Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Year C – the Baptism of Christ

Over the last fifty years, there has been renewed interest in the Person and the work of the Holy Spirit in the Western Church.  The Holy Spirit has never really posed much of a problem for the Eastern Church, which has always seemed to give proper weight of significance to the so-called Third Person of the Trinity. For the Western Church, however, the nature and work of the Holy Spirit has always be somewhat a source of unease, discomfort, even embarrassment. This contrast is strikingly apparent in the way the iconographical traditions in the East and West have presented the Person of the Spirit. Think, for example, of Andrei Rublev’s famous icon called The Trinity which marvellously conveys the mutual deference and equal dignity of three figures representing Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then, contrast it with the way the Trinity is conventionally depicted in Western iconography. The Father and the Son are easily identified. The Holy Spirit, however, is rather more difficult to pinpoint, usually appearing somewhat off-centre in the form of a small, rather mangy, dove.

The reason for the ambivalence we feel towards the Holy Spirit has a lot to do with the Spirit’s elusive nature. We can grasp the concept of God the Father, because we can think of him by analogy with our own human fathers. We can us comprehend Jesus, the Son of God, because in his incarnation, he became one of us, and walks alongside us. But the Holy Spirit seems more impersonal. The great St. Augustine of Hippo described the Holy Spirit as the love, which binds Father and Son together. While the Father and the Son clearly have density as Persons, the Spirit seems to be more like energy, like electricity, lighting things up, but without a personal face. Yet the Church from the outset has sustained a conviction that the Holy Spirit is more than mere energy but, along with the Father and the Son, a divine Person, worthy of worship. 1. One of the distinctive characteristics of Luke’s version of the baptism story is the context of prayer – with the Holy Spirit another important theme in Luke. We read that when all the people had been baptised, and Jesus had been baptised and was praying, the Holy Spirit came down upon Jesus in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ The activity of the Holy Spirit and God the Father form part of the movement of prayer of the Son of God. And it is this movement of prayer between God the Father, the beloved Son and the Holy Spirit that launches Jesus into his public ministry and we learn sustains Jesus at crucial stages of it: the Transfiguration, and the Garden of Gethsemane.

2. The centrality of prayer in Luke’s account should remind us that practice lies at the heart of the Christian faith and the context within which the Church’s articles of faith need to be understood. The doctrine of the Trinity developed as the Church’s best attempt to give an account of what Christians do when they pray. The basic constituents of what later became the Christian creeds were to be found from very early on in the baptismal practices of the early Christians. Do you believe in God the Father who made the world? I believe and trust in him etc. The doctrine of the Trinity did not, as it were, drop down from heaven, as articles of belief which are intellectually to be accepted on not accepted. The doctrine of the Trinity is rather a carefully crafted shorthand account of the most basic Christian practice of prayer.

3. And it is in the context of prayer that we need to reflect on the nature and work of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is essentially a work of recreation. When we pray we unleash the power of God in creation in us – the Spirit of God hovering over the void and God uttering ‘Let there be light’. In the beginning, the triangulation of Creator God, Word of God and Wisdom of God is implicitly present. The Word and the Wisdom of God are the divine agencies that express God in time and space and in lived human experience. An early Church Father called God’s Word and God’s Wisdom the two arms of God. The Spirit of God comes to be associated especially closes with Wisdom, “unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear…she is the breath of the power of God…while remaining in herself, she renews all things.

4. It is the Spirit’s capacity to renew things which perhaps accounts for the ambivalence with which the Spirit is so often greeted. The Spirit is not the custodian of the status quo. When the Spirit moves, things are not left unchanged, but transformed. The Spirit is the agent of Creation, the agency through which the Son of God is brought into human being, the medium of that loving assurance that sustains Jesus through his blackest moments, the means by which the Church is brought to birth, and God’s love is spread abroad in the world. The Spirit is the agent of new beginnings. This is why those who love the status quo in whatever context wish to domesticate the Spirit, to restrict the Spirit to a small bit-part somewhere off-piste.

5. When I look at the architecture of this beautiful Church of St. John’s you see in its very stones the legacy if previous transformative works of the Spirit. I have spent a great deal of time since I have arrived, trying to imagine what the Church looked like at various stages of its development. There are rumours of an Anglo-Saxon precursor. There is evidence that the modest but beautiful Norman nave and crypt were added to. Norman architecture was later complemented by Early English (those pointed arches). The Church was broadened with aisles; the roof rose to create the clerestory; the porch added, the galleries built, and latterly, an extension constructed. These endeavours were, I am sure, works of the Holy Spirit, a Spirit making all things new, but a Spirit who is the same, yesterday, today and forever. These transformations occurred because the Church was enlivened by a community of Christians in whose prayer the Trinitarian movement of Father, Son and Holy Spirit was at play.

6. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is this: what new transformation of the Spirit are we prepared in prayer to open ourselves up to? And what legacy might this opening up to the re-birthing power of the Spirit leave – both in the living stones of the flesh and blood people who make this community up, and in the stones which surround us as we celebrate God in public worship and private prayer? And what is there in us – if there be anything in us – which might make this an unpalatable prospect.

7. The great second century theologian, Irenaeus defined Tradition, as an ‘expression of the Spirit in its youthfulness’. The Spirit is the same Spirit who makes all things new. We must distinguish tradition from traditionalism. Tradition is ‘the living faith of the dead’; traditionalism is ‘the dead faith of the living’. Tradition is active and dynamic; it is continuous with the past, but also radically discontinuous with it. Traditionalism rejects change outright. Tradition and traditionalism are very easily confused.

8. The challenge for us on the day we commemorate the Baptism of Christ is to renew our commitment to prayer. Because it is in the context of prayer that we are drawn into that movement of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit; it is in the context of prayer that we open ourselves up to the re-birthing power of the Spirit who though the same yesterday, today and forever, also makes all things new. What legacy will this congregation leave in the fabric of these hard stones and the living stones that inhabit this beautiful building? Are we prepared to join with the Spirit in its youthfulness, or will we instead perfect our traditionalism?

AMEN

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Traditions

You may remember (or not as the case may be!) that I recently distinguished the meanings of ‘tradition’ and ‘traditionalism’.  Tradition was defined as the ‘living faith of the dead’ and traditionalism as ‘dead faith of the living’. It is astonishing how quickly rather recent church practices acquire the status of  ‘traditions’, the way we have always done things, the way things have been always and everywhere since time immemorial (or at least the way things have always been in our own church). When older church practices are rediscovered, revived and reintroduced into Church life, they are sometimes dismissed out of hand as untraditional novelties, e.g. the practice of server’s laying out the table for Communion instead of the priest.

It is remarkable, when we think on the transformations this church has undergone over the centuries, how easy it is to become attached to the latest stage of the church’s development, or at least the stage of development the Church was at when we personally began to identify ourselves with it, or even the practices of the Vicar who was in charge when we first started attending and who did so much to nurture our faith. What we call the ‘tradition’ of the Church is in fact simply a snapshot of the Christian community at a particular stage of its spiritual pilgrimage. And tradition lapses into traditionalism when we capture the Church at a particular stage of its life and invest that stage with the status of a law of the Medes and the Persians, which can’t be revoked under any circumstances.

In our gospel reading, Jesus challenges the traditionalistic thinking of his family, his friends, his neighbours and his compatriots. And this challenge elicits a violent response. The story is breath-taking because with a few interpretative glosses on the bible passage he has just read out Jesus is taken from the heights of popularity and transformed into an object of visceral hatred.  Jesus is presented in perhaps as ‘homey’ and ‘churchy’ a setting as you are likely to find in the New Testament.  Jesus is captured in the early, energetic phase of the public ministry into which he was catapulted at his baptism. He has developed something of a reputation for wisdom, and as a teacher, which accounts for the growth of a large popular following. 

In Nazareth, Jesus temporarily slips back into the rhythm of domestic life. He attends his home synagogue and is given the scroll of the great prophetic book of Isaiah by the temple attendant. The temple attendant was not simply a synagogue dogsbody but the local officer who had the task of inducting the youth of Nazareth into Israel’s scriptures and who himself may have had had a hand in the early biblical education of Jesus himself. One of the speculative sub-texts of this passage, perhaps, is the eagerly anticipated return of the Nazarene equivalent of the ‘blue-eyed boy; Jesus reading and expounding the Scripture underneath the proud and benign eye of a former tutor.

One of the several distinctive features of Luke’s gospel is that Jesus doesn’t suddenly emerge with a fully-formed human nature. Jesus is presented as one who grows into maturity, who gradually realizes the wisdom with which he is possessed, who progressively comes into fuller consciousness of his unique vocation as the Son of God, which is drawn out in communion with God the Father and the Spirit of God.

Jesus is also indebted, as we all are, to the influence of those who were responsible for his upbringing: his network of family, friends and community, including speculatively the temple attendant. “It takes a village”, as they say. In Nazareth, Jesus come fully into his own, into the fullness of his own person, here in the company of all those who were principally responsible for shaping him as a human being, But Nazareth also represents a radical point of departure for Jesus. Because it is here in Nazareth, that Jesus challenges the traditionalism of his compatriots through his appeal to the Scriptures they shared.

The words of Scripture are read, Isaiah’s great message of liberation, in the spirit of Jubilee:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’

In the passage which immediately follows, Jesus announces that the reading has been fulfilled in the hearing of the congregation.  And the reaction is of wonder at Jesus’ gracious words. Jesus’ stock rises, because they think he is confirming their traditionalism. They think that all this liberationist talk is directed solely at them, at Israel. That God would one day redeem Israel from suffering, from their bondage to the yolk of Rome, from the rampant paganism they saw roundabout them. But then, to their horror, as we read in the passage that follows, Jesus introduces an apparent novelty, something untraditional. The things, about which Isaiah speaks, the gracious words of liberationist hope, Jesus strongly implies, are not directed principally at Israel, but at the very people from whom Israel sought to be liberated, the pagans, the evil doers, the paragons of wickedness. Of the many widows that existed in Israel at a time of great famine, God sent Elijah to none of them but rather to the pagan widow of Zarephath. Of all the lepers there were in Israel in the time of Elisha, Elisha is sent to none of them but rather to the pagan commander, Namaan the Syrian.

And we read:

“When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and when on his way’

It’s rather like Jesus saying during the Second World War that the message of liberationist hope was principally directed at Adolph Hitler, or, perhaps rather like Robert Runcie asking a congregation to pray for the relatives of Argentinean soldiers killed in the Falklands War.  Jesus’ interpretation seemed novel and perverse. And yet Jesus’ interpretation was anything but novel and perverse. Rather, Jesus was tapping into a deep stream of biblical principle, working out a fundamental biblical logic which was cosmic in conception and universal in scope. And that principle or logic was this: God created the world and declared the world very good. The goodness of the world has been tarnished through human sin. God called Israel to be God’s means of redeeming that tarnished world, of restoring creation marred by sin, and overcoming human evil which is expressed in sin. Israel was indeed a distinctive and privileged people, the custodians of the law and the home to the prophets.  But God had called Israel into the world not for Israel’s own sake but for the sake of every family under heaven.

This is implicit in God’s call to Abraham who was to be the father not of a single nation but of nations.  It becomes clearer, rather paradoxically in the context of this passage, in Isaiah, which depicts Israel in triumphal procession, but also shows the Gentiles in train. What is implicit in the OT becomes explicit in the new. God came into the world not to redeem the world from suffering, but through suffering. Jesus’ suffering on the Cross is the exodus – the through way – the risen ascended life he wishes for us all human beings. The message of liberationist hope is not the monopoly of a single community but the legacy for all who respond in faith in Jesus. Indeed, in our gospel passage, what may above all other things have enraged his townsfolk who thought they knew Jesus so well was his implication that he was the one through whom God would effect the message of liberationist hope, ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me’.

Jesus was using Tradition, the expression of the Spirit in its youthfulness, the dynamism of Scripture’s deep logic, to challenge the traditionalism of conventional wisdom, people’s narrow view of God’s purposes.  The challenge for us all here this morning is to consider whether our own vision of what God might do is inspired by our contact with  the Tradition, or a reactionary concern to preserve things as we think they have always been, even though they haven’t, and were never meant to be.

AMEN

Year C – Epiphany 3 – 24th January 2010

Today in Luke Ch.3, we meet John as God’s messenger who, on hearing a word from the Lord, goes through the region, issuing a call to repentance; for people to turn to the way of righteousness, such that they, and we, will be ready for Christ when he comes.

And this morning I want to highlight both the sense of challenge that John embodies, and the note of hope his presence inspires. And I want to do that through looking at the book of Malachi. We read from Ch.3 v.1-4 and Malachi as a whole holds some critical keys to understanding the figure of John the Baptist, and quite a lot else besides. I recommend a read of it, which even with pauses for thought, takes only a few minutes. For Malachi, who is of course God’s messenger to the people in his own day, addresses a particular set of circumstances – namely the decaying religious institution of the temple priesthood of his own day. He singles out the priests in their disregard for the proper exercise of their office and duties. “Where is the respect due to me”, says the voice of God, “O priests who despise my name!”

But what is going wrong? First of all, the priests are offering polluted food on the altar of sacrifice: they are sacrificing blemished animals that are either dead or sick or disfigured through violence. Instead of bringing to God the best of the flocks and herds, as true devotion requires, they are using animals that have been discarded and can’t be used for other purposes. This may seem a relatively minor offence, but it demonstrates a slackness and cynicism that has entered into their practice: they are turning aside from both what God demands and the demands of their office, and from the proper demands they should be laying upon the people. So God says, “I will curse your blessings”, referring to the incantations and liturgies performed in worship; and, “I will spread dung upon your faces”: thus God will bring them face to face with the rotted product they are offering before the people. Secondly, they are failing in their duty of instruction to the faithful. The text says, “you have shown partiality in your instruction”, and “have caused many to stumble”… which is interesting… Is the partiality of instruction partly that they are not requiring the bringing of suitable sacrificial animals, or is it something else? There is a comparison drawn between these priests and their more worthy forebears of the house of Levi. The covenant with Levi was originally one of “peace and grace” says Malachi, under which priests gave “true instruction” and the people “gained in knowledge”. It would seem that partiality of instruction is a failure to do the necessary work of prayer, reflection and study that will allow insight to be shared and gained. These priests are lazy and they have turned aside from their calling. They are distracted. Something else has taken over, or caught their attention, or is eating up their time and energy: which brings us to the third complaint which is that the priests are spurning their own marriage vows. They are not remaining faithful to their wives: which is presumably part, at least, of what is distracting them. This may mean they are taking temple prostitutes, and thus allowing temple prostitution to carry on unchecked. Whatever the precise context of their faithlessness, however, God is witness to it. For when the priests raise their cries at the altar and shed crocodile tears, complaining that God does not accept their offerings, Malachi is quick to point out that this is little more than an evasion and a diversion: because God does see! “God is witness to your faithlessness to the wife of your youth”. And God is not impressed.

Thus Malachi lays out the damning details of a discredited institution – the temple priesthood – it’s shoddy, insincere worship, the inadequate instruction and the sexual immorality that has flourished in the vacuum created by a lack of true commitment. What comes next, however, is very interesting: because Malachi observes that the priests keep on and on asking, “why is God not accepting our offerings?” And my reading of the narrative is that their lame but persistent protestations are to be understood as a refusal to acknowledge how bad things have become: their anxious questioning is a manifestly diversionary activity that allows them to avoid the truth that is becoming clearer and clearer to those on the outside looking in (including Malachi the prophet): that all is not well. And here I wonder if we might observe some interesting parallels in the malaise that many would say has overtaken much of western Christian institutional religious life. It is easy to knock people and institutions when they are struggling and it is now a commonplace to observe that much of institutional western Christianity is in crisis. But it is nonetheless rather alarmingly true that we are inclined to think – along the lines of the temple priests as reported by Malachi – that so long as people are going to church, and the clergy are turning up, and offerings are being made and sermons are being preached, and instruction is being given; then everything’s all right!! But in Malachi’s potentially parallel context – albeit in a more extreme set of circumstances – he sums the situation up by warning the priests and people alike; “you are mistaking evil for good!” What you are offering, he says, is far from a sweet offering to the Lord, and its consequences for worship, instruction and public morality are there for all to see. It’s no wonder God does not accept your offerings! You have lost your way! The trouble is, you can’t see it or you won’t see it! So start looking! Because God is coming to judge!... And if there is any parallel to be drawn between Malachi’s day and our own, this is something we might want to think about. That we, like the priests might be under a judgement of which we are either wholly unaware, or with which we are choosing not to engage, is alarming – or if it isn’t, it should be!

To take a topical example, away from the arena of religion, the official inquiry into the Iraq War is raising once again the issue of the extent to which our then leadership, and we as the general public, were caught up in a supreme self-deception about going to war – perhaps of this sort of kind. We were told, and then told ourselves, that what we were doing was right: we called it a necessary evil, being undertaken for the greater good. The inquiry has thus far declared that whilst considerable errors of judgement were made in the execution of the conflict, the process of going to war was legal. What goes unsaid – and we have to supply the script – is the extent to which evil was indeed mistaken for good. And at this vantage point it’s hard not to conclude that we are judged. I hope we would want to do things differently with hindsight. It seems to me a very human tendency to get so comfortable with certain established practices (for example in the fulfilling of religious obligations) or so comfortable with shared dogmas (that this or that is the right line to take or the inevitable course of action) that we end up losing a properly self-critical perspective. And when we are challenged we can’t even see the problem! Malachi speaks into a very modern condition.

But there is a further consideration, which is, what happens when the Lord will come? Because our passage of today begins with the words: “See”, says God, “I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me” (that’s Malachi we presume): but then this, “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple!” Well, the likely truth is that the last thing the priests wanted was for the Lord to come into the temple and ruin their nice, established, indulgent way of life! There is terrific irony here, because actually they’re not seeking the Lord at all! What I fear Malachi is alerting his audience to is that while they think they are serving and seeking the Lord, actually, unwittingly, they are simply perpetuating a rather tired, dysfunctional, and in this case, corrupted institution. Thus, what I think Malachi brings to us is quite a sharp critique of institutional life – particularly institutional religious life. His message lacks some of the passionate critiques of social injustice that we hear from Isaiah, Hosea and Amos, but it rings with truth as we observe how passion, desire and commitment have withered and drained away from this tainted institution. And this is precisely the threat that always hangs over institutions – the banks, our beloved Church of England, the annual keeping of Christmas, the institution of marriage even, which Ed Balls and David Cameron are fighting over currently. As we have observed already, if we are not very careful, we call evil good and close ourselves off from challenges and critique.

                                          But! In the Lord’s coming there is hope yet!!..... And staying with Malachi, I would say that the hope rests essentially in the contextual and closely particular nature of the remedy. For what will the Lord be like when he does come? The Lord “will be like a refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap.” Why? Because the two things that most characterised the environment of the altar in the temple were fine metal and fine linen! The incense bowls, the vessels and the candlesticks, and the fine altar linen! The Lord goes straight to where the problem lies, the toolkit of the priests and their attendants. “And he will purify the sons of Levi, and refine them like gold and silver until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.” The silverware, the gold goblets and the linen are a symbol of what awaits transformation: for they can as easily divert and corrupt as enhance and inspire (as intended). The refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap are an expression of the necessary transformations themselves. They are the vehicles that can effect change – the reappraisals and the readjustments that can keep us alive. And this will be the Lord’s doing!

In Malachi Ch.3 God says, “I am sending my messenger (Malachi) to prepare the way before me”. In Isaiah Ch.40, in the passage in our gospel reading, God alerts the people to a voice crying out in the wilderness (John) saying, “prepare the way of the Lord.” What we hear in Isaiah 40 is that those who will prepare a way will see the salvation of God: which we affirm will come to us in the person of Christ. What Malachi reminds us, and so does John, is that the coming of salvation has a judgement face as well as a joyful face. In our preparations for receiving Christ, we have to be ready to accept the challenges of judgement, and be willing to make sometimes quite radical readjustments in our lives and institutions, if we are indeed to endure the day of his coming. Amen.