Walking in the Spirit
Part 2

Easter 5                                           6 May 2007

Last week we talked about the 7-fold gift of the Spirit, which is the complex of inner spiritual dispositions planted in the soul by the Holy Spirit when we are baptized.  These inner dispositions are part of that inward change wrought in us when we become children of God and are made to share in Christ’s own sonship with the Father.  Last week we noted that these dispositions were part of the empowerment of the Messiah for the divine work of salvation and a gift the Messiah shares with his own people to fit them for carrying on his work—to restore the world to unity with God through the Cross.  Another way of saying the same thing—but getting at another quality of our relationship with God—is to say that this gift of the Holy Spirit elevates us from being merely the creatures of God to being his children.  Through the indwelling Spirit, the Father adopts us as his own sons and daughters in his one and only Son.  This is not merely a legal fiction by which we are considered to be God’s children, even though we are not.  It is an actual sharing in the divine nature and we are given the qualities of that divine nature which fit us to be God’s own children.  These gifts enable us to live a changed life in this world.

When we are baptized we enter into the possession of these gifts and of our new status.  Christ comes to us, we come to him, the Spirit dwells in us.  This is called a state of grace.  Grace, this sharing in the divine life, becomes the environment in which we live—the sphere of unity with God and each other in Christ.  If we respond to our new environment, then all the supernatural elements of our new life are activated.  If we don’t respond, we can ruin this environment by a kind of spiritual pollution—that is, inattention and sin.  A polluted environment cannot produce growth or health.  But if we adapt ourselves to this gracious environment, then the Spirit will progressively take control of our lives and we will grow and flourish in grace. 

But here we run into a puzzle.  By all our observations, it seems that there are many different levels at which the will can respond to God, many grades of self-surrender, and the process itself never seems completed in this life.  Why doesn’t God simply make us holy all at once when the Spirit is given to us in baptism?  It would all be so much simpler.  For some reason God has not chosen to operate this way.  It is the difference between the miraculous and the supernatural.  Grace is supernatural.  That is, in baptism we are really given a divine infusion of power.  If we persevere in cooperating with this grace it will gradually supernaturalize the whole of our lives.  The miraculous is also a manifestation of divine power.  But it operates independently of cause and effect and breaks into the normal and natural to accomplish the divine purposes.  Miracles are completely under the control of God, whereas cooperation with grace is partly under our control.  It seems that ordinarily God does not wish to break into our lives by means of the miraculous.  He wishes us to learn to cooperate with his grace and to choose his ways for ourselves and to learn to live as his children in our own way and at our own speed.  In short, he respects our freedom.  If we want to be holy, then we will have to choose to be holy, every step of the way. We have available to us more resources than we will ever use—God Himself, the indwelling Spirit, Jesus our Saviour.  But we have to learn to discover, utilize, attain, acquire, strive, surrender, and sacrifice—such is the way we humans are made and apparently only so can we come at last to our perfection and happiness.  Occasionally God does supply a miracle, for his own reasons and in his own ways, but not ordinarily.  All of this seems like the long way around, but that is how reality is shaped.  If we want the quick fix, the big miracle, the magic bullet—then we want something other than what God wants to give us.

Last week we talked about part of our spiritual equipment for living into the spiritual life—the 7-fold gift of the Spirit.  These are spiritual dispositions which come into play as we give ourselves to the work of the Spiritual Life.  They don’t appear unless we are at work in the business of living for God.  Then we begin to see that the disposition to do God’s will has already been given to us, as an interior faculty rendering us responsive to grace.  Today we begin to look at the work of the Spiritual Life itself and we start with the three great virtues—faith, hope, and charity.  Virtues are qualities of character that appear in a life that has been exercising them.  We all have muscles, for example, but we are not all strong.  Strength comes as we exercise muscles we possess in ways that develop their potential.  Virtues are capacities or abilities which emerge in those who exercise them.  In order to be virtuous two things are needed: capacity and work.  Unless you have the capacity to play the piano, you can work at it forever and never play well.  But you can be filled with musical ability and never play because you are too lazy or indifferent to develop your ability.  The three great virtues—faith, hope, and charity—are not natural abilities.  They are given to us in our baptism.  The ability to believe, to hope, and to love, are planted in us by the Spirit.  But we will never be faithful, hopeful, and loving unless we work at it, unless we develop the virtues for which the Holy Spirit has given us the capacity.  These three virtues are at the heart of the spiritual life.  They are the chief ways in which the character of God’s own sons and daughters is recognized.  There are a lot of other virtues, and we will be talking about many of them, but these three are fundamental—all the others come from them.

Now we have all heard of faith before, and I probably will not say much that you do not already know.  But how often do we consider it a virtue?  If it is a virtue, then we are largely responsible for the quality of our faith.  It is a character trait which we can develop by exercise.  And that means it is mostly a matter of our will.  Of course, it is also a gift of God or we could never arrive at faith in the first place.  How do we define it?  To believe is to do two things.  First, it is to be able to know and accept something as true.  Second, it is to be able to trust.  By faith we understand that Jesus is the Son of God and our Saviour and we accept him as such.  By faith we entrust our lives to him in this world and in the next.  There is a supernatural work of grace involved in this.  Unless God gives us this faith, none of us could ever come to believe.  The life of grace begins from God’s side and we are free to cooperate with Him and allow Him to bestow upon us the faith to accept Jesus as our Saviour.  This is called conversion and it normally precedes our baptism.  In baptism we are further filled with faith when the Spirit comes to dwell in us. 

But faith does not come to us full blown.  At the beginning of our spiritual lives we see and know very little.  We do not trust God very deeply.  So we enter upon a process of learning to trust God so that we may more clearly know him.  The more we trust, the more we perceive; the more we know God the more profound is our trust in him. 

One great obstacle to faith, of course, is doubt.  You might think that doubting is related to thinking, since we have all heard that the more you are educated the more difficult it is to believe.  But that is not really true.  We are mostly tempted to doubt, not because we get some powerful new information which brings into question our fundamental Christian beliefs, but because we experience difficulties in holding to God’s will and are tempted to take back our trust.  It is true that our faith can be built on shallow thinking and then better information can shake it.  Then we must think harder and, of course, many don’t want to do that.  But it is more likely that doubts arise this way: we are battered with suffering or problems or difficulties we have not experienced before, and all of a sudden we doubt that God is with us.  Has suffering brought us some new information we did not have before?  No, we already knew about it.  But we did not experience it.  In the midst of our suffering, we have the opportunity of trusting God and continuing to live for him.  If we do, our faith is strengthened; if we fail, it is weakened. 

Faith will become a habit, a virtuous habit, if we constantly choose to be faithful and trusting.  We have to set ourselves against a popular strain in modern culture which thinks it is a virtue to be skeptical about everything.  Skepticism in the service of truth can be helpful; but there is a skepticism which is merely at the service of self-interest—doubtful about everything that demands a personal effort.  That is deadly to faith—a manifestation of sloth.  On the other hand, if we develop the habit of faith, we can become a people who cleave to God through thick and thin—we can be faithful.  As in all the virtues, there are certain kinds of exercises we can do to develop faith.  The two chief are study and prayer.  As we study we learn to appreciate the content of the faith, the truth that we know.  As we pray regularly we learn to know the God in whom we believe.  Then when the occasions in our lives come in which our faith is challenged, we will meet them with our believing already exercised and strong.  No spiritual life is possible without faith; it is at the heart of our relationship with God.  We only know God by faith in this age; he has promised us something far better in the age to come.

Hope is the second of the theological virtues and a vague thing it is in the minds of many people.  It is often regarded as a kind of wishful thinking, as in: I hope it won’t rain tomorrow; or, we must always hope for the best (even though we know it is not likely to happen).  Yet, we all know that where there is no hope, there is despair.  And where there is despair, there is often the cessation of life itself.  Without some kind of hope at the natural level of our existence, we have no reason to go on with life.  Hope, then, is a desire for something that you think is achievable, something that justifies your efforts and work, and will give meaning to what you do, even if it is not certain that you can attain it.  Without hope, there is no sustained effort towards a goal.  Now I think it is true that you have to be able to visualize something in order to hope for it.  That is, you have to have an imagination. What you cannot imagine you cannot hope for and you will cease to work for. The supernatural virtue of hope is the ability to desire as possible what God has promised—that is, that we can somehow achieve the age to come, come to stand in the presence of God Himself, reach our final happiness, and personal fulfillment in the Kingdom of God.  Hope conceives our true end by a kind of spiritual imagination and inspires the will to set its course towards God.  Faith, of course, believes in this true end, but it is hope that motivates the will to aspire towards it. 

And here is where we can see both how hope is a virtue and why it is so weak these days.  It is a virtue because it is a capacity that can be exercised and developed by practice.  By prayer and effort, we can grow in hope, our whole being can be suffused in this desire for the Kingdom that will motivate all our actions towards that end.  It is also obvious why hope is often underdeveloped.  It has to do with our imaginations and the simple truth is that our imaginations are too full of too many things for us to desire much the things of God.  We are bombarded from morning to night with messages that fill our imaginations with myriad conceptions of the good life, but none of which pertain to our ultimate goodness. Our imaginations are sick, a sickness characterized by Tony Campolo as “affluenza,” a compulsive seeking for worldly goods and comforts and a successful life-style. Our imaginations are so filled with images of the things we don’t have but want, of things to do we haven’t done, of deals to make we haven’t made, that the vision of the Kingdom of God is obscured.

The only way to strengthen hope, to develop it, is through thinking and meditation.  We have to let our imaginations be soaked in the very things our faith tells us are true, so that our desires can be awoken for them.  We need to see through the false promises which the desire for transitory things holds out to us.  Where hope is strong it is a veritable anchor of the soul, that which holds us steady in all the confusion around us and when the troubles and difficult times come.  Where hope is strong one does not give up, either on God or on oneself because faith knows as true and hope desires as a real possibility the triumph of the promises of God.  Remember that lovely collect from Lent: “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise, that among the swift and varied changes of the world our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” 

The last of the theological virtues is charity or love.  It is hard to know what word to use since all the words for love have been abused and confused.  My favourite is the Latin translation of the Greek, agape, caritas, from which comes the Spanish, caridad.  But that is a little clunky to use—and even the word charity carries some negative connotations.  Love is the pinnacle of the virtuous life; all the other virtues flow from it.  It is the fulfillment of the whole of the law of God.  It is related to the natural capacity to love that is ours because we are human, but the theological virtue is more than this.  That is why it is desirable to have a separate word for it.  We are called as the sons and daughters of God in order to love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves.  The virtue of charity is the inner capacity to do this.  To love God with all the heart is not to describe an emotion, it is to describe a way of life, a life centered around, and devoted to, the will of God, to God Himself.  Charity is the virtuous ability we have to live for God in this way and to actively care for the good of our neighbor in the same way that we care for our own good.  Of course, as we learn to channel the whole of our life’s energy toward the service of God and learn to care for our neighbor’s good as we care for our own, our emotions will be brought into the picture.   If we begin to have a real emotional love for the things of God, well and good.  It is better to be kindly affectioned towards our neighbor than not.  It is easier to be loving if we feel loving.  But the virtue is the doing, not necessarily the feeling.  Which is why love is an action word, not a feeling word.  It is nice to hear you say you love God, but I would rather know if you live for him and care about the person next to you.  Christian loving is a capacity, not an emotion, and depends on the will, not our sentiments.  It is an out-going of ourselves towards God and our neighbor, and so is akin to sacrifice.  Such sacrificial loving must be practised in order to be developed.  And we practise it as we act in loving ways towards those around us and order our lives according to the will of God—which is mostly the same thing: we prove that we love God by loving our neighbor—who, as we remember from the parable of the Good Samaritan, turns out to be anyone we run across who needs our help.  Before we can do a lot of loving, we will probably have to do a lot of praying—which means that all Christian action begins in prayer.

And so there remain these three: faith, hope, and love.  The greatest of these is love, but love will never be attained unless faith is strong and hope keeps desire alive.  We not only need to have faith in the revelation of the love of God in Christ, but to have the hope that we can become loving people and so find the fulfillment of all our desires in becoming God’s loving children in the Kingdom of His Son.

Let us pray.  Almighty God, who sent your Holy Spirit to be the life and light of your Church; open our hearts to the riches of your grace, that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit in love and joy and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.