she sings like a cyclone
SERMON PREACHED
at the CATHEDRAL CHURCH of St PAUL, DUNEDIN
PENTECOST (9th June) 2019
READINGS:
Acts 2: 1-21
Psalm 104: 24-35b
Romans 8: 14-17
John 14: 8: 1-27
As we engage
in one of the three great feasts of the liturgical year, the Christian
calendar, we are confronted with one of the great conundrums of Christian
conversation. How do we speak of this “third Person of the Trinity,” this shadowy
figure that one parishioner of mine years ago insisted on calling “Spook.”
We’ve been mainly tongue-tied for 2000 years, so why bother? Next week I hope
someone in this sermon-spot might apply the same question to the beyond words
(or numbers) conversation about the Trinity. But for now: who is this Third
Person?
Why bother?
Aren’t there better ways to get bums on seats in our crumbling buildings? For
that matter, aren’t we better off simply repeating the mantra “spiritual, not
religious,” beloved in some circles? Some say so. I believe they’re wrong. I
believe they dance on the graves of those prepared to live and die, sometimes
prematurely, for these teachings.
So let us
pause, for a few minutes, acknowledge that we dwell in a mystery. A few
minutes, while inadequate, are necessary to open hardened, sclerotic hearts to
mysteries greater than mere human being. Who is this Third Person of Pentecost?
One problem
is that in the scriptures of our faith alone there are two main strands of
conversation about this strange elusive Person of the Godhead. She (and we’ll touch
on gender soon) is the one who inhabits the second verse of our scriptures: the earth was a formless void, and darkness
covered the face of the deep, while a wind (ruarch) from God swept over the face of the waters. Trinitarian
theologians affirm that she inhabits even the first verse, albeit gently: in the beginning, when God created. God:
triune, community God. She, Pentecostal Spirit, inhabits, too, the bewildering
twenty-sixth verse of that first chapter of Genesis; Let us make humankind in our own image. There God in the plural is at one level a mere
grammatical construct, what scholars in their precision call “a plural of deliberation
in the cohortative”! Good with words,
those academics are! But the words in the playful truths of interpretation are
more than mere grammar. They open doors to admire the mysteries of a community of
God, God who is Three-in-One and one-in-three, eternal paradox.
This glimpse
of the Spirit is no plaything. Call me a wuss but as a poor air-traveller I was
painfully aware of the winds of God as our airbus bobbed like a
cork-in-a-maelstrom in the skies from around Palmerston until we touched own at
our airport two nights ago. I remember only too well as a home-alone seven-year-old
cowering from the winds and falling trees at my Kapiti family home, as the Wahine
storm thrashed its fatal way through the lower North and upper South Islands. I
remember a storm cell in northern New South Wales flinging heavy doors at
head-height through my back garden, flinging cricket-sized hail stones through
the windows of our rectory as my daughter and I sought protection in the centre
of the house.
The wind of
God is not a gentle zephyr, not a plaything, but potentially a life-shattering
cyclone. Yet, if our hearts are not too hardened, she is also the force that
draws winds from our own souls as we witness Aoraki Mt. Cook for the first
time, or the MacKenzie country, or watch a desert moonrise or one of the
startling dawns that Anne and I are privileged to watch from our Careys Bay
home, splitting the horizon into reds and yellows and purples and blues above
the Otago Harbourmouth.
But the first
Christians? They found a new identity of the Spirit. John told of the moment in
which Jesus breathed New Creation into the nostrils of the frightened, puzzled
disciples after the Resurrection. We might call that moment the first hongi of
faith, re-creating God’s hongi of the man built from clay in the second
creation story of Genesis. Luke tells a different story. He tells of disciples
cowering in fear in an upper room, cowering as I once was as those windows
shattered around my daughter and me. But the disciples were suddenly empowered
as the risen Lord appeared, fiercely tangible, and breathed New Life, New
Creation into their troubled souls, transforming them from chickens to eagles,
willing to soar (not to mention die) in their new found strength. Languages
shattered at the Tower of Babel are unified once more, discord made into harmony,
and the language of resurrection life remains a single language despite our
petty divisions and hatreds within the body of Christ.
So who was
this, who is this Spirit who transformed those frightened few? She is
the ruarch of creation, terrifying in potential. But she is also the only means
by which Christ and all that he made known of the heart of God is released from
an upper room in Palestine and made present to you and me and all who have
opened our hearts to Jesus. Her job-description, if I can put it that way,
incorporates both the wind that blows through a thousand paddocks of James K.
Baxter’s memorable phrase, capable of smashing creation and its lives. She is
also the one who can empower us to participate in, be transformed by, be agents
of all that Jesus was and is. All aroha-love, aroha-compassion, all prophetic justice-seeking
speech and action (for in the Spirit speech and action are one) on behalf of
the poor and the broken people and species of earth, all resurrection hope as
we hold in our hands the hands of the dying or hold in our silences the grief
and despair of the bereaved, all these are the gifts of the Spirit who makes
the risen Jesus present and known throughout space and time.
There is so
much more I could say in this love-song to the Third Person. She is the Spirit
of wild-empowerment, who moves in many ancient religions. She is hinted at in the
Māori
mythology of Tāne, Tāne-mahuta, Tāne-nui-a-Rangi, who created First
Person from the blood and breath of his own being. She is present in myriad
versions of the Rainbow Dreaming of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island
mythologies, and even in the brutal mythology of Gilgamesh. She is often
female, and that need not stop her from making known to us the risen Christ.
She is no
plaything. Yet she is the gift of the Risen Christ, making him known and
present to us as we stumble in his Way. She is not to be trivialised as
“Spook,” though centuries of our disinterested, confused language about her
enhanced that caricature. She is not the entertainment of the charismatic
movement, though in the corridors of our stuffy churches we perhaps needed that
manifestation, for a season, of her healing power.
She is the
“enemy of apathy” of John Bell and Graham Maule’s hymn, who mothers creation,
hovers on the chaos of the world’s first day, opens to us the scriptures and
reveals Jesus to us in them, and empowers us to be his hands and feet and body
and blood in the world. She is God with us and in us, for as long as we permit
her to be so, and sometimes, thank God, when we do not.
Let us
continue to sing her praise in word and silence and music, and pray that we may
through all our lives and beyond be transformed by her gentle but irresistible
presence.
No comments:
Post a Comment