Friday, July 18, 2014

Stairway to Heaven

A while ago I took the opportunity to tell the Sunday School children a story.  I told them the story of the Great Family, and this is the story we are exploring over the remainder of the year.  The Great Family is the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

It is a wonderful story and there is so much to learn from it. 

Last week we had a peak at the birth and early life of Jacob and Esau.  We could tell that they were headed for trouble.  I wonder how many of you have not read the story in between that and the story we had today.  I had better assume a few of you and fill you in before I get into it.

So last week we finished with the story of Jacob breaking the traditional rules of hospitality by making his brother Esau pay for a meal when he was famished.  In this way Jacob secured what rights the first-born might have had in the family.

After this Isaac takes his family to a town called Gerar in the land of the Philistines.  There, they were blessed with abundant crops and his herds of sheep and cattle grew enormously.  Interestingly, he repeated the same mistake as his father Abraham.  You might remember a story of Abraham telling the King Abimalech that Sarah was not his wife but his sister, thinking it would be safer for himself as well as Sarah.  Well Isaac did the same to the same King, telling him that Rebekah was his sister not his wife.

Eventually the King wants to get rid of Isaac.  His family had become too powerful.  But they parted friends and Isaac went back and settled in Beersheeba.

The next part of the story – where Jacob gets that special blessing from his old and blind father, further cheating Esau, is preceded and followed by a little bit of the Esau story.  Firstly it says that Esau married two Hittite women and life very unpleasant for his parents.  Then, just  before our story for today began we are told that Esau thought he ought to get some better wives so he went back to Ishamel’s family and found a cousin to marry.

The story of Jacob getting his father’s final blessing sets the scene for our story today because Esau gets so mad when he realises he has been cheated again that he declared he would kill Jacob.

So Rebekah and Isaac agreed that it would be best for Jacob to take a little trip away – back to the home country and the town of Haran where Rebekah’s brother Laban lived.  Laban had daughters.  It was time for Jacob to have a wife.

Our story today happens on the way.

Jacob is sleeping and he has a dream or a vision – a stairway to heaven with angels and everything.  God, the Lord, was even there, and God restated the promise that he had made so emphatically to both Abraham and to Isaac. 

“I will give you this land and innumerable descendants.”

Two things struck me from this story.  Firstly, this is clearly a turning point for Jacob.  In his story up to this time there has been little reference to God.  Maybe that is not so strange in families – the grandfather being faithful, the father knowing about the faith a bit, but the son not knowing and not caring.

But here, Jacob encounters God in such a powerful way that his life would never be the same.  From being an agnostic he is now a believer.  "The Lord is here!  He is in this place, and I didn't know it! It must be the gate that opens into heaven." 

And so he dedicates that place as a holy place – Bethel – the House of God – and it was Israel’s most holy place right through until David secured Jerusalem as first the political and then religious capital of Israel.

So for me this story is a reminder of that moment when I encountered God so amazingly that my life has never been the same since.  It is good to remember these things.  We don’t experience God like that all the time, but the memory of it keeps us from throwing it all away as if it meant nothing.  I hope it reminds you of that part of your own story, too.

The second thing that strikes me in this story is that Jacob sets out on his journey as a frightened solitary person.  He was all alone on this journey.

Then the promise of God comes along, reminding him that that he is still destined to become the father of many people, a great nation.  From being isolated from his family he is thrust right into the middle of an inescapable community.  It is in and through that community that the greatest work of God was going to be accomplished.

"I will give to you and to your descendants this land on which you are lying.  14 They will be as numerous as the specks of dust on the earth.  They will extend their territory in all directions, and through you and your descendants I will bless all the nations. 

It is through this great family that all the nations of the world will be blessed.  God is declaring right there at the outset that an integral part of the plan he has for this great family is that everyone on earth should know God’s blessings, not just the great family.

And God’s declaration finishes with these wonderful words of assurance:  Remember, I will be with you and protect you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.  I will not leave you until I have done all that I have promised you."

So we can join with our Nuba brothers and sisters in saying:
God is good – all the time
All the time – God is good

Alleluia!!

From Little Things Big Things Grow

One of my favourite song-writers, Paul Kelly, teamed up with aboriginal singer and song-writer Kevin Carmody a few years ago to write a very powerful song about Aboriginal Land rights.  It was called “From little things, big things grow.”



This could be a theme song for the life of Abraham. 

The beginning of Genesis chapter 25, which you may all be thankful we did not read out loud, gives some of the substance to this.  The genealogy is expanded in Chapter 36 and its purpose seems to be to provide an explanation of the origins of the nations living around Israel.  But it is also concerned with showing just how small the beginning was.

Now you all thought Abraham had just two sons, didn’t you?  Ishmael and Isaac are the ones we all remember, but we are reminded in this chapter that after Sarah died Abraham got himself another wife and fathered six more boys – who knows how many girls along the way.  And while Isaac had just two boys, Jacob & Esau, Ishmael fathered a dozen sons, as did Jacob, and Esau had six sons.

Not a bad start towards progeny outnumbering the stars in the sky.

The selected readings for today could be gathered together under the theme “How wonderful and mysterious are the ways of God”.

One of the things we heard about last week was that Abraham thought it was important to have a wife for Isaac from among his relatives.  This was not to be the pathway to marital harmony – and this idea is reiterated in the story of Jacob going to Laban to find himself a wife.  This is something that the descendants of Abraham struggled with over and over – even Esau recognises it and looks for a wife from among his relatives.  But it still creates trouble.

But let’s focus on this story.  What is there here for us to notice today?

THE CRISIS OF BARRENNESS
It is interesting that Rebekah is afflicted with the same problem as Sarah – she was unable to conceive.  We might think of this as a biological issue, but the writer is not interested in biology.  He is interested in theology.  “Where is God and what is God doing in this story?”  That is a theological question.

This theological crisis drives Isaac to prayer.  He recognises that he and Rebekah do not have between them the resources necessary or the capacity to generate their own future.  A future would only be possible by God’s continuing action.

The future that is thus opened up for Isaac is possible only because YHWH gives good gifts in answer to prayer.

THE FIRST SHALL BE LAST AND THE LAST FIRST
What did all you instincts for good family life feel when you read about Isaac preferring Esau and Rebekah preferring Jacob?  It is not going to end well, is it?

While many people think this story is laying down the foundation for the concept of Israel as the “elect” people of God, I can’t help thinking that even in that concept is a hint of the wonderful Gospel idea that Jesus got into trouble for – the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

But there is a really interesting twist in this – and I’m still not sure of what to make of it.  Jacob takes precedence over his older twin brother by treachery, and his mother colludes with him in this treachery a bit later on in chapter 27.

When I think of the idea of the first shall be last and the last shall be first, I get the sense that the proud will be brought down and the humble raised up.  Yet as we look over the story of Esau and Jacob in its entirety Jacob seems to be the proud and ambitious one and Esau seems to be the humble one – just look at how gracious Esau is in Chapter 32 and 33.

However we might like to explain all this, there remains the sense that God works things out in most unexpected ways – and probably despite the failings of those who end up being the agents of God’s blessings for all.  When you look at the whole of Jacob’s story it is a wonder, sometimes, why on earth God chose him.  But then, so many of the heroes of the faith had feet of clay.

Maybe this is enough for us to take from the story today. 

A long time ago, I was grappling with a choice that I thought could take me “out of God’s will for me life.”  This had been drummed into me as something of great peril for me, if I chose wrongly.  I was committed to going to seminary in about a year but then heard about two missionary-teacher positions that Eira and I could have filled.  But I was afraid that taking the teaching position might deflect me from going to seminary after all.

My dad showed some remarkable wisdom then that I have relied on now for many years.  He said that rather than facing such a black and white choice, we were often faced with a choice between two good things.  He then said :  “God will bless you whichever you choose – even if you later think you chose wrong.”

Time and again we read stories of our heroes in the faith who go about achieving what they believe God has called them to in less than the best ways.  Yet God’s grace is sufficient to enable them to bring blessings despite their failings.


Now this is encouraging to me.  I hope it is to you.  We mostly recognise, at least privately, that we are often abysmal failures at being what God wants us to be.  Yet again and again, God chooses to “overlook” those failures and bless what we do in his name and for the sake of his glory – not ours.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

A Road Less Travelled

Many years ago M Scott Peck wrote a best-seller book called “A Road Less Travelled.”  I want us to embark on such a journey for the next little while.

Usually on Sundays I preach a sermon based on the Gospel reading.  I might refer in passing to the First reading, or the Second or the Psalm.  Most often my thoughts for you are focussed on the Gospel.

A couple of weeks ago I took advantage of a “Preachers’ Day Out” organised by Elizabeth Smith.  The Dean of Studies at Wollaston led us through the First Readings for the remainder of the year.  All these readings are from the Pentateuch or what the Jews now call their Torah.  These are the first 5 books.

Inspired by all this I wondered how I would go using these stories for inspiration for my preaching.  This is certainly a road less travelled by me.  But we will be exploring some wonderful stories.

These are the foundation stories of The Great Family.  Abraham was called into relationship with God through a covenant.  It is through this Covenant that the God-Human journey began.  That journey reached a climax in the coming of Jesus – the Son of Man / Son of God.  And ever since God has been seeking us out to be in relationship with him.

In order to help make some sense of this I encourage you all to read the stories yourself.  I have copied a page for you with the set readings from now till Advent.  But don’t just read them.  Start at the beginning of the Abram story – Genesis 12. 

We will be reminded of the Isaac story with Hagar and Ishmael at the heart of it.

We will spend a few weeks on the Jacob story.

We will spend a couple of weeks on the Joseph story.

Then we will travel with Moses and the people of Israel into the wilderness for many weeks until Israel crosses over the Jordan.

As you read these stories take note of the names of people – especially in those boring little ancestry lists.  I am sure you will come across some unexpected names. 

Notice the names of places – for example BeerSheeba.  It crops up repeatedly.  Consider the meaning given for the name.  That should be in a footnote of your Bible – otherwise check it on the internet.  Think about who goes there.  What happens there? 

When we gather for Morning Prayer in Thursdays, I will offer the text for the following Sunday for discussion there.  So if you are available why not come and see what we can learn together.

What I want to do for you in the rest of my time this morning is give you some idea of how to read these stories.  I want you to be able to get the most out of them.

To begin with I want to say that I am discovering in later life that seminary was really a bit like going to pre-marriage counselling.  It was a necessary part of my preparation for ministry, but I am not sure I remembered much of what I was told.  I think I might even have thought some things were entirely irrelevant to modern ministry.

You might be surprised to know that the OT was not written down until about 500BC.  Now it is generally agreed that the Abraham story began about 2000BC
And the King David story about 1000BC.  So the stories we are considering had floated around as oral tradition for a very long time before someone wrote them down.

They were written down after one of the most significant times in the life of Israel – the Exile in Babylon.  There they learned something about God that was a bit like what Buzz Aldren said on the moon: “One small step for man.  A giant leap for mankind”.  From then on the people of Israel had a different idea of God.

Prior to this experience, the people of Israel shared the world view of their neighbours.  Most people believed that each nation’s God was only effective within the nation’s borders.  This meant that when a country was overtaken in war, the best way to disempower the people was to take them away from their God.  All you had to do to do this was take them back to the winner’s country.

While the people of Israel were in Babylon they got a consistent message from God through the prophets.  They were told to settle down and live in the land.  If they did that God would bless them and the nation in which they were being held prisoners.

So, when Daniel came along with his three young friends, the Babylonian King promoted them to positions of power and influence.  When their enemies tried to cut them down to size, the King discovered something amazing about the God of Israel.  Daniel was saved from the lion’s teeth.  Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were saved from the fiery furnace.  If the God of Israel could do this so far away from Israel, then that God must be the greatest of all Gods.

It is after this mind-boggling event that the people of Israel return to rebuild Jerusalem and take up residence in Canaan again.  Even then during this time they were under the control of foreign powers in their own land.  The Greeks and the Romans in particular.

I think what we will find two things again and again in the stories we read over the next few weeks.  Firstly we will see a gradual reorienting of the people to the idea that God’s blessings are for all the nations, not just Israel.  We will also discover how central hospitality to the stranger is in all these stories.  I trust we will all have something to look forward to.

The Trinity - A Statement of Faith

I was quite intrigued by that statement by Bruce Prewer with which I began my Introduction at the start of this service.

The Trinity is not a definition of God but a cry of faith
from the heart of the Christian experience.
A cry of trust and commitment,
a cry of love and adoration.

Most preachers I know dread the thought of preaching meaningfully about the Trinity.  I think that’s because whenever we try to explain it we end up have to make ordinary words mean something different from what they usually mean for it to make sense.  And even then we are not sure it makes sense anyway.
Bruce Prewer recognises this when he says: “God is a profound Deep, into which all our busy and clever words can fall without a sound.”

This invites us to think of God as being like a deep well.  We can throw our wisest and most majestic words into this Mysterious Deep that is God, and they never touch bottom.  There is no splash.

For me God has always been a wonderful Mystery.  I use “mystery’ not in the sense of a puzzle which clever minds can solve, like in a detective story, but as an un-chartable, indefinable Personal Reality.  God the Mystery interacts with our lives but eludes our grasp.  God is a Mystery who leaves us on our knees in wonder and awe.

Way back in the 1200s that famous author called Anonymous left a book about God which today is published as “The Cloud of Unknowing”.  That was his, or her, way of trying to describe the wonder of God, whose Mystery can never be fully understood or explained by mortal minds.  In fact the closer we come to God, the greater is the shining darkness that confronts us and overwhelms us.

METAPHOR

A common response to this is to resort to metaphor.  The many Hebrew names for God have embedded meanings that try to express something that we understand God is like:

YHWH – I am who I am
Adonai – Lord or Master
Elohim – God our Help
El Shaddai – God Almighty

I think of these as being like the facets of a diamond – each giving us a unique view into the heart of the diamond.

We as Christians also use metaphor to help us understand something about God or Jesus – name such as Abba or Eternal Light, Prince of Peace, Joy, Lover, the Word, Brother, Saviour – and of course we have talked in recent weeks about John’s metaphors for the Holy Spirit – Advocate, Counsellor, Friend.

Of course, the real problem is that we can really only think in terms related to time and space, and God transcends time and space.  God is spiritual, not physical. 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

Trinity is not a Biblical term.  None of the Bible writers ever used it, and yet it has become so central to the Church that we use it to determine who is in and who is out.  By that I mean that the Trinity is the central mark of the catholic faith.  For the Councils of churches through all time since Nicaea different churches may have diverse ecclesiology and theology but so long as they affirm Jesus as Lord, and God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then they are welcomed as truly Christian.

So the Trinity is not a side issue.

But it is so darned hard to explain other than resorting to a circular kind of argument.

God is God is God!

But God came among us in Jesus.  Jesus was God, even though he spoke of his Father being someone he could address as “Abba”.  So we naturally called him Son of God.  Jesus is a visible, tangible expression of God for us – in our humanity.  Jesus and the Father are One.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God.  As our Comforter, Advocate, or Friend the Holy Spirit is the spiritual expression of God in relationship with us.

In the History of theology, the Creedal statements affirming the Trinity were essentially born out of the contemporary heresies of the day.  That perhaps is why it was so important – and we are locked into it now as the central and defining feature of catholic Christianity.

We use this tricky language of there being ONE God but THREE Persons.

But let us go back to my opening remark.

The Trinity is not a definition of God but a cry of faith
from the heart of the Christian experience.

I think I can unpack this idea with less difficulty than trying to create an understandable definition of God.

One idea that has been explored in our Experience of God as Trinity – as Three in One – is the idea of community.

In this Icon image on the screen we have an image that reflects the story we read from Genesis.  In that story it says Abraham had a vision of the Lord and then tells of three men who came along with amazing news.  These three represent God.

The original image was created by AndrĂ© Rublev in the 1400s in an Orthodox Church in Russia.  But even though it is about that Old Testament story it is clearly a Christian image – it makes us think of the Lord’s Supper – three sitting around a table with a chalice in the centre of it.

In this the Church is saying that our God is radically different from the idea of individual Gods for these three are one – they exist in a sense in community.

Ours is an egocentric age.  When “post modern” people define themselves they do so over against everyone else.  We want to do our own thing.  We want to find ourselves.  Others are just things to be used for our pleasure.  We speak endlessly about “my rights.’  Our individuality is what defines us.

If God exists in community and we are created in the image of God, is this individuality an appropriate expression of our life in God?  I think not.

French writer Teilhard de Chardin wrote that this was in his view a fundamental flaw in modern thinking.  He said:

its mistake is one which causes (us) to aim in exactly the wrong direction.  It is to confuse individuality with personality.......  If we are to be fully ourselves we must advance in the opposite direction, towards a convergence with all other beings.”

Maybe Teilhard de Chardin was right; we have confused individuality with personality.

God in three Persons?  Perhaps this points us to that communal personality which is the absolute Highest State of Life.  Perhaps true Godliness here on earth only flowers in the communal experience.  Perhaps this is the kind of joyful ongoing beyond death which we hint at when we speak of “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”  Maybe “heaven” is entering far more deeply into the experience of communal love; into communal personality.  And dare I say it, more and more into the communal experience of the Trinity.

SUMMARY

If the Trinity is at the heart of our experience of God – as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – then I think it is worth giving some time to think over how can it be expressed in the way we live as Followers of the Way.  I can get away from the ABIDE language of John when I think about this.


“The Father and I are ONE for He ABIDEs in me and I ABIDE in him.  And you will be one with me if you ABIDE in me.

In our Experience

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 Holy Cross?  I know that some of you have experienced a somewhat Charismatic style of Anglicanism, either here or elsewhere.  

For many of us, though, this kind of experience of the Holy Spirit is quiet foreign to our experience 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 charismatic or Pentecostal 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 shared with you 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 think about the Holy Spirit in the Bible and the Church we have only notice 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.  The words John usually uses for the Spirit are THE ADVOCATE or THE HELPER and sometimes THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH.

There are no great miracles associated with the work of the Spirit for John.  In a very intense conversation Jesus has 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 we 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?

This is where the passage we read today makes its contribution to the John tradition.

The story begins with these words:  “It was late that Sunday evening,” (after the first Resurrection appearances).  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.”

In my mind this is a very powerful image, and it is an image that has carried on in the life of the church – one or two of you came to the Chrism Eucharist just before Easter when the Holy Oils are blessed?  When Archbishop Roger blessed the Chrism Oil – the oil we use for Baptisms and Confirmations – he stooped down and blew 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 that Ezekiel story we had some time ago about the valley of dry bones.

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. 

Lord Jesus, Pray for Us!

Did you ever hear someone say something that was very moving?  You knew that it was profound but you couldn’t yet say what all the implications of it were?

Whenever I hear this passage from John 17 I feel a bit like that.  We usually read it on this day or during the week of prayer for Christian Unity – between Pentecost and Trinity Sundays.

I know these words are good.  They are very profound.  And I am also sure I really don’t understand all they can mean for us.

I think St John must have felt the same too.  He thought these words of Jesus over and over to try and explain clearly what he meant.  What came out in English is rather long and complicated.

But here’s a little thought of encouragement.  I hope that we can all understand it and take home with us.  John was most concerned for the church.  They were in a time of crisis because of the periods of persecution they had experienced.  What words of Jesus, he would have thought, would be the best to encourage them with?

And John remembers these words of Jesus.  He tells them to us as Jesus’ teaching ministry was coming to an end.  Here we see the Church in a wonderfully new way.  Jesus is praying for the church.  By being prayed for the church in a sense takes on a new identity.  Many in the church were feeling a bit helpless, frightened and confused.  These words of Jesus transform the church into a community that clearly belongs to God.  And because it belongs to God, it is freed and empowered to fulfil God’s purposes for the world.

We know this ourselves on a small scale, don’t we?  If we are having a hard time and a friend prays for us – and we know it – somehow we are not nearly as frightened or confused as we were?


John is telling his friends in the church – you and me – that they shouldn’t be afraid.  Jesus has prayed for us.  And he has prayed that we would have all the power of God to be his people, sharing his love with all the people whose lives cross that pathway of our lives.