visionary John

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

and the GLENORCHY MISSION HALL

 SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(May 25^th) 2025

 

 

READINGS

 

Revelation 21:10; 21: 22 - 22:5

Psalm 67

John 14: 23-29

 

 

Since Easter these mysterious faceless guides that I called the lectioners, shadowy figures in an ivory tower somewhere, who succeed where I could not dream of succeeding, giving us a planned coverage of biblical readings over a three-year.

The word “plan” of course being my drawback.

By leading us through John’s account of the gospel, not merely the resurrection appearances, but the earlier teachings, the lectioners give us a remarkable insight into the experience and understanding of the first apostles. As they encountered their Lord, he was initially unrecognisable. But he was absolutely tangible, in those 50 days after the first Easter. Through those days the disciples, together with Jesus, dug deep into the great texts of the Jewish faith.

They found these texts to be unlocked not with some esoteric Da Vinci Code meaning, but with the new insight that comes from new perspective. As if I were watching an American football game, which seems to me a complete and unmitigated shemozzle, suddenly being given a rule book and video demonstration of the rules and subtleties, coaching in the arts of play, launching me into an aha moment when what once was shemozzle suddenly becomes comprehensible contest.

So the disciples recalled many things that Jesus said, and they understood with new ears. In this passage the apostle John, whoever he was, remembers, decades later, the promises Jesus gave of peace, of the new and dynamic sense of his presence, despite his absence from sight. This is not like me knowing that Anne is vaguely out there somewhere in the diocese, but a powerful heart-pumping knowledge that the one who is out of sight is inexplicably and immeasurably present. “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” says Jesus, gently, to Thomas. That’s you, that’s me.

This Thursday is the feast of the Ascension. I have found over the years that Anglicans are abysmally poor at attending it (work gets in the way), so I haven’t scheduled a Eucharist this week. Perhaps I will go, quietly, sit on the lake side and ponder. (I enjoy my own company, but it is against the rules of Anglican theology to celebrate mass alone. And even given my belief that we celebrate with the Saints and even the ancestors, their presence is a little hard to quantify!).

This is what Jesus was emphasizing in our passage when he said enigmatically, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” He said it in various forms over and again, but for it to be recorded decades later, when the Fourth Gospel was written, it had to ring true. It had to resonate with the experience of those first Christians.

With you and me, too. John covers that base when he reminds his audience that there were so many things he would love to have said about those encounters with the risen Lord, and indeed the Incarnate Lord before that, but that the whole world could not hold the pages of such a book. John, as he late in life looked back on those events, he knew how immeasurably life-and world-changing they were. So too did those who listened as his gospel was read out. They too experienced the inexplicable but invisible presence of the risen Lord, made known by the one they had come to know as Advocate, Counsellor, Spirit.

Our doctrine of the Trinity came later, as Christians spent centuries wrestling to find language to express the mysterious truth that God was triune. But nothing else could explain the tangibility of the presence of the risen Lord who they encountered in their worship, in their fellowship, in their journey through scriptures. And while the years, centuries, even millennia have passed we too stand in the privileged place of encounter with the risen Lord, made possible through these elements, clung to by faith but also by that occasional uncanny pressing sense of Christ-presence.

This Thursday somewhere, whatever we’re doing, some of our sisters and brothers (especially I should add in the Roman Catholic communion) will be recognising the disappearance of the fleshly Jesus from our sight. Yet next Sunday our experience of him will be one and the same as it has always been, sometimes powerful, sometimes sketchy or even meh. Yet nevertheless always validation of the claims he made to be one with, claims he was inseparable from the creator of the heavens and the earth.

So inseparable that he even came to be known as Word, the Breath, the Son, Godself.

Closer indeed then our own breath, for this presence is the breath of the creator, the Redeemer, the Giver of life, as I sometimes say when I give the almost-final words of the liturgy.

Breath does not force us, does not direct our every footstep, dictate our every decision. If it did we would not be a people of faith but dull, robotic mechanisms. Bots.

That we are not. As we go out of our worship today we are called simply to do our best as we offer ourselves and our lives afresh in the service of the risen and Lord, and his reign of justice, compassion and love.