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“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offering.”    Hosea 6:6

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have  come to call not the righteous but sinners.”   Matthew 9:13

Two very similar phrases from two different books of the Bible, written by very different characters in very different situations and times. What they both tell us, though,  is that we have a God who is all forgiving and who desires us to come to him with open hearts. And, that it is to be open to changing our ways rather than physical sacrifice that God wants. A change of heart and ways is a better gift to God than any physical sacrifice made by any of us could ever be. 

What these reading this morning also do is to call us to mission. They call us to reach out to God’s people and to tell them about the love God has for them, regardless of who they are or what they have to offer physically. All God wants is to love them and encourage them to love others in return. God’s love is not dependent on how much money or material goods you have or how much you have to spend on buying favour. God just wants you to love him as he loves you. 

This is the message we have to proclaim through out Scotland and the world. We are called by God to be his missionaries of Christ. For in Jesus the ultimate sacrifice was made on the Cross, once and for all time. God needs, nor wants any similar sacrifice. What God wants is his people, us, to become more like him. All loving and all accepting, following the ways of Jesus in welcoming friend and stranger.

How can we do this today? How can we be good missionaries?

For me, mission is not about knocking on doors, or by leaflet dropping or accosting people on the street ‘Bible bashing’. It is about being ‘Me’ in God’s world and by being ‘Me’ in ways that will encourage others as I try to accept them as they are. To truly, see another person, to give them time, to listen and to truly hear what they have to say and to reassure them that they are loved by God and are beyond value to him. 

None of us are perfect. We Christians are just as much sinners as the next person. What we have though, is the knowledge that God loves us. To know that we are truly lovable and acceptable to God is, when you really think about it, mind blowing! As such this should encourage us and fill us with joy - knowing even when we screw up that we are still fully loved  by our Creator, really is amazing. For how many of us can actually say that we have never given up on someone when they have hurt or disappointed us?

As followers of Christ, as Christians we have a Baptismal call to mission and ministry. Through our Baptisms we are empowered to discern and explore the vocation we have been given and to spend our lives working that vocation out. Some of us may be called to specific types of ministry or mission but on the whole most of us are called to be the best version of ourselves that we can possibly be. To be ourselves in our every day lives is a very powerful and effective tool for God’s mission. 

There is a well known adage that; ‘You are not taught the faith, you catch it.’ What this means in practice is that the example we set for others in our daily lives is far more powerful that we might acknowledge or accept. 

Think of the people who have been important to you in your journey of faith. How did you learn from them? What did they do or say? Ask yourselves why you admire them or their ‘faith’. Everyone here this morning, I suspect, is an example to someone else, although you may never know so. We are all in effect ambassadors for Christ, for God; and as such we are called to carry the ways of the Divine into the world we inhabit. 

The Early Christians just got on with mission and ministry and gave it no fancy titles. They lived their lives in ways that gave glory to God and support and love to those around them. They were in the most part unremarkable in themselves but they were inspired by Christ and his ways to come closer to God and his love. 

Like those Early Christians we are not righteous, or remarkable and nor are any of us perfect. We live our lives in the light of the Gospel and in the knowledge that we are loved by God. We are, therefore. called to let others know that they too are as equally loved by God and that the ways of Jesus can change their lives beyond measure and that it is all free. No sacrifice needed just an open heart and a willingness to change. 

As missioners and ministers of Christ take heart in the knowledge that just by being ‘You’ - you will already be making a change in someone else’s life, just as someone else will be changing your life too. Just be brave and be ‘you’ out there in God’s world and you will change that world just a bit. And, if we can all change a little bit then just imagine how big that change could be when we add it together.

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God almighty!

Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;                                  

Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty!

God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Trinity, a season in which we celebrate the three persons manifested by God. Three ways of being the one and only God. When one says it or writes it, it seems quite simple but to many when we talk of the three persons in the God-head they may assume we are talking about three gods and not One God. 

On the face of it the Trinity seems to be perfectly straightforward; God is one God manifested as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each being in God is a separate, whole being and each being is God at the same time. One God but three beings - simple! Or Not! The more I have thought about the Trinity over the years of study, prayer and experience I have come to understand it by thinking about it in very simple terms. Here’s an example: Each of us is unique. There has never been another human being exactly like you or me and there will never be another you or me in quite the same way as we are. Yet each of us fit perfectly into the human race and into God’s creation. We form part of that creation and help complete the unity which God has designed. That unity would not exist without us and that unity will keep expanding to contain all of God’s creation until the end of time. Creation contains more beings than the Trinity but like the Trinity we are all needed in it to make it whole.

If we can think of the Trinity as a whole with different aspects to it; perhaps it becomes easier to understand. God is the Creator, the Spirit and the Christ. These three beings hold together because they show us different faces of the one God and they hold together because of love. 

“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father. With the Father and the Son, he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.”

    Nicene Creed

The Holy Spirit, is the third person of the Trinity, which is our understanding of God. The Spirit is often the being associated most particularly with the inauguration of Christ’s Church and if you did not know better it may seem to have only appeared after Christ’s ascension into heaven. To think that the Spirit only appeared at that time is incorrect.

Yes, the Spirit is the third person of the Trinity and an equal but different part of God. That is undisputed. Whether or not the Spirit proceeds from God the Father alone or from both God the Father and Jesus Christ is still under debate and has been for 2000 years. It is a debate that will continue between those churches guided by Orthodox or Roman Catholic principles. For the Orthodox the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone and for the Catholics from the Father and the Son. The debate about the ‘filioque clause’ split the Early Church in the 11th century and reconciliation still seems a long way off. 

In the Scottish Episcopal Church we lean towards the Orthodox position on the Spirit, that it proceeds from the Father alone. No doubt debate will continue for many centuries and perhaps we may never agree or ever truly know. Why? Simply because we can never fully know God for we are part of God’s creation and are not God. We can never fully know God as God knows us. The debates and arguments, however do not disagree on the fact that the Spirit is already present in our world and in our lives. 

It is also worth noting that word ‘Spirit’ coming from the greek ‘sophia’ is feminine and we could refer to the Spirit as ‘she’!

I said, earlier that if you were encountering the Christian Faith for the first time at Pentecost you might be mistaken that it was at Pentecost that the Spirit made its first appearance in the world. It did not. 

The Spirit like the ‘Logos’ - the Word made flesh, Jesus the Son - was pre-existent with the Father in the being that we call God but who were manifested in God’s time. In Genesis we are told that the Spirit hovered over the waters like a dove; in the Gospels we are told that Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit and in the accounts of his Baptism we are told that the Spirit descended on Jesus; and from the Book of Acts we read that the Church existed before Pentecost and was not founded by the Spirit at Whitsun. 

Where we have Peter speaking to the assembled believers - the fore runners of the Church. 

What then we might ask actually happened at that first Pentecost? I think we can gain some understanding of what went on by considering two words: empowerment  &  waiting.

All of us are familiar with waiting rooms, perhaps of the Dentist’s or Doctor’s surgery. The waiting room is quite often the place you suddenly feel much better than you did and wonder why you bothered to make an appointment. The upper room where the disciples gathered was like a waiting room. St.Luke records Jesus telling the disciples to remain in Jerusalem:

“Stay here in the city until you have been closed with power from on high.”             Luke 24:49

Wait they did for some 10 days or more , never out of contact with each other and anticipating what might happen. They, probably, did not find the waiting time easy and they were no doubt itching to get on and share the news of the miracle of Easter. But, wait they did until suddenly and without warning the Spirit rushed in:

“… suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the use of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Diverse tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave ability.”         Acts 2:1-4

The Spirit empowered those in that upper room and gifted them the skills they needed to spread the ‘Good News’ across the known world. Their wait paid off in ways they could not have expected. 

At that first Pentecost the gathering of Christ’s followers were transformed from a gathering of like minded people to an outward looking, missionary and evangelising community of believers fired by hope in the resurrection of Jesus and the redemption he offers us all. A wonderful gift and one you might not think needs to be repeated.

Logically, this may be correct but in practice we are blessed by the fact that the Holy Spirit still visits us today and comes upon us in different ways and at different times. For example at our Baptism or when we receive Holy Communion or when we interact with any of the seven sacraments. Each and every time we receive a Sacrament we are blessed by the Spirit and not only in the Sacraments, the Spirit can choose to come upon us at any time and in any place. 

We can all make great plans for our future but how quickly these can change if the Spirit decides otherwise. I thought I’d have a career in education but the Spirit decided otherwise and I discerned my call to ordination with the help and support of others along the way. all of us need guidance as to what it is that the Spirit might be calling us to do with the gifts it give us. We need guidance to ensure that it is God’s will we follow and not our own. If we rush to put our own plans into action they invariably fail or only achieve meagre results. 

This I think is what might have happened to those early followers of Jesus if they had  gone out immediately to proclaim the resurrection but by heeding Jesus’ command to ‘wait’, then much greater things could happen when the Spirit came  upon them. We need to be reminded regularly that we need to be in the waiting room occasionally before starting a new endeavour. We need to allow ourselves to be open to God’s Spirit in the knowledge that with God we will achieve more than we thought we might or could. 

If we are prepared to wait and be open to the Spirit, our patience will be rewarded and God will show us what it actually is we need to do for the best. Just as the Dentist knows what to do with our teeth (well we hope they do) we have to trust in the Spirit to get it right for us. We have to bide our time, open our hearts and minds and be ever ready to meet God’s challenge or call. The wind blows where it will. No one can make it blow where they wish it to. Or as St.Luke wisely says:

“Stay here in the city until …”

One of my most vivid early memories can be dated precisely to the twelfth of April 1961.  My grandmother had died the previous November, and we had been clearing her tiny terrace house in Haltwhistle. Getting on the train to travel home felt like being expelled from a childhood paradise. I’ll come back to that idea of Paradise as a place in a few moments.

 Once we were home, I took myself to bed significantly before the usual time for the ten-year-old me but I was very soon shaken awake by my mother.

“You must come down and watch the news! The Russians have sent a man into space!”

After that first manned space flight, Yuri Gagarin was widely quoted as saying that he been into space but that he hadn’t seen God or Heaven. He never said it – the comment was made by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and, many years after Gagarin’s early death, a friend revealed that, like so many people of his generation, Gagarin had been discreetly baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant and that he made sure that his daughter Yelena was baptized shortly before his space mission, in case he did not return safely. 

Khrushchev’s piece of atheistic propaganda was prompted by the once widespread belief that the universe had what Bishop John Robinson called “a three-decker structure” – earth in the middle, hell down below and heaven up above. There are striking images of the Ascension of Jesus Christ from past centuries inspired by that belief, including frescoes and paintings in which He has almost disappeared upwards into a cloud and only His feet can still be seen. 

Our reading from Acts might seem to suggest the kind of vertical take-off those paintings and frescoes depict, so how can we understand the Ascension now that we know, as Khrushchev put it, that heaven is not “up there”? A three-dimensional explanation won’t do but our understanding of dimensions suggests a way forward. We experience four dimensions because we ourselves and the world we inhabit clearly have three and we also know the passage of time, which is the fourth. It may help to think of heaven, of Paradise, of being in the full presence of God, not as being in a place but as experiencing dimensions of which, during our earthly lives, we are only intermittently aware; dimensions glimpsed, as it were from the corner of our eyes. 

Our Celtic pagan ancestors and their Christian successors had a sense of this, for they spoke of “thin places”, places where those extra dimensions can be glimpsed. Places can be geographical, they can be buildings such as our church and they can be acts of prayer and worship, including our Eucharist. The altar around which we shall presently gather is a “thin place”, a place where we draw near to the many dimensions of the divine and the divine draws near to us

I have several times been back to my childhood paradise as an adult and, on one occasion, I took a Russian friend and his family with me. A few years later, he returned the compliment by taking me to the beautiful lakeside village in Novgorod Province where his grandparents had lived. The church there was desecrated in Stalin’s time and has remained a ruin. My friend explained how, as a small boy, he played in the ruins and, looking up at the damaged fresco of Christ in majesty on the inside of what had been the main dome, had a sense of something mysterious and very important – a glimpse of those other dimensions. What he didn’t know then, because he was deemed too young to keep the secret, was that his parents had, like Gagarin’s parents, arranged for him to be baptized in a clandestine service. Clandestine because his father’s job depended on his being a member of the Communist Party.

One of the prayers that the Russian Orthodox Church uses on Ascension Day includes these profound words:

“In your Ascension, you exalted us and glorified us together with yourself.”

Those words pick up on the theme of glorification in today’s Gospel. What Jesus means by glorification isn’t obvious. He certainly didn’t mean the kind of self-aggrandisement that human beings sometimes indulge in – lots of gilded decoration in your office, a vast ballroom next to your house, a plan to build the world’s biggest triumphal arch – you know the kind of thing. We simply cannot glorify ourselves in the Biblical sense of the word. For glorification in the New Testament isn’t about bigging-up. When we say “Glory to God” we are not bigging God up – as if we could. The theologian Karl Barth helpfully defined that Biblical understanding of glorification as

"…to make either oneself or someone else appear such as he is; to show forth something in its essence…" 

When Jesus in today’s Gospel prays:

“I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.”

He means that his whole life, death and resurrection have been a showing forth of God’s nature. The Russian Orthodox prayer I quoted a moment ago needs to be understood in the light of that. 

“In your Ascension you exalted us and glorified us together with yourself.”

The Ascension glorifies us in the sense that it reveals our full human potential. We too can be drawn into close relationship with God. We too can be glorified in the sense of having our full human potential realized.

That possibility of closeness to God is one of the reasons why we are not celebrating “vertical take off” today – the Ascension is not about Jesus’ disappearance into a remote location. Rather it’s about three things:

Firstly His glorification – the making fully clear of who he is. In that sense it affirms and completes the good news of Easter, the good news of the Resurrection.

Secondly His closeness, God’s closeness to us. Closeness in the sense of availability, if we are receptive, and closeness in the sense of shared experience. The Ascension is about the taking of our humanity, including our sufferings and the death which awaits all of us, into the very heart of God. Because of the Ascension, God is, of God’s very essence, suffering, dying humanity glorified and brought to completion.  Not in some remote place but in dimensions very close to us and sometimes glimpsed, as that small Russian lad caught a sense of mystery and wonder while playing in a church desecrated and half demolished by a dictator. 

Thirdly about the possibility of our glorification, of the realisation of our full human potential for loving relationship, a process in the here and now, in the four dimensional world, a process which by opening our awareness of the dimensions of the Divine moves us towards the complete fulfilment of our potential. That’s what Charles Wesley was on to when he wrote:

“Changed from glory into glory

Till in heaven we take our place.

Till we cast our crowns before Thee,

Lost in wonder, love and praise.”

 “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 

          Acts 17:23b

In the ancient world most gods had names. For how else would one know who to thank or to curse for the good and bad things that happened to one? 

Luke, in that quote from Acts  is being canny in the tale he tells about the altar inscription to an unknown god. He is telling us that this anonymous god is obviously worthy to have an altar given to them  and that they must have done things that could not be attributed to any other named or known god. 

In the Christian Faith, our God is not named; God is simply God his being is his name. God’s name is not given. In the Hebrew tradition God does have a name ‘Yahweh’ but he is not called such nor is it ever written in full out of respect to the deity. Our Christian god is the god of the Hebrews but we simply know him as ‘God’. The name we associate with God is ‘Jesus’ for as St.John tells us:

‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’

and Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. As such we do not need a name for God because God has revealed himself to us as Jesus. In telling his hearers that he will make known to them the ‘unknown god’ Luke is opening the way for us to hear all about ‘Jesus' the only name we can associate with God.