THE FEAST OF PENTECOST 2013

• Acts 2:1-21 or Genesis 11:1-9 •
• Psalm 104:24-34, 35b •
• Romans 8:14-17 or Acts 2:1-21 •
• John 14:8-17, (25-27)

Pentecost -- El Greco

In ordinary speech, the English word ‘enthusiasm’ does not have religious overtones. But in fact it comes from Greek words meaning a special kind of zeal that results from divine inspiration. This is exactly what the disciples display in this week’s passage from Acts. Overwhelmed by the Spirit of God, they showed such enthusiasm that passersby stopped to stare, and concluded that they must be drunk.

The Feast of Pentecost, which is observed six weeks after Easter, commemorates this event. Though it no longer attracts anything like the same attention as Christmas and Easter, it is in fact a third, and equally major festival of the Christian year. Why is it so important? The answer lies in today’s Gospel which begins with a request – ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied’. Everyone who has any feel for religion can hear the deep longing that Philip expresses. But Christ’s answer  -- 'Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’ – contains a salutary reminder. We can fail to be satisfied with the truth.

St Philip -- James Tissot

 The Spirit which took possession of the disciples, John tells us, was expressly sent by Jesus – ‘The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you’. It is in Truth, Peace and Love that this Holy Spirit is to be found. Yet the gift of this Spirit is not ‘as the world gives’. A spirit of truth, love and peace does not lay any great store by affirmation, vindication or accomplishment – all of them things on which both societies and individuals tend to fix. That is why we are prone to reject the Holy Spirit and keep on looking.

So if this truly Holy Spirit is to ‘abide in us’, we must not' let our hearts be troubled 'by worldly desires, or 'be afraid' of worldly failure.

EASTER VII 2013

• Acts 16:16-34 •
• Psalm 97 •
• Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21 •



Christ of St John Salvador Dali (1904-89)

• John 17:20-26

Just who was Jesus? This is the question that the disciples had to grapple with following the Resurrection, and that we too are left to grapple with on our own account. Up to the first Easter morning they knew him to be a highly charismatic preacher, a teacher with a radical interpretation of the Jewish law, and a person possessing remarkable gifts of healing. These aspects to his personality made him the kind of person who could either attract intense loyalty, or generate envy and hatred.  If this is what he was, then Jesus’ life repeated a pattern found in the lives of many other prophets.

When he met a painful and humiliating death, it seemed that for all his charisma, Jesus had been a failure. 

The Resurrection dramatically altered this estimate. Now he was special to the point of being unique. But how special, and in what way? John’s Gospel is far more centered on this issue than the other three. Most especially, it records long speeches where Jesus talks at length about who he is, and what his relationship to God is. It is plausible to think that these speeches in the first person – “I am” --  look back on the historical Jesus with the benefit of Resurrection hindsight. They record the profound theological insights that a follower of Jesus was compelled to come to in his struggle to understand th

e full significance of Christ.

Resurrection Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910)

This week’s readings include two of these ‘first person’ passages, one from John’s Gospel and the other from Revelation, a book that tradition attributes to the same writer. They record what might be called the final verdict on the question ‘Who was Jesus?’ and they affirm a truth central to the Christian faith.  Jesus is the “the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star” who has brought the faith of David to a perfection that no other human being ever has. To express this truth, John has Jesus declare “You, Father, are in me and I am in you’. Christ is fully human and God filled, so that despite all their imperfections, human beings now have the chance to “become completely one” with the God who made them, who loves them and who will be their judge.

ASCENSION DAY 2013

• Acts 1:1-11 •
• Psalm 47 or Psalm 93 •
• Ephesians 1:15-23 •
• Luke 24:44-53

Ascension 

Ascension Day is one of the principal feasts of the Christian Calendar. Yet, while this means it is to be ranked alongside Christmas, Easter  and and Pentecost, it has rarely been accorded the same sort of importance in the life of the Church or the practice of individual Christians. Perhaps this is in part because the event it commemorates -- the ascension of the risen Jesus -- is recorded by only one evangelist, Luke (though that is also true of the Epiphany). Perhaps it is because over the centuries its precise location in the Christian year has been subject to local variation. But mainly, I think, it is because the theological significance of the event it celebrates is very hard to separate from the Easter Resurrection and the coming of Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

One way of identifying this significance, however, is to note the special way in which the brief period between Ascension Day and Pentecost unites us, and Christians of every age, with the first disciples. Peter, John Andrew and so on, saw Jesus in the flesh. They walked and talked with him, watched and listened to him over the years of his ministry. It ended in apparent failure of course, but then, as physical witnesses of the Risen Christ, they were granted a second opportunity to be in the privileged company of the Son of God.

In the pursuit of our discipleship we do not have these advantages. We must live in faith in a way that those few Galileeans did not have to do. Ascension marks the point at which Jesus left them to complete their discipleship, by finding a faith just like ours. His departure "from their sight"  meant that  for a time they had to stand firm in knowledge of the Resurrection, without his unique presence to sustain them. In this way, his ascension required them to prepare themselves for what the rest of us rely on -- a Holy Spirit that draws us into the eternal life of the Father whom we do not see and the Son whom we never met.

The image of Christ ascending is grafitti painted on a wall in Bristol England, and made available in the collection of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

EASTER VI 2013

• Acts 16:9-15 •
• Psalm 67 •
• Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 •
• John 14:23-29

Gate and Tower of the New Jerusalem

In a profound way, the readings for this Sunday summarize and connect the origins, work and goal of the Church. In the Gospel, Jesus gives his followers an early indication of what will happen when he is no longer an earthly presence among them. He promises them a ‘Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name’ and who ‘will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you’. Here, of course, we find the basic elements of the Trinitarian theology that has been, and remains, the truly distinguishing mark of the Christian faith. Its principal importance, though, lies in the assurance that we, who never experienced the historic Jesus, can nevertheless encounter him in a Spirit of life that remains accessible to people in every age and place.

It is this same Spirit that prompts, and enables, Paul’s response to the famous dream in which someone in far off Macedonia calls to him to share a Gospel whose power and relevance must break all geographical and ethnic boundaries, and speak to the human soul that lies within everyone.

St Paul -- Giotto (1300)

Between the Gospel promise and the missionary Acts of Paul the Apostle, lies Revelation’s compellingly beautiful statement of the ultimate goal in which the work of the Spirit will culminate. What is striking about it, is just how God centered it is. The picture of the ‘heavenly’ Jerusalem that it paints, is not a paradise in which all our desires and needs are met, but one in which they are transformed and transcended within the Person of God. We now no longer need sunlight, or clean water, or political security, or even places of worship, because God’s presence will be so immediate that everyone ‘will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads’. This vision is no promise, of course, for those whose hearts are set on wealth and power as the world understands these. But to those who long for a full realization of the spiritual nature that God has planted in them, no more wonderful prospect could be imagined.

EASTER V 2013

• Acts 11:1-18 •
• Psalm 148 •
• Revelation 21:1-6 •
• John 13:31-35

The Gospel for this Sunday is very short, but of great importance. When people are asked to summarize the Christian faith, they often say that there are two great commandments – to love God with all your heart, and to love your neighbor as yourself, because Jesus is recorded as saying this in three Gospels -- Matthew, Mark and Luke. However, to think that this summarizes the Christian faith, is an important mistake. That is not what is going on.

Churches in the New Jerusalem  Aristarkh Lentulov (1882-1943)

Jewish scribes asked Jesus to pinpoint the crucial commandments among all those that were to be found in their scriptures – several hundred in fact. He picks just two – one from Deuteronomy, the other from Leviticus – and declares that everything else in the Jewish law and prophets hangs on these two commandments. He does not say that they summarize his own faith. In contrast to the other three, John’s Gospel does not record this episode. Rather, he tells us that Jesus offered his own disciples a third, and new, great commandment – ‘that you love one another’. As faithful Jews, their love of God and neighbor should be something that could be taken for granted. What marks them out as followers of Christ is that they show a special love for each other.

Given the divisions, persecutions and mutual contempt that have so often marred the Church – and still do – it is this third, distinctively Christian commandment that has proved very much harder to live by, virtually impossible in fact. That might seem to make the Christian faith a hopeless undertaking. But the reading from Revelation reminds us to place our hopes in a future world that God has promised, not a world that human beings, however well intentioned, will make. It is God who makes all things new -- in ways that we find hard to discern no doubt – so that we must wait until ‘the home of God is among mortals’ before we can expect ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.

EASTER IV 2013

Shepherd and Sheep -- Camille Pisarro (1888)

• Acts 9:36-43 •
• Psalm 23 •
• Revelation 7:9-17 •
• John 10:22-30

The 4^th Sunday in Easter is always “Good Shepherd” Sunday. It gets this name from the fact that the appointed Psalm is the 23^rd – ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ -- and the Gospel for the day is a passage from John in which Jesus applies the metaphor of shepherd to himself. In many churches, it is customary to have “shepherd” hymns and anthems (often versions of the 23^rd Psalm) in order to underline the Good Shepherd theme.

Partly thanks to the enduring popularity of the 23^rd Psalm, the language of sheep and shepherd is both familiar and comforting to most church people. And yet, the world in which we live – even in rural areas – is so far removed from the world in which the biblical shepherd was a familiar sight that we might wonder whether, despite its familiarity, the image can still speak to us, or convey anything at all to those who are not already church goers. Indeed, for a modern audience, describing faithful Christians as ‘sheep’ can be expected to have negative overtones – a docile inability to think for themselves.

The Good Shepherd

 

To make the metaphor speak afresh, we have to understand that shepherds in biblical times had two crucial tasks. First, they had to lead the sheep to sources of water that they couldn’t find for themselves. Second, they had to protect their sheep from wild animals against which they were powerless. Sheep needed the superior strength, wisdom and care of the shepherd to survive and flourish. Without it they would “go astray, each to his own way” as Isaiah famously puts it (Is.56:3).

The message for us is this. However earnest our seeking, searching, questing and questioning, it is God who finds us, not we who find God. Our task is to be able to recognize His call, and to follow the divine Word in preference to establishing paths through life of our own devising.

3rd/4th century mosaic from the Roman Catacomb of  Priscilla, courtesy of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt Divinity School

EASTER III 2013

Petrus and Paulus --  Luke Tuymens (1998)

• Acts 9:1-6, (7-20) •
• Psalm 30 •
• Revelation 5:11-14 •
• John 21:1-19

This week’s readings record two of the most important events in the history of the Christian church – Christ’s post-Resurrection commissions to the apostles Paul and Peter. Together these two figures tower over all others in the Acts of the Apostles, and even now, two thousand years later, they remain compelling models of what really it means to be an ‘evangelist’ – a preacher of the news that humanity’s salvation is to be found in the life and death of Jesus.

The contrast between them is instructive. Christ’s appearance on the road to Damascus is probably the most famous conversion experience in human history. Saul, renowned for his strength of will and motivated by a profound hatred of Jesus, is first reduced to being led by the hand, and then transformed into Paul, Christ’s most passionate and theologically articulate servant. Peter is a simpler and a softer character. In his case, the risen Christ transforms an almost dog-like faithfulness into inspirational leadership that quickly wins him the deepest respect of the earliest Christians.

Calling of St Paul He Qi (2001)

Peter and Paul were both good Jews, and as Christians they remained so. When they finally met it was their attitudes to Judaism that caused their disagreements. Paul heard in Christ a call to transcend traditional boundaries that Peter was reluctant to abandon. It was a dispute they found ways of negotiating, and like the other differences between them, it reveals something very important. Right from the outset, the Bible tells us, Christ chooses to entrust his ‘flock’ to shepherds with a wide variety of gifts and sharply contrasting styles.