MY JESUS

I became a grandfather during the year; quite a milestone really.  When people approach their 60s their friends of similar ages are generally passing this milestone.  I suppose it is an important mark of moving on to the next generation – wherein our immortality lies in a sense.

One of the things that I have enjoyed about this experience is that the progress of my granddaughter through her milestones (she is 7 months old) has reminded me of experiencing those same milestones when my own children were babies:

·        The first smile response.

·        Sleeping through the night.

·        Holding onto something in the hand.

·        Holding the head steady.

·        Crawling.

·        Pulling themselves up on furniture (the scariest bit).

·        The first clearly enunciated word. 

·        Walking.   Etc.  etc. 

I think it is fascinating to realise that while these may achieve these milestones in a slightly different order from each other or over a different timeline there is sufficient predictability and pattern to make us really take notice if one is missed out or seems delayed too long; we check to see if there might be some underlying problem that needs attention.

CHRISTMAS MILESTONES

Because we compress the Jesus story of 33 years into a single cycle over 12 months, especially that within 3 months of our celebration of his birth we will be celebrating his death and resurrection, some of these things get a bit distorted, or overlooked.

The readings we are addressing today related to events a week after Jesus’ birth; the official readings for today relate to events when he was 12; and next week the readings will relate to events when he was perhaps 3 or 4 years old.  And then we have nothing of his story until he is about 30.

So the question that comes to my minds is:

“What does the gospel writer or the Church want us to remember or take not of by writing this story down?”

I want to suggest that while some of the supernatural events that surrounded the birth narrative might want us to know that this little baby was so special he was perhaps divine, this story wants to make it very clear that he was a little Jewish boy, like millions of other Jewish boys, who when he was 8 days old was formally given a name (usually related to his father’s name) and he was circumcised – scarred for life as one of God’s people, Israel.

In all the 2000 years of Christian history no theological debate has been more frequently and fiercely contended than the issue of the humanity and divinity of Jesus.

What gets us into trouble most often is when we try to explain the coexistence of these things using logic and empirical knowledge. 

No wonder, really, too, when you look at the Nicene Creed that we recite each week.  The middle section about Jesus begins with 11 lines that emphasise his divine origins and leads into a single line, simple statement that “he became truly human”.  His trial and his death are mentioned in two further lines and these are followed by 7 lines recounting his resurrection and ascension etc.

Anyone who tries to have these things coexist by any other means than “MYSTERY” is headed for tough times, because none of it is self-evident, logical or provable.

HISTORY AND FAITH

Modern biblical scholars generally manage this by speaking of Jesus in two ways – the Jesus of HISTORY and the Jesus of FAITH.

When you think about the processes by which the stories of Jesus life and teaching were recorded, I think you can accept that it wasn’t until the end of his life that people really recognised that there was something special about this man. 

No-one was keeping a diary of his birth and childhood.  Those stories came into circulation afterwards and so they tell us more than what actually happened.  Embedded in the narrative of what happened are things about who we believe Jesus is because we know the end of the story.

Albert Schweizer was the first modern scholar to try and pare away the Jesus of Faith bits so that we might begin to see something about the Jesus of History, and over a hundred years later scholars are still trying to unravel the puzzle.  Marcus Borg’s recent publication “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” sums this work up very succinctly in the title.  We all have well-founded ideas about the Jesus of Faith, but we know much less about the Jesus of History.

THE ESSENTIAL HUMANITY OF JESUS

I think we in the church live in constant danger of losing the essential humanity of Jesus, and thereby lose the profound mystery of the incarnation of God, and the wondrous brotherliness of our Christ.

I have heard people comment when confronted with some of the tough challenges and complexities of life: “But of course Jesus had the advantage over us; he was God’s Son.”

Not so! That is heresy.

This story and others emphasise for us that Christ Jesus was truly human.  He lived in the same real world that you and I live in.  He was very poor.  He experienced fear and pain and sadness just like we do, and to me, that makes him far more accessible than if he were simply a divine in human clothing.

Here is one of the ironies of my life as a minister of the Gospel: 

·        It is very hard to get non-Christians to confront the fact that Jesus was Divine,

·        yet it is almost as difficult to convince Christians that he was truly human.

Some of you may be familiar with the series of novels written by Fr Joseph Girzone called “Joshua”.  One of the attractions of imaginative books like these about Jesus is that they underline the common humanity of Jesus.  They are read mainly by church goers who have been in danger of losing the down-to-earth reality of the incarnation.  They warm our hearts by depicting a Christ who was one of us; really one of us.

This year I would encourage you to explore what you can of the Jesus of History and let his self-identification with our humanity fill you with hope that your life can be truly transformed by the grace and love of God.  This is not because I want you to ditch the Jesus of Faith, but because in him the human and the divine become beautifully and awesomely aligned and we need to take hold of both dimensions to fully understand him.

SO TRUST THIS MYSTERY 

This is the Mystery!  That Jesus is for us both fully human and yet divine.

·        Hold on to the Mystery.

·        Or better still, let the Mystery hold on to you.

Throughout all the year, with the special Christian festivals of Christmas, Epiphany, Transfiguration, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost –

·        for goodness sake don’t let go of the hand of the human Jesus;

·        only in the human hand do we find the Divine hand;

·        and only in the Divine hand do we find our own destiny.

AMEN

Divorce and Remarriage

The whole issue of marriage is very topical these days as various parliaments in Australia are giving consideration to the issue of Marriage Equality — but that is a topic for another day.

We in the church have been grappling with the issue of divorce and remarriage for much longer, haven’t we'?  First of all it was an issue for general society and then for the church in particular. 

As I think about my own history with this issue I am reminded that as a young person, whose father was a minister in the church, I saw my dad move from a general opposition to the idea of divorce, to an accepting understanding of it – all in the context of the issue of divorce entering into the lives of his children.  My brother was first divorced and then remarried and is now divorced again.  One of my sisters married a divorce man, and then my other sister was divorced and is now remarried.  By entering into my close family experience, the opinion of my whole family about this issue shifted.

Perhaps this has happened in your family.  When we are confronted with difficult issues in real life — not as a theoretical reality — we often end up with different views in the matter.

THE TEXT - Mark 10:1-12

In this story, the discussion that follows between Jesus and the Pharisees it appears at first glance that Jesus utterly forbids divorce.  Jesus said that Moses only allowed divorce because of the hardness of men’s hearts.  He went back further to the beginning of the Bible, to Genesis, where it is written that man and woman "shall become one flesh," and "They are no longer two but one. What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”

From this, some churches have totally forbidden their members to undertake divorce.  Others have tried to side step it by the device of "annulment" instead of divorce.  Other churches accept divorce as an unfortunate but necessary option where a marriage has irretrievably broken down.

If Jesus utterly forbids divorce, on what grounds can our church tolerate divorce and remarry divorcee’s?  I will attempt to make this clearer in what follows.

THE SITUATION IN JESUS’ DAY

I invite you to keep in mind two things when this passage from Mark’s Gospel is read.

First, it’s a man’s game.  The conversation started with the Pharisees asking if it were lawful for a

man to divorce his wife. It was a question about men’s rights.  In that era in Jewish culture, divorce was largely the prerogative of men, not women.

As far as I am aware there were only three grounds on which a woman could divorce her husband:

1.     lf a Jewish man wanted to leave the holy land and go an live in a pagan country, she could refuse and seek divorce.

2.     If the man embraced another religion, the wife could divorce him.

3.     The third ground for divorce l think was if the man committed blasphemy.

On the other hand, men had numerous grounds.  Women had no right of reply. If a man found anything "unseemly" in his wife, all he had to do was to write out a statement of divorce, listing the grounds, get it witnessed by another man, and then send the wife away.  This put a woman in a perilous situation.  She was disgraced in the community; her family were not likely to take her back.  lf she could not quickly find another husband, her options were either to become a servant, a beggar, or turn to prostitution to keep alive. So when Jesus speaks about divorce in his social environment; it should be heard as a vigorous protest against a grave social injustice.

Secondly, back to basics. Jesus immediately drives the Pharisees back to basics.  They wanted to have a discussion about their rights under the regulations of Moses; their right to divorce a woman.  Jesus pushes them back to Genesis and the basic intention of God: From the beginning a woman and man were intended to stay together in mutual respect, trust and love.  Basically marriage was meant to be a life-long commitment.

Jesus takes us away from the compromises and confusions that happen when relationships do not work well, and he moves us back to God.  That is the only valid starting point as far as Christ was concerned. 

What does God see as the best possible way of life?

Togetherness: an ever-growing love through a life of mutual cherishing. That is the goal.

SO WHAT IS OUT OF PLACE HERE?

This text is a bit like the story of Jesus refusing to heal the story in Mark 7 where Jesus refuses the request of a Gentile woman to heal her daughter.  There Jesus speaks in uncharacteristically racist language.

Here Jesus speaks in uncharacteristically legalistic language.  His words seem to echo what you would have expected the Pharisees to say; but do they?

There is a yawning gulf between Jesus and legalistic religion.  The Pharisees came asking ‘Under what circumstances is it right for a man to divorce his wife’?"

Like their imitators in today’s world, these Pharisees just wanted to be in the right - always.  They expected to get from Jesus a list of conditions under which they could divorce their wives and feel very righteous about it.  That was their thing; the thing that gave them a buzz. They had to be in the right.  It was not only in matters of divorce that they saw things this way.  It applied to every other moral and religious issue.  They were fanatical about justifying themselves.  Therefore they were continually looking for ‘mitigating circumstances’ – excuses that were deduced from the laws of Moses that allowed them to maintain their high and mighty self-righteousness.

There we have it.

In a society where marriage was in a mess, and where men were divorcing their wives for trivial reasons, these paragons of virtue wanted to talk about rights. Jesus stumped them by in effect retorting:  "It is never right to divorce your wife."

The only thing that God intends and the only thing in God’s eyes that can bear the load of being called "right," is a life-long relationship of committed love.  Such can only happen in an environment of shared grace, where forgiveness and respect is ever present.

So, Jesus is not so much forbidding divorce as driving us to recognize our inability to fulfill the perfect law of God, and then offering us grace.  Grace is the remarkable alternative to legalistic self-righteousness.  In matters of marriage and divorce, as in all other ethical issues, we fail often, yet can gladly avail ourselves of the liberating grace of God, through Christ Jesus our Saviour.

Let me quote from one of my favourite New Testament scholars Eduard Schweizer:

"A legalistic requirement forbidding divorce does not help...but also a freedom in which a man can avoid the confession of guilt is even less beneficial.”

He then goes on to say:

“Divorce can be a sign of repentance by which two people face up to their failure. It can be a confession that they have not succeeded in living according to God’s will.  Divorce can therefore set one free to experience the mercy of God."

SUMMING UP

I believe that at one level, Jesus was confronting the male arrogance which had made divorce primarily a male privilege.  He was angry with their treatment of women.  His words about divorce and the hardness of men’s hearts are fundamentally a social justice protest.  Jesus was not putting a ban on divorce.  He was putting a ban on self-righteousness.

At a basic level, all of us has have committed adultery.  That is, we have watered down the perfect, beautiful, loving will of God on a dozen different moral issues.  Every one of us has compromised thousands of times.  Only when we stop trying to put ourselves in the right, when we cease asking "when is it lawful to do less than the best?" do we open up our minds and hearts the renovating mercy of God.  Then we are enabled to get on with life, gratefully and gracefully.

   

This is the Good News.   

The Authority of the Bible

A few Sundays ago I was preaching on Divorce and remarriage, and was confronted by the words of Jesus that said in effect that divorce was never right, and yet in most western Christian communities it has almost disappeared as an issue.  

Now if any of you are a bit like me, and have moved from being quite legalistic about divorce and remarriage into a position of understanding and permitting it, I wonder if you, too, have struggled with a wondering if you have done a bad thing to the Bible by disregarding something that Jesus seems to have said very specifically.

This strikes at our sense of the authority of the Bible and raises a question for us — "How can we

do what seems to be the opposite and not undermine the authority of the Bible?"

I have struggled with this question, mainly because l have never clearly thought through a framework for understanding what authority the Bible has.  For most of us there are two central planks in the

authority of the Bible - God wrote it, and it is infallibly correct. Anyone who disregards the text or its plain meaning is undermining its authority.

My seminary training taught me a different view of the text, but it didn't give me an alternative

understanding of the authority of the text; and just recently someone wrote something that makes so much sense about it that I want to share it with you before l unpick this issue of divorce and remarriage.

Clearly, the text of the Bible was written by men (there is some suspicion that Priscilla may have

written Hebrews, l think), but as an easy example, when Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians he

was not writing Holy Scripture.  He was writing a letter to some friends to help them as a

community of Christians.  For him The Psalms and the Prophets were the Scriptures. 

Similarly, when King David and others wrote the Psalms, they were not writing Scripture. For

them, only the first five books of the bible were Scripture.

The process by which these texts were elevated to sacred texts was progressive and took a long

time.  In the case of what we call the Old Testament, at first there was just the Torah -— Genesis to

Deuteronomy — then they added the Psalms and some of the Prophets and finally some of the

later prophets and the writings like Job and Esther.  This took about 600 years and even then

some people want to leave bits out that others wanted in.

In the case of the New Testament the decision to include post-Jesus writings to the Old Testament

didn't happen for several hundred years, and it all took three or four goes at deciding on the in-group of texts, and then Luther and others wanted to get rid of James and we still have a difference of opinion in the church about the Apocryphal books.

So, what is it that gives these texts their authority?

I was recently reminded that the authority comes from the determination by our forefathers in the faith that these texts should be regarded as sacred texts.  They were not saying they were written by God, as some religions do with their texts - the Quran and The Book of Mormon, for example - but they were saying these texts give us a great basis for discovering what God wants of us.

The task we have, as have God’s people have had throughout all time, is to discern from these texts how we should then live, and because the texts are constantly being considered in different times and places to when they were written, we have a complex task of interpretation.

What must I do to Inherit Eternal Life?

Some years ago I came across a series of CD recordings from a conference by Franciscan Monk, Richard Rohr and a lay-woman writer, Paula D’Arcy.

The theme of the conference, to which they spoke, was “A Spirituality for the two halves of life” and I have listened to those talks over and over again because they speak into a very deep part of my life and experience.  In some ways they gave me a vocabulary for things I knew without having the words to express or even understand them.

Many of us understand the image of life as a journey and perhaps even more so when we give some consideration of our spiritual life as a journey – and I think it is fair to say that this could be a theme common to the readings we have had today and which I would like to explore with you.

Richard Rohr and Paula D’Arcy explore the idea that when we are young, or young in the faith, we need a structure for our spirituality that is very much based or rules and good order.  It is about developing the confidence that we know we are in the right place with God.

So it is that when we were young, what we needed for our faith to flourish, was good teaching, strong community and a set structure for our spiritual life such as regular times daily for prayer and devotion, strong obligations to be along at everything happening at church and the like.

All of this gave us a great foundation to build our life of faith on – Rohr would call it a strong container.

The interesting thing is that it is almost universally the case that after a while something will happen on our journey of faith that will break the container.  We will find ourselves in places where the old rules don’t work any more.  There are now too many inconsistencies in life or contradictions that we were once blind to but which are screaming in our face for attention – the rules and structure of the old container can’t cope with them any more.

Paul D’Arcy is the speaker who tells very graphically how her container was broken.  She had grown up in a devout Catholic family where their life in Christ was the rich seedbed of their family life. 

When she was just 27 years old and expecting her second child, she was involved in a traffic accident that killed her husband and daughter.

In her grief, the container broke.

This was not supposed to happen.  She had been a good person of faith.  She had done all the right things.   This was not supposed to happen.

It took her a long time, but she gradually discovered that there were some new ways in which she could be with God, in which her spiritual life was nurtured that didn't rely on everything fitting in according to the rules.

It is into this kind of faith that Job is being called through the most incredible suffering.

It was into this kind of faith that David was called as he struggled with his sense of failure and abandonment.

And if you study the lives of the great saints of God you will generally find that there has been a transformative moment for them that is born out of suffering but in which their container was broken but they went on to discover new dimensions of life in God.  St John of the Cross is a great example – he joined a monastery at a young age and was really very good and obedient.  But something went wrong and his Abbott put him in the monastery dungeon for two years – that really broke his container.

The Hebrews reading and the Gospel tell us something about Jesus that lines up with this.

One of the themes that Hebrews emphasizes is that Jesus was fully human and experienced all the highs and lows that we count as the human journey.

In this context, I can’t help wondering what might have happened to Jesus before he took on his public life and ministry as a thirty year old.

I am sure Mary & Joseph brought him us a good Jewish boy – he would have learned the Torah by heart and known the law as well as anyone, but it is very clear from his teaching that he has moved beyond that kind of “goody-two-shoes” kind of faith that is so full of confidence because he has kept all the rules. In fact a large part of his teaching ministry seemed to be railing against those who were using the rule-keeping as a means of maintaining their own self-righteousness and burdening others for whom it no longer worked.

I don’t think Jesus could have arrived at that kind of wisdom without some kind of transformative moment born out of great trouble or grief – but we will never know what it was.

So, a man runs up to Jesus and asks:

“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Most of us resonate positively with that question, don’t we?  I am not sure that we all understand it in the same terms, but I think we get the idea – “How can I be sure?”  He wanted some reassurance that he was getting it all right.

It is interesting that Jesus starts with the rules – the Ten Commandments – and the man is able to say that he has kept all of these from his youth – he really was a “goodie-two-shoes” wasn’t he?

And then he gets to the heart of the matter – keeping the rules doesn't matter if your heart is set on things less important than God.  This man was rich and Jesus said “Let it all go – give it away to the poor.” 

This is the pathway to life in God – driving through the rules to the things that are most important.

For some people the distraction is money, but for others it is their job, or their social standing or their power.  All sorts of things can get in the way – things that we think will make us happy, but which invariably do not.

So, Jesus’ suggestion here that the man give away his money to help the poor is much more about the man than it is about the poor – not that Jesus doesn't always seem to have his eye out for the poor.

If you listen to the teaching of Jesus you do not find him often siding with the priestly style that emphasizes the law and the rules – most often he sides with the prophetic tradition that invariably involves a challenge to the establishment and the rules.

In Micah 6:8 we have three very simple filters through which to decide what is expected of us:

            Do Justice

            Love Compassion

            Walk Humbly

Jesus was inviting this man into that space and was saying in effect that if he did that, he would find peace with God – a much better peace than he gets from keeping the rules.

If I could remind you of last week’s Gospel story where Jesus seems to have a very legalistic response to the question about divorce and remarriage.  If you look carefully at the story you will discover that Jesus’ concern was not that the Pharisees wanted to be able to divorce – with him responding that you cannot do that.  Jesus’ concern was the sense of self-righteousness that the Pharisees wanted to maintain while they were doing what was clearly unjust and unkind – condemning a woman to a life of destitution because they wanted a new wife.  Jesus ran those filters over the situation and came up with what seemed like an unexpected answer.  I don’t think he would give the same answer to a woman of today who has been beaten and abused asking if it is right for her to divorce and remarry; or to a couple who have just lost it for so long now that they really are bad for each other and need to be free to start again with someone else.  They need grace and forgiveness – and Jesus offers a freedom to receive that and move on.

But I digress.

I really like the work that Richard Rohr and Paula D’Arcy have done, although there are times when I feel like they are simply describing two different kinds of spirituality, rather than one into which we are best suited to grow into.  So long as the structure of rules and the like is not having a negative impact on a person’s life, so long as they are not just papering over the things that don’t work in order to keep the rules-framework, then they are okay and they are in the right place for the moment.

But I wanted to use these readings today to introduce you to the idea, if you didn't know it already, that there is another way of living our life in God, that generally comes out of the tragedies and struggles we have in life and that is grounded in grace and freedom. 

More than once Jesus made it clear that no amount of rule-keeping is going to get us over the line – even the best rule-keeper will have failed to satisfy the demands of the law just as much as little old you and me – and we both know we aren't very good at the rules.

And the good news is that this new way, this way of freedom and grace, enables us to respond with compassion and inclusion to all the people we meet in our journey and be willing to travel with them for a while.

The Lord be with you.

How say you, this Pentecost?

What do you want me to tell you about the Holy Spirit today?

Every year, seven weeks after we have celebrated Easter, we celebrate this day called Pentecost – we all know it has something to do with the Holy Spirit, but somehow, when we are reminded of that story in Acts of the Holy Spirit coming in such a dramatic fashion, most of us look around the church as we know it and say “So What?”

Do these kinds of things ever happen here at St Matthews?  I’m a visitor, so I really don’t know, but my guess is not.

Some of you may have Christian friends who belong to Pentecostal churches, or you may even have journeyed in such a church yourselves, but that experience of the Holy Spirit is quiet foreign to the experience of many in the church and so we generally dismiss it as something that is all too hard to understand.

Some of you may even look rather longingly at the enthusiasm for the faith that your friends in such churches have and wonder why you have missed out – weren’t you good enough? Or faithful enough?

This situation generally leads to one of two responses:-

1.      We might be inclined to relegate all this signs and wonders stuff to the past – that God used them to get the church started but God doesn’t need them now!  OR

2.      We get very defensive and go down the line of saying that all this Pentecostal stuff is wrong; its fake; or even its evil!

If I was to objectively describe my experience of the Holy Spirit in the Church, I would have to say that what I see is two very different pictures.

One is built around signs and wonders – like the Acts story.  I have colleagues for whom this experience of the Holy Spirit is congruent with their own – they see signs and wonders such as healings, words of wisdom or insight, the ecstatic utterances in what seem to be foreign languages which are then translated into a prophetic word from God.  I have a cousin who is a pastor of a small country church and regularly I am told of miraculous healings in which the blind see and tumours vanish from MRI images.

The other is built around images of quiet unassuming people whose lives manifest those fruit of the Spirit that the Apostle Paul talks about – people who are growing in grace and wisdom as they walk day by day with God and guided by this Advocate or Helper.  Sometimes these faithful souls, these wonderful “salt of the earth” type people, are wracked with anxiety that they have missed out on something or guilt that their lives have failed to measure up somehow.

Which of these is right?

DIFFERENT WAYS

Despite my four-year theological degree and years of pastoral ministry in which I must have preached more than a few Pentecost sermons, it has only been recently that I realised that there are two very distinct Holy Spirit Traditions in the New Testament – and funnily enough they seem to match very closely the observations I have just made about my experience of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

Let me share with you some insights into these traditions.

In the same way that media observers of politics seem only to notice the flamboyant, or outrageous, so when most of us have thought about the Holy Spirit in the Bible and the Church we have only noticed the Signs and Wonders tradition.

The Signs & Wonders Tradition

This is the tradition that Luke records for us and which took root in various places in the earliest church and in the church as we know it today.

Signs and Wonders are said to be things that call us to faith – and for many people they do.  The way Luke tells this story is a very deliberate strategy by which we are drawn into an understanding of what God was doing through these amazing events.

For the early church, these stories were inextricably linked to a very ancient Hebrew story about God’s plans for the world.

Way, way back in the mists of time, the story is told, everyone spoke the same language.  People were essentially nomadic, so this was a good thing.  They settled for a while in the river country of Mesopotamia and decided to build there a great city, as well as a tower – a huge tower – that reached up to heaven where they could meet with God and make themselves famous.

For some reason or another, the Lord God didn’t particularly like this idea, and as a solution decides to mix up everyone’s speech so that they can no longer co-operate in this tower-building enterprise and will be scattered all over the world. 

We all know the Tower of Babel story, and we all understand that at the heart of it was the idea of punishment for wanting or doing something wrong.  Whether we regard this story historically or as a kind of parable – we know that in it we were supposed to learn something very true.

The Lukan tradition of the Holy Spirit is grounded in this story as it brings together people from all over the world with their different languages – all gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate this wonderful festival.

And an amazing miracle happens!

The language about it is a bit ambiguous.  We generally understand it to mean that the Apostles were miraculously able to speak in so many other languages that all the visitors in Jerusalem were able to hear the stories of Jesus in their own language. 

But it is possible to understand the words as meaning that the miracle was more in the hearing than in the speaking – that the Disciples were telling the stories and even though people might not have been able to understand Aramaic in normal circumstances, by some miracle they were able to understand the stories.

Either way a miracle happened – signs and wonders – that was clearly undoing the act of God on Babel; reversing that punishment and ushering in a new season or era of life empowered by the Holy Spirit.

The Breath of Life Tradition

But there is another tradition of the Holy Spirit in the Bible, and the Gospel we read today gave us a hint at it – and it is quite different from the Signs and Wonders tradition of Luke in Acts.

John uses quite different language about the nature and work of the Holy Spirit.  In the passage we read today the Spirit is referred to as THE ADVOCATE or The Helper and in another place THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH.

There are no great miracles here about the work of the Spirit.  In a very intense conversation Jesus is having with his Disciples at the last supper he tells them that he must leave them and that the Holy Spirit will, in a sense stand in his place – a continuation of the Incarnation of God in the world. 

The image of the Advocate is a legal one – for someone who speaks on our behalf.  There are hints here of the way in which the Spirit might give us the wisdom to say the right thing and so be speaking through us in a sense, but I wonder, too, if there could be a sense here of the Spirit speaking on our behalf before God Almighty – saying things for us that  could not possibly say.

There is another sense of Advocate that some translators pick up and that is of the Helper.  When we unpack this idea we come up with a sense of God that is very real and present for us in our day to day living.

That other phrase Jesus uses here is the term The Spirit of Truth.  In some senses because God is Truth, this term is just a different way of saying The Spirit of God, but it also embodies a whole lot of great ideas about the work of the Spirit being involved in helping us know what is true and being transformed by what is true.

This sits closely with the ideas of Paul about the Fruit of the Spirit becoming increasingly evident in our lives.

Now some of you are already jumping ahead of me and thinking – where does all of this link into the Old Testament like the other one did?

Well, to do that we have to go on a bit further in John’s gospel to something that happened in the second story John tells us right after he has told us about Jesus Resurrection and the empty tomb – in chapter 20.  You will remember this.

“It was late that Sunday evening,” the story begins.  All the disciples were terrified that the Romans or the Jewish religious leaders would be coming to get them.  They were hidden away in a locked room and suddenly, Jesus appears right there in the room.

As you might imagine, fear and amazement gives way to joy when they realise who it is, and then Jesus does something totally unexpected which harks back to a much older Hebrew story.  He breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive people’s sins they are not forgiven.”

What a powerful image, and it is an image that has carried on in the life of the church – how many of you have ever been to a Chrism Eucharist just before Easter when the Holy Oils are blessed?  When Archbishop Roger blesses the Chrism Oil – the oil we use for Baptisms and Confirmations – he stoops down and blows over the oil; a very powerful symbolic gesture.

There is another story in which breath is used in an amazing way.  Again in the mists of time, God was playing around with clay and fashioned himself a man – not like those Chinese warriors that have all been turned into immovable terracotta – this was till soft, pliable wet clay – and God breathed breath into his nostrils and the man began to live.  It is there in the Ezekiel story we read today, too.

This life-giving breath of God that John calls the Spirit of God is showing us that in the Spirit we are new Creations; this story of Adam is set before sin enters into our experience, so there is a sense in which this work of the Spirit is about creating us fully into God’s original plan for humans.

So, we have these two great Holy Spirit traditions in the Bible and in the Church and they both can teach us stuff, not least to be respectful of those whose experience of the Holy Spirit is different from our own.

On this Pentecost Sunday let us give thanks for both the quiet and the spectacular, but most of all for the fruits of the Spirit, and especially for that most important gift of the Spirit that Paul tells us about – love. 

A New Covenant! Really!!!!

Rules in life are really important!

There are all sorts of rules, aren’t there?

There are rules about how to eat and how to talk and who to talk to and who not to talk to.

There are rules for playing games of various codes – Union, League, AFL and Soccer – just mention various approaches to football.

Of course there are rules that help us work out who are the winners and who are the losers – not just in games, but in all sorts of spheres of life – and we all want to be winners.

In a way it isn’t any wonder that most of the religious systems in the world have as a very big part of them some kind of rules that most people think it is best to keep.

The Jewish religion certainly was full of rules.

They had rules about what to eat and how it should be cooked.

They had rules about what kind of fabric was permitted in your clothing.

They had rules about cleanliness both literal and ritual.

And they had a whole lot of rules about what you had to do to be friends with God again if you had done bad stuff – remembering that some bad things could only be remedied by you being stoned to death.

There were a whole lot of moral sins that could get you stoned but also:

Being a stubborn and rebellious son (or daughter?)

Cursing one of your parents.

Violating the Sabbath.

Now this last one was a beauty because the Pharisees had worked a million and one things that would be violating the Sabbath if you did them between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.

An idea that was at the heart of this was the thing we call a COVENANT.

There are various kinds of COVENANT in the Bible but the most common is a reciprocal or conditional covenant by which two parties agree with each other “If you do this, I will do that!”

When we put this into a religious context we get something that looks in its simplest form like “If we do all the right things, our all-powerful God will really look after us.” The term we most commonly use is “bless us!”

We all like the idea of getting good things if we do the right thing.

All this is okay so long as we understand how it all works and everything goes according to the rules.

Which brings me to this season of LENT which we have nearly completed – next week is Palm Sunday.

We have a special term for what kind of Season Lent is – PENITENTIAL – SOLEMN – SAD!

Psalm 51 speaks right into the sentiment of this season:

¹ Have mercy on me, O God,

in your enduring goodness:

according to the fullness of your compassion

blot out my offences.

² Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness:

and cleanse me from my sin.

If you have a Bible or prayer book look it up.

Some of you will be familiar with musical settings for the Mass that use Latin terms for their names – Sanctus, Benedictus, Kyrie.

They did the same things for the Psalms which were often set to music. They used the first Latin word in the Psalm for the name of the setting. The Setting of Psalm 51 is called Miserere – “Lord Have Mercy on Me.” Gregorio Allegri wrote in the early 1600s one of the most loved musical settings of this Psalm that lasts about 15 minutes – it really is like listening to angels and a great hi-fi in here would make it sound wonderful. I am sure.

But the Miserere and the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei all seem to focus especially at this time of year on our miserable lot in life because we can’t do it – we can’t keep all the rules.

Actually that seems to me to be the point of it all – the Gospel, that is.

Have you ever been disappointed when you thought you did everything right and you still got it in the neck in some way or another?

Have you ever felt resentful about that person who lives down the road from you who has broken all the rules in life and yet they seem to have everything?

I want to suggest that God started trying to tell the people of Israel a long time before Jesus came along that keeping the rules was not all it was cracked up to be by the Pharisees.

In the part of Jeremiah we read today we have those famous words that God wanted a new covenant, one that God would:

“write on their hearts;

And I will be their God

and they shall be my people.”

This was to be an unconditional Covenant.

I WILL BE THEIR GOD

THEY WILL BE MY PEOPLE

God was saying that the rules couldn't work – the old covenant didn’t work.

There is nothing we will ever be able to do to deserve God’s goodness, and it is God’s will that none should be condemned.

So God introduced us to this amazing word – GRACE.

This is the word that makes the life and death of Jesus make sense for me.

So often Jesus broke all the rules – he healed on the Sabbath, he touched lepers and unclean women, he let his disciples gather food from the roadside on a Sabbath.

That Hebrews reading we had has some interesting things to say about how this new Covenant works – especially because of who Jesus was. Yes, the imagery is all about the temple sacrificial system, but this High Priest is effective, not because his blood satisfied some divine law, but because he discovered that deep wisdom that we all find life in losing it.

That is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us this amazingly short parable:-

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it, but those who yield up their life in this world will discover what eternal life is.”

We are so strongly wedded to our sacrificial imagery in understanding what happened when Jesus died – it’s imbedded in our theology and liturgy, and of course it is thoroughly Biblical – but this deep wisdom we find in John’s Gospel today helps many people come into new and meaningful understandings of the kind of relationship God wants to have with them.

This is not one based on Rules.

It is a deep personal relationship with God based on God’s commitment to be our God no matter what and in which we can relax about those rules because God’s grace means that the relationship is no longer based on the rules, but rather a commitment to be in relationship – giving up our life to be in God.

The Lord be with you.