The Holy Spirit – Forming Connectors, Birthing The Church
The Holy Spirit the animating principle of all living beings, the breath that breathes over the creation creating in the whole creation, life; the breath breathed into the mud making it become a life, alive with God, with soul, with spirit, with sinew.
The three ways that we’ve looked at the Holy Spirit were first, we looked at the Spirit as breath; second, we looked at the Spirit as calling us forth to vocation and response in a personal and an individual way, and now we’re going to look at the Holy Spirit in the Church, and on the way in which the Holy Spirit has brought into birth this Church that we love and we care for so dearly.
In understanding that, let’s go to the promise that Jesus made. “And when the Advocate comes, he will show the world how wrong it was about sin, and about who was in the right, and about judgment: about sin: proved by their refusal to believe in me; about who was in the right: proved by my going to the Father and your seeing me no more; about judgment: proved by the prince of this world being already condemned.” (Ref John 15: 8 – 11)
This promise of Jesus speaking about the Advocate speaks to the role of the Advocate about sin because the one sin that John sees in his gospel is those who refuse to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. With all the seven signs that are given, with all the displays of power, with all the displays of his righteousness, and that people still refuse to believe. And when the Spirit comes, it will convict us about sin, about our belief or disbelief in Jesus Christ, about righteousness – that he is the righteous one; and about the condemnation of the world because he has gone back to the Father and therefore those who disbelieved in him are judge. And what Jesus does for the disciples, and what the Advocate does for us is moving now to the next phase which is to the church. So that everything that Jesus did for his twelve (12), the Holy Spirit does for us his disciples.
In his priestly prayer, Jesus would pray, “I pray not only for these, but for those who through them will also believe,” and that means you and I are included into that prayer, and so everything that Jesus does for the twelve, the Holy Spirit does for you and for me, and that way we lose nothing by not having known Jesus in the flesh. We miss nothing at all, and what that says is that the Spirit has a dynamic life and action for the disciple, part of which is the birthing of the Church.
