SERMON PREACHED IN AN UPPER ROOM
TO A COMPUTER, AN INTERNET
AND A BIRD OR TWO
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (May 17th)
2020
READINGS
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:8-20
1 Pet 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
In our gospel-passage
today John refers to the commandments of Jesus. The commandments that Jesus
gives are in a sense few and far between. He wasn’t big on “do’s” and “don’ts.”
Nevertheless, John’s writing makes it clear that by “commandments,” Jesus is
incorporating all that he is, all that he has taught his listeners, all that he
has been for his listeners. More than once Jesus has emphasized the need for
his followers to be faithful to his word, and in John’s hand Jesus himself is
Word. Jesus now for the first time names the Paraclete-Spirit in that strange
way: advocate, helper, guide and much more, all wrapped up in a strange title
and strange new experience of the trinity of God, whose task is to be Christ
within and around us. It is safe then to say that to “keep the commandments of
Jesus” is, by the help of this Paraclete-Spirit who is Holiness, and to whom from
now Jesus begins to refer frequently, to “keep the commandments of Jesus” is to
be immersed in and embody all that Jesus is and teaches. The Holiness of the
Spirit making the Holiness of Jesus present to us. In his writings, Paul uses
the phrase “Christ and him crucified” to mean something similar. The life,
teachings, behaviour, death, resurrection and future judgement are all
incorporated into these phrases: Jesus, and all he is: Son of God.
When speaking of the
doctrine of salvation I will often refer to the work of the Cross in “universalist” terms, the
salvation-work of God-in-Christ moving onwards until the number of those
unwilling freely to accept God’s love is zero. But that is not to relativize
all religions and religious viewpoints, as if behind every viewpoint there is
some sort of unity of which all faiths are a weak replica. Nor is it to reduce
Jesus to a one-amongst-many holy man and moral teacher. Paul, at least in
Luke’s rendition of him in the Aeropagus address, which I suspect is close
indeed to Paul, Paul is able to associate the God of the Cross with the God of
countless faiths. But this is not relativism: “all religions lead to God so
pick and choose to suit.” No: God, in Christ, leads to God. But God in Christ
will honour and reach out to every being who prays, seeks, longs for the love-touch
of the divine.
As Jesus promises the
coming Advocate-Paraclete-Spirit he makes it clear that the insight that comes
by faith in Jesus and the commandments of Jesus, faith in the whole being and
teaching of Jesus, is prerequisite to the experience of God’s pneuma,
God’s Spirit. That Spirit trans-forms, electrifies our own spiritual lives, re-forms
us in what theologian Jürgen Moltmann might call “cruci-form” shape. She reforms us with the
hope-filled, love-filled, joy-filled, compassion- and justice-filled essence of
God, reforms us in the likeness of Christ, the likeness and holiness of God-for-us.
The Orthodox speak of divination, and if I understand that remotely aright it
is that slow Spirit-filled transformation into the image of God for which we
were originally created.
The Paraclete-Spirit also
teaches us to pray. She can turn empty recitations and incantations into the
language of heaven, if we let her. By this I do not refer to the phenomenon
know as glossolalia or “speaking in tongues.” That too can either be an empty
incantation or an offering of prayer. Only the tuning – we might even say “atunement”
– of the praying person’s heart can decide that. Am I open to the cruciform
Spirit of God as I read ancient prayers? Am I open to the cruciform Spirit of
God as I speak or sing in tongues? Am I open to the cruciform Spirit of God as
I stutter my heartache?
God knows my prayer life
is impoverished enough. I find many ways to block out the promptings of God’s
Spirit. Yet we can open ourselves, by the discipline that I undoubtedly lack,
to that power of prayer. The psalmist gasps “Blessed be God, because God has
not rejected my prayer or removed divine steadfast love from me.” The psalmist
can do so because she or he is so filled with God’s Spirit that she both
acknowledges her fallibility and God’s plugging of the gaps and enrichment of her
spiritual life. Our best liturgies lead us on a journey from unrelatedness to
God to relatedness to God, as our prayers can move from hollow incantations or
meaningless gibber to Spirit-enflamed connection with God. Our lives, too, are
liturgy, journeying, as we let them, from the stumblings of hollow men and
women to the resuscitation of the Spirit.
So it is that Jesus
declares we are not orphaned. We can choose to remain as if orphaned, alone and
friendless on a tiny blimp in an infinite universe. Or we can surrender our
lives to the Spirit who breathes beauty and life into that universe, beauty and
life into our lives, beauty and life into the existence of the forsaken and
lonely and broken individuals and peoples and even species (for God promises a
new heaven and a new earth). We will celebrate the Spirit’s coming at
Pentecost. But she comes and has come even before Creation, blowing through a
thousand paddocks and even the paddocks of our lives, if we let her, infesting
us with Jesus. Dare we let her?
Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Infest us with the cruciform life of Jesus. Come, Holy Spirit, come.
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