breathe in ... breathe out

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St MARTIN’S, DUNTROON

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 17^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Amos 8: 1-12

Psalm 52

Colossians 1: 15-28

Luke 10: 38-42

 

 

As Jesus and his followers trudge steadily towards Jerusalem they are out of step – cognitive dissonance some people like to call it. Perhaps I'll call it pedestrian disharmony. Except that Jesus knows this – as always I would want to emphasise I do not mean this in a clairvoyant or crystal ball gazing way. No, but he knows that those trudging with him just don't get it. That’s why in Mark’s gospel Jesus keeps telling people to shut up. Shhh. “Wait and see” my mother used to say back in the days one used to get pudding or dessert, and wanted to know what it was we were having. Wait and see.

Wait and see says Jesus, the Cross and Good Friday and the extent to which God’s redeeming love unstoppably reaches.

So, just after a brief powerful lesson that we explored last week, who is my neighbour, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we find Jesus breaking through social barriers; visiting women, making one of them a disciple, and finding more unneighbourliness. The nuisance reality of jobs that have to be done and conflicts that must be resolved breaks in to the idealism of Jesus’ words at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and do likewise.”

But it is not an either/or but a both/and. Martha, my friend Nicki Colledge  reminded us in this past week’s Gospel Conversation, Martha sneaks off to Jesus to get him to sort her sister out. Don’t triangulate, it was suggested, is one incidental message of our scene today. Elsewhere in the scriptures Jesus does not say if you have an issue with your brother or your sister go and drag someone else into it, go and triangulate, but go to them and in love sort out your differences. Mind you, no one ever said that was easy, and I doubt that I practise what I preach. Nevertheless, let’s at least start our understanding of Mary and Martha by acknowledging that whinging to a third party is not the Way of the Cross.

But other questions are at issue here.

We have Jesus breaking through social barriers – he was and is no respector of inappropriate protocols. He here dares to permit Mary the role she no doubt demanded without any great subtlety, that of “sitting at the feet,” a sort of shorthand description Of becoming a disciple. Later the Church silenced stroppy women the likes of Mary, but while Jesus was around in the flesh no one who knew him dared contradict his radical professions and enactments of justice and love. Fortunately the silencing of women only lasted around 1950 years or so. But in this scene we are given a brief glimpse of the reign of God, the justice and equality by which, as Paul puts it, there is neither Greek nor Jew, male or female.

Mary’s life-choice is a dangerous one. For a period – who knows how long? – she dares to shut out the noise and the busyness of the world around her. It is not an either/or, the dishes still needs doing, the income needs earning, the cattle lead drenching, the lawns need mowing. But Mary dares to be still, no radio, no television, no computer, or whatever the white noise of the first century had to offer in order to drown out reality and the voice of God. She faced just the stillness of being. Being with Jesus in the flesh of course, which is not technically available to us. But untechnically, or to put it a better way, mystically, it is. Through that Third Person of the Trinity, Jesus is with us, and we too can pause, in creation, in liturgy, in dreaming.

To do so we have to learn to internalise that wonderful prayer, “Lord, it is night.” In this case it need not be night. Lord it is stillness time. Time just to be. “What is done is done, what is not done is not done. Let it be.” We need to find Mary’s stillness, and thus find the stillness of God, the still point of the turning world, a turning cosmos beyond worlds.

In liturgy – and Martha’s dinner was liturgy – we can at its best find leverage by which we may tap into that stillness. As our church infrastructure collapses it may be our gift to White Noise Generations, our own included: be still. Oh Lord hear our prayer. Be still and know the one the author of Colossians describes as “first born, through whom all things.” be still and find the love and peace and justice of God. Be still. In that stillness find a moment to give thanks. Even amongst the hurly burly of dishes to be done, cattle to be drenched, livings to be earned.

Be still and become Christ to those to whom he sends us. Go out to exhale the Christ who we have inhaled in the silence the Christ who has renewed us

 

dancing with robbers

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St ALBAN’S, KUROW

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 10^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Amos 7:1-17

Psalm 82

Colossians 1: 1-14

Luke 10: 25-37

 

There is something deeply humbling – a reality check if you like – about preaching on the Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan in 2022. It’s an incredibly vivid parable, and as our Gospel Conversation panellists all noted, It is so vivid it basically needs no explanation in order to extract meaning.

But there is another dimension in 2022. When I began my ministry, it was a well-known parable, in some ways awkward to preach on precisely because it was so well known. What was there that was new to say? Vibrant young preachers – I was far too dry and boring – attempted to bring an old story to new birth by reinventing the characters and perhaps the ploy did no harm. I well remember one in which the Samaritan was a punk rocker. Each generation has found its Samaritans – those like us, but not quite. Just a little other to us. The good Muslim. The good transgender. The good Russian. The attempts tend to reveal our own prejudices.

Do I digress? Maybe. But if we were to take a quick survey down the Main Street (and I’m not brave enough) we would find, when we asked about the Good Samaritan, that while some would vaguely know the phrase, increasingly few would know the story or from where it came.

It is a vivid story. Few of us are arrogant enough to believe we are the Samaritan. Most of us recognise our propensity to walk by on the other side. Busy-ness, compassion fatigue, fear of attack on ourselves as we help a victim – a sort of modern day “Billy don’t be a hero” syndrome. We know we are the walkers, most of us, and those that don’t probably are.

Can the parable speak to us? We are painfully aware of our short-fallings. Yeah, yeah Jesus, we know.

There are a couple of warnings. The similarities between Jew and Samaritan are deep, deeper than the differences. We see that in John’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. So near, and yet so far. Put me in a room with a group of Sydney Evangelicals – there – my biases are showing – and all my resentments will emerge. Yet if a militant extremist from Mars were seeking to eradicate all Christians it is doubtful they would bother to differentiate between us.

There is the subtle issue, too, of the hard yards. I might give a busker or a beggar some loose change, but to my shame I have to admit that I would not put in the hard yards to see them restored to wholeness. I might pick up a hitchhiker covered in obvious prison tats, but I might wonder if I really wanted that person in my car, and quickly drive on. While I have from time to time worked with the disadvantaged including prisoners I have usually found excuses soon enough to run to the comfort and safety of my world. Here, Mr Beaten Up Guy, here’s 10 bucks for some Aspro and good luck for the walk home.

Beaten, stripped, left for dead. As Jesus told the story did he know that this description and worse would soon be his fate? Yet there is a bit of Jesus, no a lot of Jesus, of course, in that other character, the hated outsider, the Samaritan.

If we tell this story to strangers today we might decide that we and they are all alike the broken person in the gutter. For we live in a rather beaten up world, and we are beaten up with it. Beaten and beaters, for we are the robbers, the victim, the embarrassed passers-by. Not the Samaritan. We get that.

But we whisper a word of hope. Because none of us would be here today if we had not been touched by the one who gave us aid, medicine, a donkey, and the glorious hope of resurrection. Let us do likewise. We can whisper a word of hope in deed and word.

love, embodied

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU
FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 2nd) 2022

 

  READINGS:

 

2 Kings 5: 3-14

Psalm 30
Galatians 6: 1-16
Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20-38

 

In his telling of the Jesus story Luke has a distinct pivot-point, which we have now passed, when Jesus stets his face resolutely towards Jerusalem, towards all that deep down he knows must await him there. His followers, still completely in a fog, turn and walk with him. Probably most, like Judas, expect that the overthrow of the corrupt Roman Empire is about to begin.

Jesus’ ministry is, in large part, one of forming his disciples, those who will take all that he is out into the world. Their vision, like ours, is imperfect. Is he a revolutionary? Certainly at this stage his revolutionary programme, if that is what it is, seems a little vague.

For he has spoken of suffering and dying. That in itself is not an unusual expectation for revolutionaries, though it would probably be preferable if their leader did not dwell on it quite so much. He has carried out acts of healing, quite remarkable ones, but tends to demand that his beneficiaries shut up. He’s fed hungry people, too, which is not a bad thing for a revolutionary leader to do, but seems not to have worried when the crowds instead of eating and joining the movement, have had their fill, and then sauntered away. Strange, this.

Unsettling.

 And he's done good things for some pretty undesirable people, really. Synagogue leaders, yes, but unclean women? Demon possessed outcasts? I mean, they’re hardly the sort to prioritise, are they? Though I suppose with all that strength, and provided the demons don’t come back, they could be pretty useful in close combat.

But at least he’s still talking about justice. The Romans – and the corrupt religious leadership in bed with them – they’ll be toppled. Won’t they? I mean isn’t that what justice is all about? And the peace once the overlords are conquered, that'll be alright, as long as they’re kept in their place.

Odd, though.

We have the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight. Sometimes the teachings of Jesus have been horrendously misapplied, to benefit the rich and powerful, the haves rather than the have-nots. But in recent decades that false power, those shibboleths have begun to crumble and we are being forced back to find not the revolutionary Jesus, in any political or much less military sense, but the one who is the embodiment of love, compassion, hope, above all, resurrection hope.

Love, compassion, hope (and more) but not from corridors of power. Not a theocracy whence Christians force their will on others. Just small, Jesus-like ways of touching those around us with love. Perhaps, and sometimes only perhaps, a little more scheduled then practising random acts of kindness, but that’s not a bad effort, either. Then slowly joining the dots of those random acts until they become habit.

By acting in small ways of love and neighbourliness in our society, the place God has called us to be, we can rumour love, can Rumer care in contrast to our often careless world. A book a couple of decades back spoke of being a “contrast society of Jesus.” That book title has picked up extra gravitas in the two decades since Alan Walker published it, because more and more we are being called to contrast not only with a care-less society, but a care-less society of followers of an ersatz or false Jesus. Constantly the media, of whom I am no enemy, remind us of the bigotry of those who claim the name of Jesus and falsely cry “Lord, Lord” as they peddle hatred and the disempowerment of women and the most vulnerable in society. Their Jesus is not mine, is not the Jesus of the gospels. They need our prayers.

We must do better, so help us God. In our passage from Luke we find the bemused followers of Jesus, genuine seekers after truth, sent out. The Greek, Dr Townsley reminded us in our Gospel Conversation for this week, is closer to “cast out” then merely “sent out.” It is as if God-in-Jesus has flung us into the world to discover how to serve God, how to experience God, and as it happens how to experience and advertise the joy that comes from knowing and being known by the God of Jesus Christ.

As part of that casting out we may be sent away from our comfort zones and challenged – but helped by the Spirit of God – to find God in new zones, unforeseen futures. That is happening to us anyway. Do not remember the former things, said Isaiah. Old certainties crumble and pass away. My litany of trials (those temptations or trials of the Lord’s Prayer) can be named once more: rising tides, stretched economies, mutating pandemics, and the most serious military conflict since two world wars – these are trials gnerated by humanity and through which he will always lead us.

These do not have the final word. However much it feels that way these trials are not the full stop at the end of human history. Our comfort zones are crumbling, old certainties are pushed aside (as Alex Prud’Homme put it). We are being as it were cast out with the seventy followers of Jesus. Yet we will be empowered to touch lives with Christ-light and Christ-love even as we stumble, along the paths that as yet seem hard to navigate. But we are not the navigators, and we will return to Jesus like the disciples with joy even if as yet we do not know what that return looks like.

On the way we are not alone. Our koinonia, our fellowship is one of our greatest gifts and should be one of our greatest advertisements. Not the rhetoric of hatred pedalled by too many in the name of Jesus – or perhaps we should say in the name of a false Jesus – but a rhetoric of love, of welcome, of embrace and fellowship “You obey the rule of Christ,” says Paul to the Galatians, “when you offer a helping hand.” We called into our simple lives simply to offer that hand of help to those God calls across our path. We are called to live simply so others may simply live. We are called to live, and by our living called to proclaim peace, justice, and hope, even in the darkest times. That is the unsettling journey that Jesus leads us on.

In undertaking that journey together and together with Christ we proclaim Christ’s reign until he comes again.

plaited faith

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

Te Pouhere (June 19^th) 2022

 

 

Ko te Karaiti te pou herenga waka

Whakapaingia te Atua to tatou Kai-hanga

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 42: 10-20

2 Cor 5:14-19

John 15: 9-17

You won’t have cause to know this, but for two years before I moved into this diocese I had the privilege of being a part of, and one of the priests at, a small Māori hahi in South Napier, called Te Pou Herenga Waka o te Whakapono: the post that anchors the waka of faith. The linguists amongst you may notice the connection between the name of this Sunday, Te Pouhere, and the words of that congregation’s name, te pou herenga.

The hitching post, if you like, of faith, to which all Christ-faith communities must be tethered.

A week ago we explored something of the meaning of the Trinity, and I hope I conveyed at least to some extent the idea that to speak of the Trinity is to speak the language of love. There is the love God has for us, but also the community of perfect, inseparable love that is the impossible, interconnected community of Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit,  in whom we are called to live and act.

Yet that can be all terribly ethereal and out there. Not meaningless out there, but out beyond our understanding, no matter who we are.

For us there is the demand of applied love. The Trinity of love is applied in the invasion of our lives by Jesus, by the resurrection hope that he brings, by the Spirit who makes Jesus’ presence and love possible through space and time, even by the act of love that is God’s activity in creating us and sharing with us the immense unfathomable mysteries of creation.

But that is still “out there.” We are not called, as the cliché goes, to be so heavenly-minded that we are no earthly good.

We are called to express our love in the realities of being human, the realities of human experience, the realities of our chain of being. We are called to express this in the interconnection that is the body of Christ. See how Christians love each other. Within that body of Christ, too, we are called to love within our small faith communities, our congregations. In the wisdom of our province, we have been called to be intentional in expressing that love across the plaits of three tikanga.

How?

What does it mean?

Since I have accidentally stumbled into a role as an historian I inevitably emphasise history. What do we know about the history of our church community? But more importantly, what do we know of the history of relationships across our varied cultures?

It is no mistake that the wise women and men who drew up the lectionary have taken us to passages about union and love. The gospel passage takes us back to Jesus’ final instructions to his followers, and it is no accident that those instructions are all about love. Though it is also no accident that if we put today’s words about love into their context in John’s gospel-account, we find that Jesus makes clear that such love is possible only through deep connection with the Vine. Jesus had said earlier, and now he makes clear once more, that to be bearers of Christ-love we must be deeply grafted, grafted thought discipline, onto that Vine.

If we turn to Paul and read him correctly, we will find that the lens through which he sees all Christian behaviour is that of love. How well do we love? The famous Hymn to Love that we know as 1 Corinthians 13, the passage made known to a whole new generation back at the time of the death of Lady Diana Spencer, summarises the demands and the signs of love. Do we show them? Do I?

John makes clear that love is no chance thing. Over and again he uses the word “remain.” It is a word implying discipline, demanding discipline. To do so, to remain in Christ as Anglican Christians in Aotearoa we are called to look deeply at our relationship with our Māori and Pacifica sisters and brothers, to acknowledge and seek to redress the disadvantages across the decades that they have experienced, to affirm symbolically and actually oneness in Christ-love.

In historical terms it is worth remembering that it was Māori who reinvigorated Christianity across Aotearoa New Zealand, and especially here in the Deep South, after Marsden’s initial overtures faded. If we value our faith we need to harbour deep appreciation, and express that appreciation, more, that aroha, that love, as best we can. It is our task to acknowledge the resource inequities across our tikanga. It is our task to listen especially to the cries de cœur from our co-tikanga in their under-resourced state. It is our task to share resources, not dumping second hand cast-offs but offering of our best to our whanau in faith. It is out task to learn from the telogical voices of our co-tikanga. 

We must learn how to express and practice faith-love. To be immersed in the Vine that is Christ we must with discipline learn to listen, to love, and to act in solidarity with our Māori and Pacifica sisters and brothers. It is to that we are recalled each Te Pouhere Sunday – by the Spirit of God to renew with discipline our love, in and for the tethering post that is Christ.

bloody impossible doctrines of love!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

TRINITY SUNDAY (June 12^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5: 1-5

John 16:12-15

Let’s start, unusually enough for me as one dwelling at the extreme edges of chaos, but let’s start from something like the beginning. If there is something that drives me bananas then it is the countless stream of Christians – mainly clergy I’m afraid – who reach the point where they decide that because they cannot understand or explain the Trinity then it is all nonsense, a barrier to church growth, and let's get rid of it.

As John Franklin said in our Gospel Conversations  this past week, to explain the road code to a three year old is a hopeless task, indeed a pointless task. As it happens I know, admire and obey the road code, at least most of the time, and that is enough without knowing the intricate reasons for its design. There are as it happens reasons why most countries in the world drive on the right and we of the once British Empire drive on the left, but that really doesn’t concern me, and so I leave it alone. As the much-covered Iris DeMent song goes, “Let the Mystery Be.” Perhaps the comparison’s not quite the right one for me and there will be others for you. I'm more or less happy to accept the workings of a  continuous variable transmission – though I confess it would not be my choice (give me a good old clutch pedal and gear stick any day) – but while the words make some sense to me the scientific constructions are way beyond me. The same will be said of photosynthesis or a myriad other things that make up my life or yours each day.

I’m lucky I guess, that I have no difficulty with the theology of Trinity. But nor do I want to explain this wonderful language of love, because like all language of love it collapses in a puff of inadequate logic. The readings we have today, and countless others we could have, are merely scratching towards the immeasurable mysteries of a Triune God.

So it is the language of love. It is the language of being loved by God and of loving God, of being known by God (as the great Psalm 139 puts it), and of knowing God at least in some miniscule way, and of wanting to know more of God. 

This is the God who inexplicably decides to create or generate or whatever a universe – or an infinity of universes perhaps – and does so. That same God breathes divine image into at least one species on at least one spinning orb in that infinite universe amngst infinite universes, allows us the freedom to run our own lives. Sometimes as we see in Ukraine  we do so with disastrous consequences through our own fault or at the mercy of the fault of others or of nature.

 But where those consequences are disastrous, and indeed always because life as we know it is finite, God enters into our experience in a moment of time – or perhaps I can say entered into our experience in a moment of history – to give us, if we accept it, a way to gain access to the eternities that we have lost in our finiteness, never had because finite, but which dwell just beyond our sight. God enters into our finite existence, into our too-human floundering, not remaining out there beyond the universes, but entering your existence and mine, entering the depths of being human and being mortal, and there births eternity. 

Despite us and for us, even though as yet we cannot get it intellectually.

But this beyond-comprehension God not only does not remain out beyond the edges of the universes, but does not enter into human experience just once 2000 years ago and leave us forlorn. This God enters into the very deepest depths of human experience, into the bitternesses of human despair, angst,  loneliness, boredom or what the French call ennui, enters into every human experience throughout space and time, even in little old North Otago. And when God enters into that experience at any time in space, there human beings who are open to God’s presence can be touched and transformed.

And through all that God is the wonderful Community of Being, and for that matter Community of Becoming, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – breathing love and hope that otherwise would not be available to us, breathing resurrection hope when otherwise there would just be a clanging echo chamber that a far-off-God or perhaps no-God left behind a millisecond after some immeasurably gigantic and inexplicable explosion billions of years ago.

Trinity? The language of love from and for the God who is and always is Creator and Creating, Redeemer and Redeeming, Life-giving and Renewing, Making and Flinging universes across infinities, and yet caring for a sparrow that falls and those dying in Severodonetsk, and even for you and for me.

Amen.

Come Holy Spirit

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

PENTECOST (June 5^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2: 1-21    

Psalm 104

Romans 8: 14-17

John 14: 8-17

If we were to ask a Muslim convert to Christianity to express the fundamental difference in his or her new relationship to the creator God, they would almost certainly point to the doctrine, and more importantly the experience of the Holy Spirit. This of course is inseparably connected to the doctrine of the Trinity, but we will explore the intricacies of that complex next week. For now let’s focus on the language of the Spirit, which is language of the heart rather than the mind, but is far from trivial for all that.

Who is she? What does she do – what is her job description as I often put it? And why am I calling her “she”? We will come to that last question in two ways, one of which I still put on hold for a little while.
But first let me sing you, or at least read you, a song. Perhaps you know it?

She sits like a bird, brooding on the waters,

hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day;

she sighs and she sings, mothering creation,

waiting to give birth to all the Word will say.

 

She wings over earth, resting where she wishes,

lighting close at hand or soaring through the skies;

she nests in the womb, welcoming each wonder,

nourishing potential hidden to our eyes.

 

She dances in fire, startling her spectators,

waking tongues of ecstasy where dumbness reigned;

She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,

nor can she be captured, silenced or restrained.

 

For she is the Spirit, one with God in essence,

gifted by the Saviour in eternal love;

she is the key opening the scriptures,

enemy of apathy and heavenly dove.

John L. Bell and Graham Maule

The task of the Holy Spirit is to release the work of Jesus Christ through space and time. More than that, her task is to release the resurrected presence of Jesus Christ through space and time. Jesus Christ was, and through the Holy Spirit is, the enemy of injustice, including the injustice of apathy, but including too the injustices of loneliness, despair, emptiness: all those dark works of death, and even the injustice of death itself.

“Silence in the face of evil,” famously said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr, “is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

And let me say I stand as much as most of us do in the comfort zone churches, deeply challenged if not roundly condemned by the German martyr’s words.

But let's pause from that thought. So much idiocy has been proclaimed about the work of the Holy Spirit. In the early days of the charismatic movement she was indeed a powerful wind of change blowing through the fusty corridors of mainline Christianity. But she generally limits herself to our readiness to cooperate in her redeeming, sanctifying, holy-making work. “She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,” says John Bell in his now famous hymn. But we can close our hearts not just by hardness, by fusty corridors, but by a fixation on that which is entertaining and exhilarating. Comfortable Christianity, with its expectation of the sensational, soon turned the experience of the Holy Spirit into a form of entertainment. “More power, Lord,” yelled the late John Wimber from a floodlit stage as he performed some act or other of entertainment dressed up as Christian ministry. 

So how do we tell where and when the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, for the terms are interchangeable, the Holy Spirit is at work?

The answer is to look back into the deep places of our texts, our sacred texts. Her task – and perhaps now I should explain that in Hebrew and Greek alike “spirit” is a feminine noun – her task is to make known the presence and the work of Christ throughout time and space. Does Jesus entertain? He reveals from time to time  perhaps a wry sense of humour but the luxury of idiocy not so much, or in reality, not at all. No. He drives forward in works of justice, drives forward in, as I have said here before, such a way that there is no dissonance between word and action, drives forward to counter loneliness, hypocrisy, hopelessness, untruth, and dullness, to name just some works of  the demonic. He drives forward both to proclaim and be present as the opposite of these darknesses in human experience, in our lives. The work of the Spirit is to fill our lives with fellowship, integrity, hope, truth, and holy exhilaration, the opposite of dark demons.

Today is the feast of Pentecost. We are called simply to immerse ourselves in the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, so that we can experience and spread justice and resurrection hope, the fullness of the resurrected presence of Christ, in our lives in our world, no matter what is going on around us. 

But we are not mere passive recipients of this gift of God. Our task is through discipline, prayer, worship, and fellowship to be co-creators of the holiness that God seeks to midwife in your life and mine and the world's. The strange truth of the Spirit, Truth that is so fundamentally trintarian, is that she works, if we let her, from within us: God in us.

Come Holy Spirit, renew us in the likeness of Jesus.

 

truth in the spaces between

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, GORE

SEVENTH SUNDAY of EASTER (May 29^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 16: 16-34

Psalm 97

Revelation 22: 12-21

John 17: 20-26

 

The author of the Fourth Gospel is a creative writer of enormous talent. At the time he wrote, division into chapters and verses was over a millennium away, so he knew nothing of flags like “chapter 17” or the fact that he wrote 21 chapters. Nevertheless he used flags, alerting his audience to significant dimensions of the Jesus-story he was narrating. Flags like key words, locations, themes. And we need to ask questions of the text. Who was Jesus addressing in John 17? It’s no longer the disciples, but the Father. “Father, the hour has come” (John 17:1).

We do not need to be scholars to be inspired by the fourth gospel. Actually, the author of this work would be horrified if he thought that we thought that we were inspired by him. He hints that in his final sentence (John 21:25).  

So I should put this in a different way. We do not need to be scholars to be inspired by the Jesus we encounter in the pages we know as the Fourth Gospel, or “John.” We should never, incidentally, call it the “Gospel of John” or “John’s gospel,” not only because we don’t know who wrote it, but because whoever wrote it will always emphasize that it is the Gospel of Jesus. But I, too, often forget that.

Onwards, then.

The author of John provides tools to know the mind of Jesus more closely. He does so, so that as we break open the word, we explore the teachings of the one who John calls “Word.” Word with a capital W.

Well, in English we give this a capital W. The author didn’t:  the scriptures were written all-caps. But it is similarly helpful to note some of the little flags the author does fly along the way. In the beginning was the Word, the command of God, the action of God, embodied in the man Jesus. Even in the beginning, not just in the first century or now.

So when we dig into the scriptures we encounter and explore Jesus. The Good News of Jesus. And if we look at John 17 we find that Jesus is no longer talking to his disciples, or to us. We are seeing how he talks to God – we are seeing how he prays.  And, just to confuse matters further, while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right to tell us (as they do) that the word “trinity” does not appear in the bible, they are wrong, because the biblical writers are bravely striving beyond the limitations of the language available to them. Striving to find words for what we later came to call Trinity. As we see Jesus pray, we are seeing the internal communications of the trinitarian godhead – in conversation, discourse, on our behalf. And it remains beyond our comprehension.

So what are we left with in our small passage in John? The longing of the Godhead, creator, redeemer, giver of life, is for our unity. This is very different – and those of you who viewed the Gospel Conversations  will have seen this – very different to uniformity. The armies of North Korea march in uniformity. The armies of God live with disagreement, finding both truth and life in the spaces between letters of our language, the silences between words of our disagreements.

Now, don’t go thinking I am good at practising what I preach. If a cause I am fighting for goes down in synod I sulk in a corner until about three minutes later when I forget what I was sulking for. Amnesia is a wondrous healer.

On the other hand it’s not the deep reconciliation that the Spirit of Christ demands of us and coaxes and coaches us to. The Christ who reaches out to his betrayers and deserters after the crucifixion was exercising the deep love that dwells at the heart of God. Such love, far removed from my airy amnesia, is available to us only through the deep workings of the Spirit.

In our passage Jesus prays for unity for those who follow after him – for us.  He flagged this back at John 11:42. It is a prayer uttered deep within the heart of the triune God, Father, Son, Spirit. It is a prayer not for the militaristic and ferociously rehearsed unity of North Korean or Russian soldiers. It is a prayer that we can be a cardiac people, a people who learn to exercise the costly cardiac love, visceral love that drives reconciliation with enemies, reconciliation far beyond the limits of our imagination.

The only aspect it has in common with goose-stepping militarism is that it is borne of deep discipline, deep surrender to the transforming work of God. The prayer of Jesus ends with the plea that the divine Spirit embodied in Jesus may be embodied in his church, his on-going and Spirit-filled body.

But we must be prepared to be the answer to that prayer, and that takes hard work of the sort that most of us fall short of (or do I speak only for me?). But we are not alone – the coming of the Paraclete is always a part of this prayer of Jesus: Holy Spirit, come to us.

But come to us not in showy exhibitionism of some sad parodies of gospel, but in the hard and prickly work of transformation.

Only then will we be the people that are known by our love, the demand that Jesus highlights at John 13:35. Only then will we see gospel transform lives around us. And we will be that only by the deep and hard work of allowing the Spirit of Pentecost to touch and transform the deepest recesses of our lives. But perhaps that’s next week’s story.