Sermon Archive
The fellowship of the Holy Spirit
Sermon preached by John Burdett at Holy Communion on 23 November 2003
The Royal Museum in Chambers Street has just opened a new gallery called Communicate!. It includes exhibits ranging from drums from Papua New Guinea, which are still used as a means of communication, to the latest technology in mobile phones, which incidentally are useless in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
One of the exhibits that particularly interests me is a heliograph. I learnt to use one when I was at school. In principle it's quite simple, you use a mirror to reflect the sun's rays to the person you want to signal to. But there are a number of difficulties. For example: How do you aim the mirror in the right direction? How do you use it for signalling? And how do you allow for the sun's continual movement? Aiming is quite straightforward. You line the mirror up using a fairly simple sighting arrangement. You can send messages in Morse code by pushing down on a lever which tilts the mirror. Allowing for the movement of the sun is more complicated. You have to continually twist two knobs to keep the beam of reflected light pointing in the right direction.
One of the advantages of a heliograph is that only the person you're aiming it at can read what you're saying. Other people may see the mirror flashing as the beam of light sweeps past them, but it won't be intelligible as a message.
There are repeated references to light throughout the Bible. Right at the very beginning of the Old Testament, in the 3rd verse of Genesis, God said 'Let there be light', and there was light. Isaiah says 'The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light' and later 'The Lord will be your everlasting light'. And the Book of Wisdom says that wisdom is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's active power.
In the New Testament Jesus is repeatedly associated with light. When he was a tiny baby Simeon called him a light to lighten the Gentiles. St John, in the prologue to his Gospel, says 'In him was life, and that life was the light of men'. Jesus referred to himself as the light of the world. And St John, in his first epistle, says quite explicitly 'This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light'.
At Pentecost the disciples saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. They weren't immersed in one great flame, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the burning fiery furnace. They each had their own personal flame. God's love was personal to them, his inspiration was personal to them, his commands were personal to them, as they are to us. It was as if the Holy Spirit had directed the beam of God's love on each of them in a way that only they could read and understand.
We know that God loves us, but his love is particular to each one of us and his message and his commands are particular to each one of us, just as parents love each of their children, but they love them in slightly different ways, particular to each of them.
So God's message to each of us is like a signal from a heliograph - aimed by the Holy Spirit at each of us personally, in a form that each of us can understand, and, as St James says, with no shadow due to turning, because God doesn't shift in the way the sun appears to, nor does his love.
But I haven't so far mentioned two of the major difficulties with a heliograph. It won't work at night. But God can speak to us at any time, night or day. Perhaps particularly at night, when we're less distracted by our daily concerns, and because as the psalmist said 'Even darkness is not dark for you, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are the same to you'. And as St John said, 'The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it'. Bill Brockie quoted Elisabeth Graham's mother three weeks ago. I'd like to quote her too, because she taught me a very valuable lesson. She'd been saying she hadn't been sleeping well, and I said 'The trouble with lying awake at night is that you start worrying'. And she said 'No, I pray'.
Which brings me to the other main difficulty with a heliograph -- you'll never receive a message if you^?re not looking in the right direction at the right time. That may be because we've shut our eyes or turned our backs, which we're perfectly free to do if we want to. Or it may be just because we're lazy. Or it may be because we're not expecting a message.
But those first Christians who received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost were continually in the temple praising God, and they were in a high state of expectation. They were looking for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and when it came they recognised it. But that sort of thing doesn't happen nowadays, does it? Or does it? Is the trouble simply that we're so infected by down-to-earth materialism that we're not sufficiently expectant?
The Holy Spirit may not appear to us like tongues of flame, but if we open ourselves to his light, we will receive his love and his inspiration and his commands, which are personal to us.
And just as the light from a heliograph can be reflected again by another mirror, so we can reflect God's love. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, 'All of us, then, reflect the glory of the Lord'. And this reflection, from one to another, builds up a network of communication, of communion. And with the communication, the communion, comes the community - the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. That's a phrase we hear so often that we almost forget to listen to it 'The fellowship of the Holy Spirit'. This fellowship, this community, involves communion not only with God but with our neighbours - the people we meet every day - the people sitting next to you now. We're part of a network held together by love. A holy internet of faith and prayer and love, all of it stemming from God himself, because, as we said at the beginning of this service, God is love. We love because God loved us first.
The origin of that love is, of course, God himself. Jesus gave the world two commandments: 'Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbour as yourself'. But for us, his disciples, whom he's chosen to call his friends he's got a third. 'A new commandment I give you: Love one another, just as I have loved you'. That doesn't supersede his second commandment, 'Love your neighbour as yourself' - that's a general rule governing our relationship with everyone. Now he's talking about the special bond of love that must unite us with all of our fellow Christians. That was a new commandment. The Scribes and Pharisees already knew the first two -- you can find them in the Old Testament -- but this new commandment has a narrower range and a more intense quality.
But there's a linguistic difficulty here. The English language, being derived from a number of different sources is extraordinarily rich compared with languages that are, for example, purely Nordic or purely Latin in origin. We can use different words to express shades of meaning where other languages have only one word available. But where love is concerned we're very badly off. We use the same word for a wide range of concepts from casual lust to the relationship between the members of the Holy Trinity.
And when Jesus said 'Love one another' he was talking about Agapē, which is the Greek word used to describe God's love. It's an expression of the essential nature of God. It's got nothing to do with affection or emotion; it isn't always in line with the natural inclinations of the person who expresses the love. It's the love shown by God in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, and on a humbler level it's the love shown by a woman in caring for a cantankerous old neighbour whom she dislikes and who takes all her care for granted and gives nothing in return. It's like the special intense light from a heliograph that you can see even in broad daylight.
I sometimes feel that people get muddled over this whole business of Christian love. Jesus told us to love one another. He didn't tell us to like each other. You can't like everybody, not even all your fellow Christians. I mean, who could possibly like . . .? On second thoughts, the task of filling in the blanks I'd rather leave to you. I suppose you can see Christian love more clearly where people don't like each other, or don't even know each other, than where affection and mutual sympathy make caring and cherishing and serving something that we enjoy.
This command that we should love one another must have been of tremendous importance to Jesus, because he kept it until his final talk to his disciples - until the climax of his teaching. This love for each other had to be the hallmark of the Church that would carry on the work he'd started. It forms the links in the network. Jesus said 'Love one another just as I have loved you. By this love you have for one another everyone will know that you are my disciples'. And when the Church keeps that new commandment in a holy internet of love and faith and prayer perhaps the world will learn to keep the old ones.