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Sermon - The Day of Pentecost (B) - 31st May 2009
St Aidan's Anglican Church West Epping
Readings: John 12:26-7; 16:4b-15
One problem with the church calendar is that it can make the Christian year look episodic. What I mean is that one week its Epiphany, one week its Lent, then its Easter, then Ascension, then Trinity and today we’ve arrived at Pentecost. They look like a list of separate events, separate festivals that we celebrate throughout the year. They can lose the sense that they are all part of the one story, the story of Jesus mission. They should never be separated because they are a part of the whole picture. Through the year we emphasize a different part of the story which is appropriate to that time of year. But that can mean we sometimes forget the rest of the story or how this part fits into the rest.
Today is Pentecost, but Pentecost is not an end in itself. Its not just one more festival. Rather, its part of the bigger story. That’s one problem I have with Pentecostals. They emphasize one part which so distorts the work of the Spirit that it obscures the rest of the story. As a result we can misunderstand Pentecost when we separate it off from the complete story of Jesus’ mission. Of course, Christianity is complex, its challenging, it is easy to misunderstand.
Some years ago I saw a cartoon of St Peter standing in front of Jesus's Cross and saying to the other Disciples: “It's time to put this behind us now and move on.” It was a satire not on Christian belief, but on politicians and counsellors, and how they can misunderstand and trivialise things. But Easter is an odd sort of story. It is about a horrible execution and then a strange story of a resurrection. And it begs the question of after all this, what was it that got Christianity off the ground? How did it really get started? Was it Jesus's death and His Resurrection, or can it be explained by a shoulder- shrugging desire to “move on”.
Easter was the pilot project. What God did for Jesus that explosive morning is what He intends to do for the whole creation. We who live in the interval between Jesus's Resurrection and the final rescue and transformation of the whole world are called to be new-creation people here and now. That is the hidden meaning of the greatest festival Christians have.
This true meaning has remained hidden because sometimes the Church has trivialised it and the world has rubbished it. At times the Church has turned Jesus's Resurrection into a “happy ending” after the dark and messy story of Good Friday, often scaling it down so that “resurrection” becomes a fancy way of saying “He went to Heaven when he died”. Easter then means: “There really is life after death for you and me - hallelujah”. The world shrugs its shoulders. We may or may not believe in life after death, but we reach that conclusion independently of Jesus, of odd stories about risen bodies and empty tombs.
But “resurrection” to 1st-century Jews wasn't about “going to Heaven”: it was about the physically dead being physically alive again. Some Jews believed that God would do this for all people in the end. Nobody, including Jesus's followers, was expecting one person to be bodily raised from the dead in the middle of history. The stories of the Resurrection are certainly not “wish-fulfilments” on the part of the first disciples. First-century Jews who followed would-be messiahs knew that if your leader got killed by the authorities, it meant you had backed the wrong man. You then had a choice: give up the revolution or get yourself a new leader. Going around saying that he'd been raised from the dead wasn't an option. It wasn’t going to help your movement.
That is, unless he actually had been. Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn't have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he's still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he's gone to heaven”. All these have been suggested by people who have lost any sense of where the story is going.
The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn't defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon - He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just re-animated or resuscitated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.
We need to be clear. These stories are not about someone coming back into the present mode of life. They are about someone going on into a new sort of existence, still emphatically bodily, if anything, more so. When St Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrection body, he doesn't mean “non-material”, like a ghost. “Spiritual” in the original language is the sort of word that tells you, not what something is made of, but what is motivating it and energizing it. The risen Jesus had a physical body animated by God's life-giving Spirit. The same Spirit that we celebrate today. Yes, says St Paul, that same Spirit is at work in us, and will have the same effect - and in the whole world.
Now, suddenly, the real meaning of Easter comes into view, as well as the real reason why it has been trivialised and sidelined. Easter is about a new creation that has already begun. God is remaking His world, challenging all the other powers that think that is their job. The rich, wise order of creation and its glorious, abundant beauty are reaffirmed on the other side of the thing that always threatens justice and beauty - death. Christianity's critics have always sneered that nothing has changed. But everything has. The world is a different place.
Easter has been sidelined because this message doesn't fit our prevailing world view. For at least 200 years the West has lived on the dream that we can bring justice and beauty to the world all by ourselves.
The split between God and the “real” world has produced a public life that lurches between anarchy and tyranny, and a world of the arts that swings dramatically between sentimentalism and brutalism. But we still want to do things our own way, even though we laugh at politicians who claim to be saving the world, and artists who claim “inspiration” when they put cows in formaldehyde.
The world wants to hush up the real meaning of Easter. Death is the final weapon of the tyrant or, for that matter, the anarchist, and resurrection indicates that this weapon doesn't have the last word. When the Church begins to work with Easter energy on the twin tasks of justice and beauty, we may find that it can face down the sneers of sceptics, and speak once more of Jesus in a way that will be heard. That Easter energy has now been released as that first Pentecost. That same spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells now in our mortal bodies and will make us alive again. Our message to our world is not just about going to heaven when you die. Its about a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth. And more personally, the good news is, its about a new us, a new you and me, made in the image of God, sanctified and purified by the Son of God and enlivened, energised and empowered by the Spirit of God. Now that’s good news.