Tag Archives: Spirit

9 June – On not being religious

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Pentecost
9/6/2019

Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104
Acts 2:1-12
John 14:8-17


In a sentence:
Our calling is not to religion or spirituality but to a reconciled humanity, the gift and glory of God

‘God’ is probably the most useless word in the Christian vocabulary.

I mention this only because this morning I want to lead us into a reflection on the second and third most useless words among our faith-words: ‘Spirit’ and ‘religion.’

The uselessness of these necessary words is in that they are so compromised by common use that they are not – by themselves – able to point to what we hope they might point to.

‘Religion’ is, these days, a dirty word. There’s the friendly neighbour who believes in God (or something godlike) ‘but I’m not religious’. By this she means that she is not overbearing in her beliefs, is not likely to try to impose them on anyone, or is not into churchy prescriptions for how to pray or worship. Here ‘religion’ is merely an unappealing way of approaching God.

Then there’s the larger scale aversion to religion on account of its apparent capacity to stir strong emotion and even violent behaviour. This is religion as potentially dangerous. The danger is particularly present when religious fervour does not correspond to other fervours – when the wider community or the nation as a whole is not religious in the same way and so religious conviction is divisive of the whole.

The divisive dimension of religious conviction is one cause of a more subtle and so much less obvious sense in which ‘religion’ functions as a category in contrast to ‘secular.’

It is in this use that the word ‘religion’ becomes particularly useless – or worse than useless – for Christian attempts to make sense of its faith to itself and to the wider community.

When we hear the word ‘religion’ in contrast to the secular we are instantly made to think of a reality smaller than the whole: the religious within the secular. Whatever a modern western liberal society understands itself to be, it is not as a ‘religious’ reality but as a ‘secular’ one. The sphere of ‘religion’ sits somewhere within the larger sphere of secularity.

‘Religion,’ then, and ‘spiritual’ interests, mark us off from each other at a level below the overarching realities we have in common.

And now we come to our texts from this morning – in particular Genesis 11 and Acts 2. The relationship between the readings themselves is that one is the answer to the other. In the mythical story of the Tower of Babel, human division arises from God’s response to the attempt to overstep the proper boundaries of human existence. Not content to be named by God, the people seek instead ‘to make a name for themselves’ and build a tower up to heaven. God responds by scattering humankind, confusing language, and so setting in place the very divisions which such things as religion seem to embody and reinforce so effectively for us.

In contrast, the story of the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost relates a miraculous overcoming of these divisions of humankind. The preaching of the apostles strangely bypasses the natural divisions of language: though they preach in their own native tongue, the apostles are heard by people from many lands in their own languages. The confused babble of Babel becomes the clear speech of Pentecost. (Just in passing, this event is not ‘speaking in tongues’ – glossolalia. Glossolalia, St Paul remarks, in fact brings confusion and requires translation, the opposite of the Pentecost experience; cf. 1 Corinthians 14).

But this is to say that the Pentecost experience – as a ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ event – precisely does not correspond to divisions in human society. It breaks those divisions down. If, as its critics argue, religion represents and reinforces human division, then the gift of the Spirit of Christ is an anti-religious event. Perhaps the only positive way we could put it (in contemporary parlance) would be to say that that Pentecost is a truly political event, in the sense that it overcomes human division to establish a human city or polis in which all speak a common language.

Pentecost does not, then, make the already religious even more so by injecting a more potent Spirit and, thereby, exacerbating the differences between us with even more religious fervour. Historically there has certainly been plenty of that but Pentecost is the possibility that political differences might be dissolved, not aggravated. The peace and human unity today’s vocal critics of divisive religion strive for is in fact already there in the events of Pentecost.

This is to say, then, that Christian are neither religious nor spiritual people, in the sense in which those words are usually heard. This is the reason ‘religious’ and ‘spirit’ belong on our register of useless words, however necessary they might seem.

The pathos of all this, of course, is that it is impossible for Christianity not to be ‘a’ religion in a secular world, not to be a pursuit of ‘spirit’ in a material world. The wider world cannot comprehend this, and neither can the church most of the time. How can it be true that such a small part of the whole could be anything more than just a part? How could what we do here on a Sunday morning – or every morning, afternoon and night, if we wanted – be crucial for everything else?

The thing about the divisions in human society is that they are always matters of the past. The Babel myth captures this for us: we are divided now because there was a point at which we parted company and that parting has remained insurmountable. The Babel story locates the cause in human pride and divine correction (we would have to say, divine grace) both of which continue, but it is history which divides us from each other. The Pentecost story looks like this as well, in that it is also in the past and looks like the energy behind another separation – that which opened between synagogue and church, another ‘making a name for ourselves’.

But while the Pentecost story (not unlike the election of Israel itself) enters our imagination as an historical event and then quickly becomes our past, it brings a content which concerns our future. The community which concerns itself with this spirit looks forward to a politics like the Day of Pentecost, and not back to the beginning which makes it distinctive from other communities. The religion which springs from this orientation is not a religion of withdrawal into a separate identity springing from past events. The religion of this spirit points toward its own coming irrelevance, when the vision it has been given is realised.

Christian faith is concerned with the strange dynamic of remembering our future. As a ‘remembering’, we recall and retell things which have already happened. But what is remembered – election, cross and resurrection, the creation of the church with the gift of the Spirit – these are a promise of what is yet to come.

We live less from a particular historical religious and spiritual impetus than towards the future that impetus imprints on us. ‘What does all this mean?’ ask the amazed crowds. In contemporary parlance, what it means is that when the Spirit of this God comes, there is neither religion to separate us nor the secular to hold us together. There is just the Spirit, and just us – God ‘all in all’ – united in understanding and amazed because of it.

We might finish simply, then, with a prayer: that the church which God created by the gift of God’s own unifying Spirit might rediscover in itself the reconciliation of difference this Spirit brings, might know this healing as God’s own work, and might become an instrument in God’s hands in the world, not to its own glory, but that it might fade into the background of a reconciled humanity, the gift and glory of God. Amen.

BasisBits – Paragraph 13: Gifts and Ministries

 

BasisBits Logo - 2 WITHOUT S

The Uniting Church affirms that every member of the Church is engaged to confess the faith of Christ crucified and to be his faithful servant. It acknowledges with thanksgiving that the one Spirit has endowed the members of Christ’s Church with a diversity of gifts, and that there is no gift without its corresponding service: all ministries have a part in the ministry of Christ. The Uniting Church, at the time of union, will recognise and accept the ministries of those who have been called to any task or responsibility in the uniting Churches. The Uniting Church will thereafter provide for the exercise by men and women of the gifts God bestows upon them, and will order its life in response to God’s call to enter more fully into mission.

From Paragraph 13 of the Basis of Union (1992)

 

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BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.

BasisBits – Paragraph 10: Reformation Witnesses

 

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The Uniting Church continues to learn of the teaching of the Holy Scriptures in the obedience and freedom of faith, and in the power of the promised gift of the Holy Spirit, from the witness of the Reformers as expressed in various ways in the Scots Confession of Faith (1560), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), and the Savoy Declaration (1658). In like manner the Uniting Church will listen to the preaching of John Wesley in his Forty-Four Sermons (1793). It will commit its ministers and instructors to study these statements, so that the congregation of Christ’s people may again and again be reminded of the grace which justifies them through faith, of the centrality of the person and work of Christ the justifier, and of the need for a constant appeal to Holy Scripture.

From Paragraph 10 of the Basis of Union (1992)

 

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BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.

BasisBits – Paragraph 8: Holy Communion

 

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The Uniting Church acknowledges that the continuing presence of Christ with his people is signified and sealed by Christ in the Lord’s Supper or the Holy Communion, constantly repeated in the life of the Church. In this sacrament of his broken body and outpoured blood the risen Lord feeds his baptized people on their way to the final inheritance of the Kingdom. Thus the people of God, through faith and the gift and power of the Holy Spirit, have communion with their Saviour, make their sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, proclaim the Lord’s death, grow together into Christ, are strengthened for their participation in the mission of Christ in the world, and rejoice in the foretaste of the Kingdom which Christ will bring to consummation.

From Paragraph 8 of the Basis of Union (1992)

 

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BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.

BasisBits – Paragraph 7: Baptism

 

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The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism. In this way Christ enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Baptism into Christ’s body initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit. The Uniting Church will baptize those who confess the Christian faith, and children who are presented for baptism and for whose instruction and nourishment in the faith the Church takes responsibility.

From Paragraph 7 of the Basis of Union (1992)

 

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BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.

BasisBits – Paragraph 6: Sacraments

 

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The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ has commanded his Church to proclaim the Gospel both in words and in the two visible acts of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Christ himself acts in and through everything that the Church does in obedience to his commandment: it is Christ who by the gift of the Spirit confers the forgiveness, the fellowship, the new life and the freedom which the proclamation and actions promise; and it is Christ who awakens, purifies and advances in people the faith and hope in which alone such benefits can be accepted.

From Paragraph 6 of the Basis of Union (1992)

 

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BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.

BasisBits – Paragraph 3: Built Upon the One Lord Jesus Christ C

 

BasisBits Logo - 2 WITHOUT S

The Church as the fellowship of the Holy Spirit confesses Jesus as Lord over its own life; it also confesses that Jesus is Head over all things, the beginning of a new creation, of a new humanity. God in Christ has given to all people in the Church the Holy Spirit as a pledge and foretaste of that coming reconciliation and renewal which is the end in view for the whole creation. The Church’s call is to serve that end: to be a fellowship of reconciliation, a body within which the diverse gifts of its members are used for the building up of the whole, an instrument through which Christ may work and bear witness to himself. The Church lives between the time of Christ’s death and resurrection and the final consummation of all things which Christ will bring; the Church is a pilgrim people, always on the way towards a promised goal; here the Church does not have a continuing city but seeks one to come. On the way Christ feeds the Church with Word and Sacraments, and it has the gift of the Spirit in order that it may not lose the way.

From Paragraph 3 of the Basis of Union (1992)

 

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BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.

31 May – Trinity – Excerpts used in Worship

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Trinity
31/5/2015

Various readings


THE SPIRIT

“The Holy Spirit, in making real the Christ-event in history, makes real at the same time Christ’s personal existence as a body or community. Christ does not exist first as truth and then as communion; He is both at once….” (p.111)

“So we can say without risk of exaggeration that Christ exists only pneumatologically, whether in His distinct personal particularity or in His capacity as the body of the church and the recapitulation of all things. Such is the great mystery of Christology, that the Christ-event is not an event defined in itself—it cannot be defined in itself for a single instant even theoretically—but is an integral part of the economy of the Holy Trinity. To speak of Christ means speaking at the same time of the Father and the Holy Spirit. For the Incarnation, as we have just seen, is formed by the work of the Spirit, and is nothing else than the expression and realization of the will of the Father.” (p.111f)

John Zizioulas (1985), Being as communion: studies in personhood and the church. New York, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

 

THE SON

“The Father appears in biblical narrative of God’s life with us as the ‘whence’ of divine events, as the Given from which they come or to which they return…” (p.194)

“Correspondingly, the Spirit appears as the ‘whither’ of God’s life. Through the biblical story, the Spirit is God as the ‘Power of the future’… The Spirit is God coming from the future to break the present open to himself… The ‘whither’ of divine events is not their passive aiming point, but their emergence and activation from the future.” (p.194)

“If the Father and the Spirit are [such whence- and whither-] poles of the divine eternity, it is then the life of the Son… in which these rhyme, in which the unity of the divine life is accomplished. Death is time’s ultimate act; that God transcends time must finally mean that God transcends death. Normal gods transcend death by immunity to it or by being identical with it. The way in which the triune God transcends death is by within himself triumphing over it: by the Son’s dying and the Father’s raising him again. The whence and the wither of the divine life are one, and so the triune God is eternal, in the event of Jesus’ resurrection.” (p.195)

Robert Jenson (1995), Essays in theology of culture. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans.


 

THE FATHER

“Christ refers all homage from himself to the one who “sent” him, his “Father”, just so accomplishing our salvation and appearing as the Son. This God is the Father only as the one so addressed by the Son, and at his central appearance in the story he turns over divine rule to the Son and indeed ‘abandons’ his role as God, leaving the Son to suffer the consequences of godhead by himself. And the Spirit as God glorifies and testifies to, only the Father or the Son, just so enabling the proposition ‘God is Spirit’ ”. (192f)

“…if God is triune, then created time must be the accommodation God makes in his own life for persons other than the three he himself is. For in the biblical story of the divine life, the whence of the divine life is the whence also of creation, and the whither of the divine life is the outcome and end of creation. We creatures appear within that narrative whose agents—Father, Son and Spirit—between them enact God’s life. We inhabit the story that is the story of God. God is indeed the one ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ ”. (199)

Robert Jenson (1995), Essays in theology of culture. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans.


24 May – The Spirit of the unbearable church

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Pentecost
17/5/2015

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 104
John 15:26-16:15


Jesus says to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

What are these “unbearable” things? The text is not explicit, and the neither do the commentaries seem to be very interested in the question either.

Why might this be an important question? It seems important to me at least because there is much today which the church finds “unbearable”: Decline in numbers, deteriorating, outdated unmanageable buildings, a much bruised reputation, the cause and effects of Uniting our Future, increasing exposure to risk in an increasingly litigious society, increasingly complex governance responsibilities. The Synod’s Major Strategic Review springs from the sense that these things cannot or should not, be borne further: they are “unbearable”.

These unbearable things being part of our common life as church here and now, what is the relationship between them and the things Jesus considers his disciples will not be able to bear? And how does the Spirit make such things bearable?

The nature of the unbearable things Jesus speaks of here becomes a little clearer when he refers to the work of the Spirit. Many things are said about the work of the Spirit in John, and we tend to pick and choose a bit between these things. John 3 gives us the Spirit which “blows where it wills”. This is the Spirit of a Major Strategic Review: open the windows, let the gale of the Spirit blow everything around; change. Then there is the Spirit of John 7, which bubbles and gurgles, springing up to do watery things for parched people. This is the Spirit for the weary minister or the jaded congregation. And then there is the Spirit of John 14-16 who “comforts”, advocates, defends: the Spirit for a church feeling under siege.

Towards the end of our text this morning, however, we heard of another Spirit – although, of course, they are all the same Spirit. This is the Spirit who “convicts”, who “proves the world wrong” about sin, righteousness and judgement. This is the least “spiritual” of the Holy Spirits we might choose to emphasise, at least so far as the popular contemporary interest in “spirituality” goes. This is a spikey Spirit that does not waft or flow or comfort but skewers us with the pointy end of sin, righteousness and judgement.

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” They cannot bear them “now” because the Spirit has not yet been given. The Spirit has not been given because Jesus has not yet been crucified. The truth about sin, righteousness and judgement will not be revealed until the crucifixion, and it is the Spirit which will reveal this and make it bearable, the Spirit who comes after the crucifixion and resurrection – in John’s case straight after them. The crucifixion becomes unbearable not because it was the loss of a loved one but because the Spirit reveals the cross to be a judgement on our judgement about what is sinful, about what righteousness looks like, about their capacity to make the right judgement. For, in its first movement, the crucifixion is a pious act, the worshipful exclusion of a heretic. Jesus tells them of their own future ordeals, and also of his own: “An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God”.

The truth which the Spirit will tell about Jesus is a reinterpretation of the cross. And that interpretation is this: that the cross is for “the world” – including here, the synagogue, the church – the sign that Jesus himself is the unbearable thing: sinful, unrighteous, worthy of a judgement of guilty.

Jesus himself – that Jesus might truly be the Christ – is the unbearable thing, the contradictory, wrong thing. What the Spirit does in convicting the world – including the disciples and the church – about sin, righteousness and judgement is make Jesus bearable. The Spirit, then, does not deliver “a truth” about Jesus – a proposition or a doctrine; the Spirit truths Jesus to us, seals this Jesus to us. The Spirit causes us to see where we have been blind: to see that God’s way in the world is very, very strange indeed.

But it gets stranger still when we get back to why we asked about these unbearable things in the first place. What is the relationship between the unbearability of Jesus, and the unbearable church – the church even we, let alone “the world”, can scarcely bear? And if the Spirit helps with respect to the unbearability of Jesus, how does the Spirit help us with the unbearability of the church?

The unbearability of Jesus, the unbearability of the church and the work of the Spirit are bound up in this way: the Spirit points to the unbearable truth in Jesus by creating the unbearable church.

The truth about Jesus which the Spirit brings is not doctrinal fact; it is a truth which changes things. Jesus is crucified because he doesn’t look right, because he clearly cannot be true; the Word cannot become flesh in that way. And so the claims he makes must be sinful, unrighteous and rightly condemned.

Over against this the Spirit teaches the truth about Jesus, but it does so not by simply contradicting our condemnation of Jesus with a “No”. The Spirit tells the truth about Jesus by doing the Jesus again: now as the church – the unbearable church. The proof of the righteousness of the unbearable Jesus is the unbearable church.

When we condemn the church for its heresy or dogmatism or managerialism or incompetence or corporatism or wishy-washiness, or for its wealth or anxiety or triumphalism or self-interest or lack of faith, or whatever, we declare: surely this cannot bear the Word of God, be the presence of God, be even useful to God. Surely there is more of God somewhere else. This is the presumption and the engine of modern, popular nowhere-in-particular spirituality: that, of all places, the Spirit cannot be found here.

But the gift of the Spirit – the gift of this particular Spirit – is the gift of extraordinary ordinary. This is the truth the Spirit brings: here, now in the church – even this church! – is the presence, or the promise, or the possibility of “heaven”, which we declare not because what of we see but because of who chooses to name this place in that way.

It matters not whether the same might be said of other places. It matters for us only that this place – our place – is claimed by God as God’s own, embraced as if an Only-Begotten Child.

This is the gospel – that, even we as are, God wills to have us.

And out of this springs the imperative: love the church. Love the church not as an idea but as it is. Love your congregation; love not only the one you’re happy to sit next to, but the one who sits in front of you, or behind. Love your presbytery. Love your church council. Love your Synod. Do this not because they are lovely, yet. Any of these can sometimes be quite unbearable, entirely unlovely.

Love because it is the love which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things which makes the beloved lovely.

This is God’s way with us; by the power of the Spirit God sends, let it be our way with each other. Amen.