disclosing new worlds

Trinity Year B

noreply@blogspirit.com (Lawrence) — Wed, 7 Jun 2006 13:05:00 +0000

Moving!!!

If you've got here via a search engine query, you might like to know that this site will only be operational here for this week and next. I have already moved it HERE, where the layout is better. I shall cancel my subscription to blogSpirit. I'm duplicating the blog here for the moment while the search engines learn the new site. That may take time, though, and they won't pick it up for a while. So if you find this helpful, bookmark the new site. Best wishes, Lawrence.

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Isaiah 6: 1-8                     NRSV text
Psalm 29                              NRSV text
Romans 8: 12-17                  NRSV text
John 3: 1-17                     NRSV text

Nuns on the Run is the story of two small-time crooks (played by Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle) who are on the run both from the Police and the Triads. They hide out in a convent, disguised as nuns, where Eric Idle finds himself scheduled to teach the A-level Religious Education class. He’s horrified. Robbie Coltrane, a lapsed Catholic, tries to reassure him by telling him how easy it will be. What’s your first lesson on?” he asks. “The Trinity!” Robbie’s face falls. “The Trinity! Now that’s a bugger!”

Most ministers and preachers appear to experience a similar sinking sensation when Trinity Sunday comes round. Far from a sense of excitement and awe at a service focused very specifically on God, the overwhelming sense is one of dismay – how to explain the inexplicable! “Trinity” means pulling out illustrations of shamrocks and sun, sunlight and warmth. For me, it conjures up the memories of trying to get my head around Barth’s “Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness”, or of listening to Nicholas Lash expound his (helpful) notion of the Trinity as “speaking of God in three ways”.

Having worked for a couple of years in local government with a Shi’ite Muslim, it also conjures up memories of heated debates, Shabir demanding that I explain how I can possibly call myself a monotheist when I clearly believe in three Gods! And in parenthesis, I must say that one of the most helpful things I have discovered on the doctrine of the Trinity is Moltmann’s insistence that to be Trinitarian is what it means to be Christian, and to be neither a monotheist nor a polytheist.

The drama of salvation
But all of this is to miss the point that our texts make so clearly this week: the “doctrine of God” is not a matter for academic debate or catechesis, but the outcome of our experience of God in Jesus Christ. The Trinity is a necessary corollary of salvation. Jesus, in this famous chapter from John’s gospel, talks of having descended from heaven, being the only-begotten Son of the Father (who loves the world and has sent him to save it) and of the Spirit who blows like the wind, bringing new life/birth. The Trinity, in other words. And if our response is, “Yes, but I’ve always thought that this is a great “gospel” passage”, then the response is, “Precisely!” Let me put this as forcefully as I can: the fundamental point to be made on Trinity Sunday is that the doctrine of the Trinity means nothing less or other than rehearsing the story of salvation! And if we do something other than that in the pulpit this Sunday, we are taking a drama and turning it into a conundrum – and that is neither faithful to the Scripture nor is it the place of preaching! The Trinity is the story of God’s passionate determination to be present with the world. It’s the reminder that God’s primary disposition towards the world is of love, not judgement. It is about the fact that the saving God is the God of resurrection and recreation, giving new birth and Life to human beings. And it is the reminder (in the person of Nicodemus) that none of this makes sense or fits easily into good religious schemes about reward and punishment, or stringent holiness movements, because God is a God of grace!

The Trinity, in other words, doesn’t just tell us who God is, but about what God does and what God is like! This is the day to get into the pulpit and tell again the wonderful, joyful story of who God is and how passionately, uncontrollably, inexplicably and inescapably this world is loved. It’s the Sunday to re-awaken a sense of wonder and to renew faith, because it is Gospel Sunday!

The “Three-in-One” stuff
If the Trinity is about the drama of salvation – about rehearsing the gospel story – what’s the point of all the stuff we usually think of in connection with the Trinity? What about the “Three-in-One” stuff? The doctrine of the Trinity attempts to safeguard our thinking and talking about God. It helps us to “get it right” – not in the sense of “explaining” God, but in the sense that we don’t create an idol in place of the Living God whom we worship in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit. I want to pick up on three aspects of the gospel story of God that the “Three-in-One” formula enshrines and protects: the fact that relationship is fundamental to the life of God; that the Spirit draws human beings into the very life of God through resurrection and adoption; and that it is appropriate to worship both Jesus and the Spirit because they are divine.

Three Persons: Love and relationship in God
The “Three Persons in One Godhead” stuff (Triunity: three in one) isn’t a cleverly-devised formula to keep Christians (and everyone else!) scratching their heads for millennia, or for keeping theologians in business! Again, it belongs to the drama of salvation. Look at the gospel passage. There is the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Three Persons. Not one Person. The story of salvation in Jesus Christ teaches us that it doesn’t do simply to talk about God only in singular terms. God may – indeed must – be One, but there is relationship within God. Three Persons in dynamic relationship. And the “cement” holding them together is love. There is a dynamic unity of love and will which means that God sends Jesus into the world to be its saviour, which will necessitate death. But Jesus is no unwilling sacrificial lamb! Jesus is a volunteer! In John’s gospel, Jesus’ high priestly prayer does what the Gethsemane account does in the Synoptic Gospels – it establishes that there is a unity of divine will! The love of God for the world is matched by the love of the Son in going to the cross. The loving self-sacrifice of the Son is matched by the love (not anger!) of the Father, who abandons himself to the loss of the Son. Which constantly makes me wonder, by the way: why does so much Christian preaching lead people to suppose that Jesus loves the world, but has to appease God who is angry with it?

The Spirit is sent in the same way as the Son is sent. In John’s gospel, the Spirit is “Another Christ”. Paul picks up on this, as we have seen in recent weeks, when he insists that anyone who has the Spirit belongs to Christ because the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ (as well as the Spirit of God). In John’s gospel, the role of the Spirit is to “lead the disciples into all truth” (14:26, 15:26). Jesus makes the Father known to them. He does so as the Word made flesh– the one who has come from the bosom of the Father (1:18). As such, the disciples can trust absolutely what they know of God through Jesus. To see Jesus is as good as seeing the Father.

That is why the disciples preach Jesus! Jesus came (in John’s gospel) to make the Father known. However, he was rejected and crucified. The rejection of Jesus was also the rejection of the God whom he called Father. Yet God does not allow the crucifixion to stand as the last word. Unknown to those crucifying him, Jesus is the Lamb of God, whose death takes away the sin of the world (John 1: 29). This means that the disciples preach Jesus. They don’t just repeat his message: now they have a further story to tell – the story of God walking among us in Jesus and saving us though his death and resurrection. They can tell this story because it is God’s story! The Jesus story is not simply the story of God acting through a man: it is the story of God as a man! Jesus is the act of God.

“Three on one” therefore insists that we have first and always to speak about God in terms of relationality. To be God is to be in relationship. The relationship between God and the world flows out of the relationship of love that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It means that Jesus is not just a man of God, but God as a man! And if Jesus shows us not only what God is like, but what it means to be human, then we come to understand that to be truly, fully and freely human – to have “Life in all its abundance” – is to be related in love to God and to one another.

The Spirit of Resurrection and Adoption: being drawn into the life of the Triune God (Romans 8: 12-17)
Jesus (particularly in John’s gospel) comes to reveal the Father. This revelation is not “facts about God”: it is to draw us into the very Life of God, so that we become in reality what we are intended to be through creation – children of the Living God. The risen Jesus does this through the Spirit.

The primary role of the Spirit in Romans 8 is resurrection. This is the Spirit of Life who liberates us from death (8:2). To have the Spirit dwelling in us is to belong to Christ (8:9). We saw this last week. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. Yet look at 8:10, and what Paul says: he has just finished explaining that if the Spirit of Christ indwells us, we belong to Christ. Then he says, “But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness”. Note that, in Paul’s, eyes, having the Spirit is the same thing as having Christ. This is not because Jesus and the Spirit are the same. They are distinct persons. Rather, it is the Spirit of resurrection who raised Jesus from the dead and now dwells in us, so that we undergo death to the old life and resurrection to the new. What happened to Jesus at Easter happens to us through faith in Christ: we immediately pass through death and resurrection, so that we are already on the other side of our own death! That is why Paul can talk as he does about there being no more condemnation for those of us in Christ Jesus (which is how he has begun the chapter and concludes it in vv31ff).

But this means that the Spirit is also the Spirit of Adoption. Not only are we raised from the dead, as Jesus was, but we are drawn into Jesus’ life as child of the God whom he addresses as Father (v15). Isn’t it curious how much time and energy we often spend worrying about what will happen to us when we die? It’s as though the answer to that question has yet to be settled – when Paul goes to extraordinary lengths to explain that it has already been answered! The only person whose death was open to question in this way was Jesus himself – and God raised him through the Spirit! Now we who have the Spirit have Christ. We have already died with him and been raised with him – and we shall be glorified with him. That is already settled. We have been incorporated into the life of the Triune God! That is what “Life in all its abundance” means! We are incorporated into God’s family life. That is why one of the most ancient formulas of salvation was, “He (Jesus) became a man, that we might become divine”. And that is exactly right! How about that for a message for Trinity Sunday, eh? We share in the life of God!

The Oneness of God: Love and worship
I have suggested that the Trinitarian formula of “One God in Three Persons” is made necessary because of salvation. We encounter God in three Persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And yet Judaeo-Christian faith has always insisted that God is One. There is only One who is worthy of worship, and that is God. There cannot be more than one God, because that could be potentially conflictual! What if one God wanted one thing and another God another? Where would we poor humans be? How would we decide what to do? We have already seen that we talk about Three Persons as a way of expressing the unity of will between Father, Son and Spirit – the unity of love. This unity of will and purpose means that we have to do with three Persons, not three gods! The statement “God so loved the world …” is an expression of the love of the divine family for the world. We cannot preach or believe as though there is a difference in attitude towards the world among the three Persons – particularly between Father and Son.

I remember hearing a sermon by Rowan Williams in which he said – almost as an aside – that “We must not preach the cross as though there is a difference of attitude between Father and Son”. Suddenly, all the unease I had felt about the gospel as I had heard it preached came into focus. I had heard it as, “God is holy and we are very sinful. God is angry with our sin. By rights, God should judge us. Yet the sinless Jesus gave his life for us voluntarily. Jesus took the punishment from God that was ours by right, so that, if we have accepted Christ as our personal saviour, God looks at us and sees the righteous Jesus and accepts us”. There was a sense there – no matter how often and forcefully I heard John 3:16 quoted – that the Father is basically itching to let fly with some thunderbolts, but Jesus (who is the “nice guy” in the godhead) deflects all that anger on to himself, so that God’s thirst for judgement is satisfied and we’re okay. Now I know that that’s to caricature things – but actually, it is to do so only slightly and far less so than we fondly imagine we are doing! Grace is as much the Father’s idea as the Son’s! There isn’t a “playing off” of holiness against mercy within the godhead. We are loved by God – Father, Son and Spirit – with the same saving love. And our response to that grace ought to be love: to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength.

Love issues in worship. What set earliest Christianity apart from other messianic Jewish sects was the insistence that it was appropriate to worship Jesus. Now, if worship belongs only to God, then this was a very serious error … unless Jesus is as divine as the Father. That is what John tries tirelessly to tell us in his gospel. His is the story of Jesus that is constantly presenting us with the divinity of Jesus and the outrage that it caused. Jesus’ claim to divinity in John’s gospel is unequivocal: “Before Abraham was, I AM!” It is in John’s gospel that Thomas confesses Jesus as “My Lord and my God”. This is the faith of the Church. But it is not about playing metaphysical games, or rehearsing ancient controversies. It is saying something fundamental to everything we are and do as churches: we love Jesus and worship him as God. So Trinity Sunday ought to be the Sunday when we worship as on no other day! It’s a day for renewing our love and celebrating God’s story in worship.

God with us – the foundation of Word and Sacrament (Isaiah 6: 1-5/Psalm 29)
Poor old Isaiah! He’s in real trouble – and he knows it! He’s in the temple, and he sees the Lord, glorious and lifted up. That is not good news! He knows he is in mortal danger. To see Yahweh is to die, because Yahweh’s majesty and holiness is awful. Yahweh’s voice can smash mighty cedar trees, uproot cities, flash forth flames of fire, shake the wilderness, send huge oak tress skittering and strip the forest of its leaves (Psalm 29: 5-9). Yahweh is no tame god! So Isaiah’s first response is “Woe is me! I am lost!” (Isaiah 6: 5). That’s a very polite version of what he’s effectively saying!

Isaiah 6 and Psalm 29 belong to a venerable tradition of the threat of Yahweh’s presence. Yahweh has no business being on earth – it’s far too dangerous for human beings. It’s dangerous for two reasons. The first one is moral: Yahweh is holy, and we are not. Yahweh’s holiness is a “consuming fire”. The second reason is one that is less dominant in the Bible but strong in the classical Greek tradition: God is God and Spirit; we are creatures and mortal. That which is spirit has no place among the earthly. In fact, the aim of human living is to discover how to flee the earthly into the realm of the spirit.

Here in Isaiah 6 we have a moment of the same sort of grace that we will see in spades in the Incarnation: God’s presence doesn’t destroy, but cleanses, liberates and commissions. That Jesus is God incarnate is an affirmation that God is not the sort of god who cannot be present on earth. Nor is God restricted to the sterile environment of the Holy of Holies. In Jesus, God enters into the depth of human darkness and living. Neither the fact that God is creator nor God’s holiness can keep God out! The grace of love is too passionate – too driving a force. It is transgressive. It bursts through the boundaries of purity and divinity with startling, life-giving energy and power. It is a astounding because it is entirely inappropriate! We look around, and suddenly discover, in Jesus, that God is among us!

And isn’t this precisely what we mean by Word and Sacrament? “Sacrament” means that God can be present in created stuff. God can be present in bread and wine and water because God was present in a human being – Jesus! And because it is God’s incarnate presence in Jesus that is foundational, we know that God’s presence is a good thing! It is liberating, cleansing, forgiving and saving. It is grace, not judgement and destruction! It means that this world is a place where we can and do expect to encounter God.

Astonishingly, it also means that this world is the place where things happen to God! Now that is totally outside the rule book on How to be God! Things don’t happen to God. But things happen to the Triune God who walks among us in Jesus Christ! God took suffering and death into God’s self. In Jesus, God embraced human history. And as a result, God continues to be among us, present not only in Word and Sacrament, but in people and relationships. We meet God “in many a guise”. And we do to God in Jesus Christ. When we give a cup of cold water to someone who is thirsty, we do it to Jesus. And when we do anything to the very least of our world, we do it to Jesus. When we are agents of grace (we children of God), people encounter God in and through us.

God’s mission and our mission (Isaiah 6: 6-8)
Isaiah is not consumed by the fire; he is cleansed by it. And the cleansed and renewed prophet is faced with Yahweh’s question: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” God is a missionary God. The earliest theological use of “mission” (meaning “sent”) referred not to sending missionaries, but to the sending of the Son by the Father and the sending of the Spirit by the Father (and the Son, depending on where you lived!). Mission is God’s idea, and God’s project. To be drawn into the life of the Triune God is to be drawn into God’s saving project of transforming the world into the kingdom. To be “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven” is not only to “sing God’s praise” but to live it out in involvement in the world.

What makes out involvement particularly special? After all, there are many other groups and people who are involved in transforming the world – often with more commitment and to greater effect! That is perfectly true, and it means, for a start, that Christians ought to be far more generous about recognising allies and fellow-workers, regardless of what faith (or none) they profess. According to the parable of the sheep and the goats, we ought to recognise them as brothers and sisters, because what we do is as significant as what we say. In other words, the disturbing challenge of mission is that it blurs our neatly-drawn boundaries of who’s in and who’s out. It means that Christians who oppose the transformation of unjust structures (in Palestine, for example) are enemies of the kingdom, opposed to God’s salvation, while humanists and communists who deride any faith in Jesus but who do his will are worshipping the Triune God!

What is Christianly distinctive about our involvement, though? It is because it is done in the name of the Son and in the power of the Spirit. That is not playing games with doctrinal formulations. All I have been saying implies that it means that our involvement in the world, its people and its transformation can never be separated from our faith in the missionary God we discover in

Jesus and through the Spirit. Being translated, that means we cannot extract our actions, activities, the deployment of our resources, our priorities and decisions from the gospel story of God in Jesus. Mission and Christian faith and proclamation go hand in hand – because mission is the making a reality of the Good News of what God has done in Jesus Christ to save this world.

That means that we might be no more effective than others (although we believe that God is able to take a mustard seed and grow a mighty tree from it, so that the effects of what we do can be totally disproportionate to their size). We might be less effective than other groups who may, for example, have a far better grasp on how structures work than we do. The point is, though, that we believe and proclaim that the transformation of the world into the place where peace and righteousness kiss is more than a human project. It is God’s project. The transformed world discloses the gracious God who walks among us in Jesus and is present in and with us through the Holy Spirit. This is the God who yearns to draw us into the divine Life itself. We cannot but continually set out the clear invitation: come and find Life! Come and love and worship the living God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be glory in the world and in the Church forever!

Amen.

Pentecost Year B

noreply@blogspirit.com (Lawrence) — Wed, 31 May 2006 23:25:00 +0000

NIGHTMARE!!! BlogSpirit have totally ruined this! I've created a new site (better layout!) on WordPress. This same article is there and it's clear. The address is http://wolabcd.wordpress.com/ Please leave a comment to show you've managed to find it! Thanks. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ezekiel 37: 1-14 Psalm 104: 24-34; 35b Romans 8: 22-27 Acts 2: 1-21 John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15 Well, folks, blogSpirit have done the dirty on me! They've made this a paying service. As an existing user, I don't have to upgrade to a paid account. Surprisingly (NOT!) I chose not to. But they've taken away the formatting features - hyperlinks to texts, bold, italic, pictures etc. Can't even get into the HTML settings to code! There are no line breaks, so I've done the only thing I can do and demarcate the sections by lines. I'm so sorry. PLEASE GO TO THE NEW ADDRESS ABOVE!!! HERE IT IS AGAIN: http://wolabcd.wordpress.com/ __________________________________________________________________________________________________ “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16: 7). Hmmm. Jesus or the Spirit? Which would we rather have, I wonder? How would we feel if we heard those words? Comforted? Excited? Would our reaction be to say, “Okay, Jesus – you be getting along now. Hurry up – not that we want rid of you, you understand, but seeing as you’ll send the Spirit …” Personally, I don’t think so. I’d want to open negotiations: “Right, Jesus: that’s one option. Now if I understand you correctly, we can’t have both – so what about you staying and we do without the Spirit? Do we get another choice here?” I’d be unconvinced. Jesus wasn’t. He’s not spinning this one and trying to make the disciples feel better about something bad – his imminent departure to the Father. He’s quite genuinely clear here: “It’s to your advantage that I go away and the Spirit comes”. Why? __________________________________________________________________________________________________ The priority of Jesus’ mission One obvious reason is that Jesus’ priority is his mission, not about making deep personal friendships with the disciples. Let’s be clear: that is not the same thing as saying those personal relationships were unimportant for Jesus. Here in John’s gospel, in the farewell narrative, Jesus has talked constantly of his love for them. He has told them that they are no longer servants, but friends. He has prayed earnestly for them, focusing his entire attention on this very special group of people. So this isn’t about lack of affection – it’s about the priority of his mission that Jesus assumes his disciples share. And the clear implication in John’s gospel is that they do. Look at the preceding verses: “None of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things, sorrow has filled your hearts”. The disciples, in other words, know both that Jesus is going to the Father and that he must. They don’t try to argue him out of it, or protest, or break down at the prospect. They have shared his life and love, and so they share his priority. They have learned to look at the world through Jesus’ eyes, and share his breadth of vision. They have already learned from Jesus that they have a task – to carry on what Jesus started with them. Only now, they move from being learners to centre stage. The next scene is theirs! They understand that. There is a widespread Christian spirituality that finds it incredibly difficult to move from the comfort and celebration of a personal relationship with Jesus to a shared passion for the world. It’s the “me and Jesus” theology of a great deal of evangelical piety. “Me and Jesus” is not a problem – in fact, it’s vital! One of the difficulties I have with a great deal of liberal theology and piety that is strong on involvement in the world is that it is woefully short on individual relating to God in Jesus Christ. God is embarrassingly intimate! That’s no clearer than in John’s gospel. While we might find it inappropriate to imagine that God would want to get as up close and personal as being concerned about each of us as individuals is concerned, the God revealed by Jesus has no such qualms. I find myself getting incredibly impatient and frustrated with the “either/or” choices forced on us by the classic liberal/evangelical divide. Why should it be that passion for the world should be separable from passionate relationship with God? And how can it be that passionate relating to God slips so easily into a privatised, individualised selfishness that shuts out the world and its crying out for salvation and transformation? Paul echoes the cry of the universe in Romans 8: 22: “The whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now”. He plays with two images: creation in bondage to decay, and as a mother in labour, straining to give birth to a new creation that is all God intends for it. God’s saving grace is a response to the world’s need. The scope of salvation is as great as creation – it is global! Just as the slaves “groaned” in the brick-pits of Egypt and their cry reached Yahweh’s ears, creation “groans” and God hears and responds. There is an aching at the heart of the universe for God, even when that aching finds no echo in rebellious human hearts. There are those lines in one of the hymns that are both true but dangerously open to misinterpretation: “Was it the nails, O Saviour/that bound Thee to the Tree?/Nay, ‘twas Thy love – Thy wondrous love/Thy love for me … for me!” That is true. Jesus loves each of us with that same passionate commitment. Karl Barth was asked near the end of his life what the greatest truth he had discovered was. The interviewer was expecting some typically Barthian profound piece of theology – and he got it! Barth answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know/for the Bible tells me so”! But Barth would never have bought into the notion that the whole scope and plan of salvation could be reduced to “me”. Jesus loves “me” because he loves the world. I am saved because salvation is for the whole world. And, Barth says, “I” am saved, not for my own personal enjoyment of salvation (important and wonderful though that is), but in order to become part of God’s mission of transforming all of created reality into the kingdom. That is why Jesus is able to say what he does to the disciples here in John’s gospel. The disciples have work to do, and they cannot do it without the Spirit. He knows that, and so do they. If they are to move from being disciples into their new role as apostles (cf John 15: 27, 16: 8-11). Unlike me, the disciples do not carp, complain or cajole. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ The triumph of the kingdom The second reason for Jesus saying that it is better if he goes and sends the Spirit has to do with the importance of the kingdom. This is not a category used by John, although it was undoubtedly Jesus’ primary category. In John, the Kingdom is transposed into something identical in meaning: the Reign of God. He doesn’t do this by talking about the Reign of God, but via the purpose of the cross. John, you remember, portrays the crucifixion as Jesus’ coronation and enthronement. His “lifting up” (complete with crown of thorns and declaration, “This is the King of the Jews” in all the known languages of the world) is the means by which Jesus “will draw all people to himself”. The crucified Christ is the visible sign of what Timothy Rees captures so beautifully eloquently in his hymn: “God is Love, so Love forever/o’er the universe must reign”! If Love is to reign over the universe, then the present powers and order must be defeated and destroyed. Jesus tells us what that order is: sin, righteousness and judgement (16: 8-11). The world is disordered because of sin. Human beings were created as children of the Light. The true Light has come into the world in Jesus, but “people love the darkness rather than the Light”. Sin cuts us off from our nature and heritage as children of God. The role of the Spirit is to bring the Light that exposes darkness for what it is, and to win and woo people into the Light where Life is to be found. The present order – the world as we have made it – is an order of retribution and deserts. There is no room for grace in it. The extravagant love of God that is shown in giving the Son for the world is seen through distorted eyes. Instead of being received joyfully as a gift, Jesus is crucified. In this sense, Jesus can define sin as “They did not believe in me” (v9). It is not a point about Christianity vs Islam (for example): it is about the wilful inability of sinful human beings to recognise God when God walks among us. Sin likewise distorts notions of righteousness. In a world of retribution and just deserts, grace is a major stumbling block – “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence”, as Paul puts it. On a “just deserts” reading, Jesus cannot be righteous. “Righteous” in John’s theological lexicon means “from God/God-like”. John presents Jesus as the one who makes God known because he has come from the Father. Look again at John’s programmatic 1:18: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known”. In other words, Jesus here is making a similar point about righteousness as he does about sin. If it is true that “whoever has seen me has seen the Father”, the challenge of Jesus is to look at him and to recognise, “God’s like that!” Or, as David Jenkins puts it, “God is. He is as he is in Jesus; therefore there is hope”. And how is God portrayed in Jesus? As grace! As Love! But the eyes distorted by sin see him on the cross as “stricken by God and accursed”. This cannot be righteousness! This cannot be what God is like! Hence Jesus says, “I am going to the Father” – in other words, God is vindicating Jesus’ claim to be the manifestation of God on earth. Jesus’ ascension is God’s testimony: “I am who I am in this man!” It is the work of the Spirit to cure blindness: to open people’s eyes to look at Jesus and see God as Love and Life. The sentence of death by crucifixion was judgement upon the so-called King of the Universe. However, it wasn’t the judgement that people thought they were passing! They thought they were passing judgement on Jesus. Ironically, they were lifting up the King of the Universe for all to see, and in so doing, passing judgement on the Pretender to the throne. The cross was Jesus’ coronation, and therefore the condemnation of the ruler of the world – the one to whom human beings have handed control. Here is John’s equivalent of Mark’s Jesus as the one who plunders the house of the Strong Man (Satan). The things that we put in place of God do not free us – they bind us. These are the things of darkness and death. The Spirit is the Spirit of resurrection – the power of God over death itself. She is the Spirit of Life. The condemnation of the ruler of the world makes possible the freedom to be found in the reign of the risen and glorified Jesus – Life in all its fullness. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ The first fruits of the new creation (Acts 2: 1-21/Romans 8: 22-27) The Spirit-fired apostles burst on the Jerusalem scene that first Pentecost with the startling announcement that the Good News is not just good news for the Jews. Their messianic hopes are exposed by the resurrection as hopelessly parochial and self-centred. The announcement is to be heard everywhere and by everyone. And they all hear it – in their own languages! The resurrection is a gigantic stone heaved by God into the world, and its ripples are beginning to spread “from Jerusalem, through Judea, Samaria and to the uttermost ends of the earth”. God isn’t just interested in sorting out the Jewish people’s problems – God is in the business of transforming the world! God is not the tribal God of a small, insignificant nation, but is God of all the nations. The God who broke the power of Pharaoh is the God who will smash all systems that enslave, oppress and kill. And how should we know this? Because the Spirit is being poured out … on all flesh. These are the Last Days. This is salvation time! Look at how the Spirit smashes boundaries. Sons, daughters, young people, old people, slaves, men and women: these are all ancient categories of divisions in society. Each had different worth in a hierarchical structure, with men at the top and female slaves at the very bottom. Resurrection is about a new world order. That’s the content of the “dreams and visions”! I’ve often heard it said that young men see visions because they look ahead to the future, whereas old men dream dreams because they look back to the past. Not so! Dreams and visions here are synonymous. Joel goes on to talk about “portents and signs” – apocalyptic language denoting an event of cosmic significance. “Turning the sun into darkness and the moon into blood” are symbolic of the death of the old order, which gives way to a new order of salvation in which “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Acts 2: 21). The pouring out of the Spirit is a sign of the universal salvation that God has brought about in Jesus. This is the Good News – the new creation! The Spirit is described by Paul as “the first fruits” of the new creation – creation liberated from bondage to decay and death (to futility). That is the content of hope and of “the glory that is about to be revealed to us” (v18). The Christian hope is not about escape from earth to “heaven”, but of a transformed earth – heaven on earth. Salvation is life for a world of death. Resurrection, personal salvation and a transformed creation all belong here together in Paul’s thinking, and the key is the Spirit. Look at vv 9-11. Whoever has the Spirit dwelling in them, says Paul, belongs to Christ, because the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. Furthermore, it is by the Spirit that God raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore be assured, says Paul: if this is the Spirit of Life who raised Christ from the dead, then you will have the very life of God in your mortal bodies! It is through the Spirit of Christ that we share in Jesus’ relationship to God as adopted children (vv 14ff). Our experience of the global order of sin and death is a personal reality. We experience it in our bodies. Resurrection and salvation are equally to be personal realities, experienced through our mortal bodies. Yet our experience, however personal and individual, is not unique. It is the experience of the whole of creation (19ff). The presence of the Spirit, therefore, is a sign – a “down-payment” or “first-fruit” of the promise that this world is to be transformed. That is important. It gives us reason to hope. It prevents the proclamation of a new world from being merely a utopian pipe-dream. The Good News of the salvation for the world that God has effected in Jesus is not just optimistic nonsense. God has started something in Jesus that God intends to bring to completion. But life’s a bitch! If we are honest, the evidence for a new world is not in our favour. It’s been 2,000 years since Paul wrote. We have never had global poverty, starvation and despair on the scale that we do today. Money, unaccountable power, sophisticated means of mass-slaughter and oppression have probably seldom been stronger. The shocking truth is that, for most people on this planet, life is a living hell, and we need to recognise that if it isn’t so for us, that has more to do with accidents of birth and geography than it has to do with the saving power of God! In the face of these kinds of odds and intractable realities, we are called to have faith and keep faith. Faith is different from certainty. We believe against the odds. We are called to have hope in the face of apparent hopelessness – not because Christians are meant to be incurable optimists, but because God raised Jesus from the dead by the Spirit, and the Spirit is afoot! __________________________________________________________________________________________________ New life for dead, dry bones (Ezekiel 37: 1-14/Psalm 104: 24-34, 35b) The Spirit is the breath of God’s life, breathed into all creation. Everything that lives does so because of God’s Spirit. That is what the psalmist says in this psalm of praise to God as creator and provider : “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground” (Psalm 104: 30). The link between the Spirit and renewed life for dead things is made in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. The historical context is that of Judah’s exile and this is a vision in startling language of homecoming. It is a beautiful Old Testament parallel to Pentecost with its resonances of wind (breath), new life and resurrection, isn’t it? Yet I want to focus on its historical context, rather than to make it into an Old Testament version of a New Testament theme. Although the image is of resurrected bodies, it is about the promise of return from exile, not a passage about resurrection! Perhaps surprisingly, most Old Testament scholars agree that the belief in resurrection came very late in the Old Testament period, and that only two passages in the entire Old Testament speak explicitly about resurrection: Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2! Why focus on this difference, you night ask? The point here is that this is a passage that speaks not about life that endures beyond death, but about life that resumes in the midst of death. Exile was experienced as a living death. The prophetic promise here is that the exile has a time limit: the people’s destiny is to return to the land. That will feel like being dead and living again. And that is an important emphasis for the Church in our postmodern world. Commentators like Brueggemann have accurately cast the Church situation today in terms of exile. We’re a shrinking, aging community whose best years are in the past. We’re no longer at “home” in the world – and that’s not meant positively! We feel lost. The things we once knew have disappeared. The old answers do not work any more. Vibrancy and confidence are ebbing away. The Church is alive – but it feels as though we are living in an alien land and, in many ways, as though we’re the “living dead”. Ask most young people today what they think of the Church and they’ll describe it in precisely those same terms: “the living dead”. We’re seen as an institution past its sell-by date, inhabited by people equally past their sell-by date. Our buildings, hymns and practices are monuments to a past that has long gone: we just haven’t realised it! Pentecost is a word of prophecy and promise to the Church in a postmodern age. The Church lives by the Spirit, and the Spirit is irrepressibly the source of Life and renewal. If we are in exile, that exile has a time limit. It is time actively to reconnect with God’s Spirit. The message of hope – the Good News of what God has done in Jesus to save the world – still needs to be heard. It has no sell-by date! The message of a world that needs transforming is as fresh and needed as ever it was – perhaps more so than at any time in living or recent memory. There is still a missionary task to be completed, and that means that God still has need of a faithful community of witnesses. Yet to be effective, we need to let go of the past and find new ways. Just as the exile forced the people to rethink their faith from the ground up, so our own exile requires a similar, courageous and faithful act of re-imagination. That sort of re-imagination is impossible without the Spirit. And it is exceedingly possible through the Spirit! It is time to heed God’s words to Ezekiel: these dead, dry bones can live! We are the people into whom the Spirit can breathe new life. We can live again – now! We need to ask ourselves, though, what our dreams and visions are about. If they are simply a hankering after the past, and dreams about a Church “restored to former glory”, we can forget it! The world has changed, and we are in exile because we have not changed along with it. We are an irrelevance at present – and deservedly so. The world has got the measure of the powerful possibilities of change and of a new future (however much we might want to criticise the content of that vision). The Church, meanwhile, behaves as all venerable human institutions do: it changes only by being dragged kicking and screaming into a new reality, and always remains reactionary and several years out of date. Perhaps the greatest challenge we still face is of finding the courage and resources to let go of our obsession with making the world in our own image. When our “visions” and “dreams” become something other than “getting in large crowds to make them like us”, then we will have begun dreaming God’s dreams! We are not creaking and dying on our feet for lack of people: we have fewer and fewer people because we are dead and dry. Exile didn’t create the dead dryness: exile happened because of it! It’s time we faced up to our situation as God’s judgement on what we had become long before we started declining and decaying. God’s judgement, however, isn’t meant as a sentence of death. It’s a time of preparation – of pruning, and paring down to the point where we are prepared to take the risk of calling on the Spirit to come and breathe new life into us – however scary, unfamiliar and uncomfortable that might be. But that’s where Life is to be found. That’s our Pentecost. Amen.

Easter 7 Year B

noreply@blogspirit.com (Lawrence) — Mon, 22 May 2006 14:04:02 +0000

Acts 1: 15-17; 21-26              NRSV text
Psalm 1                                NRSV text
Jeremiah 10: 1-10a                NRSV text
1 John 5: 9-13                        NRSV text
John 17: 6-19                         NRSV text

Judas has been headline news recently. The latest issue of National Geographic devotes its cover and main article to the Gospel of Judas. Among the popular hate figures of public consciousness, few have done more to get to the top of the list of “People I hope my sister never brings home” than the man whose name has become a cipher for betrayal and treachery. So when Bob Dylan went electric in the so-called “Royal Albert Hall” concert in 1966 (the venue was actually the Manchester Arena), one member of the enraged audience calls out “Judas!” It’s one of the music's legendary moments. Dylan, who has shrugged off the barracking and animosity of the audience till then, reacts to that particular call with fury. He can live with being misunderstood, and can play on unappreciated. But to be called a Judas is something else. “I don’t believe you!!!” he responds. Then turning to his band, he orders them, “Play f***ing loud!” The drummer hits the snare, and Dylan breaks into his stunning “Like a Rolling Stone”, howling his contempt at his audience. It’s wonderful! You can hate him, ignore him, barrack him and slate him – but don’t call him “Judas”! Okay, I’m being very self-indulgent here! It’s a treat when the texts give me an excuse to talk about His Bobness (Dylan!), but it’s relevant.

What is so despicable about Judas’ actions, as Peter reminds the fledgling New Israel in Acts 1: 16ff, is that he was the one “who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus”. The agony is that “he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry”. Judas sold out Jesus – and the whole band of disciples – for money. There was no high ideal at work, despite the sophisticated and more sympathetic portrayals of him in films as diverse as Jesus Christ Superstar and Franco Zeffirelli’s epic Jesus of Nazareth. Certainly, Peter would have no truck with the notion in the Gospel of Judas that Judas was in any sense being courageous and faithful! Judas is the man who will sell his closest friends for money if it suits him. Judas was simultaneously one of them, but not of them.

This dynamic of “being part of them, but not of them” is present in this week’s section of Jesus’ High Priestly prayer in John’s gospel. They are part of the final transaction between Jesus, the Father and the disciples. This is Jesus tying up any last loose ends – a checklist, if you like, of his mission. And so he comes to the crunch: he is leaving, returning to the Father. The disciples (the Church) will remain in the world, however (v11). They will need protection, and Jesus asks that they may enjoy the same care from God that he has enjoyed. The world is a dangerous place for heaven-dwellers. It is not a place that is friendly to messengers from God (cf 1: 11). Jesus is “in the world” because this is where he has been sent by the Father. He is here, fully, yet does not belong in the world. And astonishingly, neither do the disciples (v16).

“In the world but not of the world”

What does Jesus mean when he says that neither he nor the disciples “belong to this world”? And if he came from heaven, is returning to heaven, and says that this is where the disciples belong, isn’t this precisely the escapist, world-denying sort of theology I have constantly being saying John isn’t engaged in?

We need to engage with the double-edged nature of “the world” in John’s gospel. On one level, the world is created reality (John uses the Greek word kosmos) and, as such, the object of God’s saving love in Jesus (3:16-17). Jesus’ mission is to the world and in the world. At his crucifixion, he is proclaimed king of the world. His purpose in returning to the Father is in order to return as the world’s ruler in all his glory.

But the world is simultaneously disordered because of sin and human rebellion against God. It is the realm of “the evil one” (hence Jesus’ prayer for protection). It is inimical to heaven-dwellers because it is set against heaven. Created to be part of heaven, it is a self-declared republic and “no-go” area for God (at least, as far as the intention of its inhabitants is concerned!).

One possible response to this by God is judgement, condemnation and annihilation. God’s actual response is love, grace and eternal life, manifested concretely in Jesus. This is the truth about God that Jesus has come to reveal. It is not information, but relationship. It is to this that Jesus refers in vv 6-8 – not some sort of Gnostic mystery, or some doctrinal “facts” about God, but the nature of God and God’s saving work in the world. God’s mission, in other words, enacted in Jesus and now to be continued through the disciples.

To be “in the world” is thus to be in a hostile place. To be a child of God through Jesus is to orphaned in “the world”, or better, to be in exile, because “home” is heaven. The spatial metaphor of heaven (“up there”) and earth (“down here”) expresses the reality of human rebellion against God and human determination to make our world apart from God. Sin, in effect, makes of creation a divided kingdom. It makes it a place different from heaven – ie different from the place where love rules and God is known and worshipped. It is not the realm of “life in all its abundance”.

This is why Jeremiah and the psalmist both talk about different ways of living in the world. Psalm 1 is a psalm about the two ways: delight in the ways of rebellion, or delight in the ways of Yahweh. Jeremiah similarly encourages his hearers not to “learn the ways of the nations”. The very existence of the separate nations is a sign of disorder and fragmentation, its origin traced back through the mythical story of Babel (to which Pentecost will be the divine saving corrective). Yahweh has created one “kind” of people – human beings. Sin leads to conflict and fragmentation, seen in the existence of separate nations and the constant attempts to become “empires”. The political processes of the world are thus the drama of sin and rebellion against God. Religiously, this is mirrored in the worship of idols – themselves creations of the worshippers. There is a subtle play here on the notion of the divine image: human beings are made in Yahweh’s image; these same human beings reject Yahweh and instead create gods in their own image. The “words” these gods speak are (scarcely surprisingly) “no better than wood” (Jeremiah 10:8). They have no word of salvation to speak; no challenge; they open up no alternative to the cycles of death and despair in which the people live.

Note the movement in John’s writing, though. The story does not stop here. Jesus has come from the Father, been rejected, has returned to the Father and will return again. The picture in Revelation 21 is of the new heaven and earth (Revelation 21:1), which are reunited when (and this is important!) heaven comes down to earth (21:2). That reuniting is not about rescuing us from the world, but the transformation –conquest – of the world into a place of life and joy (cf 21:3-4 – some of the most beautiful words in the bible, I reckon!).

So to be “in the world, but not of the world” is, in John’s sense, to have switched allegiance. In his terms, this is about our relationship to God in Jesus Christ. His controlling metaphor is “abiding”, which leads him into the curious and poetic refrain of “being in”: “I in them and you in me” (17:23). That is where ultimate loyalty lies. This is the new community whose life is characterised by love. That is a different way from the way of the world. It is the commerce of heaven. Yet the task – the mission – of the new community is to live this out “in the world”, as Jesus did. This is where love is made concrete – where the rubber of faith hits the road. The eternal life we enjoy in Jesus Christ is meant to be lived out here. It is the “abundant life” of God that has been made possible in Jesus. So being “not of this world” is not about condemnation of the world, but about proclaiming that this place is where love can and ought to rule. It points forward to the destiny of the world: the present rebellion has a limited life! The earth’s destiny is to be reunited with heaven – with God. This is the place where God wishes to dwell with us.

The reality of resistance

The hyper-Calvinists taught the doctrine of Irresistible Grace. If God had elected only a few to salvation and predestined them for fellowship with “Him” (that sort of God can only be male!!!), then grace and salvation are inevitable. Yet Judas reminds us of the depth of human resistance to God. Of course, the crucifixion does as well. We must never forget that the story of the cross is the story of the utter failure of Jesus’ mission. Not only is he crucified, but he is abandoned by those closest to him. That is why the Spirit makes such a difference, and why the Spirit is so central to the post-resurrection accounts of Jesus. The Spirit is transformative. She is the power of resurrection. Incarnation alone is not enough (“water and blood”, in terms of 1 John 5:6). The presence of Jesus alone – even as the incarnate Word – is not enough to ensure that grace is able to do its work of liberation, forgiveness and transformation. The Spirit is also necessary. Where the Spirit is, there is the possibility that a Peter who denies even knowing Jesus can become the Peter of Acts. The Spirit makes us children of God. The Spirit empowers and protects us in the world as we try to make the eternal life of God a visible reality in “the world”. And the Spirit “makes our joy complete”. Jesus prays for his disciples – and God’s answer to his prayer is the Holy Spirit. It’s time to be waiting actively on God for the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Let’s do so with a deep sense of excitement and anticipation!

Amen.