SERMON FOR TRINITY SUNDAY

14^th June 2014

Rev. Margaret Raven

Isaiah 40:12-17,27-31 - those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength

Mathew 28: 16-20 – in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit

“The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”               Isaiah 40: 28b-31

You would expect the disciples to collapse from stress, depression –maybe even post-traumatic stress disorder wouldn’t you?!  Over the last 6 weeks,the readings here in church have catalogued their experiences:  the betrayal, death, resurrection appearances and ascension of Jesus followed by the coming of the Holy Spirit………The Holy Spirit described variously as flames hovering over the disciples’ heads, peasantdisciples suddenly fluent and speaking inthe foreign languagesof countries all around the Mediterranean Sea and, finally, Jesus appearing out of nowhere to breathe peace on the men and women huddled together, praying, in the upper room.

What must it have been like to have lived through all that?!

The disciples have had to live through God’s idea of what needs to happen to bring in the kingdom of Heaven on earth. It turns out God’s strategy involved a lot of personal stress and a series of mind-boggling events. Considerable attitude-adjustment was needed!

Now Isaiah in the passage Douglas just read says that God’s“understanding is unsearchable”. So it has proved: The events the disciples have just lived through show a pattern and strategy beyond all expectation; one unexpected thing after another. No wonder Jesus, prior to his betrayal at Gethsemane asked for them to have an enhanced prayer life with God- one very like his own…..and no wonder the resurrected Jesus told them to stay together as a group and wait where they were. ……Isaiah also says “those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength”……...  Stability and routine are restful and conserve emotional energy. Staying in the familiar group builds on learned, mutual relationships. Praying together provides mutual support, intimacy, intuitive understandings and, enhanced trust. 

So, for the disciples those weeks have meant one emotional trauma after another: shock, grief, terror, mind-boggling experiences, hiding from Temple and Roman authorities ,being stranded in the big city, dependent on friends of Jesus  who are willing to risk hiding them at their house, sole responsibility for the group of faithful women who have been with the disciples and with Jesus since the beginning….never knowing whom to trust. People are living through this kind of abrupt polarization of society right now in Syria or Ukraine. People compelled to live their emotional, religious and political life underground in Burma, Iran, Egypt, Libya or anywhere where there is mental oppression…..such people live on their nerves and become exhausted very quickly. They lose resilience.

“Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint”.

The disciples had their upper room provided by friends, their prayer life with God, the companionship and compatibility of their group as well as the instructions provided by Jesus to do nothing – to wait until the Holy Spirit was sent to them as Comforter. They had a common understanding, a structure and a discipline. They did not “faint and grow weary”. instead they renewed themselves and their strength so that when the Holy Spirit came in its many and bewildering forms they were ready and able for the next exertion…..the next leap into the unknown. As Isaiah had understood it they were able “ to mount up with wings like eagles”. In concrete terms they now became public speakers able to present coherently the new understanding of past prophesy and salvation history to Jews, Samaritans and Gentiles. They healed. They could hold their own with learned men as they explained the Jesus Way and the meaning of the events they had experienced. They had become apostles capable of taking these understandings to the Mediterranean world and beyond.

In time the Jesus Way became the Jesus Movement. The Apostles died. The other eyewitnesses died. A canon of approved writings became essential.

It emerged around 180 AD. It is our Bible. It contains the Old and New Testaments as we call them…  Core Jewish Scriptures  plus a deposit of the legacy of memories of Jesus – 4 gospels, the story of the Acts of the Apostles, some hymns and set speeches for explaining the content of the Christian faith, the writings of Paul, apostle to the Gentiles and, key apostles’ responses to  the inevitable fractious controversies that took place in the cities, ports and towns of the Mediterranean world as Christian communities established themselves and grew. Inevitably the letters and the new groups of emerging Christians had to deal with the growing pains of local community group and a religious movement!..... we know all about these don’t we:  internal scandals, inter-ethnic disputes, cross-cultural issues, organizational problems, conflicting theologies and, personality clashes …..

Remember also, the Mediterranean world was a sophisticated place: there were challenges to emergent Christianity from philosophy, science …the whole intellectual world……and from differing worldviews.

In essence the challenge to simple witnessing to experiences of Jesus as seen and heard by disciples and apostles became:Who, Why, What, When, How, Where is this God you proclaim?It took almost 350 years to hammer out a sophisticated answer to that question. It’s complicated. We will parse it out in a few minutes when we say the creed together.It’s complicated.

Thanks be to God the Apostles who walked, talked and ate with Jesus identified and used a simpler formula earlier. We hear it clearly coming down  over 2000 years: the witnesses’ experience& understanding of God: as Father, as Son Jesus and, as Holy Spirit: all equal, all God , all having distinct functions,  communicating among themselves. A mysterious Trinity of three in one and one in three. 

2 Corinthians 13:11-13 written much closer to the apostles’ time already has the content of the faith worked out and communicated pithily - in shorthand – easy to memorise - for our benefit: “Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord JesusChrist, the love of God and the communion/fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you”.  

God’s strategy and plan for bringing in the Kingdom to this world as well as for our personal salvation: Grace; Love; Community. A blessing in every sense of the word.

Sermon for the Feast of Pentecost

8th June 2014

Peter Davey

Readings:

Acts 2: 1-21 – And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit

John 20: 19-23 – He breathed on them and said: Receive the Holy Spirit…

Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”

I don’t know about you, but for many years I had a problem with the 3rd member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. I got the idea of the Father- the Creator of all that is. And the son, Jesus Christ, whom the Father sent to redeem the world. But where did the Holy Spirit come in?

It is clear from our reading from Acts that the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost marked the birth of the Church when the Spirit fell on all the believers and they started speaking in other languages and with great confidence and authority. The apostle Paul writes extensively about the Spirit and When he writes to the Corinthians he makes it quite clear that every member of the church is baptised in the Holy Spirit and being baptised in the Spirit is more or less a definition of what it is to be a Christian. It was not, however, until I read and meditated upon the Gospel of John at our monthly Taize services  that I realised the true significance of the Holy Spirit.

At the beginning of John’s Gospel we read John the Baptist’s account of seeing the Spirit descending on Jesus like a Dove and at the end of the gospel we read that Jesus said, “Peace be unto you” and he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”. As you read through the gospel you realise that Jesus is constantly referring to the power of the Spirit that dwells in him  that allows him to perform miracles - giving sight to the blind, raising the dead - but above all what it is to actualise union with the Father. But not only that, but that the heart of Jesus’ teaching to his followers is how they too can actualise union with the Father through the Holy Spirit. In other words, Jesus was teaching his followers how to become him!  Jesus was not asking his followers to copy him or be like him, he was teaching them how to be him. The only difference is that he was one man while his followers were many.

Once I realised this fundamental insight, the whole Gospel became clear. So when Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” he was also telling his  disciples, and therefore us, that when he is no longer in the world, they will be the light of the world as through the power of the Spirit they will be him! Similarly with all the “I am “ sayings in John’s gospel.   Through the Spirit we can know what it is to be one with the Father, one with Jesus and one with each other.  As Jesus prays the night before he died, “That they all may be one: as thou Father, art in me and and I in Thee, that they all may be one in us- that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me”. And again, “that the love wherewith Thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.” 

But how do we realise this consciousness of being one with Jesus and the Father? Well when you read the Gospels  you find the reassuring fact that the disciples didn’t get it either? The problem is that you cannot change your consciousness through your intellect. We can believe something in our heads but that doesn’t change our consciousness. But is it so surprising that the disciples didn’t get it? They were just ordinary men and women with largely no religious background. Most of them couldn’t read or write. Imagine you were Peter, or Philip or Mary or Martha and Jesus told you that you could know what it was like to be one with God just like him! And yet Jesus again and again says that their becoming him is the whole point of his life and teaching.

Do you remember the encounter Jesus had with the devout Pharisee Nicodemus? Nicodemus wanted an intellectual discussion between 2 teachers. He says, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher come from God for no man can do the miracles you do except God be with him”. And bang! Jesus socks it to him with, “Very truly I say to you, except someone be born again, they cannot see the Kingdom of God” and  “Except someone be born of water and of the Spirit, they cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”  To be born again, born of the Spirit,  is another way of saying we must change our consciousness and only the Spirit can do that.

So if only the Spirit can transform us, does that mean we have to wait for the Spirit to change our hearts and minds? Now many of you may well have experienced this transformation of your consciousness already, but I would like to talk about my own experience here. I think that so long as we are open to being transformed by the Spirit, then the Spirit will begin to change our consciousness. Remember in our Gospel today “Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”. The word that Jesus would have used for Spirit in his native Aramaic would have been Rucha which is also the word for breath. Jesus would have used the words, “Rucha de Kutcha”  or Holy breath. The breath of Jesus is the Holy Spirit. After the reading of today’s Gospel at the Taize service last month I used a guided meditation which I have found extremely powerful. It has helped me to begin to transform my consciousness. It involves becoming aware of our breath, our Rucha, and then inviting Jesus to breathe in us. By allowing Jesus to breathe in us we begin to realise the Christ consciousness that Jesus himself realised and experience the peace that Jesus gave us in the Gospel reading. I shared this meditation with Andrew last year and I know he found it very powerful also. If anyone would like to experience this meditation with me please let me know and we can arrange it.

And how do we know when the Spirit is transforming us? Well in 1 Corinthians Paul talks about the gifts of the Spirit such as wisdom, tongues, prophecies, teaching etc.  These gifts were clearly in evidence on the Day of Pentecost. But in another letter he speaks of something even more important than the gifts, and that is the fruit of the Sprit. It is the bearing of this fruit that above all is a sign to ourselves and others that we are being transformed by the Spirit, the Rucha of Jesus. Paul writes to the Galatians,

“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Jesus manifested this fruit in abundance and then gave us his breath, the Holy Spirit, so that we can manifest this fruit in the world. Only if we abide in him and he in us can we bear fruit. And then, with his breath and spirit within us, he says to us, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you”.