architect of love

 

SERMON PREACHED at St NICHOLAS’, WAVERLEY (OTAGO)

TRINITY SUNDAY (30^th May) 2021

 

Readings

Isaiah 6:1-8

Psalm 29

Romans 8:12-17

John 3: 1-17

 

 

It’s an old tale, possibly true, that clergy who were able  to do so loved to flick pass preachments on Trinity Sunday to their curates, placing the Doctrine of the Trinity in the too-hard basket for their own repertoire. To my embarrassment, when I looked back on my preaching in early years I found that I had often done something similar. In my case, as I am something that some of you will know as an extreme “P” on Myers Briggs co-ordinates, it was nothing to do with organising a systematic, annual flick-pass. I was never organised enough to arrange such a thing, never organised enough to realise that such and such a date on the rosters was Trinity Sunday. It wasn’t until Anne and I were working together in a New South Wales parish and I managed – accidentally – to be 1500 kilometres away visiting my children, that she pointed out that I had left the mysteries of the Holy Trinity to her. I was gutted: I am deeply committed to this central Christian doctrine, to the extent that I believe that it is, together with the Resurrection, the doctrine by which we stand or fall as an identifiable faith.

Which does not mean I think it’s a matter of turn or burn. I don’t think God is greatly in the business of burning anyone. But that is – to some extent – a different story. To some extent.

Still: it is a large jump from the mostly simple God-language of the New Testament to the complex and often dull recitation of the Nicene Creed. On the other hand, I don’t think the Holy Spirit of Pentecost went on holiday after the closure of the New Testament. That work of revealing the heart of God was not something from which she takes a Sabbatical. It is a large jump because the context was changing, and the experiential simplicity of the first Christians was needing greater explanation and explication if it were to survive in a complex and often cynical, crumbling Roman Empire. Or in the twenty-first century. And anyway, does recitation of the Creed have to be dull? Might it not be a song of joy, spoken or even sung? As an erstwhile atheist I have never found the words “I believe” to be dull. After 44 years of stumbling but rewarding faith they remain words that astound me. I believe. I believe.  We believe.

Still, I have too often worked with clergy and other church leaders whose approach is that the creed is to dismiss it as long, boring, and to declare that the Trinity has nothing to do with the gospel. Where do I go to howl in fury? Or is it to weep in sorrow?

Many years ago, when Anne as an undergraduate, she was friendly with a young Muslim student. They knew each other well – I suspect he had the hots for her – and one day he declared that he could accept Christianity if Christians would do away with the awkward teachings about the divinity of Jesus and the triunity of God. He had a point: what we had left could easily translate into a Muslim world view – or a Jehovah’s witness worldview, a Jewish worldview, a Muslim worldview or dare I say it a Masonic worldview (so much a part of our Anglican and other non-Roman Catholic backstories, as Bishop Nevill would remind us). But we would not have Christianity. Again: this is not to say God is in the business of burning those with other worldviews: “there are others, not of this flock,” says Jesus, and some early Christians dared to remind us that it is God’s will that all, not just some, who are to be embraced in the eternities of God.

Have you noticed – as I’m sure you have – that Nicodemus came to Jesus by night? Darkness is always significant in John’s telling of the Jesus story. But darkness is not the end of the Nicodemus story. Slowly as he sees the fullness of Jesus, the light shines in his darkness. Those words should be familiar, too. It is Nicodemus whose love for Jesus has him carrying 50 kilos of spices to anoint the dead man’s body. Nicodemus learns to love Jesus.

The language of the Trinity is language of love, too. Over years and decades the early Christians reflected and reflected more on the hold of love that Jesus had for them. More than that, they reflected too on the deep experience of his loving presence that they had continued to have since the strange events of resurrection and ascension. Paul spent about a decade and a half reflecting theologically and spiritually, trying to understand the Hebrew Scriptures in the light of his own powerful original and then on-going experience of the Risen Christ. Slowly the language and what we might wrongly call the mechanics of the Trinity began to form in his and other Christians’ minds. And always their reflections were driven not by some need to make equations of the head but by their deeper need to express the equations of the heart. The language of the Trinity is the language of love. The unseeable, unreachable Creator God, drawn near. The integrity of the human Jesus, in flesh and in subsequent Spirit, was so powerful that Jesus could be no less than God, no less than all we need to know of God. The presence of that long-ago human being not long ago but very, very now – very, very now despite his invisibility. That presence in sacraments, present in fellowship, present even in the words of Scripture. That presence, that both the gospel writer Luke and John Wesley would call “strangely warming,” was life-transforming and death transforming. and slowly the revelation of Triunity formed in the Christian mind, formed as a marriage of head and heart.

In the end does it matter? I believe it does. Again, it matters not as a ticket to ride to some eternal bliss, denied to those who don’t have it, some ticket to a train that carries only the righteous and the holy. Far from it.

The Trinity matters because God is revealed in the tender, patient Jesus who engages with Nicodemus until Nicodemus finally finds that light that shines in darkness. Jesus who heals a centurion’s dying daughter, who heals a man’s blindness, a crippled woman, a demoniac, a hungry crowd. Jesus who touches and transforms, showing justice and compassion consistent with his teachings. Jesus who, as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and a handful of weeping women eventually discover, heals even the obscenities of death and bereavement.

The Creator is inseparably entwined with the man Jesus, made known in space and time by the Spirit … not a far-flung architect of the universe or master craftsman who remains at the outer edge of time, but a compassionate loving God who enters yo
ur life and death and my life and death and the life and death of those we love and care for and turns all into the glorious hope of the new heavens and the new earth, the hope of resurrection.

There is though one final catch. For we are called so to immerse ourselves in the community of the Trinity, in the love of and from Creator, Redeemer, Giver of life, that we too bring resurrection hope and justice and compassion to those around us, that we too become ambassadors of justice and compassion, a people of light that transcends all darkness, that we too become a Good News People in a world that is somewhat short of anything but un-good news.

 

The Lord be with you.

no rose garden

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU NORTH

and St Alban’s, Kurow

PENTECOST SUNDAY (23^rd may) 2021

 

Readings

Acts 2:1-21                                        

Psalm 104:25-35, 36b

Romans 8:22-27

John 15: 26-27, 16:4b-15

 

There is a whole infinity of ways to describe this formative moment in early Christian history, this strange, beyond words moment – or perhaps period of moments – in which the church was suddenly empowered, liberated and commissioned to reach out through space and time. A glance at the readings shows Luke, John and Paul all giving different nuances, almost irreconcilably different narratives of the first Christian Pentecost.  As with the stories of the first Easter the writers are attempting to narrate that which is beyond narration. As with the stories of the first Easter the writers have to resonate with the experience of those who witnessed and experienced the events of which they tell.

Those who days or hours or some other period of time before had been broken and terrified were suddenly overwhelmed and empowered to continue the work of Jesus. More than that, they were empowered to experience an all but tangible sense of the presence of Jesus with them in the words they shared, the rites they performed, the scriptures they read. The invisible but overpowering presence of Jesus would be a part of the Christbearers’ story from that moment to the present, though we have manipulated and distorted it from one extreme to another from era to era.

In 1970 Lynn Anderson warmed (or anaesthetised!) the cockles of the heart of the western pop music world with a syrupy little song called “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden.” It was a song largely typical of its time, pleasant enough, far from profound. Anderson re-released it last decade, and while her voice hadn’t changed the world probably had. Or hadn’t. But now I’ve promised you an ear worm! But there was and is still no rose garden. Anderson and God have much in common: neither promised a rose garden. 

Why? At times the Holy Spirit of Pentecost was turned into a vague and mostly forgotten theological abstraction. At other times she became a warm and fuzzy, and sometimes dangerously misleading spiritual high. Both were rose gardens. Complacency. Idiocy. Opposite extents of a pendulum swing.

The Holy Spirit that Luke, Paul and John wrestle in their writings was neither. She was the overpowering presence who had appeared throughout the history of the people, shocking and changing God’s people and God’s universe from the moment the universe exploded into existence – or thereabouts. She had danced over chaos in the milliseconds of creation, had danced in the hearts of God’s people, had enflamed and enraged the prophets as she cried out for justice and compassion towards the oppressed (Palestinian and Israeli).

Now she was empowering a new, parallel people of God with the immeasurable challenge and immeasurable gift of the timeless, dangerous, life-giving presence of the physically risen but now visually departed Christ. She was liberating irrepressible, death conquering, justice proclaiming Jesus throughout space and time, so even we can experience him, far away and long after. But she wasn’t and isn’t promising us a rose garden – nor a bed of petals. She is promising the dangerous, unsettling, yet resurrection bringing presence of Jesus.

If much Christian preaching seemed by and large to forget her from about 150 a.d. to the late second half of last century, that more recent era didn’t do her many favours either. As she swept through mainline churches, liberating us from our formulaic stuffiness, she was manipulated and transposed to become a plaything, entertainment, a rose garden. We domesticated the dangerous wind of God.

As Trinitarian theologians emphasize she had and has what we could describe as one main job description, at least insofar as she relates to God’s people this side of the grave. She makes the presence of Jesus and all he did and is available to his people. Many over the last twenty years have heard me tell the story of the parish I inherited where a group of parishioners believed the Spirit had set them free to crawl around barking for Jesus. I suggest that, no matter how much fun they had, how liberating the experience was, it was not the work of the Spirit of the Christ of the Cross. The work of the Spirit is to make Jesus and all he stands for present to us. Barking was not the forte of the Christ of the gospels.

Yet we are experiencing a powerful era of the Spirit. If, yes, the charismatic renewal of the ’60s and ’70s blew our cobwebs away, the Spirit of God is now blowing our false western gods away, our Baals and our demons of complacency and deception. We are being forced to chose now whom we will serve: a god of entertainment and good times, a rose garden god, or the justice proclaiming God of the Cross. The dubious god who gave us massive privilege and prestige in society, buildings and bank accounts, or the God who declared that the Christ can have no place to rest, will have no flash palace until, as another pneumatological hymn puts it, “his work on earth is done.”

Pentecost is the great feast of the church, inseparably linked to Easter. We are renewed, re-immersed in the challenging Christ the Cross. We are this day thrown back on the mercy and empowerment of the Risen Lord, who forgives, restores, and sends us out into the world to be love and justice for the unloved and the broken.

The Lord be with you.