doing mighty things. But the truth is it's really dessert in terms of life in the Spirit. What the Lord would have us to do is learn how to have a balanced diet of life in the Spirit; and every week we re-enforce what we will need for that balanced diet when we have our worship together.

Get your Prayer Books out Turn to page 355 and at the top of the page you will notice that it says Holy Eucharist Rite 2, then there is a little heading underneath it. Let's read that heading together. It says, "The Word of God"; let's say that. Now, flip over a couple of pages to page 361. There you have the second half of our service and its heading says, "The Holy Communion."

Every week when we gather together for worship, we are given this prescription for a balanced diet for life in the Spirit. The Word of God and the Holy Communion. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God and Holy Communion strengthens us, prepares us, gives us direction and fits us for the work that the Lord has set before us for building up his Kingdom. So, I propose today as we talk about how the Spirit is Moving to Nourish us that we spend a little time reflecting on how He nourishes us with Word and how He nourishes us with Communion.

I was a relatively new Christian when I started college and I had received a call to priesthood at the end of my first year of college. I got all fired up; I wanted to prepare myself for seminary and so I said, "Well, what I really need to do is take some Bible classes, some courses on Scripture here at the University of Florida." So, I signed up for some and some of the teachers I had were marvelous. But, I had some other teachers who were interesting. Some of the teachers who taught me those Bible courses at the University knew Scripture forwards and backwards. They knew the Hebrew, they knew Greek and they could read it without missing a jot or tittle. They were experts in their field but they taught the Bible like my English professors taught Shakespeare. It occurred to me that they were teaching it this way because they did not really believe what it said.

Now, even as a young Christian, it occurred to me that I had seen how the Bible had transformed peoples lives throughout the generations. And while Shakespeare is wonderful to read, he doesn't transform anybody's life. So, I knew that in the midst of all this teaching something was missing, not only in the teaching but in the lives of those professors. I was to discover later what it was that was missing.

At the end of the last meal that Jesus had with His disciples before His crucifixion, our Lord made an incredible promise to them. In John, Chapter 16, He says, "I have yet many things to say to you but you cannot bear them. When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own authority but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me. He will take what is mine and declare it to you." He promises the Holy Spirit will come and clarify and glorify and teach.

When the writer to the Hebrews wrote his text, he said this, "The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit and joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." That cannot happen except by the power of the Holy Spirit who moves through the text and makes the Word leap right off the page and into your heart. That's how our lives get transformed by the Gospel. That's how our lives get transformed by the writings of Paul. That's how our lives get transformed by reading the Old Testament, because the Spirit moves through the text, in a way that it could never move through Shakespeare, and transforms our lives.

Only when that happens will we in our own walk begin to feel the truth of what Peter writes. He says, "You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable through the living and abiding word of God, for all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the Word of the Lord abides forever. That word is the Good News which was preached to you."

As I look around at our culture today it occurs to me that we are increasingly, as a generation of Christians, Biblically illiterate. My wife Claudia teaches on the high school level. She teaches some of the brightest and best at Choctaw and over the last seven or eight years while she has been teaching there, she has seen even in her own classes the way in which the young people committed to her care are increasingly illiterate about what the Bible says. There are a number of people who are brightest and best in high school who don't know significant Biblical facts and people. I'm talking, "Who is David?" "What do you mean when you say, 'Moses and the Exodus?'" As a generation, we have come to take the Bible for granted. "Oh, yeah, I know that. Oh, yeah, I've read that."

So, even in our own Bible studies as individuals a lot of times we let the text be for us as Shakespeare. We don't invite the Spirit in and so we read the text and it comes and it goes and it does not transform us. So, in our generation we find not only people in the larger culture but people within the Christian churches who are being tossed to an fro by every wind of doctrine. They have no firm foundation upon which to build their thoughts and their words and their deeds.

I find when I begin to take Scriptures for granted that the Lord has a way of drawing me back into our past. The preface for the Revised Standard Version of the Bible begins this way."The Revised Standard Version of the Bible is an authorized revision of the American Standard Version published in 1901 which was a revision of the King James Version published in 1611. The first English version of the Scriptures made by direct translation from the original Hebrew and Greek and the first to be printed was the work of William Tyndale. He met bitter opposition. He was accused of willfully perverting the meaning of the Scriptures and his New Testaments were ordered to be burned as untrue translations. He was finally betrayed into the hands of his enemies and in October 1536 was publicly executed and burned at the stake.

The Bible you hold in your hands is courtesy of the martyrdom of Tyndale and others like him. Shall you take it for granted? Why would William Tyndale and others like him throughout the centuries give up their life to get Scriptures like this in our hands? The answer is because it can change lives. It is one of the principal vehicles through which the Holy Spirit can enlighten his people. You see, Tyndale and those others had the audacity to believe that Timothy was right when he penned this, "All scripture is inspired by God (God-breathed) and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."

When we gather together on Sunday mornings we begin with the service of the Word. We hear God's Holy Scripture read to us from the pulpit. Are they just words for you? Or have you given the Spirit permission to move through those words so that they leap from the page and into your hear?

Then in the second half of the service, we move to Holy Communion. I am often asked by various folks, "Why do we have to have communion every week?" Now, the easy and simple answer is, "Because the first Christians had communion every week." But that begs the obvious questions, "Well, why did they have communion?" What was so important about gathering together to have a bite of bread and a sip of wine that they were willing to put their lives on the line for the privilege? Well, they knew the text.

Turn in your Bibles to Luke, Chapter 22 and look at verse 19, "Jesus took bread and when He had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' Likewise the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.'" Now, I am not generally inclined to share with you Greek words because who cares but there is a Greek word in this text about which we should care very much. The word we translate "remembrance" in the Greek is "anamnesis". We translate it remembrance because it is a nice short way to do it but the Greek word actually means this: To take an event from the past and by the power of the Holy Spirit to relive it in the present. Now think what the ramifications of that are: What it means is that by the grace of God and through the power of His Holy Spirit our Lord Jesus Christ himself can make himself as intimate and personal to us today as He could make himself intimate and personally available to those disciples in the upper room, or the disciples who walked on the way to Emmaeus with him when He broke bread.

You see we get caught up in communion in the midst of God's time. We get swept out of our dimension and into a whole new mystical dimension that belongs solely to the divine. And there we meet Jesus face to face, at this rail, and He nourishes us with His body and His blood. He makes himself really present to us and feeds us with honest-to-God soul food. Imagine that. The Lord makes an appointment with you and invites you to share even now in the heavenly banquet and the food He is going to give you is himself, His body, His blood.

Now, the elements of bread and wine, they are not going to change. If you stuck the bread under a microscope and if you looked at the wine in a chemical lab it would still look like wine and it would still be bread, but by the power of the Holy Spirit its substance for us would be transformed by the presence of Jesus Christ himself.

I want to read something to you. This is of an actual record of the confession made by a congregation of 49 Christians who had met in their priest's home to fulfill their bounden duty and service.

"Straightway, the pro counsel ordered Datives to be suspended on the rack and his body torn by barbed hooks. Then Saturninus the priest came forward and the pro-counsel asked, "Did you, contrary to the orders of the emperor, arrange for these persons to hold an assembly. Saturninus replied, "Certainly, we celebrated the Eucharist." "Why?" "Because the Eucharist cannot be abandoned." As soon as he said this the pro counsel ordered him to be put immediately on the rack with Dativus. Felix the son of Saturninus and a reader in the church came forward, whereupon the pro-counsel inquired of him, "I am not asking you if you are a Christian. You can hold your peace about that but were you one of the assembly and do you possess any copies of the scriptures?" "As if a Christian could exist without the Eucharist or the Eucharist be celebrated without a Christian," answered Felix, "Don't you know that a Christian is constituted by the Eucharist and the Eucharist by a Christian? Neither avails without the other. We celebrated our assembly right gloriously. We always convene at the Eucharist for the reading of the Lord's scriptures.

"Enraged by the confession, Anulinus ordered Felix to be beaten with clubs. Last of all, the lad Hilarion, the son of Saturninus remained. The pro-counsel said to him, "Will you follow your father and your brothers?" "I am a Christian", he confessed in his youthful voice, "Of my own free will I joined the assembly with my father and my brothers." The pro counsel then tried to terrify the boy by threatening torments. He said, "I shall cut off your hair and your nose and your ears. Then I will let you go." To this Hilarion replied clearly, "Do what you please; I am a Christian". The pro counsel ordered him to be returned to prison and all heard Hilarion's voice crying with great joy, "Thanks be to God!" .

So, why do we have Holy Communion? Because when you have met Jesus face to face; when you have been nourished by his blood and fed by his body; when He has made himself at home within you, there is nothing that you will not do to get back in that relationship again and again and again and again.

I think the best story and teaching I have ever received about the Eucharist and its importance was from my first-born and second-born children. When my son Nathan was four years old, he managed to come down with chicken pox and as good brothers are wont to do he passed those chicken pox on to his three-year old sister. They were both at home with raging fevers and zits all over their little bodies. On Sunday I went off to church and I reserved some of the sacraments in a little box and I took it home after the service much like we do here after the first service when we take the sacraments that have been set apart and consecrated to folks in their homes or in hospital settings. So, I took communion home and when I got there I found that Nathan and Rebecca were asleep. I put the communion kit on the mantle above the fireplace and I decided that when they woke up we would celebrate communion. After about 15 minutes, I thought, "You know what's going to happen...I am going to forget and that little box is going to sit there and its very inappropriate to not go ahead and consume the elements." So, I called my wife Claudia and we had a little service there in the living room and we ate the bread and drank the wine.

About ten minutes later, Nathan and Rebecca both got up about the same time and they came toddling down the hall. I greeted them and held them like dads do, being the official father-of-the year award recipient. I was holding them and they were smiling and laughing and they said, "Daddy, did you bring communion home?" I said, "Well, yes, I did but you were both sleeping so soundly I didn't want to wake you up and I didn't want to forget about it; so your mom and I went ahead and celebrated." You know what my son and daughter did? They cried. Now, they could not tell you what the difference is between substance and accidents. They couldn't talk to you about the real presence; they couldn't talk to you about trans-substantiation or cons-substantiation. What they knew is that I had placed them as their father on a spiritual starvation diet because in their little spirits, the Holy Spirit through the power of the Eucharist had made such an impact on their lives that they knew that they needed that renewing of a relationship every single week.

I haven't forgotten that lesson; I suspect I never will. It leads me to the truth. In John, Chapter 6, Jesus is speaking and He says, "Truly, truly, I say to you unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day, for my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him." Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord comes to us in word and in communion to give us the basics of a walk in the Spirit; the basics we will need to build upon if we are going to be effective instruments for ministry in the Lord's hands.

I love the desserts! But, the desserts are no substitute for the meal. The next time you open your Bible think of the cost of getting these words to you; think of the power that's represented in this text--the power to change your life. In a few minutes when you gather around this table, you think of the power of this Eucharist, the power that the Lord has to come and nourish you with His Body and His Blood and change your life and transform and strengthen you to be about the work He has set before you to do

Word. Sacrament. Basic parts of the Christian diet. May we never forget them and may we never, never take them for granted. Amen.