dancing in the footsteps

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (13^th 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