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Saturday, 26 May 2018

dancing beyond the capabilities of mind


SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN
TRINITY SUNDAY (27h May) 2018


READINGS:

Isaiah 6.1-8
Ps 29
Romans 8.12-17
John 3.1-17


When we speak of the Trinity we enter the language of love. Not the language of dissection, or of structural analysis, nor even of explanation, but of love. That said, even love language falls short, rings hollow, if it is nor grounded in experience. The difficulty for those who design the lectionary is that of choosing which language to use to showcase the love that is demanded of us by and for our creator, our redeeming, life-giving Triune God.

The readings give us hints as to how we might praise God by serving God, or even serve God by praising God. The Westminster Confession (more beloved of Presbyterians admittedly, than Anglicans) proclaims boldly that the “chief end” or “primary purpose” of human beings is to praise our God, to pour out the language of love. We might get put in a loony bin if that were our sole activity, but the powerful imagery remains: are there times when we pour our souls out in crazy praise to our invisible Creator?

There is a very real sense that we are invited to find our place in the stories that we read, inserting ourselves into the text. Not least we might in passing note the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision of calling. Their sole, or at worst primary role is to sing the praises of God. We might notice, too, Isaiah’s deep sense of fallibility, of not being good enough to serve God. Who is he to speak with the authority of God?

Who is anyone to do so, you or I included? Despite feel good pop-psychologies, it doesn’t do any harm to be reminded of our inadequacy. This is at least in part the reason why the Anglican version of Christianity incorporates so many checks and balances; our service of God must not become a monument to our own egos, wills and preferences, but is tested against the waters of wider traditions and opinions, a partnership between us and the wider Body of Christ.

The basic language of Trinitarian love is simple. For the Hebrews the Ruarch/Spirit was a sort of creative word, creative command of the Creator God, by which God’s actions became reality in the world. The Christians finessed this understanding. Their experience of God in the life and teachings – and the absolute identification of the two – in Jesus was so powerful, and so inexpressibly ratified in the Resurrection, that they began to speak of him, too, as Lord and God.

So far so good. Yet physically as we know from the ascension story, he had, after being physically present to them for a while, disappeared, dissipated perhaps, from the followers’ sight. Disappeared, yet he remained powerfully, tangibly present in their experience of worship, fellowship, and exploration of the scriptures. And the language of Trinitarian faith was slowly, and I would argue irreversibly born.

The believers’ response was love language.

Well … Paul’s language is not only the language of love, but sometimes the language of correction, for he was a prophet and a pastor. A people that claim to love and serve God but whose lives do not emanate Christlike love are skating on thin ice. Paul highlights a few failings of what we might call ersatz or faux Christ-followers.

One or two are of a sexual nature, though his emphasis is more on exploitation and predation. Most are references to behaviours that tear at and tear down the body of Christ: factionalism, back-stabbing, a catena of behaviours that he calls the works of the flesh (and that his contemporary James attributes to undisciplined tongues).

The temptation of course is always to point the finger at others: the responsibility is to note the three fingers pointing back at ourselves. Paul will always contrast flesh and spirit: the latter is the result of, the state of, the joy and love of immersion in the Triune God. Words to describe that God of Jesus Christ so far evade human description that in Paul’s time words had not even been invented to express the love God emanates, imparts, exudes. But where that love is, the Spirit of the Triune God is at work indeed.

So we are left with the (at this stage) rather obtuse Nicodemus, who John depicts stumbling his way through the gospel story, through three appearances. Nicodemus staggers awkwardly from incomprehension to adoration, to the moment when he eventually has no words but only ointment to pour on the body of the friend he first visited secretly by night.

While occasionally we might and do need Paul’s strong words of correction we could do worse than Nicodemus, whose love for Jesus overcomes intellectual confusion, and who eventually sacrifices so much to anoint the body. But Nicodemus was pouring out his love for Jesus between Good Friday and Easter, weighed down not only by his fifty kilo or so load of spices, but by grief and perhaps a sense of failure.

We live in a different time. Blessed says John are those who believe but have not seen.

We are called to something else: we are called to join the post-resurrection witnesses of Jesus, pouring out our hearts to the sometimes stern, never wussy or chummy Creator. We are called to experience not the dead Jesus, but the risen Jesus, made known to us by the eternal Spirit. Jesus, made known to us despite being beyond our sight or understanding. Jesus, made known to us in scripture and in fellowship and in the elements of bread and wine. Jesus made known to us in love and hope and justice, peace and reconciliation (“Peace to those who are far off, peace to those who are near”). Jesus, made known to us in the one another that we are called to love within the Body of Christ.

We are called to be a trinitarian, resurrection people, dancing beyond the capabilities of the mind, dancing where the God who flings universes across the heavens meets us in a Palestinian peasant, meets us in suffering, leads us through death to life, and embraces us and those we love, eternally.

Alleluia, Amen.



Saturday, 12 May 2018

dancing in the footsteps


SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN
SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (13th April) 2018


READINGS:

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Ps 1
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19


The wonderfully poetic author John, perhaps the most lyrical of the New Testament authors, struggles valiantly to convey the experience of the first post-Easter followers of Jesus. Like falling in love it was beyond words. Like the pinnacles of human experience, it was beyond words.
What is there when we reach beyond words? Some biblical interpreters argue that the rot set in for Christianity the moment the first New Testament story teller, Mark, set the experiences to papyrus. I have had friends challenge me to conduct an entire liturgy with no words, only the silence and the gestures and the love that are the deepest entrails of God.
Yet after all, as John made clear, the One we call the Christ and Lord and Son is Word, is Wisdom and Word and words must be a big part of all we’ve got, to tell of him, to keep the Jesus-rumour alive.
So: words, I’m afraid. And while John the evangelist is using his words to tell a story, we might also see it as a love-story, a love poem perhaps. His demand of us as listeners to the story is that we participate in that love, in divine love. His prayer is that we participate in ways that only the Spirit, the “Comforter” whose empowerment we celebrate next week, makes possible. God is love, is John’s equation, and love is God, and where one is the other is. We can glimpse that divine love humanised only in the life of Jesus, John indicates, and the life of Jesus is made known to us only in the inadequacies of words. Those words, though, are enflamed by the Spirit, so we can feel their impact, timelessly. And – I think I am being true to John here – as we feel that impact and allow our lives to be saturated by it, so we become a people of love, and through us others may know the love that is Divine, death-conquering, life resurrecting eternal love.
As we move into the great liturgical stanza of Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity words fail. Explanations fall short. You are now entering, as Janet Frame put it in another context, the human heart. But this is the human heart enflamed by divine love. This is far beyond the mere rational, as love language often is. Sometimes we can find at least partially rational explanations for it, but the God who dances beyond the universes will not be limited to our small imaginations, and John knows it. “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” These words are designed to have us dance in the footsteps of the Creating, Redeeming, Holy-making God. Those who reduce biblical witness to a “how to” manual miss the point. Love, in John’s view of the world, is the result of saturation in the presence of God.
There are measurements of our lovingness. Are we as a faith community hospitable to the stranger? I think this faith community is exemplary in this regard. Are we hospitable to God’s future, ushering in new ways of experiencing and expressing the experience of God? We may have to make changes in the months ahead. Are we hospitable to one another, seeing the presence and the signs, the artistry and the God-gifts in those we meet in and through our interactions in the church community? Do we look for the giftings in one another, affirm them, rejoice in them?
In Gethsemane Jesus prays not for uniformity, where we all clone each other, but unity, whereby we rejoice in our differences, allow ourselves to be edified by the gifts of those we rub shoulders with, allow ourselves some giving of our own gifts knowing they will be enhanced by God’s spirit, utilised by God’s people as we seek together to proclaim the Risen Christ. Our job, as Thomas Merton put it, is to love others without stopping to enquire whether they are worthy. John would argue we are enabled in this task only by the presence of the Spirit-Comforter, of whom more next week.

TLBWY