Sermon - Pentecost Sunday

Sermon, 23^rd May 2010

Pentecost Sunday

Text: John 14: 8-17

In the name of God: Creator, Pain-bearer and Spirit of Love and life.

There’s a programme at 9.30 in the evening on ABC television called Q and A – Questions and Answers. It is a programme where a panel of about four people field questions from audience members. My cynicism asks whether these questions are really always ‘off the cuff’ or pre-arranged – but that’s not the point to discuss this morning. Often the panel contains politicians, mainly from the Federal parliament. If you ever want to find out how to not answer a question but at the same time speak authoritatively for some minutes this is the programme for you!

In this morning’s Gospel reading we have a portion of the script for a Q & A programme. The opening scene is played out in the previous chapter beginning at verse 36 of chapter 13 when Simon Peter is reported to be asking Jesus where here is going and what the heck he means when he talks to them in the way he has been.

Jesus has just delivered what is most definitely a farewell speech – in terms that would raise not just questions but alarm and fear in his disciples. These are men who are portrayed as having no clue as to Jesus’ real identity or purpose. They are shown, in short, as being thick as two short planks!

Of course Jesus’ answers that the Gospel writer has given don’t help either.

In Chapter 13 verse 37 Jesus answers a straight question “Where are you going?” with an extremely vague and non committal reply. He says, “Where I am going you can’t follow me now, but you will follow me later”. What sort of an answer is that? Ambiguous to say the least!

After Jesus reply to a further question by Peter where he also foretells that Peter will publicly deny him, it’s Thomas’s turn to ask another seemingly natural question. “How can we know the way if we don’t know where you are going?”

Here Jesus responds with the well known words, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.”

So we reach the question posed by Philip and which forms today’s reading. He says, “OK Jesus, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” Come on, come clean, where is this Father you keep talking about?

The Gospel writer then has Jesus respond by telling Philip that he is looking at the Father - Yahweh – the ancient God of the Israelite peoples and who brought them out of Egypt and who is in Jesus and Jesus is in Him.

Now that’s a revelation!

Jesus then speaks of love – ‘If you love me’, he says, ‘you will keep my commandments’, and I will pray the Father, and he will give you another counsellor, to be with you forever’.

Now that’s a promise!

So just who is this ‘counsellor?’ ‘The spirit of truth’, says Jesus. It’s a pretty exclusive offer as well because this spirit of truth is not available to just anyone. ‘The world’, Jesus says, ‘cannot receive’ this spirit. Why can’t world receive this spirit of truth? Well, it’s not because God is not available or because God holds back or because God denies the general population access to the spirit. Not at all, it is because the people of the world don’t see God as the disciples are now seeing God in Jesus. They can’t see God and therefore can’t know God or God’s spirit.

So the next question comes from the audience. ‘Why can’t ‘they’ see God, and just what is meant by ‘the world’ anyway?

‘The world’ refers not to the earth but to the general everyday bloke and girl in the street and the reason they can’t see God is because they don’t stop and look – it’s that simple!

In order to receive a gift you need to first be in contact with the giver. A gift is not something that we can earn – not something that comes as a result of our efforts.

This spirit is nothing less than a gift from God.

The disciples of the story in Acts were not engaged in any work that would earn them God’s love in the form of the spirit. They were sitting in a closed room wondering what the heck to do next. They were just waiting - much like Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. But unlike the play where Godot never arrives - that’s when God comes. Not when we are labouring and searching but in the quiet time when we just wait.

I have just read a little book by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, entitled Silence and Honey Cakes. It’s about the ancient ascetics of the fourth and fifth centuries who lived in the Egyptian desert where they had gone to escape from the rat race of the cities of their time. They mostly sought to find God in silence and contemplation. Most did. They sought God – took time out to wait for the spirit that Jesus had promised. Their pearls of wisdom that have come down to us indicate that their quest was not in vain.

The other reading set for today is from Paul’s letter to the churches at Rome. This writing predates the gospel by many years but the language is similar. Paul reiterates that spirituality (which infers a state of peace and wholeness in one’s life) is not something that we generate ourselves.

Paul speaks of receiving the spirit rather than congratulating them on having achieved spirituality. He also infers that this is not something that is born in us; rather it is something that comes from outside our own selves. It is not, if you like some sort of inherited personality trait.

There two other things that need to be said.

First, we mustn’t get the idea that once having received the gift of God’s spirit we need do nothing more – it doesn’t mean that we can now sit under a tree and contemplate our navel – far from it. The old adage ‘Use it or lose it’ springs to mind.

God’s spirit is the sort of Gift you can’t just unwrap, admire, and thinking it’s far too delicate and valuable to be used, carefully store it away in a bottom drawer in case something dreadful happens to it. The trouble is that, having done that, you tend to forget it’s there and your family will find it when they empty out your house after the funeral.

No, the gift is given so that we might pass it on to others. It now becomes our gift to give – to our loved ones, our family and friends, also our community. Here the concept of the neighbour comes into play.

Anthony the Great, one of the desert ascetics, said, “Our life and death is with our neighbour. If we win our brother we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.” There’s food for thought - and a mighty challenge! We win our brother (or sister) through the gift of God’s spirit.

The other thing that needs to be said is that having received the spirit of God we don’t magically become immune from the troubles and trials of the natural human life – far from it! To quote Professor Mary Shore again, the spirit of God is …”a gift that does not exempt believers [ from trials and difficulties] but plunges them right back into the world's sufferings and pains, [but] empowered and confident in the future God is bringing about.”

Another thing - did you hear what Jesus said in verse 14? ‘If you ask anything in my name, I will do it’. There lies a potential study on prayer.

Andrew H. Wakefield in "What Happens When We Pray," (2007) suggests that the parent/child relationship offers an analogy for what Jesus is promising here. He writes:

If we extend the analogy just a little, we may be able to think of these promises as the same sort of hyperbole that parents use when they tell a child, "I would do anything for you!" The child may say, "Really? Then I want a tattoo; I want a pet elephant; I want a Ferrari!" The child has missed the point. The hyperbole shows the parent's infinite love for the child, a love that will seek the good of the child even above the parent's own good.... The hyperbole is a way of expressing the intimate relationship between loving parent and child—and that relationship is not simply about giving and receiving.

So how do we react when prayer apparently goes unanswered? Has the spirit of God that we have been promised and experienced as the disciples at Pentecost did, left – and, as in Don McLean’s song ‘taken the last train for the coast’?

Do we blame ourselves in that we don’t know how to pray properly? There’s no one way to pray – but a multitude of ways – don’t limit God. The promise made here is not a matter of ‘you can have anything you want’.

Remember the terminology used here – it’s the parent / child relationship we see. Carry that on and Jesus is giving an assurance that God will not desert us in our hour of need – we will not be thrown out into the snow to fend for ourselves.

He is saying that no matter what happens to us, no matter what tragedy strikes, no matter how low and desolate we feel, Jesus, in the spirit of God will be with us and we will know God’s everlasting love and presence – closer than our very breath. That’s a solemn and serious promise and that’s what Pentecost can mean to us today.

The Lord be with you.

Easter 7

Sermon, 16^th May 2010

Easter 7

Text: John 17: 20 – 26.

In the name of God – Creator, Pain-bearer and Spirit of Life and Love.

I sometimes wonder what the author of John’s Gospel would think if he heard some of the interpretations of his writings as presented in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. I imagine he would be amazed to think that his writing was still being read, studied and discussed some nineteen hundred years after his time.

It’s fair, I think, to adopt a something of a midrashic interpretation of these writings.

Midrash is a Jewish method of interpretation which conveys many layers inherent in a text. So we can believe, if we wish, that Jesus actually spoke these words and their meaning is plain. I for one find that an impossible ask. There is no doubt that these are not the actual words of Jesus as ostensibly recorded here. Preservation of speech and text was not as easy as it is today. We take for granted audio and video recording whereby a person’s speech can be recorded and stored to be replayed at some time in the future. The video camera even preserves the nuances of expression that aid immensely in interpreting the speaker’s meaning and intent. In John’s day no such devices existed and it was only through the skills of the oral traditions that particular sayings were preserved.

John wrote about the turn of the first century CE – some sixty or seventy years after Jesus’ crucifixion – at least one - maybe two generations later.

First then, the practical application of the Gospel in its own time – its “sitz im leben”.

This Gospel addresses specific circumstances that were being faced by a Christian community. The writer is urging his church to beware of internal factions and also seeks to strengthen their resolution in the face of hostility and persecution.

Barnabas Lindars, an Oxford theologian, writes," ...it is now widely accepted that the discourses are concerned with the actual issues of the church and synagogue debate at the time when the Gospel was written." The community of John was particularly strong in its criticism of Orthodox Judaism of its time. It would not have been many years since the followers of “The Way” of Jesus – the Christian sect – had been acrimoniously expelled from the synagogues.

It is only in the Gospel of John that we see these long speeches of Jesus where he speaks about himself in such divine terms. The discourses found in this Gospel are considered by many reliable scholars to have originated in sermons that are predominantly the evangelist's own composition but which may be loosely based on a saying or act of Jesus derived from the oral and synoptic Gospel tradition.

Many contemporary scholars regard the Gospel of John as more theological and certainly less historical than the Synoptics. John's picture of Jesus is very different from that which emerges in the Synoptic Gospels. In John Jesus is the pinnacle – he is very definitely presented as God incarnate and is to be greatly venerated.

So we can immediately see threads of varying layers in the text this morning.

We see how the writer is exhorting his community to stick together in the face of persecution by both The Orthodox Jews and the Romans. “Unity is strength”, he is saying. So Jesus, truly Yahweh’s Son in human form, is speaking to his disciples on the very evening of the final night of his arrest and death. He is offering words of hope and strength. He is telling them all that will befall him in the next few days.

Then, in a long prayer, he asks God to bless them and give them strength in their coming adversity. He is strengthening their understanding of him as God’s son and prays that the ancient God of Israel, his father, will uphold them and cause them to remember all he has told them about himself. He peaks in such intimate terms with Yahweh, reminiscent of the patriarchs of the Old Testament but in MUCH more intimacy. Here is a son speaking with a loving father not a servant bowing before an omnipotent God.

Across the centuries this story has gathered around it all sorts of connotations tailored for the particular time. Using the Midrashic principle we can adapt it as a lesson for our own community. There would be few communities where there is not dissent bubbling away either covertly under covers or overtly in obvious destructive acrimony between members. This phenomenon is not restricted to Christian churches of course but it is within a Christian context that I would address it.

For any community to flourish and succeed in its task there needs to be unity. Bring dissent and disunity and the community suffers and is weakened. Disunity can originate in many places and in many people. It can be deliberately broadly destructive or arise from personal and even unthinking selfishness.

There is an old Nigerian proverb that says: “The pebbles are the strength of the wall”.

So that traditional wisdom is saying that each individual is vital if unity is to be maintained. What is the purpose of this unity? The Gospel writer’s purpose was clear. In Verse 23 he explains that ‘they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’- that is, as a son! The deepest illustration of human love – parent for child!

What a wonderful thing this sense of family is? The illustration infers a deep bond that says, “Together we can overcome all adversity”.

Another proverb; this time from Ghana – “It is because one antelope will blow the dust from the other's eye that two antelopes walk together”. What a lovely insight. It’s not what we can get out of a relationship or our community – it’s what we can do to help our friend and neighbour – even if it is just ‘blowing the dust from the other’s eye.’

Professor Mary Shore , Luther Seminary St. Paul, Minnesota points out that this morning’s text is lifted from a PRAYER not an exhortation or instruction. So, she says, “Jesus is not offering instructions to the disciples or to the church they will lead. This means, for instance, that as important as evangelism is, when Jesus tells his Father that he is asking "not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word" (verse 20) he is not exhorting the church to participate in evangelism.

Likewise, as commendable as ecumenical partnerships are, when Jesus asks that those who believe and those who do not yet believe "may be one" (verse 21), he is not exhorting involvement in ecumenical dialogue.

Jesus is not exhorting the church here. He is not instructing. He is not preaching, teaching, or rallying the troops.

Jesus is praying.”

The question is raised, “How do you feel when someone prays out loud for you?

Comforted, vulnerable, grateful, honoured, humbled, awkward but appreciative, like someone really cares? It can make us feel uncomfortable to be the focus of another’s attention – even in love.

Perhaps that is why we have so often on the past made this passage into a list of orders or instructions. We wish to avoid the intimacy of prayer.

Professor Shore adds, “If Jesus were exhorting his disciples, and by extension us, we could strive to meet his expectations then. If he were exhorting us, we would have a mission - namely, not to disappoint him. Instead, we overhear a prayer on our behalf and are not called to action in that moment as much as wonder that the Father and the Son spend time discussing the likes of us and our little community of faith.”

When someone prays for us in our hour of need it is because they love us. When God, the very Spirit of love, is part of that and responds by bringing deep peace and joy into our lives, regardless of our circumstances, we are truly blessed.

THE LORD BE WITH YOU.