“Who Works Through You?”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Text: 1 Corinthians 12:3-13, John 20:19-23
They called it “an incident” but no one really defined precisely what “the incident” was. It occurred in 1963 on a Hungarian ship sailing in the North Atlantic. Something happened on board amongst the crew, and because of it, two members of the crew were “sectioned.” By sectioned, I mean that they were deemed to be intellectually incompetent. So, they were taken off the ship, brought on shore into Halifax, met with the police and the Department of Immigration, and eventually placed in a mental institution in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
It was 20 years later that I encountered the two men. They were still in that mental institution, still receiving psychiatric care, had never wandered off the grounds of the hospital, and were confined to the same ward. I was there as a pastoral intern student. These two Hungarian men, Tabor and Carl were very close to one another. It was obvious that because they had been on board ship and they had a long history with one another that they were close friends, so much so that they seemed inseparable. They went to meals together, to the gym together, and they were separated only by a few inches most of the time.
They were so close, and because only one of them spoke any English, it was necessary that if anyone wanted to convey something to the other then they had to have the other there to interpret. Carl was the one who spoke excellent English. Throughout the time I was there he befriended me, and at times would even make fun of me. He would tap me on the stomach and he would call me “nagy dereg fiv”. Is that close Rev. Tamas? “My big, fat boy” was the literal interpretation.
He would actually be in conversation with me a lot of the time, for he was also a devout Christian. His friend Tabor had grown up in the Reformed Church, the Magyar Church, which was the Calvinist Reform Church in Hungary that dates back as early as the 1540s, so he would talk theology with me. Tabor would just sit there. However, one day, only one of them was there. Carl died of a heart attack. Tabor was completely lost. He had depended on his friend to speak English, to translate, to take him places. He was the loneliest human being that I had ever seen.
Yet, over the days and the weeks that followed, Tabor came of age. He went to the worship services, but now he started to sing the hymns in English. He would recite the prayers and the Apostle's Creed. He would try and talk to me. He started to ask for his own medications. He started to interact with other people in the ward. Tabor, it seemed, came of age. Everyone thought that with the disappearance of Carl everything would fall apart, but on the contrary, everything in Tabor came to life. This man blossomed and grew as a human being.
I have thought about the relationship between Tabor and Carl, and I liken it in many ways to a parallel relationship between Jesus and the disciples. Now, let's not take the analogy too far! I only wish to imply that the relationship between Jesus and the disciples was one of having been bound in a close bond and a close relationship while Jesus was on this earth. Throughout Jesus' ministry the disciples followed him wherever he went. They hung on his every word. He translated for them the will of the Father. There was a sense in which not only were they with Jesus, but they were guided by Jesus. He was their voice, he was The Word, he was their source.
Even though they had observed his death and crucifixion, even though they had seen him raised from the dead, still the bond they had with him was one of the likeness of Tabor and Carl, one that depended on him, and was bound to him in a great bond of love. A wonderful relationship! In many ways, it appeared that after Jesus had appeared to them and after his Resurrection and then having left them and ascended, the disciples were left with his memory. They were left with his message, they were left with his stories and anecdotes and experiences of his power, but he was gone, like in the great Roman plays. Jesus was like the deus ex machina, the character who just appeared on the scene suddenly like God, and then disappears and leaves the scene. For the disciples, it appeared that was it. A wonderful story! Great memories! A fabulous encounter! A Lord to follow and worship! A God to glorify! Sitting at the right hand in heaven! This was it, though, he had left the scene, so it appeared.
It appears so to many people. For average people today, when you talk about Jesus and his ministry, you would talk about Jesus as that deus ex machina, as that god that appears, but then disappears and goes on his own. So many of the biographies that have been written over the last 200 years, and that started in the 19th century and have caught on again in the early part of this millennium, have been based on the fact that the story we have of Jesus and his Gospel ends with his glorious Resurrection, his Ascension into heaven, and an account of his life.
Many of those who follow biblical studies look at Jesus and try to see him through the eyes of history, as if history alone will be able to determine how much we can actually know about this Jesus and his life and his ministry. There might be some of you, in all honesty, who treat Jesus as if he is just someone who broke on to a scene 2,000 years ago, did miraculous things, revealed the power of God, even forgave sins, but now is raised and has disappeared.
If that was the whole of the Christian Gospel, fair enough! If that is the end of the message of The Bible, okay! But, I think there is something more. I think there is something in that song from the Beatles that “You say 'Goodbye' But I say 'Hello.'” To the disciples, who thought Jesus had disappeared from the scene, Jesus took them to one side and before his very exit he says to them, “I will not leave you alone, I will send you a spirit of peace that as the Father has sent me, so have I sent you.” In other words, Jesus promises not only to be a memory, but to be a powerful presence, not only to ascend to heaven but through the power of the Spirit to continue to speak to the ministry and the power of the Church.
If you look at this story closely, you will see that Jesus had already promised the disciples, even during his ministry, in that magnificent passage between John 14 and 17 and the great High Priest's prayer, Jesus says to the disciples, “I will not leave you comfortless. I will send you a helper who will be with you always. You will bear witness to me as the result of the power of the Holy Spirit. You will do greater things than me by the power of the Holy Spirit. You will achieve great things. I will not leave you comfortless. I will not leave you alone. ”
It is not only in John's Gospel that we see this. We see this theme working its way through Luke and the Book of Acts as well. There is this sense in which Jesus will bestow upon the disciples the power of the Holy Spirit to be able to lead others into the ministry which he had begun. Even the Apostle Paul, picking up this very same theme in the Book of Corinthians, believed that the Church would be empowered with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and again in the text that was read today, to be able to do great things.
My friends, in other words, the story of the Christian Gospel does not end with the ascension of Jesus to heaven; it continues through the power of the Holy Spirit, as promised to the Church. That promise takes two forms in the text that we have in John's Gospel. The first is the form of a comfort. It is no coincidence that on two separate occasions Jesus says, “My peace I leave with you.”
Not only does Jesus send the Holy Spirit, he sends the Holy Spirit as a spirit of peace, as a spirit of comfort. In other words, they might have their memories. They might have tremendous stories, they might have had great prayers that they were creating and hymns that they were singing in praise of Jesus, but they had more… they had the comfort of his very presence.
In many ways then, even the way that Easter was remembered was different. The Easter story, the Resurrection of Jesus, was something that they had observed. They had gone to the empty tomb. They had found it that way. They had experienced Jesus appearing to them in many different places after the Resurrection, but now Jesus is inviting them not just to observe Easter, but to participate in Easter. In other words, the very same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead is now going to be working in them and through them. This is what Pentecost is about. It is not the deus ex machine who appears and then disappears; this is the God who continues to bring peace and comfort and power to his people.
I started by talking about two Hungarians, and I am not doing this just to please Rick, although it is, but there is a very famous Bishop from the Lutheran Church and his name was Lajos Odess. He was one of the most famous Lutheran priests in a small Lutheran Church from Hungary. In the 1950s, when the Communists took over Hungary, when the people were oppressed, when the church schools were being closed, and the pastors were being imprisoned, Odess being one of them (he spent two years in prison because he spoke out against the closing of the Christian schools). He was bullied and tortured and finally made his way to give a presentation in 1956 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
To a small gathering of worldwide Lutheran bishops he wanted to give a sense of the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it empowered him to stand against the monolithic power of the Communists. His speech goes down in Lutheran folklore! Part of the speech is as follows in excerpt. He said to them, remembering what he had gone through:
They placed me in solitary confinement. It was a tiny cell, perhaps six feet by eight feet, with no windows, and it was soundproof. They hoped to break down my resistance by isolating me from all sensory perceptions. They thought I was alone. They were wrong! The Risen Christ in the power of the Spirit was present in that room, and in communion with Him I was able to prevail.
Here was a man who had suffered for his faith against a mighty system of oppression in a room that was solitary, but he knew that it wasn't solitary, because the power of the Risen Christ was with him in the power of the Spirit.
That is precisely what Jesus had promised the Church and promised the disciples right from the very beginning. There are many of you, who at times in your lives, maybe not facing the same kind of oppression as Bishop Odess did, but still nevertheless feeling the power of oppression of loneliness or of despair or the inability to cope with the challenges of life, who sometimes feel in the presence of death even, that all is lost, you should hear the words of Jesus, the words to the Church, “Peace be with you.”
There is a second aspect to this, and that is that there was a commission. Jesus didn't just comfort the disciples; he actually went out of his way to give them a sense of commission. He says to them, “As the Father has sent me so I send you.” In other words, just as Jesus had been given the great call, had been given the great task of bringing the Good News of God's love and salvation to the world, so too are those who follow in his name are being given precisely the same commission. From the peace that he offered comes the power that he offered to bear witness to his name, and he did so by creating a community that was based on the power of the very Spirit that had raised him from the dead, a community of people who were being lifted up in order that they might be able to go out into the world.
Now, I don't think that we should extend things overly to believe that somehow the Church has improved on Jesus. Dostoevsky warned us not to do that with the story of the Ground Inquisitor in that magnificent book, The Brothers Karamazov. Don't do that! Don't believe that the Church is greater than Christ! That is a heresy! But, do understand that the Church's call to the mission of Christ, as the Father had sent him, so he sends us.
I had a deeply moving conversation last Sunday night when I was in Nova Scotia. It was a moving conversation because it was with the person who taught me the first course in the program at Acadia, Dr. John Samara. He is not a divinity professor. In fact, he is a professor of psychology in the Education Department. But, he is a deeply committed Christian. Dr. Samara is someone who I have known for nearly 25 years, and I admire him greatly for his intellect, and for all his ability to publish, he spends a lot of his free time working in the L'Arche community under the guidance of Jean Vanier with those who are mentally ill. John says that he finds in working with people who are vulnerable and in need, the power of the Spirit working in the community to embrace and nurture and lift up those who are weak. He said, “You know, the more I think about the power of God's Spirit in my life, the more I witness the power of God's Holy Spirit at work in the world. I realize that it is the same Jesus Christ, the same Jesus of Nazareth, who is out there touching people's lives, and giving them the peace and the hope that they need even in their brokenness.”
He said, “I want you to read something when you go back home.” And he gave me some quotes from Jean Vanier - always the teacher, Dr. John! One of them says the following, and I think in the light of this magnificent text from John's Gospel this means the world. Vanier wrote:
Communion is mutual trust and mutual belonging. It is the to and fro movement of love between two people, where each one gives and each one receives. Communion is not a fixed state. It is an ever-growing and deepening reality. Community is mutual vulnerability and brokenness, one to the other. It is liberation and freedom for both, indeed, where both are allowed to be themselves, where both are called to grow in greater freedom and openness to others and to the universe and to the all-loving God.
Is that not what the Church is called to be in our age? Is that not the power of community? I think it is! But, it is not community for the sake of community. It is community that is bound together by the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit. And, when that Holy Spirit is at work, Christ continues to speak to the world through us.
Christ continues to have his mission through us. You know, the more I think of Carl and Tabor and their relationship, I realize that Tabor had been listening to Carl. But, once Carl had stopped speaking because he had left the scene, Tabor started to speak on the basis of what he had learned from Carl. Tabor sounded like Carl. Even his making fun of me sounded like Carl. When he pressed my stomach and said, “nagy dereg fiv” he sounded like him.
When the Church speaks in the power of the Spirit, and when it becomes a community of the peace of the Lord, it is as if Jesus is addressing the world again. So, I ask you, ?“ Who works through you? Does that same Spirit manifest himself through you?” I pray it does! Amen.