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My name used to be Levi. Ironic, isn’t it. Levi, in Hebrew, means “joined”. I wasn’t joined to anyone – I was the most despised and hated person in Capernaum.

I lived and worked on a border – the border between the territory ruled by Philip the Tetrarch and the territory ruled by Herod Antipas. So I wasn’t just a tax collector, I was in Customs and Excise as well. And because of that I lived and worked on a different kind of border – the border between respectability and crime, and I crossed that border many times.

People had good reason to hate me. I was collecting taxes, some of which went to the Romans, the occupying power. I was a collaborator. I was the man to whom the local farmers had to take a tenth of all the grain they harvested, and a fifth of all the grapes and olives they picked. Then there was income tax – 1% when I was collecting it, which may strike you as minimal, but it was still a source of resentment. There was a poll tax which you paid just because you existed. If you moved, they taxed you – You had to pay if you want to drive your animals along a Roman road. And, of course, I was on the take – taking a cut for myself to increase my earnings. Well, after all, I was a skilled worker – I can read and write, and what’s more, I can read and write Greek, the language of commerce.

I was excluded from the synagogue. As a customs officer, I was seen as permanently unclean. A customs officer has to search people and their possessions, Jews and Gentiles alike. If I’d gone through all that purification ritual every time I frisked a Syrian or searched a Samaritan’s saddlebags I’d never have had time to do my job. So the leader of the local synagogue treated me as if I were a leper.

And then I began to hear stories about the teacher from Nazareth, and about the astonishing miracles that he was performing. About how he reached out to people who were outcasts – touching and healing lepers.

And then one day, there was a hubbub in the street, and the sound of a crowd approaching. I grabbed my money bag and got ready to run. It might be an angry mob. And then Jesus came in. When he came in, there was a gasp from the crowd. They couldn’t believe that he would make himself unclean by entering my office and talking to me.

Even some of his followers looked shocked – it took a while for those of them who had been fisherman to accept me – I’d taken a lot of money off them in the past. Then the crowd fell silent and into that silence Jesus dropped two words – “Follow me.”

The ripples from those words are still spreading out through my life, years later, and I shall never forget how they made me feel. A door had opened – not the door of my office, but a door in the wall of hatred and prejudice that cut me off from other people, and I was being invited to step through it.

And then I got a crash course in what following Jesus involves, for the very next person who asked his help was the leader of the synagogue, the man who for years had treated me like dirt. His little girl had died. He was hoping for a miracle. And on the way to his house, a different miracle happened. Jesus healed a local woman who had suffered from years and years of bleeding. All it took was for her to reach out and touch the fringe of his cloak. Which, by the way, rendered him unclean. Not that the leader of the synagogue made any fuss about that. He was just desperate for his daughter to be healed, and so she was.

Responding when Jesus said “Follow me” was easy. I was being offered love and acceptance for the first time in many years. What came later was difficult and challenging, but it was possible because the love and the acceptance were there, and they still are.  I now know that it was the love and acceptance of God that entered my office that day.

My name used to be Levi. When I chose to follow Jesus, I was given a new name. Now I’m Mattityahu, but you can call me Matthew. Mattityahu is Hebrew and it means “Gift of God”. And the amazing thing is that since Jesus began to call me by that name, no-one has seen any irony in that.

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 Sunday, a day 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.

I can remember when I was at Theological College having to write an essay on the doctrine of the Trinity; the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that a blank sheet of paper would say as much about the Trinity as I could possibly attempt to say in 2000 words. I’m still not convinced that that course of action would not have been better this morning.

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 and each being is God at the same time.

One God but three beings - simple! Or Not!
I remember trying to explain the Trinity to a Hindu friend at school. I did my best but I think we both ended up utterly befuddled. He had a wonderful understanding of a multitude of different gods exhibiting different aspects of godly behaviour but struggled with the idea of one God having different beings of himself. I got the idea of many different gods but did wonder how my God was able to exhibit three beings at the same time? I think we both decided that God and gods were mysteries and not ever meant to be fully understood or comprehended.

My thinking has moved on from my school days and I believe become more simple rather than complex. 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 one:
I am a son, a brother, a partner, a granddad and an uncle, a priest but I am still only Dean; one human being but functioning in a myriad of different ways.

And here is another 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 more easy 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.

Love is the glue that binds the Trinity, love is the thing that is expressed by the three beings of the Trinity in their different ways and love is what makes the Trinity immortal and everlasting, for love never dies. Love may change and grow, diminish or expand but it never dies. It is quite frankly the life energy of the universe and all creation and I think best describes what God actually is.

So to describe the Trinity as love means that if love is the whole, the unity; then the ways in which it is expressed show us different aspects of that unity, of that whole. God is the loving creator or parent - the Father. Jesus is the human face of God sent to love us, and the Spirit is the power and wisdom of love sent to change us and to draw us close. All different

aspects of the one love which is ultimately God.

We will never be able to fully explain the Trinity but if we try to keep it simple and look at it in terms of love, we might get a glimpse of what God is all about.

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God almighty!

All thy works shall praise thy name,

in earth and sky and sea; Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty!

God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Today’s readings seem to offer two very different accounts of the gift of the Holy Spirit – the moment in St John’s Gospel when Jesus breathes on his disciples and the dramatic experience of Pentecost, the rushing, mighty wind, the tongues of fire and the great outburst of energy and enthusiasm which impelled the disciples to go out and tell as many people as possible the good news of Jesus Christ.

Why two accounts? I don’t think that they are contradictory. A careful reading suggests that they are part of a process. They are also, I think complementary.

First the process. St John writes of a very quiet and private moment shared by Jesus and the disciples.  The emphasis is on forgiveness. The disciples are given a share of God’s energy so that they may be a community experiencing, sharing and offering forgiveness.

The second part of the process happened at Pentecost and turned into a very public occasion. Pentecost or Shavuot, fifty days after Passover, was one of the great Jewish pilgrimage festivals, a time to come to Jerusalem and visit the Temple. It was a harvest festival, a celebration of the first wheat harvest of the year, but also a celebration of God’s gift of the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, including the laws which are the Jewish people’s response to God’s covenant. The dramatic descent of the Holy Spirit empowers the disciples to proclaim the good news of God’s love and forgiveness.

That process, that move from forgiveness into proclamation is every bit as important today as it was two thousand years ago. Our contemporary culture is very strong on proclamation, on the assertion of beliefs, ideas and prejudices, and much of that proclamation is completely devoid of forgiveness. Just spend five minutes scrolling through Twitter to see the truth of that. And that isn’t just a contemporary problem. There have been times in the history of the Church when the assertion of doctrine became separated from the imperatives of love and forgiveness, and terrible cruelties ensued. Our two accounts of the giving of the Holy Spirit are a powerful reminder of to fulfil our calling to proclaim the forgiving love of God we need to be a community of forgiveness and love..

So much for the process. What about the complementarity of the two accounts of the giving of the Holy Spirit? If, like me, you have never experienced anything as dramatic as the rushing mighty wind and the tongues of fire described in Acts you might be tempted to question whether the Holy Spirit is working through you unless you had also read that very different account in John’s Gospel. Given these two accounts there is something for all of us, whatever the nature of our religious experiences, whether they have been sudden and dramatic or a quiet and private experience which gradually unfolds and develops.

Today, in a happy circumstance, our celebration of Pentecost is also the celebration of a baptism. The birthday of the Church, as some have called Pentecost, is also the moment of welcoming a new member into the church, giving Lochlan a second birthday which I hope he will celebrate as he comes to understand its meanings. All babies and toddlers are bundles of wonderful potential and baptism adds important dimensions to that potential. Those dimensions are explained in today’s reading from First Corinthians in which St Paul lists the gifts of the Holy Spirit and emphasises that they are given for the common good.

It is such a familiar passage that you may not have noticed the surprising fact that one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that Paul mentions is the gift of faith or belief. But surely, you ask, all Christians have faith, all Christians are believers? Well, yes but in different measure. Those who are strongest in faith are not necessarily the most active members of the Church but are as essential to its life as those whose contributions are more evident but who may, like most of us, experience doubt. The Church is a community of the gifted and the gifts are varied and vital.

Time will tell which gifts are bestowed on Lochlan but today he finds his place in the Church, that inclusive community which has received the loving forgiveness of God, which practises it and proclaims it to the world.

“For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.”

Why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven (Acts 1: 11)

Where do we go from here? How often have we asked that question ourselves or been asked it by others over the years? There is a real honesty there.

In this year’s programme for the Edinburgh International Festival, its new Festival Director, Nicola Benedetti, writes “Even as a child, when asked about my biggest inspirations, I would never give the expected list of virtuoso violinists. For some reason, I aways found my way to figures who galvanised people around an idea, and whose tie to hope was so strong, they made the unthinkable happen”.

She goes on to say “Here, in Edinburgh each August, we come to re-establish connections. We all need to feel a part of something much larger than ourselves. What better cause than uniting strangers in mutual curiosity. We have searched for connection and commonality across a broad spectrum of the arts, of cultures and of artistic collaborations to create a programme that offers a fresh perspective on what binds and defines us. Now we deepen this search alongside you”. There is something of that which is reflected in our readings.

On Thursday morning we held a zoom service celebrating the Ascension. It is unclear from the Gospels and from Paul’s writings how long the period between the Resurrection and the Ascension was.

The Church’s liturgical year suggests just a few weeks.  In Matthew, it looks very short, while Paul seems to extend it to include the appearance to him on the Damascus Road. John’s account is the most vivid, with details of significant meetings and memorable meals. In Acts it seems to suggest that the disciples are hoping that things will go on like they used to be, only better. Then they suddenly find that Jesus is not going to stay and that he expects them to carry on without him. As they head back to that upper room we hear nothing of their emotions – no fear, no despair, no joy. They get on with things, waiting for whatever it was that Jesus said he would send to help them, though they were not sure that they will know it when it arrives.

One minute they are in the inner circle, waiting to hear about the plans from the kingdom of Israel and their vital part on the matter, and the next minute, they are a leaderless, purposeless group of people.  But they have learned two things. Did you notice them? They have learned to stick together - whatever happens and to keep praying.  Sticking together and praying are to become two of the defining characteristics of the new Christian community.

In our gospel, prayer and community are equally obvious. Jesus’ prayer for the disciples is that they “may be one as we are one”.  Jesus knows that the disciples may feel left bereft after the Ascension. He asks for protection for his followers “so that they may be one”, and in their unity, demonstrate the loving unity of God.

As we seek to follow the ascended Lord, may we too follow that same example.

We rejoice O Christ that you call us to follow you and that in union with you we can live as sons and daughters of eternal love. Through the power of your spirit help us to dwell in that love and live it out towards those we meet today.

Introit acclamation:

Hail the day that sees him rise! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, for forty days we have been celebrating with joyful hearts the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, his bursting from the tomb and his defeat of the power of sin and death. He appeared to his disciples many times and told them about the Kingdom of God. Today we recall how he left this earth and returned to his Father, ascending into heaven to take his throne over all dominions and powers. Trusting in his reign over all creation, and submitting to his Kingly yet loving rule, let us offer him the praise and glory worthy of his name.

Collect:

O God, your Son Jesus Christ ascended to the throne of heaven that he might rule over all things as Lord. Keep the Church in the unity of the Spirit and in the bond of peace, and bring the whole of creation to worship at his feet, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Hail the day that sees him rise, Alleluia!                                                                                                     Glorious to his native skies; Alleluia!                                                                                                               Christ, awhile to mortals given, Alleluia!                                                                                                  Enters now the highest heaven! Alleluia!

 Acts 1:1-11

Why stand looking up into heaven?

This Jesus will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

1. In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning ²until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. ³After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over the course of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. ⁴While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. ‘This’, he said, ‘is what you have heard from me; ⁵for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’

6 So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ ⁷He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. ⁸But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ ⁹When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. ¹⁰While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. ¹¹They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’