“If Stones Could Shout” (Luke 19:28-40)

For the next few moments I want you to try to imagine what it must have been like to be among those who stood on the streets of Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. (I’ll even let you close your eyes if you like, as long as you promise not to go to sleep!)

The city would have been bustling with people, as worshippers from all over Palestine and many from considerably farther afield—from as far away as the distant corners of the vast Roman Empire—had begun to gather in preparation for the annual Passover celebration.

For centuries there had been a tradition that, as they made their way towards the holy city, travellers would recite what are known as the Psalms of Ascents, the fifteen psalms beginning with Psalm 120. Many of those psalms remain familiar to us today, as they have become entrenched in our Christian worship: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?” “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go the house of the Lord.’” “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved…” “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream…” “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain…”

So it was that there was literally music in the air as Jesus and his followers made their way towards Jerusalem. Our Bible reading this morning opens with them looking across at the city from the top of the slope that separates it from the Mount of Olives—and I find myself hearing the distant echoes of those psalms being sung in the background.

As they made their way along the twisting road that led down into the valley and then up towards the city, Jesus knew what awaited him there. Indeed, he had been warning his followers about it for some months: “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.” (Luke 19:31-33)

The Disciples

In fact, Jesus had warned them on at least three separate occasions what was going to happen to him. However, the disciples, really hadn’t paid very much attention at the time. Plus, I suspect that by this time they were so caught up in the excitement of the coming Passover celebration that those words of foreboding had faded almost entirely from their minds. They would have had no idea of the darkness that was to engulf them over the coming days.

It was in that context that Jesus came to them with a request: “Go into the village ahead of you. There on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’”

The instructions seem strange to me—almost like something out of a James Bond movie. However, the disciples seemed to think nothing of it and went on their way unquestioningly, following Jesus’ directions to the letter. And as it turned out, everything was exactly as he had told them. Little did they know that they were embarking on a trajectory that would lead to treachery, betrayal, torture and execution.

Now they were happy to obey Jesus and to carry out his instructions. But in a few days’ time they would see this same Jesus, whom they had come to love and adore, roughly arrested, unjustly tried, brutally tortured, and nailed to a cross to die a slow, agonizing death. And they would find themselves cowering behind locked doors in fear for their lives. Piece by piece, everything that they had come to believe in and to hold dear over the previous three years would be turned on its head.

The Multitude

The next scene takes us to the gates of Jerusalem. Located atop Mount Zion and surrounded by thick stone walls, the city would have made an impressive site, especially for those who came from the towns and villages of the countryside.

I am reminded of one of my visits to New York City. I was with a friend and we were walking through the streets of Manhattan, when a stranger came up to us and said, “You’re visitors here, aren’t you?” When we asked him what gave us away, he replied, “It’s because you’re looking up, not ahead.” All our attention had been riveted on the enormous skyscrapers that towered above us, to the point where we weren’t paying any attention to where we were going!

I can imagine a similar dynamic taking place with many of the pilgrims from the tiny hamlets of Palestine—among them Jesus’ disciples. There were the more than a quarter of a million of them jostling along through its narrow streets. And everything about the city would have prompted oohs and ahs.

At the centre of it all was the magnificent Temple occupying thirty-six acres of land. Its fifty-foot-high gates flanked by enormous columns, its gold glistening in the hot Near Eastern sun, it would have been an impressive sight even to modern eyes. Already more than forty-six years in the making, it would not be fully completed for another four decades.

Now add to that the excitement and anticipation over the coming celebration of Passover. Then into this scene there enters a strange sight—a man riding on a donkey, with other men going before him and spreading their cloaks along his path as though he were a king or some kind of royalty. This leads to what seems to have been a spontaneous outburst of excitement, as some join in and spread their garments on the road, while still others cut down palm branches and lay them along the cobblestones. Meanwhile, all of this is accompanied by joyful shouts of “Hosanna!” and “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Of course, we all know that within the space of a few short days the jubilant cheers of the multitude would turn to shouts of “Crucify!” Among them there might even have been some of those who passed by him as he hung naked on the cross, who jeered at him and mocked him with the words, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself…”

The Stones

Then there were the religious authorities, who would have none of this spontaneous celebration. “Teacher,” they snapped, “rebuke your disciples.” To which Jesus replied, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

My suspicion is that the stones that Jesus was referring to may have been the enormous megaliths that formed the base of the Temple. Some of them weighed as much as five hundred tonnes. You may recall that on a previous visit to Jerusalem one of Jesus’ disciples had drawn attention to them. “Look,” he said (and I can imagine the wonderment in his voice). “What massive stones! And what enormous buildings!” (Mark 13:1)

Now let me ask: Can you think of anything more inanimate than a stone—particularly a stone of that magnitude? Yet Jesus says, “If [the human voices] were silent, the very stones would cry out.” What did he mean? Was he just being poetic? Was he using exaggeration to get his point across?

Maybe. But I think there was more. And my reason is this: It is because at the cross everything would change—and I mean everything. It was not just a matter of closing the gap that separates you and me from God on account of our sin. What was happening on the cross would radically affect the whole created order in its entirety—even the rocks! For it was on the cross that Jesus would defeat once and for ever the cosmic powers of sin and evil and death—all that is wrong and sinful and out of step with God’s will in the universe.

We get a glimpse of what was happening in Matthew’s remarkable account of what took place in Jerusalem at the moment when Jesus gave up his spirit:

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27:51-53)

So it is that when we get to the Book of Revelation, we find the aged John peering through his astonished eyes not just to catch a dream of things made better, but to be captured by a vision of the whole of creation transformed. What he gazed upon was a new heaven and a new earth. “For,” he says, “the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” (Revelation 21:1)

The apostle Paul expressed the same kind of understanding in his letter to the Romans, when he wrote:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:18-23)

So as we move through this Holy Week towards the observance of Good Friday and Easter, if I leave you with anything, I want to leave you with a cosmic vision of what was taking place as our Lord and his disciples made their way into the holy city.

When Jesus was to utter those words from the cross, “It is finished,” he was not just saying that his life was coming to an end. He was doing away once and for all with sin and evil and death. He was ushering in a whole new creation, made perfect in accordance with the will and pleasure of his Father.

In the words of the apostle Paul, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20)

When New Testament scholar N.T. Wright wrote his book about the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion six years ago, he chose the dramatic title The Day the Revolution Began. In his conclusion to this massive 400-page-plus study, he wrote this (and please forgive me for quoting it at length!):

With all this we lift up our eyes and realize that [we] have been so concerned with getting to heaven, with sin as the problem blocking the way, … that [we have] forgotten that the gospels give us [the atonement] not as a neat little system, but as a powerful, many-sided, richly revelatory narrative in which we are invited to find ourselves, or rather to lose ourselves and to be found again on the other side. We have gone wading in the shallow and stagnant waters of medieval questions and answers … when only a few yards away is the vast and dangerous ocean of the gospel story, inviting us to plunge in and let the waves of dark glory wash over us, wash us through and through, and land us on the shores of God’s new creation.[1]

The obedience of the disciples would quickly turn to fear. The shouts of “Hosanna!” that rang through the streets of Jerusalem would soon be no more than an echo. But the day is coming when even the stones will not be silent, but will resound with the joyful chorus of all the redeemed:

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honour and glory and blessing!
(Revelation 5:12)

Let’s be sure that you and I are part of the crowd!

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[1]       The Day the Revolution Began, 415-416

“In the Meantime…” (2 Corinthians 5:1-21)

Years ago (in fact it was the first summer after we were married), Karen and I decided that we would spend our summer vacation visiting her relatives and my birthplace here in Nova Scotia. We didn’t have a large salary between us, and we were young and adventuresome, so we decided that it would be a camping holiday. Everything went wonderfully smoothly until we were in Ingonish on Cape Breton Island. It was there that, around two in the morning, the heavens broke loose with a torrential rain. The downpour was unremitting. Pools of water began to develop on the roof of our old canvas tent and the whole structure began to sag. I ran around the outside tightening the guy ropes, but my efforts were of no avail. We rearranged things inside the tent to protect them from the drip-drip-drip that had begun to develop. But by five o’clock and not having slept a wink, we decided that it was time to pack up and abandon ship, so to speak. So, we hopped into the car, drove the two hours to Sydney and waited in the parking lot outside Canadian Tire until opening time. (Needless to say, the sky had already begun to clear, and I don’t think we had another drop of rain for the rest of our time in Nova Scotia!)

Well, I hope my little tale of woe doesn’t discourage any of you who might be thinking of camping this summer! It’s really an attempt to help us dig into the apostle Paul’s words in our passage from 2 Corinthians this morning, where Paul begins by writing about tents: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven…”

I probably don’t have to remind you that Paul was a tentmaker by profession. That was how he made his living. And I suspect that he worked hard to make good, quality tents. Although in the climate where he lived, they would have been more to shield from the sun than from the rain. Yet Paul knew that, no matter what kind of material you stitched a tent from, it was not going to last for ever. It might stand up for years, with special care perhaps even a decade or two. But the ravages of the hot Middle Eastern sun would eventually reduce it to worthless rags.

For Paul the tents that he carefully cut and sewed together were a reminder of his own mortality. The author of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament put it much more grimly when he mused,

Honour and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young,
Before the years take their toll and your vigour wanes,
Before your vision dims and the world blurs
And the winter years keep you close to the fire.
In old age, your body no longer serves you so well.
Muscles slacken, grip weakens, joints stiffen.
The shades are pulled down on the world.
You can’t come and go at will. Things grind to a halt.
The hum of the household fades away.
You are wakened now by bird song.
Hikes to the mountains are a thing of the past.
Even a stroll down the road has its terrors.
Your hair turns apple-blossom white,
Adorning a fragile and impotent matchstick body.
Yes, you’re well on your way to eternal rest,
While your friends make plans for your funeral.
Life, lovely while it lasts, is soon over.
Life as we know it, precious and beautiful, ends.
The body is put back in the same ground it came from.
The spirit returns to God, who first breathed it.
It’s all smoke, nothing but smoke…
Everything’s smoke. (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8, The Message)

Well, if that doesn’t get you down, in recent months the fragility of life and health has been made much more real for us with the advent of covid. Who would have thought less than half a year ago that we would all be attending church on YouTube, followed by a fellowship hour on Zoom, and shopping at stores dressed like bandits?

Promised (1-8)

Well, it wasn’t my intention to put you into a depression this morning! Nor was it Paul’s when he wrote to his friends in Corinth. Because Paul wanted to assure them that this tent, that is our bodies, is not all there is to life—that they will be replaced with something far greater and far more glorious than anything you or I can ever begin to imagine. In Paul’s words, it is “a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands”.

Now the biblical authors in their wisdom (and that includes Paul) do not tell us in any detail what that resurrection life will be like. Suffice it to say that it will surpass anything we have experienced in the here and now. The prophets offer us glimpses in the language of poetry of a place where “the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food,” where there is no harm or destruction (Isaiah 65:25). The book of Revelation gives us that remarkable picture of a numberless crowd of people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” standing around the throne of the Lamb, while the angels and the heavenly beings cry aloud,

Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honour
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen! (Revelation 7:12)

But it seems to me that apart from a few other images here and there, that is about as specific as the Bible gets. C.S. Lewis was able to put a lot of these biblical pictures together in what I think is a very original way, in a little book entitled The Great Divorce. It is the imaginative story of a group of people who are transported from this world into the next. To his surprise, Lewis finds that the world as he had known it had in reality been little more than shadows and that life in the world to come was far more real and far more solid than anything he might have envisioned even in his wildest dreams.

After he gets out of the bus, he senses that he is in a space with a vastness far greater than anything he has ever experienced before. Even the solar system seems like nothing more than the inside of a room. As his gaze turns to his fellow passengers, he observes that they are transparent like ghosts, that the grass does not bend underneath them when they tread on it. He stoops down to pluck a daisy growing at his feet and, although he tugs at it until sweat pours from his forehead, the stalk refuses to break or even twist. The story goes on and I’ll leave it to you to read it. But the point that Lewis was seeking to make is that the world that awaits us is immeasurably more substantial than anything we have experienced or can even imagine in the here and now.

Practised (9-17)

At this point we need to be clear what Paul (and for that matter the whole Bible) is talking about. It is not just some future experience that awaits us, the proverbial “pie in the sky when I die”. For those of us who have entered a relationship with Jesus Christ it is a present reality. Paul puts it this way in verse 17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

So there is a sense in which, through our faith in Jesus Christ, you and I have already begun to set foot in that new creation. To be sure, we are still fallible, sinful and as prone as ever to mess things up (and here I speak from my own experience!). Yet at the same time we are called both as a church and as individual believers to live as inhabitants of that new creation.

“So,” says Paul in verse 16, “from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” That is, when we enter a relationship with Jesus, everything takes on a new perspective—particularly the categories by which we are so inclined to define ourselves and other people, whether they be social status or education or looks or sex or race or whatever else.

As I was preparing for this morning’s sermon, I came across some profound words on this subject by James Denney, a Scottish Bible scholar who taught with remarkable clarity. Here is a little of what he wrote more than 125 years ago:

Those who are in Christ have died to the whole order of life in which [people] are judged ‘after the flesh’. Perhaps the Christian Church has almost as much need as any other society to lay this to heart. We are still too ready to put stress upon distinctions which are quite in place in the world, but are without ground in Christ. Even in a Christian congregation there is a recognition of wealth, of learning, of social position, … of race, [all of] which is not Christian… These distinctions … are meaningless in relation to Christ, and ought not to be made… If [these] distinctions … are lost in the common relation to Christ, then life is open to us in all its length and breadth; all things are ours, because we are his. To make them narrows and impoverishes the soul. To be guided by worldly distinctions is to know … people by what is superficial in their nature; but … to look at [them] in relation to him who is Redeemer and Lord of all, is to know all our [brothers and sisters], and to know them not on the surface, but to the heart.[1]

This was the point that Paul was at pains to get across again and again in his two letters to the church in Corinth. For tragically it was a congregation where social status was still all too important for some, where others had not let go of pagan practices, and still others had allowed themselves to slide into immorality.

In contrast to this, Paul writes elsewhere that in the Christian community “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And in the book of Acts Paul’s companion Luke tells us of the earliest Christian community, where

they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together… They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42-47)

Now I’m not saying that we need to mimic that church in every detail, but clearly it was a community in which Jesus was present, where the world to come was visible in the things that are, where God’s new creation was erupting amid the old. And that is what God in Christ is calling you and me to be today. To put it in Paul’s words, we are Christ’s ambassadors.

Purchased (18-21)

But how is all this possible? Paul summarizes it for us in what for me is one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

It was on the cross that Jesus absorbed into himself all the anger, pain, bitterness and division, all the injustice, prejudice, conflict, hatred and evil that have so poisoned and corrupted God’s creation. It was at the cross that God pronounced his definitive “No!” to all that is wrong with the world. And through that cross God has opened the way to the new creation, to our home in eternity.

The day will surely come when you and I will shed this tent of our earthly bodies—when we shall be gathered in that new creation to stand in awe around the throne of the Lamb. But between that time and this God has redeemed us and called us and empowers us to be agents and representatives of that world that is to come—a community where Christ is present and seen and believed through the witness of our lives. May God the Holy Spirit make us equal to that task!

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[1]       Denney, 2 Corinthians, 1894, p. 208

“Blown Away” (Acts 2:1-11)

 I’ve been scratching my brain to find a suitable metaphor to describe the experience of Jesus’ followers on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit first came upon them in power. One image that came to mind was the four Pevensie children in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia—Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy—when they first entered that strange, enchanted land with its fauns and talking beavers, a witch who turns innocent creatures into stone and of course Aslan the great lion-saviour.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, the second image that came to me (and maybe I am about to reveal things about me that you didn’t want to know!) was from the movie Ghostbusters. Do you remember the scenes where the cameras began to reveal strange things happening beneath the otherwise normal streets of New York City? Odd-coloured vapours arising from the drains, paving stones heaving, gargoyles on buildings starting to twitch…

In each case we are being introduced to a world beyond our own, to the notion that what we consider normal is only the tiniest fragment of a vast, hidden realm unperceived by our senses. For the Pevensie children it lay behind the doors of an ordinary wardrobe. For Dr Peter Venkman and his team of parapsychologists it was hidden in the recesses of a major metropolis.

For Jesus’ followers something of that wider world had been opened up to them as they followed him through the towns and villages of Galilee. There they witnessed things that they would never have thought possible: paralyzed people walking, blind people seeing again, lepers being cleansed, demons being cast out, the dead raised back to life again. To use Jesus’ own words, the kingdom of heaven was among them. And of course things had become stranger still in the days following Jesus’ crucifixion, as he appeared among them recognizably the same and yet somehow strangely different.

Up until now you might say they had just brushed with the kingdom of heaven. On Pentecost they were actually stepping into it themselves for the first time. “Suddenly,” as Luke describes it, “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Many of us are so accustomed to reading this passage at Pentecost that I wonder if we haven’t lost sight of what a terrifying event this must have been.

The sound of the wind that swept through the room was not like some gentle summer’s breeze. Nor was it even that of a strong wind in which you might be tempted to go out for a sail or fly a kite. No, it was “a violent wind”, a wind powerful enough to sweep you off your feet and blow down trees. In the words of Psalm 29, it was a wind that “twists the oaks and strips the forests bare”. Those of us who were here in Halifax for Hurricane Juan a dozen years ago would have an idea of what I mean. The word Luke uses to describe the forcefulness of that wind at Pentecost is found in only two other places in Scripture. We come across the first instance as Moses and the people of Israel stood on the banks of the Red Sea with all the might of Pharaoh’s vast army approaching fast behind them. We are told that Moses “stretched out his hand over the sea” and the Lord drove back the waters with a powerful east wind that turned the sea into dry land (Exodus 14:21). The second is when the psalmist speaks of the thick oaken beams of a ship being shattered like matchsticks by a violent wind (Psalm 48:7). Such was the roar that filled the whole house where the disciples were sitting at Pentecost. Those first followers of Jesus were literally being swept up into a whole new world.

New Language

Now one of the problems with wind is that it rearranges things. You’ve just raked up all the leaves from your lawn when a wind comes up and takes you back to square one. You’ve just neatly arranged all the papers on your desk, when someone opens a window and they’re all over the floor. So it is with the Holy Spirit. He has an annoying habit of rearranging our lives, jostling us out of our settled ways, challenging our neat, man-made categories. That was certainly the way it was with the disciples, as suddenly they found themselves praising God in languages they had never spoken before.

Of course what they didn’t know at that point that what was happening to them was not for their benefit but for that of the many pilgrims who were in Jerusalem for the festival. Those visitors began to hear the praises of God being proclaimed in their own individual languages—Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest in that long list of unpronounceable nationalities. And it had them bewildered.

I had a small experience of that when I was rector at St Paul’s Church on the Grand Parade. During the weeks following Christmas we would read from the gospel in a different language each Sunday. The intention was to give us all a greater appreciation of the worldwide church. On one particular Sunday the reading happened to be in Mandarin. As it was being read a man entered the church having just arrived from China as a student. He had come just to take a peek inside an historic building and spoke almost no English. Yet there he was hearing his own language being spoken. Needless to say, it was a deeply moving experience for him and we saw him every week after that.

In the last church where I served, we had a member who had a Master’s degree in Teaching English as an Additional Language. She was keen to reach out to the many immigrants to Saint Paul from all over the world and so she trained some of the members so that we could offer English conversation sessions. In spite of every effort, I think that over a period of two years we had only one taker and we were a little disappointed. Then suddenly we were inundated with more than a hundred refugees from Burma, most of whom didn’t speak a word of English, but the Holy Spirit had made sure that we had our conversation partners in place.

One of the ongoing challenges for the church is to relate the good news of Jesus Christ in language that people can understand. It is a sad fact that the longer we are involved in the church the more comfortable we become with a language called “Christianese”. Words such as “sin”, “repentance”, “grace” and “Saviour” have rich meaning for us and I would not begin to suggest that we even think of discarding them. But they are at best meaningless to the average non-Christian and in some cases they are seriously negatively loaded. (When I was a child I used to think that the Salvation Army had its name because it picked up old discarded clothes and furniture and saved them. I had no idea that people could be saved too!) We need the fresh breath of the Holy Spirit to sweep us out of the language of the Christian ghetto to communicate the good news of Jesus in new ways that touch the minds and hearts and lives of those around us, that causes them to ask questions as the crowd did at Pentecost. “How is this happening?” “What does this mean?” “What shall we do?”

New People

The result of the Holy Spirit’s work on the day of Pentecost was that three thousand people were added to the little band of Christian believers in its first twenty-four hours. I can’t imagine the logistics involved in baptizing all those people! However, I know that growth on a similar scale continues in many parts of the world today. In the Middle East and North Africa there are reliable reports of thousands of Muslims turning to Christ, sometimes quietly and beneath the official radar, sometimes in mass baptisms of dozens, even hundreds, of people. An article a couple of years ago in the London Telegraph told the story of massive church growth in China. It included a calculation by Purdue University Sociology professor Fenggang Yang that by the year 2030 the Christian population of China will exceed 247 million, making it the largest Christian population in the world.[1]

I am sure we welcome such growth. At the same time growth also brings its challenges. Remember that wind of the Holy Spirit, stirring things up, moving them around, undoing our tidy little arrangements? It didn’t take long for that to happen among the Christian believers in Jerusalem. Just move a few pages along in Acts, to chapter 6, where Luke begins, “In those days when the number of believers rapidly multiplied…” It all sounds good. But then he goes on: “… there were rumblings of discontent.”[2] The problem centred on the Greek-speaking believers, who were complaining that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. A couple of chapters later we meet with Simon, who had been a practiser of sorcery and had the crazy notion that he could buy the Holy Spirit with money. In each of these cases (and there would be many more), the problem the disciples were facing was the challenge of growth, as new people came into the community and brought with them new backgrounds, new ideas, new issues, and new needs.

The New Testament bids us look forward to the day when people of every nation, tribe, people and language will stand around the throne of the Lamb crying aloud, “Salvation belongs to our God!” (Revelation 7:9-10) That is a picture of heaven, but from an earthly perspective things can look different. The church in Corinth included in its number women and men who came from backgrounds of sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, thievery, crass materialism, alcoholism, backbiting and dodgy business practices.[3] But they were there because the Holy Spirit had brought them there. I imagine that the lives of the elders and deacons in that church would have been much quieter without them. As it was, however, it must have been something like a bronco ride. The wind of the Holy Spirit was blowing through them—and all they could do was to hold on for dear life and pray!

New Creation

As the Holy Spirit moves through us he will bring new people into our midst—and unless we are only prepared to accept clones of ourselves, that will bring its challenges. But the Spirit is equal to them and we must trust him to do his work.

There is a new movement that has been gaining strength in the church. It’s called “messy church”. I don’t know a lot about it, but I am attracted to the title. I well remember an elderly clergyman coming into my office and staring at my desk. “You know,” he said (and I’m sure you’ve heard this before), “a messy desk is the sign of a healthy mind.” I’m not sure that that is entirely true, but I took it as a compliment. At the heart of “messy church” is the notion that a church that is healthy and growing, a church where the Holy Spirit is blowing, will always be a little messy, a little rough around the edges, perhaps even a little unsettling at times. At the same time it will undoubtedly be an adventure. It will bring rich, deep and lasting relationships as we face life’s challenges together, as we don’t ignore the mess around us and within us and together allow the Holy Spirit to do his work.

All of this is so worth it, because it is part and parcel of participating in God’s new creation irrupting into the old. As in the opening chapter of Genesis, the Holy Spirit is hovering over the waters, bringing about a whole new order from the darkness and chaos that surround us. And you and I have the inestimable privilege, with Peter and James and Mary and Joanna and Andrew and Paul, with Augustine and John of the Cross and Theresa and all the countless saints down through the ages, with men and women and children in Burma and Argentina, Libya and Nigeria and some of the most unlikely places in the world today, of being participants in and witnesses to that new creation.

“Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Are you and I willing to be swept off our feet by the Holy Spirit and blown into that adventure which is God’s new creation?

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[1]        Tom Phillips, “China on course to become 'world's most Christian nation' within 15 years”, The Telegraph, 19 April 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10776023/China-on-course-to-become-worlds-most-Christian-nation-within-15-years.html

[2]        New Living Translation

[3]        See 1 Corinthians 6:9-10