As most of you have heard, we have a little grass volleyball pick-up game here every Thursday evening. It has been really enjoyable. Volleyball has been in my immediate family for as long as I can remember. My dad started playing in his early twenties and we just always had a grass court at my house growing up. Both of my sisters played at college even.
When I was working in Des Moines, I was playing two to three nights a week. My dad was coaching high school volleyball in Tama County, and at some point I got pulled into coaching as well, coaching AAU teams for about 4 years before I entered seminary. Volleyball, despite being just a game, also became a way to minister to people.
The other day my dad told a story about a girl that he used to coach. He said she had a lot of talent, but just could never seem to put it all together in High School. Then she went off to play in college, same sort of thing. She was a hard worker, but just couldn’t seem to get to the next level.
In her personal life, she always struggled as well. One day she came home to meet with him, to talk about what was happening. She came into his office with her bible. Her bible was all marked up, highlighted, underlined, written in, with some post-it notes too.
She was really trying hard, but despite it all, things were going very poorly for her, she kept getting into bad relationships and making bad choices, and as my dad talked to her, he just couldn’t figure out what the problem was either.
About a year later she called him, and she had a completely different tone to her voice. She reported that everything was going great all of a sudden, finally, and he asked her what had happened, and she said that she had gotten baptized about three months ago, and that made all of the difference.
Dad was really surprised by that, he just assumed that she was baptized, but apparently she hadn’t ever been, and it goes to show just how important it was to receive the Holy Spirit into her life. In today’s Gospel, the last line we heard from Jesus was, “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”
A lot of times when we hear this reading focused on prayer we think of the things we aren’t receiving in prayer, but what we forget is the most important is the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is God’s greatest gift to us. We receive the Holy Spirit at Baptism, so we tend to think, “okay well, we don’t need any more” but the reality is until our lives are completely configured to God, we do need more, we can continue to ask and receive more of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
I put a little diagram in the bulletin to help explain this concept. I found it in a book (In His Spirit by Fr. Richard J. Hauser), it was contrasting the Scriptural model versus the West’s model, we often think about it wrong. See, the Holy Spirit lives inside of us and if we don’t recognize that work of His grace, we will wrongly attribute our good actions to ourselves instead of God, and never understand the presence and power of God in our daily lives, never understanding the pervasiveness of God’s love and activity. (paraphrase from page 23)
If you look at the left side, that little black striped triangle is like the intersection of a Venn Diagram, but that is where the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. One way to think about it is that when we are baptized as children, there is just a little bit of overlap. As we grow in faith, grow as disciples, the overlap increases, the Holy Spirit is active in us more and more.
We can have that Holy Spirit in a greater way if we ask for it, if we continue to pray for it, and then live by it. The goal is really to have a perfect overlap where everything that we do, every action, is completely loving and completely acting in the mind of God.
Do we listen to the voice of God in our lives? It is often a small interior voice, prompting us to do this or that. We think it is our own voice, but it is really God’s voice, we just have to listen to it. When we say, “your kingdom come” in the Lord’s prayer, we are really asking God to come into our hearts in that moment in a deeper way.
This is the gift that God has given us through our baptism, a relationship with Him where He has “forgiven us all our transgressions” through His suffering, death and resurrection. In this “he brought you to life along with him” so we could be in “right relationship” with Him. Our relationship grows over time.
We must be persistent in prayer, which is really just being persistent in communication, which is like any relationship, right? As long as we persevere, God will continue to answer that prayer of giving us a deeper relationship with Him, one that increases our ability to hear God’s voice and do His will for our good and the good of His Kingdom.