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Sermon:
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I'm sure many of you, like me, have heard one or two Trinity Sunday sermons that began with "The Holy Spirit is the hardest person of the Trinity to understand." It's a sentiment that I can't say I understand at all.
There is a long history of it though, and I will spare you the details of that history except to say take a look at results in the Nicene Creed. There's a decent sized paragraph dedicated to The Father. It's small, but it gives a clear sense of what The Father has done in the world. Then we get a huge paragraph dedicated to The Son, listing in full detail Jesus' entire life on earth.
And then we have The Holy Spirit with only three lines dedicated to the Spirit, lodged into the paragraph about the church. We learn not much else except the vague notion that the Spirit is the "giver of life" and, primarily, the Spirit's relation to The Father and The Son.
This is mind-boggling, especially because of what we hear in our Scripture readings this morning.
In Romans, we learn that "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."
In John, the Spirit is that which will "guide us into all the truth." In John, as we have been learning in our Tuesday Bible Study, there are aspects of the Spirit called the Helper or Advocate, depending on what translation you're reading.
The Spirit is a guide and a helper along the way for us. The Spirit lights the path for our life in Faith.
The Spirit is the gift of God's love inside us, in our very hearts. Basically the Spirit is God's presence in us. The Spirit is exactly what the name says: The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God poured out to us, dwelling in us. We even celebrated this outpouring last week in Baptism.
What that means in our lives is often a mystery, that I will admit. That's why the Spirit is a guide into all Truth because that's what we need.
The Spirit is God's presence abiding in us. It doesn't get much easier to understand than that. We might not understand how God works in the world all of the time, or even most of the time, But we do understand that God works in us and through us. The Holy Spirit is God doing that, working in us and working through us.
Next time you hear someone say how hard The Holy Spirit is to understand, you can say "not really". The Holy Spirit is the way we know God best because The Holy Spirit is inside us always. We just have to being open to listening to the Spirit's voice because then we will truly hear God.