Beyond God the Parent: Come, All You Are Thirsty

Beyond God the Parent: Come, All You Are Thristy

Beyond God the Parent:

Come, All You Who Are Thirsty

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn for St. John’s Episcopal Church

The Day of Pentecost, May 24, 2026: John 7:37-39; Acts 2:1-21

Today is the Day of Pentecost. It is the day we remember and re-enact the day that the Holy Spirit descended upon the fearful disciples, huddled in an upper room, and transformed them into a united, powerful, loving, and radically inclusive healing community centered on Jesus’ Way of Love. The Holy Spirit fell upon all of them. Not some of them. Not the most gifted or the most worthy. Everyone—young and old, women and men, free and slave, people of every category and people beyond category. All. All.

The Holy Spirit is a real, vibrant, living, untamed and untamable force whom those early disciples experienced as wind and fire, and that Jesus compared to living water springing up from deep within a person and available to anyone who is thirsty. In both Hebrew and Greek the words for “spirit” also mean wind and breath. Invisible, more essential to life than food or water, breath is needed every minute of every day. So it is with the Spirit. The words in Hebrew and Greek for “spirit” are not male gendered words; they are feminine in Hebrew and neutral in Greek.

I bring up that last point because several times in my life as a priest, women have privately shared that they struggled with the notion of God as Father, or even as Parent, because their own fathers terribly abused them, and their mothers did not protect them. One woman gave me permission to share her story with you. She said that her father physically abused her as a child and that as an adult she wanted nothing to do with him. She had told another woman in her church that she was having a hard time relating to God as Father, and the woman told her just to connect with the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit would help her and give her everything she needed. So she took that to heart and began consciously seeking to connect with the Holy Spirit. After several years she had learned how to hear the Spirit’s guidance, and it really transformed her spiritual life.

She had a horribly bad relationship with her father. She couldn’t forgive him. Every time they got together, they fought. One day they were visiting at his house, and her father told her he had been wrong about many things and asked her forgiveness. This woman said she opened her mouth intending to reject him, but the words that came out of her mouth were “I forgive you.” She never told him she was as astonished as he was. She felt that it was the Holy Spirit saying those words and making that reality possible. She said that this had been the first time she felt her father was sincere, and it was a turning point in their relationship. She experienced it as a healing, and as something that did not come from her own will or power. They actually became able to have a relationship for the first time, and she eventually became his caregiver when he was approaching the end of his life.

I did think carefully about whether I should share this story, because forgiveness is a complicated topic, especially for people who have been abused, and each person’s journey is different. Please hear me when I say that if you have been abused, I believe the Holy Spirit can support you with whatever you need for your healing, whether or not that involves forgiveness. For this particular woman, the Holy Spirit granted her the ability to speak in the tongue of forgiveness in a way that released her from being chained to her father’s abuse. In the upper room the night of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit granted the disciples the ability to speak in unfamiliar language about God’s deeds of power. In the story of this woman, the act of speaking the words “I forgive you” was itself the deed of power being accomplished in that moment. The words were alive; they were themselves a creative act, just like the words of creation when God said, “let there be light,” and there was light.

This is what the Holy Spirit is like. The Holy Spirit is the creative agency of God, who in creation hovered over the face of the deep just like a mother hovers in the act of childbirth, giving birth to the cosmos.  In the gospel reading from today Jesus says:

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ (John 7:37-38)

Interestingly, the word translated “heart” here is not the Greek word for heart, which is kardia. The actual Greek word used here is koilia, which means “belly” or “womb.” Out of the believer’s womb shall flow rivers of living water, the Spirit. Of course there is water involved in childbirth, and this seems the most apt metaphor to me of what the Holy Spirit is and does. Out of the believer’s creative center shall flow rivers of living water, the Spirit who births new things in us, who opens our mouths and enables us to speak words of power, language previously unknown to us, to become co-Creators with God of the restored and healed world that embodies Jesus’ Way of Love.

After two millennia of Christianity, we are at a flexion point. Theologian Phyllis Tickle wrote a book called The Great Emergence, in which she says that about every 500 years the church undergoes a radical change, a kind of mass rummage sale. First Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire; 500 years later Eastern Orthodox Christianity split off from Western Roman Christianity; 500 years after that came the Protestant Reformation, and now today, in this time of massive cultural shift and upheaval—what do you think the change is?

We probably need more time to understand this flexion point completely, but I would say it is the time of the Spirit. The time to reclaim feminine images of God, for we cannot truly have a world in which women and the earth are treated equally with men and humans when we have an exclusively male God. It is the time to reclaim the God who is not only Parent, but who comes to us as the elements—water, fire, wind. The Creator made humans in the divine image—female and male in the divine image. And within the Christian tradition, the Holy Spirit is the Person of the Trinity who is able to help us to re-imagine, re-wild, our experience of God, to experience the creative power of God to heal us, our earth and our world.

How do you experience the Holy Spirit? How would you like to experience the Holy Spirit? Jesus has issued an invitation which still stands: come to me, all you who are thirsty. Out of the believer’s womb, out of the believer’s creative center, will flow rivers of living water. The water of birth, the water of life, the water of wisdom and new beginnings. What are you thirsty for? Within you is the creative power of God, the energy center from which birth and healing and new language can pour forth like the waterfalls on the North Shore in the spring time. Let us open ourselves to the power of the Spirit. Let us yield to Her, receive that which She yearns to give each of us uniquely, and become agents of God’s new creation. Amen.

10am Service