Jesus Baptism

by Peter Lockhart

(My last sermon with Kairos Uniting Church: Clayfield Hamilton Congregation)

It is entirely appropriate that on this last occasion that I preach here that my last words to you are about the eternal Word. The baptism of Jesus, the eternal word of God, focuses our attention on what is important for this day just as it has been through my 8 years here, Jesus. And so, this is also a sermon about beginnings, not endings, for the baptism of Jesus signalled the beginning of his ministry and so reveals God’s purposes in him.

I think I will be eternally grateful to my systematic theology teacher Gordon Watson who encouraged me to write a paper about Jesus called “Christ, the Spirit & Worship”. Although, it’s subtitle has more bearing on what I will be saying today: “The accommodation of the Spirit in Christ's obedience with reference to the relationship to doxology, as understood in John 17:19.”

Now whilst this may sound like another language to some of your ears this phrase for me heralds us into the presence of the mystery of the idea that God became a human being and the doctrine of the Trinity: the incarnation. On one level there is nothing that may appear practical about this theology yet for me it is the heart of our faith.

The concepts to which I am referring can be explored in Mark’s description of Jesus baptism.

If we were to stop and think for a moment the whole notion of Jesus baptism by John should jar against our senses. The Baptist was in the wilderness baptising people with a baptism of repentance and of forgiveness of sins. The word repentance means “turning back to God” – it as if we are facing away from God and the act of repentance is changing our position from having our backs to turned, to looking towards the one who made us.

The offence of Jesus baptism by John is that here is one who Mark has already described as the Son of God acting as if he is out of step with God – facing away.

Anyone reading this story must wonder where this story is going. How incomprehensible is it that Jesus, who is God’s Son and therefore must be facing God, needed a baptism of repentance?
The answer purely and simply must be that Jesus did not need such a baptism for himself but through his actions was symbolising the divine action that was occurring in and through his life.

Jesus presence in the world, the presence of God’s eternal Word enfleshed, involves the full identification of God with what it means to be human. God in himself is offering his own life to us by sharing in our life.

Jesus baptism of repentance is not a baptism for his sake but for ours, on our behalf, for our sake. Jesus does need to turn back to God, we do, and because as Paul later wrote, our lives are hidden in Christ’s, it his repentance not ours that opens up eternal life and right relationship with God and each other.

This is why our own baptisms as Christian people are so important: because they signify that our lives are drawn into Jesus own baptism and our lives are now shaped by being baptised people – people who in Christ and by God’s grace are turned back to God, not through our action of turning towards God but Jesus.

The mystery of Jesus baptism is further convoluted by the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus. For those who understood Jesus to be the Son of God in Mark’s era the idea that Jesus did not already have the Spirit of God upon would have been strange. And, later hearers of the scripture, who had come to a Trinitarian understanding of God’s life, would think that this was even more bizarre.

Jesus the eternal Word of God had existed eternally with the Father and the Spirit and this unity of the Godhead, Father, Son and Spirit could not logically cease through the incarnation – the inviolable unity of the Trinity must have remained. So why does the Spirit appear?

Once again it is not for Jesus own sake that the Spirit is seen descending like a dove but for those who witnessed the event and ultimately for God’s purposes in salvation. The Holy Spirit shares in the life of the incarnate Word as Jesus the Christ accommodates the Spirit into his fleshly life. It is in the sharing of this life that the Spirit of God is then poured out after Jesus’ death into his disciples and then among all peoples in order that people might be drawn in Jesus and by the Spirit into sharing in God’s own life.

What is occurring in and through Jesus is no less than the re-creation of the world! This morning we heard the beginning of the creation story from Genesis and so just as the Spirit hovered over the waters at the moment of creation so too the Spirit hovered over Mary’s womb and now at the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry – his baptism.

This is the heart of the Christian story – a story not about my repentance or yours, a story not about mysterious encounters with the divine, a story not about my personal relationship with Jesus or decision to follow him. It is the story of God’s decision and action in and through Jesus Christ to renew the creation. It is a story bigger than any of personal stories and experiences of God yet compassionate and aware enough to draw our personal stories into that grand narrative of God’s love for the world.

In this sense I have no words to give other than to reaffirm Jesus, the eternal Word made flesh. He is God’s gift to the world and to know God means to know Jesus and to know Jesus means to know God. In him we see God in the world and we know and have our hope fulfilled that God loves, God gives, God makes new, God forgives, God heals, ultimately that God is!

Jesus baptism and descent of the Holy Spirit point at this reality of God. It is a sign and symbol of God’s intention not simply for those witnessed that gathered and saw John baptise Jesus but for we and the whole creation.

The act of Jesus baptism is a symbol of God’s love and grace, and so also is it that which it symbolises. In the same way that Jesus baptism is a symbol of God’s love and action in the world so too is our gathering as baptised people here today.

In a world which continues to join lustily in the refrain that “God is dead” our gathering and the gathering of congregations everywhere declare Jesus repentance and celebrate in hope a promise for all creation. Everything will be made new! Our feast at the table reminds us that we are people of this new creation as we have a foretaste of the banquet of all nations at peace with Gdo and one another.

In this, the church is that which it signifies, it is the beginning of the new creation. We do not make the new creation; we cannot offer any word to the world; nor any other salvation to the world, other than one already given in Jesus life, death, resurrection and ascension. We are to be a light to the nations not because we behave or live as people turned back to God but because we live acknowledging the one who turned back to God on our behalf and in whose life we share by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our purpose in being the church is none other this to point away from ourselves and at the author of our salvation who has made us to a light among the nations, just as the Israelites were to be a light among the nations. We exist as the church not for our own ends, not to make nice social gatherings, or little Holy clubs but to remind the world that God is and God has a future for the whole creation even when all we can see is death and despair.
So my last word to you in my preaching here is I believe as it should be simply the Word: Jesus. He is the only message that the church really has because in him God has redeemed the world and has begun a new creation which by grace and through the Holy Spirit you and I already have encountered. May God bless you all with wisdom and the Spirit to continue to share and celebrate this message in your lives.

Trinity Sunday: An old sermon!

Peter Lockhart

An sermon from 2007 Year A Trinity Sunday... what to do this week?

Today the lectionary gives to us a gift from the church – today is Trinity Sunday. The reason that I say that it is a gift from the church is that the concept of the Trinity does not come to us directly from Scripture because the Bible does not use this language, this word Trinity, to describe God. Rather, in reflecting on the depth of God’s revelation to us in Jesus Christ the early church in its struggle to articulate the truth of God’s existence adopted this language of describing God as Trinity.

This comes to us as gift in the context of the struggle of humanity to know its creator and to understand the creation. In his book The Mind of God the eminent mathematician and physicist Paul Davies declared ‘While we assume there is a design behind the physical reality, science can’t really tell us anything about the designer, the nature of God, or God’s relationship with human beings.’ (end quote)

To seek to understand God and to listen for the story of God does not mean turning away from scientific inquiry and reason but marrying it with the revelation of this very creator in our midst. For, to borrow a phrase from another physicist and theologian John Polkinghorn, to describe God as trinity is not a case of doing some ‘speculative mystical arithmetic’ but is grounded in the very narrative of the revelation of God found in the scriptures.

Jesus’ claims concerning himself and his relation with God and the Holy Spirit give rise for us to speak of God in this way.

John asserts Jesus to be the eternal word of God.

Jesus claimed that he was in the Father and the Father was in him and that those who had seen him had seen the Father.

The promise of the Holy Spirit is the promise of the Spirit sent from the Father, the same Spirit that was seen descending on Jesus at his baptism.

And, Jesus command to go and baptise in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit further makes this description of God appropriate.

Here in these passages and others we encounter God not simply as some monad but that God in Godself is a community of existence – a communion of being.

If we listen to the very first story found in the scriptures this truth of God’s very nature as existing as a communion is found as we hear that we are created in God’s image:

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness:

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

Here we find that to be made in God’s image is to be made male and female – not male or female, but both together – a community. To be in the image of God is to be one, yet one with distinct entities. The fullness of being human in the image of God is being humans together, just as God is one yet three.

This helps us to make sense of the statement that God is love. To love involves both a lover and an object of that love. If God in God’s very self is love then that love is a love expressed in the mutuality of existence of the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

This gives to us the context of our own existence created to love and be loved by God and by each other – to do less than this would be to deny the reality of our being created in God’s image and thereby to deny what it means to be truly human.

Yet the narrative that unfolds in the pages of the scriptures is that this exactly what human beings do: rather than live in the communion of love whereby we exist as one for each other we as human beings continually seek our personal end, our personal gain.

The story of Adam and Eve is not some isolated event in prehistory but is each of our own stories – we deny the reality of our existence and seek more as if what we have already been given is not enough. And when we are questioned about this we try to blame someone else.

But God’s love for us is so deep that he gives to us himself, his son, the incarnation – Jesus with us to live for us. Here the work of God as Trinity becomes clearer and even yet more confronting. Jesus fully human and fully divine shares our human existence living in communion with God and the creation.

The culmination of Jesus share in our existence as well as our estrangement from God and each other is found in the cross and resurrection. The theologian Jürgen Moltman describes Jesus death as an entirely Trinitarian in which Jesus human cry of abandonment, ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ is matched by the desolation of God the Father as mourns the estrangement of humanity in the death of his only son.

Here we begin to have an insight into the concern of God at our suffering and of God’s will that this not be the last word for the cross without the resurrection leaves us without much hope. The Spirit descends into the realm of dead to – a place complete oppose and devoid of God’s existence to meet Jesus there and bring him to new life.

To contemplate this is to understand that even in the place of death to which Jesus descends, a place of complete separation from God Jesus is retrieved. The Eastern Orthodox churches speak of the days between Jesus death and resurrection as the time of his descent into hell. There is no place in this life or in our death that God has not been and that God cannot reach us.

This God, who is love, loves us to this point of self sacrificial giving so that we might be with God eternally. The sending of the Holy Spirit to us makes us one with Jesus in his action for us and in the church we are made to be a sign of hope for the world as humans existing as human beings created in God’s image are meant to – as community.

The church is meant to be God’s people living in respect to how we were created and were recreated to live, but it does not take a genius to see that we do not live this way as the church, even though this is the church we believe that God calls us to be. Like those who lived before Jesus death and resurrection our fall into temptation, to live as if we are not in created God’s image and so to seek something other, is continually there.

The rampant individualism of the post enlightenment world, both modernism and post modernism, have so impacted on the belief of the western church that for so many our faith is private or personal matter. Evangelists continually emphasize our personal relationship with Jesus as being the central reality of faith, but unless we understand that as persons we are not drawn into a one on one faith experience but into the community of God’s existence which includes not only other people but the fullness of creation then we have turned away from the truth of the gospel.

To be Christian means to be the church – for the church is the body of Christ, it is the Church in the power of the Spirit. Bound together by God’s love and into God’s existence together we celebrate our risen Lord.

This understanding of the church came up in my lecturing on Thursday when I was quoting a passage from John Calvin’s Institutes written in 1559.

“For when we believe the Church, it is in order that we may be firmly persuaded that we are its members. In this way our salvation rests on a foundation so firm and sure, that though the whole fabric of the world were to give way, it could not be destroyed.”

Half of the students reacted to this understanding of the church expressing that whilst the ideal and imagery is great it had not been their experience of the church. Many had been hurt and burnt within the community of the faithful – a reality for most of us.

Yet within the arms of the church that we believe, the church that God has made through the power of the Spirit, our hope is that we do share in the Trinitarian life of God and we become fully human.

Calvin, being the realist he was, declared:

"But in order to embrace the unity of the Church in this manner, it is not necessary, as I have observed, to see it with our eyes, or feel it with our hands. Nay, rather from its being placed in faith, we are reminded that our thoughts are to dwell upon it, as much when it escapes our perception as when it openly appears."

Being church is as much a matter of faith and an expression of God’s Trinitarian life as our hope in the promise of Jesus that we will find our way home in him.

The depths of the mystery of our faith stand alongside the mystery and wonder that is seen in the creation by the physicists and biologist and ecologists. Our unity with God who is Father, Son and Spirit, our unity with each other, our unity with all living things humbles us and gives to us place in this world, in our lives and with our God.

Giving thanks for this mystery we can echo the wonder of the great Albert Einstein:

One cannot but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one merely tries to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

So with him and millions before us and millions to come let us pass into silence before the mystery of the Trinity and seek the face of the one who loves us.

Pentecost: Sermon Preview

Peter Lockhart

A sermon based on Acts 2:1-21

The Holy Spirit descends and breathes into the disciples, and those listening, an amazing ability.

They are given the ability to speak and listen and understand languages other than the one that they speak.

At its base level I believe that this description of the day of Pentecost is a reversal of the confusion set upon human beings at the tower Babel, a story found in the book of Genesis Chapter 11.

In summary the story of the tower of Babel goes like this.

“Up until this point in the Bible, the whole world had one language - one common speech for all people. The people of the earth became skilled in construction and decided to build a city with a tower that would reach to heaven. By building the tower they wanted to make a name for themselves and also prevent their city from being scattered.

God came to see their city and the tower they were building. He perceived their intentions, and in His infinite wisdom, He knew this "stairway to heaven" would only lead the people away from God. He noted the powerful force within their unity of purpose. As a result, God confused their language, causing them to speak different languages so they would not understand each other. By doing this, God thwarted their plans. He also scattered the people of the city all over the face of the earth.”

http://christianity.about.com/od/biblestorysummaries/p/towerofbabel.htm

In one sense then I see the Day of Pentecost as a reversal of this story. It is a sign that human beings are reconciled again to God. A reconciliation that is understood to occur by the disciples through what Jesus does. So whilst understanding comes through shared communication it is not the shared communication that draws human being back towards God and each other.

So, and this is a big so, whilst shared understanding is given as a sign of reconciliation with God, the reversal of the Tower of Babel, onlookers of the event fail to understand it, even though they can see and hear in their own language, “they must be filled with new wine!” In other words, “they are drunk!”

One of our greatest problems as humanity is our inability to understand one another, even when we speak the same language. You only have to observe politicians and the issues that humanity is confronting to understand this.

What I find particularly disturbing is our inability to hear those who may be speaking a word of prophecy amongst us. During the week I heard a report about the death threats being levelled at climate scientists in Australia.

These scientists are speaking the same language as those listening: but is the problem that people don’t want to listen? Is it because people cannot see beyond the meal on their table and the roof over their head?

The hopeful, yet naive, notion that J.F.K propounded in the 1960s was :

“Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johnfkenn124671.html

When we as human beings fail to listen, to really listen, even when we are given a common language, how can we place so much faith in ourselves?

The Spirit was poured out to give an opportunity to witness to God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ. The shared language on that day was a sign of what God was doing, but what is clear to me is that even with a common language we as human beings are still confused and more often than not even selfish bunch, we are all at sea.

The witness of the disciples was that it was because of God’s love expressed in Jesus Christ that we have become reconciled to God and one another and it is only when we find some unity in this proclamation that it can make any sense. It is this which becomes our hope, not the amazing gifts we may have to share with one another, but the God who through the Spirit and in Christ is present at work in and through us giving us hope even when we are misunderstood and sneered at as drunkards.

Pentecost: Living right to the end of life!

Peter Lockhart
The following was used as a devotional reflection in a retirement complex.

The pouring out of the Holy Spirit described in the book of Acts is an amazing thing: the sound of a rushing wind; tongues of fire; the ability to hear other languages and understand. So perplexing is the behaviour of those gathered that they are accused of as being drunk.

The Holy Spirit comes in power to give the disciples the strength and support to move forward in faith sharing the good news of Jesus with other people. This is a story of hope and purpose and direction in life.

And when we speak of the Holy Spirit we usually use words which describe life and movement.

The Holy Spirit is poured out, it is rushing wind, tongues of fire, bringer of gifts, giver of life, guide, comforter, inspirer and so on.

Tomorrow I am conducting a funeral and it has caused me to pause and think about how we understand this story of the coming of the Spirit and its place in our lives as we get older.

I suppose I can’t really speak from personal experience too deeply yet but I think one thing that maybe some think when they hear about the pouring out of the Holy Spirit is that it just sounds tiring.

The Holy Spirit comes to give life and movement but as you get older life and movement are just that little bit harder.

I imagine it’s far easier to speak of dance of the Holy Spirit if you don’t have arthritis or you don’t have a bung knee or a gammy leg.

I imagine it’s far easier to speak of the Holy Spirit as guide if you’re not stuck without a licence anymore or you’re not living in a retirement village or nursing home.

Yet it could also be far easier when we begin to think this way to write ourselves off as if there is nothing left to contribute and life has just become a waiting game, waiting for the only thing left, which we don’t really want to think about too much: death.

But when I read the story from the book of Acts I am always struck by the phrase “your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams”. Your old men shall dream dreams!

This is no less important than the young men who have visions. To take this point a little further, I would argue that the Spirit comes with different gifts for our age and stage in life. Your old men will dream dreams is an example contained within a prophecy.

I want to share a story I heard yesterday about a man who has terminal cancer. After being discharged from hospital he went home but when he got there he went straight to bed and was refusing to come out.

A young woman, a social worker, went and encouraged him step by step to reengage with life. To move out of waiting for death into living what he had left. The first step was simple to get up and to have a shower.

Step by step the man reengaged in living as best he could and gradually he became involved in supporting other people with cancer. He got involved so fully that last year he ran a Cancer Council Morning Tea in his home.

Not only was he living but he was living for others.

The vision of the young woman to help the man rediscover life turned into a dream for the man, a dream which became fulfilling not only for him but for others.

The Holy Spirit brings new life, helps us discover new gifts and passions and within the context of community young and old, male and female, rich and poor God empowers us to witness to Jesus who promised to send the Spirit to help us live our lives and live them abundantly, right to the end. Amen.

The one coming into the World

In the story of the raising of Lazarus found in John 11 Martha recognises Jesus as the one coming into the world. This is a marvellous image of God's grace and love. Jesus is coming into the world and in him God is coming into the world. Whilst having a historical context there is a constancy of the movement of Jesus coming into the world through the power of the Holy Spirit, the helper that Jesus says the Father will send.

Jesus coming into the world shifts we human beings in our relationship with God. Firstly, it celebrates our created existence. Our lives are affirmed by the incarnation which reminds us that the creation is good and we are to live in the light not of what we expect may happen after we die but in the gift of life we have now. Second, it says we do not need to go to find God anywhere because Jesus is one who comes to us. Jesus coming into the world is God's coming into the presence of our daily living and we can discover that God is there with us not simply some God out there who is immune to what it means to live.