Sunday, January 31, 2016

Trying to Domesticate the Spirit

"The wind, or spirit, blows where it pleases.  You can hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it is coming from nor where it is going.  The same is true for everyone born of spirit."  John 3: 7b-8 (my translation)

Jesus is said here to remind us that movement of the Spirit is spontaneous and cannot be tamed or boxed in to fulfill our expectations.  That reality can be annoying, when it is useful to make some prediction.  For example, does a person become spiritualized as the direct result of the act of baptism, which is conducted for infants as well as for older persons?  Until recent decades, our Tradition held that the Spirit was received (or fully received) when a person, having been previously baptised, took ownership of baptismal promises through the rite of Confirmation.  And so, back in those days, Communion was withheld until after one had been confirmed.   But later our Episcopal prelates decided that the Spirit is received fully when one has been baptised with water in the name of the Holy Trinity, so that the sacrament of Confirmation adds nothing to it, except as a vehicle for receiving one's adult marching-orders as a Christian.

The biblical book of Acts, being the sequel to Saint Luke's gospel, and by purporting to offer early history of the Christian Movement (which it does in a contrived fashion), affords an opportunity to research the "history" of the Spirit in the life of the fledgeling Church.

We find baptism preceding the giving of the Spirit (8:12 et seq.), baptism accompanied by giving of the Spirit (19: 5-6), and sometimes baptism administered after the receiving of the Spirit (10: 44-48). Moreover, we find baptisms, not in the name of the Trinity, but in the name of Jesus only (19:3-7), and we find the Spirit not being received at all until conferred in the Sacrament of Confirmation (8: 14-17).   Perhaps Jesus' intuition on this matter was right.










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