Spirit Wants the Kingdom of God
Posted by stpauls on June 27, 2010 under Sermons | 
Be the First to Comment
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on June 27, 2010, Fifth Sunday after Pentecost.]
“No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” I suppose that we could have a sermon about how we ought to be detached about this or that tradition or theology; “let the dead bury their dead,” sounds like another suitable quote for such a sermon. But, this is not going to be it. Jesus is not preaching about deserting certain things; rather, he is living in and living out the kingdom of God, which is about emptying ourselves of everything, about having nothing.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Earlier in the same chapter of Luke, Jesus sends the twelve with power to proclaim the kingdom. He does not tell them to travel light. He tells them to have nothing. Our gospel today is about the mission of the disciples, and therefore, about our mission that is rooted in Jesus’ own weakness and homelessness. In other words, the mission of the Church is rooted in a spirituality that does not look for success as a necessary conclusion, nor does it look for self-congratulation in everything we do.
In Galatians, Paul is still struggling with the divided Galatian Church, calling the Church to freedom. And what is this freedom all about? It is not an objectless and timeless bliss for the solitary subject, but the state of a self being engaged (in communion). Paul makes a distinction between the freedom that is for the sake of the flesh and that of the spirit. The first is opposed to the mutual service of life in the spirit. Life in the flesh designates the state of self-protective mutual hostility, the culture of achievement and possession, the definition of each other’s identities in terms of their place in such a culture. He points out that the desire of the spirit is at odds with the desire of the flesh, because while the flesh wants rivalry and greed (financial, sexual, magical, material), the spirit wants communion (joy, love, generosity, things that cannot be done except when done in community).
And so the definition of “spirit” seems to be that which is oriented to the new humanity, which is the divine life communicated to us human beings. Spirit does not designate here some part of an organism. To grow in the life of the Spirit is the process of having Christ formed in us. This is what spirituality truly means, an education in the new humanity that relates to all our work, our art, our politics, our sexuality, and our economics, and prayerful looking to God which must pervade them all; it is not a subdivision of our humanity any more than spirit is an item in the list of things that make up the human being. It is the business of making our lives mean what Christ’s life means: the presence of gift, promise, commitment, new relation. A spirituality uninterested in this would indeed be divorced from mission – and thus divorced from God. It would be a fake spirituality. Spirit is what wants the kingdom that Jesus talks about in Luke, and so desires to realise the humanity of Jesus in its own act and being. And in turn, the church is called to communicate the reality of the new humanity or new creation, a reality only communicated in the facts of communal life.
Last Wednesday, I attended, as you all may have heard (together with the honourable David Facey-Crowther[*]), the interfaith forum for ending homelessness in Vancouver, where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish leaders met with the local minister for housing in British Columbia and a representative of the city counsel. Here we had an occasion where it was clear that the Church in all its various branches was called to minister the gospel in an environment of plurality, challenge, and difficulty, in the context of people with different convictions and priorities. Our first power in this context is to know how to speak words that open and do not close the options of conversation. It was not all very successful as far as the way those attending were speaking, and there was a kind of attack on the minister from one participant, which certainly closed off the options of further talking, a bit like James and John in today’s Gospel, who when they failed to prepare the way for Jesus to enter the Samaritan village wanted to wipe it off the land.
When we talk, we do not ever know what long-term result of any particular encounter with people of other convictions and faiths might be. What we do know is that the door opened by Jesus for the whole human race can never be shut. How exactly the communion of the Church can enter into and transform the situations in which Christians live is not something the Church can project or control. The action is God’s alone, and he alone can break our selfish fear and will to compete with others. The need for the discipline of silence remains important for this so that God can break onto our servitude to fear and rivalry. That is why it is important to pray.
Jesus, we are reminded in the gospel today, has his face set towards Jerusalem where our fear and rivalry take him to the cross, but still he defeats our fear and opens the doors for us yet again. Our business as a Church is to try and stand in that great opening cleared by the cross and resurrection, speaking the words that the Spirit gives us that will make relationships. What comes from it, God knows. The Church that produces no visible sign in its inner life of the extending of communion and the challenging or breaking of competitive and destructive patterns of life is a Church that ought to ask itself whether it is really in love with the kingdom of God. Without the conviction of gift and judgment, and the vision of a humanity converging on Christ, there is no excuse for the Church. This is the basis of all that you do here and that we pray about here, especially the work of the Advocacy Office. Of course, this remains a place that we have to manage administratively with as much care and imagination as one can muster. We do it as best we may, but Jesus is telling us today, that if that is all we do, we have not actually heard the gospel. And the gospel is telling us that suppose everything were taken away from you, even your confidence that the power of the kingdom would be visible, suppose that you carry nothing with you, then be sure still that God’s word is still what it always was, Christ’s lordship is still what it always was, and the Spirit’s freedom is still what it always was, and they will be so whether you live or die, fail or succeed.
You do not have to fight for God’s honour. This is the basis of our encounter with other faiths, too. God’s power can only be manifest as totally different when we disconnect it from our methods of managing and being anxious that we do the right thing and control those around us. Paul’s motto “Not us, but Christ,” should be our motto, making the world see that we are able to live with looking foolish and making mistakes, simply because of Jesus’ victory over the world. Then failures will proclaim what our successes could not proclaim. “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit … Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another” (Galatians 5: 24-26).
Amen.
[*]
David R. Facey-Crowther is professor and head of the Department of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the author of several works and articles on Canadian military history and is currently a member of the advisory committee for the Canadian War Museum.