threefold mystery

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the GLENORCHY MISSION HALL

TIRNITY SUNDAY

(May 26^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

Isaiah 6: 1-8

Psalm 29

John 3: 1-17

I have spent some time over the past week or two reading two theological, or at least metaphysical writers both of whose names will be familiar to some of you. I am working systematically through the synod addresses of Bishop Penny Jamieson. I am reading, or if I’m going to be honest reading about because I’ve always found him impossible to read, Lloyd Geering.

I have to say I am profoundly moved by some of the thought of Penny Jamieson. I equally have to say that while centenarian Lloyd Geering is universally regarded as a delightful human being, his writings have left me cold for at least 40 years.

But what has this to do with Nicodemus?

Maybe something. Maybe nothing. Perhaps it is a little forced, but I would have to say that Bishop Penny’s writings have generally left me with a sense of being bathed in light. However profound Geering and others like him may be I find myself still bathed in darkness. Hang on to that thought, because on this Trinity Sunday we have, particularly in the Nicodemus reading, a journey from darkness to light.

Darkness to light. Perhaps not abstract notions when we’re dealing with massive electrical collapses at Saint Peter’s, now thank goodness nearly solved. But in metaphysical terms very much abstract, very much metaphorical. And to attempt to get our heads around the mysteries of the Christian Trinity using only the language of the intellect is to remain deeply enmeshed in darkness. I remember only too well numerous sermons attempting to explain the Trinity.

They all failed. All will. To understand the failure of these explanations, we should to describe colour, or taste, or love itself. Let alone the Trinity the language for which the early Christians strove. For this is language of love.

Increasingly then over my decades of faith I have leaned on the traditional language of the early church. They too were, like Nicodemus, stumbling in the dark and slowly, glacially, entering impenetrable light. Their fallible language is as good as any since, and as flawed as any since, but hallowed by time despite the flaw

To speak of the Trinity from time to time I will use threefold phrases such as Creator, Redeemer, and Giver of life, or Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Hope-bringer. I so in recognition that I don’t want our language of God to be over-masculinized. But when I do I will do so and always add the traditional and yet still inadequate formula, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Partly that is because I will always have ringing in my ears the admonition of my great a much-loved theological mentor Dick McKinney who expostulated wildly at the misconceptions, combinations of innumerable three-part word sequences that were floated in sermons and lectures as an attempt to improve our language and understanding of the Trinity.

All fell abysmally short and dissolved our mysterious God into shallow meaninglessness. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are flawed labels, but they are hallowed as I said by the test of time. They speak however inadequately of identities beyond human understanding, beyond human inadequacy. Not, thank God, “Father” as I am a flawed father. Not Son, as I am a flawed son. Each comparison is with the being beyond our understanding.

As our Jewish friends, and indeed even Muslim friends will remind us, our creator God is far beyond our understanding, much less our control, absolutely holy, absolutely incomprehensible, for to comprehend God is neither more nor less then too attempt to reduce God to the levels of our intellect. Ringing throughout the Hebrew scriptures our God’s famous admonition “no one looks on me and lives” (Exod. 33:20).

Hymn writer Walter Smith nails it beautifully:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

in light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days.

Perhaps we grasp some comprehension of that when we see footage of early nuclear explosions, such as the tragically named Trinity bomb in the New Mexico desert, or the nuclear testing scenes in Maralinga, French tests at Mururoa, and m ore. Even in those early unenlightened days the spectators turned their back on the blasts: light unwithstandable. An obscene imitation if you like of Godlight, but imitation nonetheless.

Unable to look on God, or the “face of God” as Exodus more specifically puts it, we are given, we believe as Christians, the entire being of God made visible to, even tangible to, human beings in the person and work of Jesus Christ. All that we can never know, understand, with stand of God the Creator enfleshed in the person and work of the historic man Jesus.

Yet the cost of being human is mortality. Even without the horrors of crucifixion the Godman, the enfleshed God, has to pass through the insults and obscenity of a death. And so as Jesus frequently says in the records of the gospels I cannot stay here (to transliterate slightly). I must go to my Father.

All we can know of Jesus is primarily recorded in the writings of four men who we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

In John’s writing particularly we find Jesus wrestling with that very issue. I must go so that the Comforter, the Advocate, the Representative, the Ambassador, the myriad inadequate words that describe the Spirit of God, can come and release me to be all that I am, have been, even will be, through space and time. The justice, the compassion, the love, even some lesser glimpsed attributes of Jesus such as tenderness, creativity and humour, all these are attributes of the Creator God made known in this one life, then made known through space and time by the emanation of the mysterious one we call Holy Spirit.

I could go on to explain that these are not three blokes in the way that they sometimes have to be expressed in art or in books like The Shack. Nor three phases like ice water and steam, but something else completely beyond our comprehension. The finest lectures I heard at theological college were lectures by those such as Dick McKinney, delving into the mysteries of Trinity, deeply aware of the inadequacy of their presentation. And if theirs were deeply inadequate, mine will be deeply inadequater, so there, almost I must leave the attempt.

But I do want to emphasise that the language of the Trinity is the language of immeasurable love. The unknowable God made known to us because God wants to know and love and redeem. The unknowable God made known to the smallness of the human mind in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, through scriptures and through other means enflamed by the one we know as spirit, released through space and time and always within and around us to draw us into that immeasurable love and light – until such time as God’s creation winds up in what we call the eschaton, the end of time, the beginning of timelessness, when at last we as Paul puts it see no longer through a darkened glass but face to face.

Nicodemus makes a journey across three appearances in John’s gospel, a journey from darkness to light. I want to suggest, albeit a little sternly, that theologians the like of a Lloyd Geering, who find the language of faith somewhat to hard to handle, leave us stumbling in the dark, confronting Jesus by night and refusing to move or grow. It is a good thing that God’s patience is eternal. But I want to, in Maori terms, “mihi,” To give credit to our esrtwhile bishop, Penny, For what appears through her writings is a profound sense of the Christ who is light in times of darkness, who sustained her through times of considerable turmoil and pain and who is never limited by space or time or intellect. 

troublesome third person

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

PENTECOST

(May 19^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

Ezekiel 37: 1-14

Psalm 104: 25-32

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

There was, some years ago, decades perhaps, a period in which people saw the experience of the Spirit to be an excuse to do incredibly silly, incredibly meaningless things. I will cut a little slack perhaps but I remember the horror with which I encountered a group whose shared joy was based on, perhaps proved by, manifested in, crawling around on their knees barking. Perhaps this was a liberating experience, but was it a gift of the god of the Cross? a manifestation of the Spirit?

Like many of us I also witnessed from time to time, particularly in the early years of my faith, that manifestation that scholars call glossolalia, speaking in tongues. Sometimes even that quite beautiful sound of singing in tongues. As time went on, impressed though I was in the early months and perhaps years of my faith by these manifestations, I came to see them as less and less important, and in some cases as a form of charlatanism.

Such manifestations can be a beautiful expression of psychological and spiritual liberation. As such they are not necessarily a bad thing. I am however not convinced that they were what Paul was talking about when he wrote about speaking in tongues, and I’m not altogether convinced that this manifestation was the hub of the scene that Luke describes in that first upper room of Pentecost.

I’m sure to be corrected by some, perhaps some of you, who I have experienced great joy and liberation in the form of glossolalia, speaking in tongues. I certainly do not think it is anything like that be all and end all of the Pentecost experience. The scriptures lead us to seek a deeper sign. That deeper sign may be strictly personal: perhaps speaking in tongues falls into that category. When I was subjected to an ear bashing by two Pentecostal pastors in Palmerston North years ago exhibiting patterns of tongue speaking that they assured me were for what the military might call demonstration purposes only I began to question their integrity. Who what why is this Spirit who has little show times?

I’m being harsh but the Spirit that Jesus speaks of as the Paraclete in John’s gospel, and which Luke depicts in terms of a reversal of the tower of Babel in his Book of Acts, is little interested in barking for Jesus, and I suggest only a touch more interested in our ability to slip into sub linguistic modes of ecstasy (though we will indeed sing of tongues of ecstasy later in the service).

If I am hinting at things that the Spiritual experience of Pentecost is not what do I suggest it is? The litmus test is what to do the Scriptures say? When Paul talks about tongues he certainly appears to be discussing something supernatural, but he places very little importance on it, and far more importance on love. Are we a people or individuals of love? Therein lies one key basis on which to evaluate our experience of the Spirit.

There are others too, secondary perhaps to that one. This Spirit who comes to us in different ways at different times has what I once years ago spoke of as a “job description.” Does the experience of the Spirit that we are having or claiming to have point to all that Jesus was and is? Is this experience consistent with the behaviour and teaching of the Jesus revealed to us by the four great gospel writers (themselves I suggest deeply inspired by the Spirit, though far from being subjected to some form of  automatic writing as if they were mediums of a less inspired ghost in a séance).

The Spirit’s task is to make known and available to us all that we need in this moment, in any given moment, of the person and the work of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Second Person of the Trinity. The task of the Spirit is to release the Man of Nazareth through space and time so that we are equally empowered by him as were his followers in the flesh.

The task of the Spirit is to empower us for the work of justice, for the work of evangelism or proclamation of the gospel, for the works that we speak of as marks of mission. The task of the Spirit is setting us aside as a contrast Society of Jesus whose citizenship, as the author of Hebrews puts it, is not of this world. This of course does not give us carte blanche to be of no earthly use to anyone in this world: quite the opposite. The task of the Spirit may be to be a people of deep Christ-centred ecstasy, knowing as we pray together, knowing sometimes on our own in the privacy of our room or a walk in God’s creation, knowing and being inspired by, breathed into by the immeasurable presence and empowerment of God.

Sometimes that empowerment will be as gentle as the dove with whom the Spirit is often associated. Sometimes as simple as holding and comforting a friend or relative in a time of great sorrow, or even for that matter a child in a time of pain or frustration. Sometimes as inspirational and world changing as proclaiming justice in the face of injustice at great risk, the work of an Oscar Romero, a Desmond Tutu or a Martin Luther King. Even the work, as I’ve often said of a Rachel Carson or Greta Thunberg, as far as I know far outside the Christian community, because the Spirit of God is not restricted by human fences.

So if you expected to come this day and learn all there is to know about the Third Person of the Trinity then I’m very sorry! These are the moments in which we stand in awe and wonder, knowing that the mysteries of our triune God are simply way beyond and above us. Yet give thanks for the remarkable drawing near of God not only in Jesus but in all that Jesus asks us to do, even in setting bread and wine aside and knowing it to be embodiment of the presence of God.

love, as best you can

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION)

 (May 12^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 5: 9-13

Psalm 1

John 17: 6-19

For several weeks now, since Easter, we have been journeying with the source of the Fourth Gospel, guided by his mystical and vastly poetic mind into the impossibly deep mind of the one he calls Word, Logos, the Son of God. We have used his telling of the Jesus story from the Fourth Gospel, but glanced too from time to time at his instructions to one of the early Christian communities, instructions that we know as the Epistles of John.

Throughout the readings we have been encountering the great promise of Jesus to be with us, as he puts it, even to the end. Which end? This of course can be the end of our own lives – and the promise of a beyond. It can be the collapse of civilizations and perhaps of humankind, and the promise of a beyond. It can be the collapse of the cosmos, of the universe and universes, and the promise of a beyond. It is all of these and more, and that is impossible for us to grasp. Yet the love of which John’s Jesus speaks is an intimate love, as close as breath.

So we can’t grasp it. John asks us not to understand with our head but to be immersed with our heart. The language particularly of John 17 from which we’ve read today is the language of deep heart, or as I call it cardiac intimacy, with God. It is the language of love, and it is no accident that the Greek word agape, the māori word aroha, the English word love appears repeatedly in John’s writings. It is as Paul famously writes, a love that does not insist on its own way, does not dominate, does not pout, a love that lives for the other. It is a love for neighbour, but, and this may surprise some advocates of Christian nationalism so frighteningly dominant in some pockets of Christianity, a love that does not impose its will on those around us.

It is a love that rejoices in the knowledge that we belong to God. At St. Peter’s we will sing that later. That belonging is the belonging of intimacy, involving trust, and both dedication and discipline. Not discipline in a brutal way, but the discipline as again Paul writes, of an athlete, focusing again and again on the tasks needing to be done. In the case of love, the love that Jesus prays for in what is called his High Priestly Prayer, the work, the tasks to be done to maintain that love are tasks of reconciliation, cooperation, tasks of immersion in the experience of Christ, which we might extrapolate as tasks of worship, of encountering Christ in scripture and paradoxically in one another. Armed with practice and rehearsal in those disciplines, we are able to know that we belong to God, and we are even able to be signs of divine love and hope in the community into which God has placed us.

As John writes the Jesus story he realises that this disciplined exposure to Christ love is the very essence of evangelism, of proclamation. After the resurrection the risen Lord will give Peter the command to love, and very few other instructions. So it is for us, and no, it is not easy, but it comes with God’s own promise, I am with you always. Our task is to continually accept the one who was with us always, seeking the spirit of love, of truth, whose coming we will celebrate at Pentecost, and who can enable us to be bearers of gospel love.

 

mene as best you can

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (May 5^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 5: 1-7

Psalm 98

John 15.9-17


We don’t need to be either Einstein or some sort of academic of the sociology of religion to realise that much that is damaging has been done in the name of religion, even in the name of Christ. Corporately as Christians, though for once not necessarily for us each as individuals, a blight on our story. As one who tends to dwell on the negative I’m told that I overemphasise it. That may be my mistake but I don’t certainly want to minimise the impact of the negative witness we have sometimes had.

At the same time I don’t want to shy away from that which has been great in the name of Christ both on the part of the body of Christ as a whole, and on the part of individuals who have inspired greatness, either on a monumental or on a private scale. Those who have inspired us, as well as the great saints who have changed society for the better.

One of them, incidentally, is the source of the writings that we call by the name of John, and which we have been exploring these past weeks since Easter. One scholar rejoicing in the name of Rudolf Schnakenburg (I studied theology for the German names!) made what I think ink is a very accurate claim; , as the heart of John’s good news.he spoke of the verses that I often use at funerals from the chapter before ours today, as Jesus announces himself as the way, the truth, the life.

Jesus is in fact many other things in this Fourth gospel, not least light, which we have been quietly acknowledging since Easter morn with the paschal candle that sits unobtrusively in the sanctuary. Light, that cancels darkness.

The wonderful rented vicarage that I am now inhabiting is pitch black at night, yet the slightest light can help me navigate my way around if I get home late at night or am, as is more often the case, up and about in the wee small hours of the morning.

The slightest light.

So John in telling the Jesus story writes about Jesus as light, as way, as truth, as life. The shadow side of Christian witness that often drowns out that good news is the form of Christianity that uses texts not as a source of joy but as a source of condemnation. I am way, truth, light, life says Jesus, and the moment he says these things and adds “no one comes to the father except through me” the temptation for Christians has been to use his additional words as condemnation. Sorry my friends, but if you don’t tally up with what I consider to be an encounter with Christ, then you miss out on the benefits of salvation. So sad. Too bad.

As my predecessor in my previous role, the ministry educator before me, Alec Clark has often emphasised in gospel conversations, the good news which we too readily suppress, is that there is way, truth, light and life. That this way, truth, light, and life exists despite global warming, global warfare, blocked Whakatipu roadways, rampant inflation, despite even the tragedies through which our life may pass. Way, truth, life exist. And in the passage that we have just read today John goes on to emphasise what the earliest Christians realised was the absolute key ingredient of our response to the encounter with Jesus: the call to love. In John’s account of the Jesus story, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the key verb is abide. Abide in love. Abide in the way, the truth, the light, the life. Abide.

I was incidentally asked by a bride the other day why we no longer use the much-romanticised response “I do” in our wedding services. In recent decades we have opted instead for the more intentional “I will.” In ordination and installation services we add the rider, “God being my helper.” Perhaps we should introduce that to our wedding liturgies?

Intentionality: abide. “If you abide in me,” says Jesus, “and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.” Not, as I’ve said before “Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,” but “Lord please equip me with everything I can use to serve and to advertise your way, your truth, your light, your love to the best of my ability.” I guess it’s not quite so catchy and certainly far less cynical in a song.

So in both readings that bear the name John today we hear much about love. Perhaps the best prayer we can send in our own prayer lives is “Lord, help me to love.” The intentionality of which I spoke a moment ago is the key to that ingredient. The word that the author of John frequently users to describe the commitment to Christ, the word we translate as abide, is one of the few that have come directly from Greek into English.

The Greek word, so I can show off, is Mene M-E-N-E. Greek like Māori turns the vowel “e” into something more akin to “eh.” “Mene in me,” Jesus is saying. That “mene” trickled down into English as the second syllable of the word “remain.” Or that’s my theory, and I am sticking to it. Mene in me. Remain intentionally connected to me. Remain connected to me in prayer, in worship, in fellowship with other believers, in fellowship with the scriptures about me, says Jesus. Be intentional.

Do I practise what I preach? Only very poorly, but that I suspect is true of most of us, and fallible though we are, poor advertisements though we may well be, our task is to keep on that intentional remaining, mene-ing in Christ as best we can, with the rider stolen from ordination services, “God be my helper.” Which funnily enough, is precisely the extra dimension that Jesus promises when in the fourth gospel he speaks of the future coming of the Spirit. But for that we shall symbolically wait until Pentecost.