2026-05-10 (Iain) Help From the Holy Sanctuary
10th May 2026: Help From the Holy Sanctuary
We are again, on this 6th Sunday of Eastertide, brought into the Upper room to hear Jesus’ final discourse with his disciples. Today’s Gospel anticipates the Feast of Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which we celebrate in 2 weeks time and is also deeply Trinitarian. So today I want to bring the two together: The coming of the Holy Spirit & the presence, dance, beauty of the Trinity: Father, Son & Holy Spirit.
You’ll notice from our reading that we give the Holy Spirit a feminine pronoun – Good Theological arguments for this, which I won’t go into today but I want to read you a quote from Joan Puls, a feminist Theologian, describing the Feminine spirit: The feminine spirit, which is not synonymous with the female person, has a certain familiarity with roots and springs and the basic elements of air and fire: a certain attentiveness to the flow of time and the harvesting of life’s fruits. The feminine spirit waits in readiness for the opportunity to inject breath into the clay of existence and to humanize the daily affairs of life. Beautiful – could be a description of the Holy Spirit: ‘The Holy Spirit waits in readiness for the opportunity to inject breath into the clay of existence and humanize the daily affairs of life.
Jesus says: I (the Son), will ask the Father/Mother (God) & he/she will give you another helper (Holy Spirit). The word another is important because the Spirit will replace Jesus, when he is gone. So the Father, Son & Holy Spirit are all present in this promise. The Spirit comes from the Father, through the Son to help us. The Greek word for helper is Paraclete, a word rich in meaning, conveying a sense of one coming to the aid of another (helper); one pleading the case of another (Advocate), one coming alongside another(Friend/companion), one providing Comfort & Counsel.
Jesus is saying I will send you one who is not only for you but will be with you. Sam Wells, the Rector at St. Martins on the Fields, argues that With is the most important word in the Bible – God, through the Holy Spirit, is with us, has our back and will walk with us whatever the situation.
Psalm 20 v 2 says: ‘May the Lord send you help from the Sanctuary. May the presence of Yahweh, believed to reside in the Holy of Holies, in the Temple, in the Sanctuary, to come & help. Jesus is upgrading this promise of help from the Sanctuary by saying help will come from the Eternal Sanctuary of the Trinity where there is a perfect giving & receiving of Love between the persons of the Trinity and where there is eternal peace, love & joy.
Rublev, a 15th Century Russian Orthodox Monk from the 15th Century, painted his famous icon of the Trinity during a time of great social & political turmoil in order to bring hope and comfort to his community. He believed that outside this world of turmoil, of hate, anger,rage, war, genocide, oppression, injustice etc, there is a sanctuary of peace, love and joy untouched & uncorrupted by evil. A Holy Sanctuary where there is no fear - it is fear that is the source of so much ugly stuff – tribal wars, tribal religion – the othering of people and of peoples.
It is from this sanctuary of love, peace & joy that our help comes. Jesus tells his disciples that they will not be abandoned: ‘I will not leave you orphaned.’ Jesus says in Luke11 v 13 that help is there for those who ask: If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Now there is of course a proviso – God is not a Father Christmas God who gives us everything we want. Our help may not come in the form of our desired outcome. Infinite intervention where God fixes everything would be a disaster: our autonomy would be erased – we would cease to be ourselves. We would not grow in character; we would not grow in resilience; we would not develop empathy; we would not have a sense of achievement – and so on and so on.
God does not give an answer to all our questions, but in Jesus, and through the Holy Spirit God enters into the heart of our questions. Leonardo Boff. The Spirit may not take away our problems but walks alongside us in our struggle in the form of comfort, perspective, hope and the strength to endure, to carry on.
Today’s Psalm gives us an indication of how the Spirit helps us:
Bless our God, O peoples; who has kept us among the living and has not let our feet slip.
For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.
Like the children’s book ‘We’re all going on a bear hunt,’ we can’t go under it, we can’t go over it, we have to go through it, through the grass, through the river, through the mud, through the forest, through the snowstorm, through the cave – as we go through the stuff of life, the Holy Spirit is with us if we ask – what a beautiful day! And in my experience, when we ask God’s help we are brought, as the Psalm says, into a more spacious place – where we are somehow freer to make good choices, however difficult they may be.
Thomas Merton describes this spacious place that God provides wonderfully:
The contemplative life should provide an area, a space of liberty in which possibilities are allowed to surface, and new choices beyond routine choices become manifest. It should create a new experience of time, not as a stop gap, but as an open space – not a time to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered or violated but a space which can enjoy its own potentiality and hopes, its own presence to itself, one’s own time, but not to be dominated by one’s own ego and demands, hence it is time to be open to others, a compassionate time. – sounds like Merton is describing entering the Holy sanctuary of God.
The Holy Spirit leads us into a new space while standing with us like a good and trusted friend. True friendship is the highest form of love & a true friend will also tell us the hard truths we may not want to hear and hold us accountable; as the proverb says: ‘The kisses of an enemy are deceitful but faithful are the wounds of a friend.’
So the Holy Spirit is given to us to be For us (advocate) and with us (Friend & comforter) but the final part is even more astonishing – the Holy Spirit is in us. Jesus says: ‘On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.– in other words we are invited into the sanctuary if we listen & attune ourselves to the spirit within – often in the form of a still quiet voice or our conscience or our intuition – that is why contemplation is so important as it provides the space where we experience the spirit for us, with us & within us – Centering Prayer/Second Sunday SacREd Space/Siloam.
So in summary: The Holy Spirit is help from the Sanctuary of the Trinity untouched by the fear, hatred and evil of this world – a comforter, a helper, an advocate, a friend who will walk alongside you and who will not leave you orphaned or alone. A helper who is FOR you, WITH you and IN you. – Just take a minute to let that sink in – if it goes from here to here it will transform your life. Amen.
We are again, on this 6th Sunday of Eastertide, brought into the Upper room to hear Jesus’ final discourse with his disciples. Today’s Gospel anticipates the Feast of Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which we celebrate in 2 weeks time and is also deeply Trinitarian. So today I want to bring the two together: The coming of the Holy Spirit & the presence, dance, beauty of the Trinity: Father, Son & Holy Spirit.
You’ll notice from our reading that we give the Holy Spirit a feminine pronoun – Good Theological arguments for this, which I won’t go into today but I want to read you a quote from Joan Puls, a feminist Theologian, describing the Feminine spirit: The feminine spirit, which is not synonymous with the female person, has a certain familiarity with roots and springs and the basic elements of air and fire: a certain attentiveness to the flow of time and the harvesting of life’s fruits. The feminine spirit waits in readiness for the opportunity to inject breath into the clay of existence and to humanize the daily affairs of life. Beautiful – could be a description of the Holy Spirit: ‘The Holy Spirit waits in readiness for the opportunity to inject breath into the clay of existence and humanize the daily affairs of life.
Jesus says: I (the Son), will ask the Father/Mother (God) & he/she will give you another helper (Holy Spirit). The word another is important because the Spirit will replace Jesus, when he is gone. So the Father, Son & Holy Spirit are all present in this promise. The Spirit comes from the Father, through the Son to help us. The Greek word for helper is Paraclete, a word rich in meaning, conveying a sense of one coming to the aid of another (helper); one pleading the case of another (Advocate), one coming alongside another(Friend/companion), one providing Comfort & Counsel.
Jesus is saying I will send you one who is not only for you but will be with you. Sam Wells, the Rector at St. Martins on the Fields, argues that With is the most important word in the Bible – God, through the Holy Spirit, is with us, has our back and will walk with us whatever the situation.
Psalm 20 v 2 says: ‘May the Lord send you help from the Sanctuary. May the presence of Yahweh, believed to reside in the Holy of Holies, in the Temple, in the Sanctuary, to come & help. Jesus is upgrading this promise of help from the Sanctuary by saying help will come from the Eternal Sanctuary of the Trinity where there is a perfect giving & receiving of Love between the persons of the Trinity and where there is eternal peace, love & joy.
Rublev, a 15th Century Russian Orthodox Monk from the 15th Century, painted his famous icon of the Trinity during a time of great social & political turmoil in order to bring hope and comfort to his community. He believed that outside this world of turmoil, of hate, anger,rage, war, genocide, oppression, injustice etc, there is a sanctuary of peace, love and joy untouched & uncorrupted by evil. A Holy Sanctuary where there is no fear - it is fear that is the source of so much ugly stuff – tribal wars, tribal religion – the othering of people and of peoples.
It is from this sanctuary of love, peace & joy that our help comes. Jesus tells his disciples that they will not be abandoned: ‘I will not leave you orphaned.’ Jesus says in Luke11 v 13 that help is there for those who ask: If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Now there is of course a proviso – God is not a Father Christmas God who gives us everything we want. Our help may not come in the form of our desired outcome. Infinite intervention where God fixes everything would be a disaster: our autonomy would be erased – we would cease to be ourselves. We would not grow in character; we would not grow in resilience; we would not develop empathy; we would not have a sense of achievement – and so on and so on.
God does not give an answer to all our questions, but in Jesus, and through the Holy Spirit God enters into the heart of our questions. Leonardo Boff. The Spirit may not take away our problems but walks alongside us in our struggle in the form of comfort, perspective, hope and the strength to endure, to carry on.
Today’s Psalm gives us an indication of how the Spirit helps us:
Bless our God, O peoples; who has kept us among the living and has not let our feet slip.
For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.
Like the children’s book ‘We’re all going on a bear hunt,’ we can’t go under it, we can’t go over it, we have to go through it, through the grass, through the river, through the mud, through the forest, through the snowstorm, through the cave – as we go through the stuff of life, the Holy Spirit is with us if we ask – what a beautiful day! And in my experience, when we ask God’s help we are brought, as the Psalm says, into a more spacious place – where we are somehow freer to make good choices, however difficult they may be.
Thomas Merton describes this spacious place that God provides wonderfully:
The contemplative life should provide an area, a space of liberty in which possibilities are allowed to surface, and new choices beyond routine choices become manifest. It should create a new experience of time, not as a stop gap, but as an open space – not a time to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered or violated but a space which can enjoy its own potentiality and hopes, its own presence to itself, one’s own time, but not to be dominated by one’s own ego and demands, hence it is time to be open to others, a compassionate time. – sounds like Merton is describing entering the Holy sanctuary of God.
The Holy Spirit leads us into a new space while standing with us like a good and trusted friend. True friendship is the highest form of love & a true friend will also tell us the hard truths we may not want to hear and hold us accountable; as the proverb says: ‘The kisses of an enemy are deceitful but faithful are the wounds of a friend.’
So the Holy Spirit is given to us to be For us (advocate) and with us (Friend & comforter) but the final part is even more astonishing – the Holy Spirit is in us. Jesus says: ‘On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.– in other words we are invited into the sanctuary if we listen & attune ourselves to the spirit within – often in the form of a still quiet voice or our conscience or our intuition – that is why contemplation is so important as it provides the space where we experience the spirit for us, with us & within us – Centering Prayer/Second Sunday SacREd Space/Siloam.
So in summary: The Holy Spirit is help from the Sanctuary of the Trinity untouched by the fear, hatred and evil of this world – a comforter, a helper, an advocate, a friend who will walk alongside you and who will not leave you orphaned or alone. A helper who is FOR you, WITH you and IN you. – Just take a minute to let that sink in – if it goes from here to here it will transform your life. Amen.
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