Sermon Archive
The Storm Wind of the Spirit
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 27 March 2005, Easter Day
Let me tell you about an 'Easter' person I encountered recently: Elias Chacour. He came to Edinburgh to give the main lecture at the Festival of Middle Eastern Spiritualities and Peace.
Elias Chacour is a small round man with a huge beard that flows down from his chin to where his waist would be, if he had one. He also has an immensely loud voice that overwhelmed the sound system of the McEwan Hall. And as we listened to him speak it became clear that here was a figure of real stature in the world of peacemaking - someone who deserves his numerous awards, including several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Father Chacour is a Palestinian Christian and an Israeli citizen -although he and his family suffered much in the founding of the state of Israel, evicted from their ancestral lands, he refuses to hate - Arab and Jew, he says, are 'blood brothers' and hatred is another name for lack of choice.
His choice instead, was to set up a school for Palestinian children around Galilee. To this he added a holiday camp each year, because these children didn't know what a holiday was. And now there's a university too, at which Muslims and Christians and lately Jews too are educated. He told us of people of all religious communities, Israelis and Palestinians, committed to friendship, non-violence and peace.
At Easter each year, when we look back in wonder at the Israel of 30AD, and when we reflect on the continuing lack of peace in Jerusalem, it is reassuring to know that the Holy Land still has the potential to be a holy place and that people from Galilee can still change the world.
Or, to put it another way, it is deeply moving and humbling to discover that the commitment and courage of a person like Elias Chacour, willing to get his hands dirty in the cause of new life and human hope, keeps alive the spirit of Easter.
Fr Chacour spoke to us about Spirit. He reminded us that the word used in Hebrew for the Spirit of God, 'ruach', can mean both breath and wind. At the beginning of Genesis it is the 'ruach', the wind, that sweeps over the waters and brings a new order of creation. These were choppy, chaotic waters not the gently rippling surface of a park lake.
This brings home to me the thought that the wind of God's Spirit is not a polite little breeze but a bad-mannered wind. The kind of storm that rattles the windows and slams the doors - that pushes people around and gets in their way. Not genteel at all - and it turns lives upside down. Not the kind of visitor, perhaps, that our Western diffidence and Edinburgh good manners rushes to welcome.
Yet, if you think about it, how else could the Christian faith have brought us here? For in the end, the Spirit of God doesn't 'do' wafting! It blows, blows and directs, purposefully. This is why, in company with millions, we still proclaim in 2005, 'Jesus Christ is risen - risen indeed, Alleluia!'
For ultimately, let's be honest, cool, calculating, dry and discerning faith is not the motive power of Christianity. It is those men and women who've been prepared to break the mould, yes, even slightly eccentric and disreputable men and women, who trace for us the Spirit's path. Trust and commitment, love and passion, determination and resilience, together with a pig-headed refusal to compromise, these mark the stormy dealings of people like Mary Magdalene and St Paul, Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther, Mother Theresa, Janani Luwum, Elias Chacour. On Thursday we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a man whose stand against the cruel repression of the powerful on behalf of the weak needed not a zephyr but a storm wind. Such are the Easter people with whom we claim kinship.
If you're like me I know what you'll be saying. 'It's all very well talking about storms, but storms can damage people too, lives can be turned inside out in bad ways as well as good.' We don't need to look far today to find lives and minds warped by the wrong kind of religion. Isn't it true that too much zeal, too much spiritual energy wrongly used can be diverted into fundamentalisms of all kinds, literalism, intolerance, anger, self-righteousness, that make us less not more human? Surely the still small voice of reason needs to be heard, to bring sense and balance and calm.
Yet there is a danger in this too. Too easily reason tells us to settle for a stability that is second best. Best to keep the peace, like Pilate, best to protect our people's interests like Caiaphas, best to maintain world order, fight terrorism, keep our faith unsullied by the world, and if small people are hurt along the way, it's a price we must pay. Our mural, outside on the east wall of the church, points out that it was not just Pilate who knew how to wash his hands and move on - neither is it just politicians for we, the public, too have short memory spans and turn so quickly away from the needs and agonies that trouble our TV viewing, when the latest election intervenes.
No, the wind blows where it wills, we do not know where it comes from or where it is driving us, so it is for all who are born of the Spirit. Not for us the option of sheltering behind the windbreak or hiding in the cellar. Not for us the excuse, if we count ourselves Easter people too, of settling for half measures. The wind blows us where it wills.
Of course, we must test the wind. But we cannot just test it by saying, 'Now what is most reasonable here? What is safest, for our bank balance, for our peace of mind, or to keep us on good terms with our friends, our bosses, the people we admire?' What we have to measure ourselves against is Easter itself, when God's Spirit blew through the tomb and emptied it but only after it had stormed and died on Golgotha.
If we take this as our pattern, our test, then we find that Easter values are self-sacrifice, compassion, forgiveness, trust, and the refusal to return violence for violence. Easter Day shows how God takes our failures, takes all the negatives, takes even death itself and turns them into reasons to believe, to hope and to love.
The call to us is to begin to allow these values to shape the choices we make. And like Elias Chacour to respond to the things that disturb us with trust and commitment, love and passion, determination and resilience, together with a pig-headed refusal to compromise - make change happen, whether that means forgiving our neighbour, lobbying politicians, campaigning to Make Poverty History or any number of other things.
In this way we bear witness to the Resurrection and learn to blow with the storm wind of the Spirit; and so become part of the reason people in future centuries will still proclaim as we do, 'Jesus is risen indeed. Alleluia!'
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