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(A Whit-Sunday Sermon)
‘My Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.’
Hag_2:5
I. For us who are spared to give thanks again another year to Almighty God for the fullness of His great Pentecostal gift, it might be enough that we repeat our great hymn of faith, and testify our unchanged belief steadfastly in that faith once delivered to the saints; for it is a chief use of the recurring festivals of the Church, that year by year, in spite of the discordant utterances which we may have heard, we testify that our faith is still unchanged, so we give thanks to God and say ‘the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one: the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, yet not three Gods but one God.’ God is one and yet three, three Persons and one God, God the Holy Ghost is one, yet are three diversities of gifts. We cannot speak of them all; but of one point in reference to all we should make sure, that the Holy Spirit is the author of them all; so varied, so wonderful, so beautiful are the manifold Divine intricacies in which we live, that it is in some sense not wonderful if man becomes absorbed and confounded in his researches and discoveries in the things which he sees. We are reminded of the Author and Giver of life. He is the finger of God, giving as it were the last touch to all the perfection and beauty which we see around us. Of all His varied operations let us confess again that He is the Perfecter and continued support. And yet while we cannot speak of all, or of many of the operations of the Holy Spirit, one, and that a most principal one, the Church brings again prominently before us to-day; to-day is Whitsuntide and also the beginning of Ember week, the week that is set apart by the Church, with special prayer and fasting, in preparation for the ordination next Sunday. Next Sunday our Archbishops and Bishops will again begin the hymn, ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,’ singing it as a solemn prayer while the candidates are kneeling waiting for admittance into the holy office of priesthood. It would be a blasphemous mockery and impudent imposition to use the words ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost, for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands,’ unless the ministry is intended to be a peculiar channel of Divine grace, and to be regarded as the appointed instrument for singular operations of God the Holy Ghost; unless, in fact, it claims Divine authority and power. On Whitsunday, the Sunday which begins the Ember week, the week of special preparation for the Christian ministry, we may well again repeat our belief in the old teaching of the Christian Church: that the ministry which we have is according to the will of Christ our Lord, and actuated by the Divine Presence of God the Holy Ghost. ‘My Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.’
II. An apostolic ministry does not mean merely a ministry springing out of the earth at the date when the Apostles lived, but a ministry which through the Apostles has the Divine sanction of the will of our Lord Himself. It is this ultimate resolution of the ministry into the Divine will which is at once the cause of the contention, and which is alone worth contending for. Our Blessed Lord forewarned us that it would be so when He asked that vital question regarding the ministry of the Baptist, ‘The baptism of John, was it from heaven or of men? answer Me.’ The Pharisees felt the danger of saying definitely it was from men, for the people still believed in the supernatural and in God; all men counted John as a prophet, but far more did they see the importance of committing themselves to a statement that the ministry was Divine, ‘If we shall say from Heaven, he will say, Why then did ye not believe him?’ To believe in the minister would involve them in a belief in Christ, belief in Christ must imply confession of sinfulness and absolute self-surrender. They felt the pressure of the Divine Presence in the question of the origin of the ministry: they adopted a consistent Agnostic position, and withheld their confession both of the ministry and of Christ. The same warning is implied in other words of our Lord regarding His own ministry. ‘I am come in My Father’s name, and ye receive Me not; if another should come in his own name, him ye will receive.’ To come in one’s own name is to come to the world as one of its own, and the world will receive its own. The greater the ability the more flattered does the world seem by the greatness of one of its own; it is but a part of itself after all that it is called upon to obey. But if a man come in the name of another, and that other not of this world but from above, then the whole relation becomes changed, and the sinful creature feels instinctively a shrinking at the Divine authority and Presence, which through the messenger is drawing men. ‘I am come in My Father’s name, and ye receive Me not.’ Such a ministry could not, of course, be taken up and laid aside like a mere civil appointment. This Hooker has admirably expressed: ‘They which have once received this power may not think to put it off and on like a cloak as the weather suiteth: to take it, reject and resume it, as oft as themselves list, of which profane and impious contempt these later times have yielded, as of all other kinds of iniquity and apostasy, strange examples; but let them know who put their hands unto this plough, that once consecrated unto God they are made His peculiar heritage for ever. Suspensions may stop, and deprivations utterly put off the use or exercise of power before given; but voluntarily it is not in the power of man to separate and pull asunder what God by His authority coupleth.’ And this was evidently the teaching of the Church at the close of the second century, for Tertullian rallies the heretics of his day with their ‘careless, capricious, and inconsistent ordinations,’ wherefore he says,’ One man is Bishop to-day, another to-morrow; to-day deacon who to-morrow will be reader; to-day Presbyter who to-morrow will be layman, for even to laymen,’ he adds, ‘they commit the priestly offices.’ Such a system he well calls ‘futilis, humana, terrena.’ It tells nothing against this Divine origin and power of the ministry that it borrows names and outward form from organisations existing in the world in which it works; this is nothing more than the taking of the dust of the ground to make the first Adam, or taking of the flesh of the Blessed Virgin to accomplish the Incarnation of the Son of God. This was done, ‘not by the conversion of the Godhead into Flesh, but by taking the Manhood into God.’ He was very God, and He became very Man, and the Spirit of God dwelt in Him without measure. We see Him in the tabernacle of His human flesh, full of grace and truth. The common thornbush of the desert, burning, yet unconsumed.
III. We may, then, on this festival of the Holy Spirit, acknowledge our thankfulness and encourage ourselves by the words of the Lord, ‘My Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.’ But the whole context of the passage teaches us that the possession of a ministry with Divine authority, and empowered with the Divine energy of the Holy Ghost, should be no mere substitute for human energy, or for the exercise and development to the uttermost of the human faculties. The message of the prophet Haggai conveyed indeed the essential assurance of the Divine Presence, ‘My spirit is amongst you,’ but it was also an earnest exhortation to work: ‘Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel! saith the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Josedech, the high priest, and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work.’ It is an exhortation, not only to work, but to combined, united work. We have, in this Ember week, been vindicating the special claim of the Christian ministry to a peculiar share in the supernatural gifts of Pentecost; but this implies no monopoly. When our Saviour ‘ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and received gifts for men.’ Not only Joshua the high priest, but also Zerubbabel the governor, and all the people are exhorted to take their part in the restoration of Jerusalem and work. It should be the same with us now. The clergy are not the Church, but the laity and clergy, the whole body of the faithful together.
Bishop Edward King.