Articles

We have just heard this morning three splendid readings from scripture, which we would do well to read, mark and inwardly digest. They have much in common, but what I’d like to consider more deeply is that each in its own way constitutes a challenge, first obviously to those who heard or read the actual texts but second, no less, a challenge to us in our Christian lives.

Beginning with the passage from the Book of Deuteronomy. This is an enormously complex and important book. It was discovered in the course of repairs to the Temple instituted during the reign of King Josiah, in approximately 622 B.C., as part of Josiah’s wide-reaching reform of Judaism as it then stood. Deuteronomy purports to be a restatement of the whole of Jewish law. To give validity to it, the words are placed in the mouth of Moses, who is on his deathbed. The Israelites have at long last reached the river Jordan after forty years wandering in the wilderness. Moses foresees that even after they get into the Promised Land, they will stray from their covenant obligations. So he is challenging them to return, to stay faithful to their God. He reminds them that Torah, the Jewish Law is not something that is far off and inaccessible. It is in their very mouths and in their hearts, for them to observe.

So where is the challenge for us? We too are called to be faithful to our God and are reminded that his law is not something far off but is for us to observe in our daily lives.

The short letter from Paul to the Colossians was almost certainly written while Paul was in prison in Ephesus, around the year 62 A.D. Paul had never been to Colossae, a city in what is now western Turkey. The Christian community there had been founded by Epaphras, who was himself a native of Colossae. But, perhaps just because he had not himself been there, Paul was concerned for the Christian community there, in spite of the fact that reports of the community were good. 

It does not come into today’s passage but later in the letter it is clear that, as in other Christian communities, the local people were being misled by false teaching about Jesus Christ and the Gospel. This is the basis of Paul’s concern for them. Because he is in prison, all he can do is to pray for them, so he assures them of his prayers for their well-being. The only hint that all is not well comes towards the end of the passage, when Paul prays “may you be prepared to endure everything with patience”.

Wherein lies the challenge for us in this letter? I think it is all too easy for us to forget that there are dear people praying every day for each one of us, for our well-being as Christians, for our preservation from the forces of sin and evil, for our health and happiness. Let us in turn remember them and be thankful for their goodness and persistence.

Finally, we come to today’s gospel reading. This , which I think we all know, presents challenges from the opening words to the end. The lawyer “stands up to test Jesus”.  When Jesus responds with a question, the lawyer gives the right answer, repeating the two great commandments from Jewish law. But he goes on to challenge Jesus, “who is my neighbour?” Then comes the parable.

A man is stripped, beaten and abandoned on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. Who was this man? And why was he travelling alone on a road know to be dangerous? We are not told and I don’t think we should make assumptions. He may or may not have been Jewish.  A priest sees him and “passes by on the other side”, perhaps afraid that the bandits may still be lurking around, or perhaps afraid that, if he touches the wounded man, he will become unclean and unable to participate in the synagogue rituals. A Levite, a type of priest, also passes by on the other side.

Then a third man comes on the scene. A Samaritan. He is moved with pity, treats the victim’s wounds, puts him on his own animal and takes him to an inn and takes care of him. The next day he leaves money with the innkeeper for the care of the wounded man, and promises when he returns to repay the innkeeper for any further money he has spent.

This parable is full of challenges for us, and in an age where there is so much knife crime, violence and misery on our streets, it is almost impossible to know how we should respond. I am sure that all too often we “pass by on the other side”. We find the homeless frightening; we wonder if they are on drugs and if we will be attacked if we make any gesture of help.

So we need the reminder of this great parable, and its challenge to us. I acknowledge that too often I have passed by on the other side. I will try to do better.

32 years ago I was ordained priest and for me the opening sentence from today’s Gospel is very apt:

“The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Luke 10:1

At the time I was ordained I thought that it was significant that the service took place on the 4^th July – American Independence Day! With the emphasis on ‘Independence’! I thought to myself; ‘Now I can go it alone, now I can change the world and more importantly the Church’ and of course I intended to do it all on my own as well. I didn’t need the help of others to do this – how quickly I realised that I was so wrong.

I was not, nor are any of us called or ordained to minister alone. For a start it is not my ministry that I exercise, it is Christ’s in which I share. My ministry only has validity when it is seen in relationship to that of Jesus - ordination is only one aspect of Christ’s ministry and my ordination as priest is only a part of the ministry to which I am called to by virtue of my baptism. Over the past 33 years of ministry as deacon and priest I have come to appreciate that my vocation to ordained ministry can only be seen in conjunction with the baptismal ministries of all my brothers and sisters in the faith. That is why for me Luke’s words:

“..in pairs..” and “..to every town..”    are vital and inspiring. 

Mission is vital for the life of the world and the life of the Church for it is through mission that the world can learn of the joy of Christ and the liberation of the Gospel message he proclaims. It is mission, mission that flows from the heart of God, that enflames, informs and inspires our ministry- mission and ministry cannot be separated or seen alone.

There are few of us committed to the ways of Jesus in the 21^st Century; 

“ The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers few.”   Luke 10:2

but there is a whole world, out there, that has yet to hear his voice and who long for it, even if they have yet to realise it. Alone we can never hope to even begin to reap the harvest but together……the possibilities are endless.

The priesthood in which I share is nothing to do with me alone I have been called to ordination on your behalf and on the behalf of all the baptised to go out into the world and do those things that you do not have time to do and to enable you into the ministries that you are called to follow; for together we have the potential to do many things that alone we could not achieve. Together we can shout the Good News louder than we can on our own and together we can support and encourage each other to always go on and do more.

Mulling over the prospectus of the boarding school to which I was bound, my father discovered that one of the hobbies on offer was printing, and he encouraged me to give it a try. Some weeks later I turned up at the ramshackle building which housed the school printing press and signed on as an apprentice. Older pupils explained what was in store. One tradition, having your head tapped against the polished flat stone used to level the type sounded scary. But there was a genuine treat to anticipate, the Wayzgoose, the annual printers’ feast. I was told that to earn my place at the feast I had to qualify as a compositor by passing a test. This would involve typesetting the Lord’s Prayer (this was, after all, a Methodist boarding school) in not more than fifteen minutes, and it had to be justified - and at this point it may be dawning on you how this reminiscence relates to today’s Epistle, for in it St Paul tells the Christians in Galatia that:

“…the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.”

In traditional letterpress printing, justification meant ensuring that there was a straight right-hand margin as well as a straight left-hand margin. Nowadays I could type the Lord’s Prayer on my computer in a fraction of fifteen minutes and justify it with a couple of mouse clicks. If you’re setting up text using movable type, justification involves filling up whatever space is left at the end of a line by inserting small lead spaces between words and sometimes very small ones called hair spaces between the individual letters of a word. When we took the test, we were not allowed to cheat by ending a line in the middle of a word and using a hyphen. Thanks to expert tuition, I passed first time and earned my place at the Wayzgoose, which turned out to be a fish and chip supper at a local cafe - a big improvement on school food. 

It’s interesting that printers took a theological term, justification, and applied it to one of the skills of their craft. It was appropriate that they did, for one of the key meanings of justification is making things right, and to make things right you need to provide what’s missing, to fill up whatever space there is. That’s a helpful clue to part of what St Paul meant when he wrote about justification by faith. 

As a young man Paul had been brought up to believe that obedience to the Law was all that God required. As a Pharisee he had been particularly strict in his observance of the Law. His dramatic encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus gave him a powerful sense of his own sinfulness and inadequacy - of the spaces in him that needed filling. He came to realise that the love of God was not something that could be earned by obedience to the Law or by any other kind of effort, indeed not something that needed to be earned. All that was needed was acceptance of the love of God embodied and enacted by Jesus. That’s what he meant by faith - not just believing in a set of propositions about who Jesus was and about the significance of his Passion and Resurrection, though the propositions are important and helpful. Faith is acceptance of the love of God embodied and enacted by Jesus. 

To accept love is to open oneself up. It’s rewarding and the reward comes in the form of fulfilment - the meeting of our needs - the filling up of the spaces in us.  But for Paul there was more to justification than the filling up of spaces. He understood that to accept love should also involve accepting a vocation to live lovingly. He also understood that in accepting that vocation we receive the grace of God which enables us to live lovingly. We are justified, we are made right, in order to play a part in the God’s purpose of making the whole of creation right. 

You can see that theme of vocation in today’s Gospel story of Jesus healing the man possessed by demons. Jesus has crossed the Sea of Galilee to the eastern side and has clearly landed in an area inhabited by Gentiles - the fact that there was a herd of pigs, an animal regarded as unclean according to Jewish Law is evidence of that. The unfortunate man is doubly unclean - he’s naked and he’s living among tombs, which were also regarded as unclean. Once the man is healed, restored to his right mind, the local people ask Jesus to leave. Whoever owned that herd of pigs must have been particularly angry with him. And when the man who has been healed asks Jesus whether he may accompany him, he is given his vocation:

“…but Jesus sent him away, saying “Return to your home, and declare what God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.”

St Paul makes the point about the Christian vocation beautifully in his letter to Christians in Ephesus.

“For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”  Ephesians 2:10

The Greek word which is translated as “made” is poiema, from which we derive our word poetry, and the great New Testament scholar Bishop Tom Wright suggests that the phrase “we are what God has made us” could helpfully be translated as “we are God’s poetry”. 

Poetry moves us, poetry makes us see the world and see people in new ways. In accepting the love of God embodied and enacted by Jesus we can become part of God’s process of putting things right. We are called to be God’s poetry and, in Tom Wright’s words:

“…to break open existing ways of looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way of being human.”

There’s a great need for that in a world marred by conflict, cruelty and prejudice. That’s our vocation, to:

“…spark the mind to imagine a different way of being human”.

Some time ago – a parishioner of St Nicolas Cranleigh - I can’t remember who – said to me: “I can never get my head around the Trinity.” I went on thinking about that for some days and realised that I couldn’t get my head around the Trinity either.

So on this Trinity Sunday morning, it is right for us all to go back to basics and look at what we understand by “the Trinity”. The actual concept of the Trinity does not occur in Scripture. It is a doctrine formulated by the early Church Fathers, based on their experiences and deepening understanding of God, of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and of some passages in Scripture, such as the lessons from the Gospel of John and from the letter to the Romans which we have just heard. Like most doctrine, it is a human attempt to put into words something which cannot ever actually be expressed in words, and is therefore only in part adequate.

The Articles of our Religion tell us that the Trinity is made up of three persons, who are one and indivisible. These are God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Holy Spirit. So let’s look first at God the Father.

There are no words to describe him, but we know a bit about God. He is supreme majesty, eternal, all powerful and all knowing, the source of life, love, truth and beauty. He is the creator of the world. It is his and he loves it. He revealed himself first to the Israelites, who experienced him as a great and loving God, constantly faithful to his promises. He was and is beyond the world and beyond our understanding. 

But God is also active in the world. When he came to the end of creating the world and its inhabitants, he made a glorious garden for the first humans. Although they disobeyed him and were expelled from the garden, God continued to watch over and care for their descendants. He liberated them from slavery to the Egyptians. He made a covenant with them to lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey, and to preserve them there if they would keep his laws. Though the Israelites broke those laws time and time again, God remained forgiving and faithful to them.

And through his prophets God promised that one day a Messiah would come to redeem his sinful and disobedient people.

I do most passionately believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth. But get my head around him? No, I can’t, and do you know, I wouldn’t want to. Because then he would be a God of my thought and imagination, not the unknowable and glorious being he is. 

So we come to the second person of the Trinity, our Lord and Saviour, God the Son, Jesus Christ. We know a bit more about him. He was born from a human woman, so was truly man. But in the love of God the Father he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, so he was also truly God. He was raised as a Jew and knew the Jewish laws. For about thirty-three years he lived and taught in Galilee and Judea. He fed the hungry, healed the sick and raised the dead. 

But he did not hesitate to ignore minor bits of the Jewish law. Even worse, he proclaimed a vision of the Messiah and of the Kingdom of God which was totally different from the idea which the Jewish authorities had. They expected a triumphant earthly King. Jesus declared that the Messiah was to be a God of love and that the kingdom of God in the hearts and minds of his people would be a kingdom of love, service and suffering. Eventually the Jews had enough of his challenge to their thinking and authority. They arranged for Jesus to die a criminal’s death of crucifixion.

And then by the love of God Jesus rose from the dead. He appeared several times to his disciples and followers, some of whom, notably Peter, had in moments of inspiration already recognised Jesus for who he was – and is. Then he ascended into Heaven. From then on all his disciples began really to comprehend that Jesus was the Son of God and the promised Messiah and that, although they could no longer see him, he was forever alive.

But there is a dimension to Jesus which is beyond space and time. As people in the early church thought about Jesus and worshipped him, they came to realise that he in his person was in fact the self-expression of God the Father. He revealed what God is and for all time has been. If this was so, then Jesus was with God from the very beginning. John the evangelist expressed this in words which we all know: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. So Jesus was fully human; he lived a human life and died a human death, but he was also fully God the Word, existing before the beginning of time.

I believe passionately in Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of the Virgin Mary, died, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, and who was and is the eternal Word of God. But can I get my head around him? No, I can’t do that either.

So we come to the third person of the Trinity, God the Holy Spirit. The Spirit existed from the beginning; we are told in Genesis that “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. All through the Old Testament we are told of workings of the Spirit.

But before he died, Jesus promised his disciples that, when he was gone from them, the Father in Jesus’ name would send the Holy Spirit to be their Advocate and to bring to their recollection all that Jesus had said and done. The Spirit came at Pentecost: a mighty wind and double tongued flames, the Holy Spirit in his full glory. The disciples were transformed from the small group of followers of Jesus, terrified of the Jews, into brilliant believers who dared, at the risk of torture or death, to proclaim to the world that Jesus had risen from the dead and was alive, and that he was the Messiah long promised by God. 

That Spirit was outside the disciples but also entered into each of them. That is the Spirit with which we are blessed today, who helps us to worship and to pray and who prays with us, who enables us to perceive beauty, truth and goodness in the world around us, and who unites us in fellowship with God the Father and God the Son. 

I do most passionately believe in the God the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life – but I can’t get my head around the Spirit either.

We are most greatly blessed by and in our Trinitarian God, whom we worship as three in one and one in three. But – a word of caution. It is difficult to talk about the Trinity, so often writers and speakers will name just one of the persons, a kind of shorthand for the whole. We may need to adjust our thinking and understanding to recognise this. So for example we read that “God sent his Son into the world,” and it’s easy to think that only God the Father is meant, but that is not so. The Trinity is one and indivisible – so Jesus was sent into the world by the Trinity, by God the Father, and God the Word, and God the Holy Spirit.

In a moment we will say together the Creed, our great common statement of belief. We will never get our heads around the Trinity; it is above and beyond our limited human comprehension and experience and our capacity for speech. Beyond the stars, eternal – and yet dwelling in each one of us. What we as Christians are called to do is to believe in the Trinity, to commit ourselves to the Trinity, and to give unending praise and thanks for our one God in three persons. 

Before training for the ministry I was a Primary School teacher. One my reasons for opting to teach young children was the sheer exhilaration I experienced when one of the pupils would suddenly comprehend something they had not understood before. I loved to see the expressions of their faces when suddenly; ‘the penny dropped’. This was made all the more special when a child who struggled to comprehend even the most basic of things overcame what seemed impossible to them. Their joy and mine was great.

Peter, was one of these children. Nothing came easy to him including bodily co-ordination and appropriate behaviour. His own shortcomings frustrated him, greatly, and the thing that frustrated him the most was the fact that he could not climb to the top of the ropes in the hall.

Peter always tried so hard to get to the top but his general lack of co-ordination and body shape hindered his every attempt. Until one morning, when after repeated attempts Peter got to the top of the rope. Out of sheer joy he shouted at his classmates and me to look at him. The children clapped and we all shared in his happiness and achievement. Nothing could dampen his joy or his spirits, even after sliding down the rope and burning his hands. Peter had overcome his barrier, at last he could climb the ropes, at last he knew how to do it.

The coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Earth at that first Pentecost, is not unlike that day when Peter overcame his barrier in rope climbing. Pentecost was the day that the barriers came down for the disciples, the day that their perceptions of Jesus were changed and they discovered that they could and should talk to people of all languages and of all nations.

Pentecost, was the time that the Spirit burst upon the world. The day that barriers between Jew and gentile, men and women, between one race and another were swept away; and the day that Jesus’ disciples were fired with energy and confidence to preach the Gospel, to the world.

Pentecost, follows Jesus’ ascension, and without his ascension, without his leaving of his disciples, the Holy Spirit would not have been able to freely fill the Earth and I doubt that we would be here worshipping today. Jesus had to ascend because his ministry as a human man was limited. Limited by time, place, people and language because we human beings have our limitations and constraints. With the Holy Spirit there are no such restrictions and as such Jesus’ ministry could now cross barriers it was unable to cross before.

The Holy Spirit, is however, dangerous!

We cannot control the workings of the Spirit, we cannot contain it and manipulate it. Neither is there anywhere the Spirit cannot go or cannot permeate.

Before being ordained deacon, I was told that I would be fundamentally changed by the sacrament of ordination. I was not too sure of this before the event but as the then Bishop of Oxford laid his hands on my head, I felt myself shot through with ‘fire’. A surge of energy seemed to flow into me and I believe it did change me. It wasn’t just me who felt this, my colleagues being ordained did too, the cathedral was filled with so much static electricity that not a single photograph came out clear. Sparks ready did fly!

The change, I believe I experienced was both perceptible and imperceptible. I felt that I had been empowered to begin my life as an ordained minister of Christ. I believe this to be true because repeatedly I have been enabled to go into situations and to cope with events that I would rather not have had to do so or that I felt I was incapable of understanding or dealing with.  I also believe that I have been given the right words, at the right time too. As Matthew records Jesus telling his disciples:

“… do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say: for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”           Matthew 10:19-20

Again and again, I have known this to be true. At time people have said to me; ‘thank you for what you said, it really helped me’. Often I have no remembrance or idea let alone memory of what I said but the Spirit obviously spoke to the right thing to the people concerned at the time. I suspect that the same thing will have been said to you too.

I acknowledge the role that the Holy Spirit has in my life. I know that without it I could not be an effective priest nor could I minister to you either and I give thanks regularly in my prayers for this agent of change.

The Holy Spirit uses all of us as ministers of Christ’s Good News. It uses us to take the message of the Gospel to the ends of the Earth; to the Earth’s far corners and darkest places. It also helps us to take that message to the dark places in each other’s lives too and into our own hard hearts as well. 

Recently I came across an article on the back page of the Church Times by the poet Malcolm Guite. He wrote this about Eastertide and Pentecost and I think it helps to sum up what I have been saying:

“ … Easter Day is really just about lighting the blue touch paper on the joyful rocket of resurrection, the 40 day Easter season that will culminate in Ascension Day, and then come down in a shower of glorious sparks - tongues of flame at pentecost - to ignite our inner fireworks and send us out into the world to kindle hearts for Christ.”                                                                           Church Times 25th April 2025

It is our duty, as people ‘born in the Spirit’ through Baptism to tell others about the love of God, to be evangelistic in the ways in which we live our lives. Not only in the way we live but in the ways we respond to each other, our attitudes to life and our fellow beings and the myriad of ways in which we love. We are called to lead others to the ways and person of Jesus by gentle encouragement, supporting them along the way, all the time, never assuming that they or we will know the way on our own.

A daunting task? Yes, it is. But, it is not a task one should worry about because the Holy Spirit will guide us in every step we take, if we allow it. If we keep our hearts and minds open, allowing the Spirit to change us at will, then God’s will, will be done. 

The greatest sin, we are told, any of us can commit is a sin against the Holy Spirit. I interpret this to mean that we sin if we shut ourselves off from the workings of the Spirit. In order to be loved and to love we have to be open, to be prepared to lay ourselves bare before the Lord, to trust in him, to allow him to use us as he wants.  

This scary but being a Christian is a risky business. Life is risky but as a Christian living in the Spirit you cannot afford to be complacent, to sit back and to take it easy. You have to get out into the world and work for God’s Kingdom.

On this Pentecost Sunday we are reminded to keep ourselves open, to allow the fireworks of the Spirit into our lives and to be encouraged by it to take risks for the sake of the Gospel. Wee Peter took a risk and achieved that which he believed to be impossible - what might God be calling you to risk?