The Nativity of the John the Baptist: Nothing Comes from Nothing

Isaiah 40:1-11 


Psalm 85:7-13

Acts 13:14b-26 


Luke 1:57-80 


If today feels a bit like Advent you aren’t having a flashback, its intended to.  The readings are full of the expectation inherent in the Advent season, with Isaiah’s prophecy of comfort for God’s people and Paul’s re-telling of salvation history up to point of Jesus’ ministry.  Moreover, almost as if to stress the reference, the Church has appointed the preface of Advent to be used in the Eucharistic prayer – listen for it as we come to consecrate the bread and wine, the celestial meal of the coming kingdom.  You see today the Church commemorates the birth of John the Baptist.  If you remember at the Annunciation when the angel Gabriel visits Mary, inviting her into the process of salvation by becoming the mother Christ, he says to her, “And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.  For nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:36-37)  So, you do the math – it’s six months until Christmas. 

The figure of John the Baptist in the Christian tradition is that of fore-runner and so the Advent resonances are fitting.  In the Gospels John is identified as voice mentioned in the book of Isaiah crying out in the wilderness: “prepare the way of the Lord”. (Isaiah 40:3)  John is in the type of the Hebrew prophet, some of whom lived in the wilderness and called for a radical return among their fellow Jews to the covenant principles.  In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus identifies John with Elijah – or at least the office of Elijah: “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came; and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come.  Let anyone with ears listen.” (Matthew 11:13-15)  For, according to a prophecy in Malachi – “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (Malachi 4:5) – many Jews believed Elijah’s return would signal the coming of the end of the age an the arrival of the Messiah.

Certainly then, for the earliest Christians, John’s ministry of witness and his call to repentance marked the beginning of the end of the waiting, and it is in undertaking this work that John makes his first appearance in most of the Gospels.  At the same time he marks the continuance of the prophetic tradition of Israel – he looks, talks and acts like the prophets of old.  And if you don’t get it, there is that verse from Isaiah I already mentioned to make the whole thing clear: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’ ” (Isaiah 40:3)  At the same time, Luke in his recording of John’s conception seeks to deepen that sense of continuance.  Before even John is cast in the type of the ancient prophets, his parents and his birth are already cast in type of other figures from the Jewish tradition – the elderly couple hoping for a child, the dedicated and faithful priest.  Elizabeth is in the pattern of Sarah and Hannah who remained true to the promises of God and who in their old age the Lord visited with longed-for children.  Zechariah is in the cast of figures like Eli and even Abraham who faithfully submitted themselves to God’s holiness, serving God at his altars and in the world while waiting for the full manifestation of the divine glory.  So, Luke is trying to place the birth of Jesus within a wider context, a more human context; and while Matthew does this in large part by a long list of genealogy (cf. Matthew 1:1-17) – look at the first chapter of Matthew when you get chance – Luke does it with character and narrative, with people and stories.  Both are trying to place the Jesus event within the story of Israel.  Luke, we can safely say, does it more graphically, appealing to the emotions and imagination of the reader or hearer.

Nothing comes from nothing, and all things – even new things – need a context in which they can be grasped or understood.  I was recently speaking with someone who wondered if the traditions of the Church might get in the way of his relationship with God, his understanding of the Gospel.  I mentioned that the fact we can speak about God in the ways that we do, or that we have the Bible in its present form, is on account of the Church who through the centuries tested, debated, experienced and reasoned the truths of the faith.  That we can speak about the Trinity – about a triune God, or that we can speak about the mystery of Jesus’ being fully divine and fully human are thanks to Church down the ages.  Even aspects of the our social and political lives such as the equality of all persons – no matter how imperfectly we may put it into action – comes the Church’s discernment of the Incarnation and thus the dignity of every human person.  In the same way, the people of 1^st century Palestine were able to see a prophet in John the Baptist, because they knew the traditions of Judaism, because they had a context for the work of a prophet.  The early Christians who read or listened to the Gospel of Luke experienced the connections between their past – the history and traditions of Judaism – and the new or the present reality of the Jesus event.  Indeed, they would not have been able to speak about Jesus in the ways they did – titles like Lord and Messiah – without the inherited traditions of Israel.

The advent language attendant on today’s feast reminds us that John the Baptist marks the beginning of something new, something which has been longed for and waited for.  At the same time the way in which Luke tells the story – and hence the way in which the Church tells the story – points to this new thing’s connections with the past; and that to understand anything new we need a place from which to stand to view it and make sense of it.  We need a context.  My Latin teacher once reminded our class of the maxim Nihil novum sub sole – “There is nothing new under the sun”.  Perhaps that isn’t exactly true, but anything new does need a past, something “old”, as it were, in order for us to have any context in which to understand it.  A balance must be struck between the two; and the figure of John the Baptist, the stories surrounding his birth, the resonances he elicits of the traditions of Israel help remind of this truth.  We always stand in that place between what has been and what is coming.  If we live too much in the former we never come into anything that is new, we may miss the developing truth of our lives and quite possible of God’s plans.  However, if we try to live only in the latter we have no grounding, we try to live in an impossibility.  Like John the fore-runner who clearly stands as the bridge between the old and the new, so are we all called to do – to stand in that place where we can discern a new future by making sense of the past, where we can live into what God is doing by being aware of what God has done.  It can be a difficult place in which to stand, the temptation being always to live in only one or the other.  Again, we find the deepest truth to be revealed not in either/or thinking, but in both/and living where opposites are in resolved in the ineffable reality of God and where past, present and future meet in the fullness of eternity. 

Pentecost 3: “Let Anyone with Ears to Hear Listen!”

Ezekiel 17:22-24

Psalm 92:1-4, 11-14

2 Corinthians 5:6-17

Mark 4:26-34

The parable is by far Jesus’ preferred way of conveying the truth of the Kingdom of God, his consistent method of conveying what I like to call the “cosmic economy”.  And while parables are common in the rabbinic literature of Judaism, and even among pagan writers, they appear in Gospels to a degree unknown in other literature of the period.  In fact, as Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan observe in their reference work on Biblical ideas, “…if one includes every simile, proverb, and aphorism that Jesus taught, then almost everything Jesus said falls into the category of parable.”  But what exactly is parable?  We may think we know, but when actually pressed with the question many people – even many Christians – find ourselves at a loss to come up with a clear, succinct answer.  If we can again look at the work of  Metzger and Coogan, they define the parable as “a picturesque figure of language in which analogy refers to a similar but different reality”.  The biblical scholar Donald Juel (with whom I ventured for the first time into the world of New Testament study in the form of his book  An Introduction to New Testament Literature) defines a parable in terms of their purpose: “to interpret abstract teaching by means of concrete analogy”.  And he goes on to cite that in the Gospels parables serve a variety of functions: they explain abstractions like the kingdom of God or forgiveness; they warn, for example of the danger of riches; they respond to the criticism of the religious authorities. 

So, we see that Jesus’ parables refuse to be neatly pinned down, their definition arises not only from what they are, but at least as much from what they do, their purpose, and even that is not one and succinct.  If this is true of their definition, it is at least as true of their interpretation or meaning.  As such, some scholars point to the important distinction between the genre of parable and that of allegory, with which the parable is so often confused.  The French biblical scholar Etienne Charpentier expressly made this distinction when he wrote that while both parables and allegories are expressed in the form of stories, the “allegory is aimed at teaching.  It is a story constructed expressly to help understand something, and the details correspond to particular entities.  So Jesus says, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches…’ ”  Parables are never that direct, they rather enable and invite a more open-ended reflection. 

Nevertheless, from the very beginning of the Church Christians have tried to apply to them allegorical interpretations, in which every detail of the parable stands for something else, and thus is yielded from it a definitive meaning. This temptation is evident even among the Gospel writers.  We see it, for example in the parable of sower.  You will remember it; it is the one in which the seed falls on all sorts of soil, and Jesus ends the parable with the words “whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”  Nevertheless, he takes his disciples aside, and explains the parable allegorically noting what each sort of soil is meant to represent.  In fact, we see the beginnings of that tradition this morning in Mark, the first of the gospels, when the writer tells us that Jesus “explained everything in private to his disciples” (Mark 4:34) Well, the majority of biblical scholars believe that this tradition, and certainly the explanation of the parable of the sower is not from the earliest strata of the Jesus tradition, but instead an attempt on the part of the early Christian community to ascribe specific meaning to the parable.  It does not mean the explanation is invalid, but it does highlight the extent to which Jesus in fact did not explain the meanings of his parables.  He instead left his hearers to conjecture for themselves, to glean a meaning arising from and imbedded in their own experience and lives.  In this sense the parable marks a call to engagement.  The “learning”, for lack of a better word, is left for the hearer to glean, not for the teller to explain; and for this reason the words “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (Mark 4:23) appear so often in the gospels on the lips of Jesus, and almost always after he has told some parable or other.

Such an injunction – “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (Mark 4:23) – demands that those who follow Jesus, who listen to him and seek to join the enterprise of the kingdom do the hard work of thinking things through, of discerning what his words mean in their lives.  In the Jesus movement there is no room for easy answers or cheap conversions, there is no room for groupies, but only for those who really count the cost of joining him.  This open-ended process of interpretation and meaning-making has continued through the centuries in the Church; and while we have sometimes forced parables into the mold of allegory, they continue to make the invitation for people to discern their stories according to the hearers’ lives and experience in order that they can yield meaning which is relevant and challenging.

Today the lectionary affords us with two parables.  The first is certainly powerful, yet its interpretation seems straight-forward: the kingdom of God grows silently and in the dark, while people sleep.  But could not also it be saying something to us about church growth, or about the passing of time?  Perhaps it is saying something about the extent to which we pass our own lives asleep in all kinds of ways – missing what is really important.  Its language carries with it some interesting constructions: “the kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed”.  The kingdom of God isn’t the scatterer of the seed, neither is it the seed or the field, nor even the growth.  The kingdom of God seems to be the meeting point of all these things.  What can that signify?  Equally the second parable presents its own tricky language and images that leave more questions than explanations.  On the surface we can see a clear meaning – the kingdom starts small, but eventually grows to become a place for everyone.  But did you notice that the kingdom does not grow into a mighty tree like a cedar as depicted in Ezekiel.  No, it becomes a shrub; granted the “greatest of all shrubs”, but a shrub nonetheless, and I don’t know about you, but  I just don’t consider a shrub of whatever size very sturdy.  But what does this mean, that the kingdom is a shrub?  Does it mean that while it can hold many people, it must always be supported, tended and strengthened?  Does it mean that it is always fragile, no matter its size and potential for shelter?  Place yourself in the parable.  Who are you – the tiny seed? the grown shrub? one of the birds that makes a nest in the branches of the shrubs?  What does what you see yourself as signify for you?  I hope you can understand what is meant by the open-ended meaning of parables.  Listened to well, they engage us and draw us in, hopefully to our emotional and spiritual growth.

I am sure that I have mentioned before the Jewish idea of the “70 faces of Torah”.  The rabbis believe that each verse as well as each story in the Scriptures can bear many interpretations according to the context in which it is read and experienced.  Torah is a living thing which engages and challenges the Jewish people afresh in every generation.  It is a sobering thing for Christians to bear this in mind about Scripture generally, but perhaps most importantly about the parables.  They too have their many faces, some not yet even discerned; and even two thousands years later they echo still the challenge of the one who first spoke them: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (Mark 4:23)

Pentecost 2: The Relativizing Gospel

Genesis 3:8-15

Psalm 130

Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Mark 3:20-35

Driving north on Highway 99, and relatively close to the 198 turning for Hanford, there’s a billboard advertisement for one of the many local churches – I am guessing it’s something like Valley Christian Church.  The billboard depicts a very nuclear-looking family: mother, father, daughter, son – quaternity strikes again, if you can think back to last week’s sermon; and the tag-line? – Building Strong Families.  I have little doubt that Valley Christian Church or whatever its name may be considers itself a “Bible church”, and so  I wonder what it does with the words from today’s gospel when Jesus appears to be hardly pro-family: “ ‘Who are my mother and brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ ”? (Mark 3:33-35)  I am sure that no matter what they may make of them, they are verses that would not sit well with fundamentalist “family theology”.  Yet they appear in the earliest strata of the Jesus tradition, and while scholars may disagree as to whether the historical Jesus said exactly this, most concur that “ideas contained in [the verses are] close to his own”.  Moreover, both the authors of Matthew and of Luke, who used Mark, the earliest of the Gospel, as a source, also seemed to feel a ring of authenticity clinging to the words and included them each in their own gospel.  At the same time both Matthew and Luke include an even harsher saying which scholars – at least in the Lucan version – generally agree that Jesus himself said something very much like it: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)  And While Matthew softens the sentiment somewhat – “Whoever loves father or mother more [emphasis mine] than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37) – it still carries a harsh tone. 

For those who have wedded the Gospel to socially conventional constructs of the family, or have irresponsibly used the Gospel to bolster their own status quo world-view, to them the passages present particular challenges, even obstacles; indeed, such challenges and obstacles that many see fit to ignore the passages altogether.  However, for those who wish to engage with the passages more authentically they still present challenges.  They highlight the fundamental and absolute call of the Gospel life – a call so definitive that it relativizes to it everything about our lives, absolutely everything and without reservation.  It relativizes and transforms gender relationships, as well as ethnic identity.  It relativizes social ranks and status, social divisions created by wealth and power.  It relativizes tribal identity; and in the ancient near-east – as it is still is in many places in the world – family allegiance is a kind of tribal identity.  In fact, the Greek of the New Testament has no word for family at all.  In both Classical and New Testament Greek the word usually translated as “family” in English is oikia and actually means “house” or “household”.  A household would include not only those immediately related by blood, but also more distant relatives, as well as servants, slaves and other hangers-on.  Think more Romeo and Juliet than Ozzie and Harriet.  The relativizing call of the Gospel demands that everything be seen, understood, lived and experienced within its radical commitment to God and God’s kingdom, and to the love of neighbor; and by neighbor is meant everyone, not only our friends or the members of our household or people we like or even people like us.  All conventional constructions, affections and alliances are to be sublimated to the Gospel call, the kingdom call, the call to service and justice beyond the tight circle of the familiar.

Sometimes, in my years in the Church I have got the sense that for many Christians whatever their stripe, when push comes to shove family comes first.  In the United States particularly it feels we have created almost an idol of the family in which not only does family come first but we have convinced ourselves that families – in their most modern construction – are the building blocks of the Church.  We forget that for the earliest Christians – and still for many in varied places of our world today – following Christ meant leaving their families, it meant answering a call considered to them more pressing, more important and more real than the ties of biology or kinship.  It hardly signified the “building of strong families”, but in fact the breakdown of familial ties and even the rise of hatred and violence between household members.  This experience of the early Church was reflected in Jesus’ words in several Gospel passages.  This one from Luke stands as representative: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division!  From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:
father against son and son against father,
mother against daughter and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”  (Luke 12:51-53) 

Now, for us living the United States in the 21^st century we will probably never directly experience that sort of inter-familial violence over our commitment to follow Christ.  However, Jesus’s words about family and family allegiance still have an important message for us, because they bring to the fore this question of the extent to which we genuinely relativize all things by the measure of the Gospel call, by the measure of God’s kingdom perspective and not our own.  Whatever we may or may not think Jesus is saying about family, the passages about family themselves beg questions of us: “When the pedal hits the metal, where do you put your trust?”  Are all our relationships and undertakings really subordinate to the doing of God’s will in our lives?”  “Do we love those closest to us, or do we love God through them?”  The latter question poses an important but powerful distinction.  Think about it:  “Do you love simply those closest to you, or do you love God through them?”  At the end of the day, for Christians the primary call is to God’s vision of the kingdom, God’s vision of a renewed creation.  All of our relationships, all of our actions have to point toward that reality, they become the vehicles through which God’s vision is recognized.

I recently read a short interchange between a young boy and his mother.  The boy – about 10 or so – asked her, “Mom, do you love me more than you love God?”.  She answered, “Of course I do.”  “Well”, he said, “I think that’s your problem.”  For Christians, any sort of love – love of family, love of work, even love of neighbor – has to find its source in the love of God and of the Gospel call, of the kingdom vision.  If it doesn’t then we are heading down the road towards a dangerous sort of idolatry.  Personally, I am not sure I want to belong to a church who makes its tag-line Building Strong Families; Building the Kingdom makes much more sense, and is simply – whether we like it or not – far more biblical. 

Trinity Sunday: Three's Company

Isaiah 6:1-8

Psalm 29

Romans 8:12-17

John 3:1-17

“Two’s company, three’s a crowd”, or so goes the old adage, and we have all been warned of the awkwardness of being a “third wheel”.  But, if two is company, and three is a crowd, why is it that four becomes conveniently a double date?  The analytic psychotherapist, Carl Jung, believed that all triads move towards quaternity, that is that all groups of three eventually seek to “complete” themselves by adding or adopting a fourth.  He saw triads as somehow deficient, and four as the archetypal number of completeness.  After all, we have the four corners of the earth, four winds, in medieval medicine, four humors, and even our sacred text contains four Gospels.  Understandably then, Jung believed Christianity to be somehow primitive and undeveloped in its commitment to a Trinitarian understanding of God.  In fact, he believed that the Church’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and more specifically Roman Catholicism’s definition of the Assumption of our Lady as an article of faith, to be attempts to “square” the triangle.  We see this movement towards quaternity in the Episcopal Church too.  We all know of the “three-legged stool” of Anglicanism – scripture, tradition and reason.  Well, how many of you have more recently heard “experience” added as the fourth “leg”?  Never mind the fact that tradition encompasses experience.  Equally, a family grouping of three – two parents and one child – feels instinctively incomplete.  The more comfortable grouping is four – two parents and two children.  The ideal grouping always seems to have a second child.  At the same time, in personal relationships, we can experience triads as inherently unstable.  There is always the possibility of two against one.  For example, two people disagree with the third, and immediately that third is left out alone and in the cold.  Alternatively two people have an argument, and a tug of war ensues as they each try to win the third to their side.  A triad always carries with it the inherent possibility of loneliness for one of its members; while, on the other hand, a group of four easily can divide up into two groups of two.

All of this being considered, we Christians still affirm the reality of Trinity as the most perfect expression of the identity of God – three persons united so perfectly in love that we can still speak of a belief in one God.  While, being aware of the instability and pitfalls of triadic relationships, we confess that the most perfect of relationships is in fact revealed in a triad, no matter our attempts or inclinations to square it.  And in that confession we imperfectly grasp at something profound about who God is, and how God works in the world.  Our confession of the Trinity is a commitment to a God who brings stability out of instability, even instability which we may believe to be inherent in a situation or relationship.  Through the perfect love of each for each, no one person in the Trinity becomes a third wheel.  Three is always and eternally company.  Moreover, while we may believe or experience triads as inherently incomplete or deficient, in the doctrine of the Trinity we are confronted with the reality of a God who can bring all things to completion, who can bring all things to fullness and perfection, and who thus challenges our common-sense instincts.  While we may experience triads as constructions which always carry with them the real possibility of alienating divisions, the life of the Trinity reveals that need not necessarily be the only way of things.  Through mutual respect, acceptance and love the life of Trinity witnesses literally to a “third way”, in which none is alienated and in which each is celebrated.  It reveals that the life of God in God’s self is fundamentality a life of perfect sociability and perfect equality against conventional odds.

As is so often the case with Christian truths, the doctrine of the Trinity draws us beyond conventional and comfortable thinking; draws us away from our inclination to make things tidy so that they fit within our comfort zone.  Comfortably and commonsensically, two’s company and four’s a double date, but our God is revealed to us in the uncomfortable, counter-intuitive third way in which three is not a crowd, but rather perfection.  And the call of the Christian life is to live out and reflect the life of God, the life of the Trinity, in the world.  It is sometimes means we are called to bear in mind and even proclaim that what seems on the surface unstable, unbalanced, against the grain, may be the very place where God is revealing God’s self, may be the way in which God is working.  Living out the life of the Trinity in the world means that we take seriously the truth that everyone belongs, no matter how awkward their presence makes us feel, or how much they may appear to be a “third wheel”.  Living out the life of the Trinity in the world means that we are always looking for the “third way”.  We move beyond simple either/or, this-or-that thinking and step into the seemingly dangerous and unstable in order to discover something altogether unexpected, and always more powerful, more life-giving, more honest.

I began by quoting an old adage and referencing Jung, both expressing a distinct mistrust of triads.  I’d like to end with words from another quarter altogether, the world of musical theatre and the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, lyrics that have always somehow made me think of the Trinity – and that tells you more about me than you probably care to know – but in any case here you are: “one’s impossible, two is dreary, three is company safe and cheery, side by side by side.”  Something to ponder.  May God draw you and all of us into the life of the awkward Trinity, in which we trust that beyond the instabilities and imbalancies we may discern God brings all things to completion, and where we hope to find a place for us and for all of us, a sociable company – yes – “safe and cheery”.

           

The Day of Pentecost: Grasping at Truth

Acts 2.1-11
Psalm 104:25-35

Romans 8:22-27

John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

I have the privilege this weekend to be spending it with our diocesan iconographer, Joyce Tanner, on an icon course sponsored by Art and Soul right here in Hanford.  In the last decades the icons and the iconography of the Eastern Churches has become more commonly widespread in the west; and not simply the images themselves, but there has been a discovery and incorporation of the Eastern Churches’ devotional and prayer practices surrounding icons.  That notwithstanding, Christianity has always struggled with the appropriateness of images.  The 6^th, 7^th and 8^th centuries, particularly in the East, saw a powerful iconoclastic (literally, “image-breakers”) movement, which pointed out both Judaism’s and Islam’s absolute prohibition on producing any images and believed Christianity should have followed suit.  The “image breakers” were formally anathematized and images declared licit for Christian devotion at a Church Council in 843.  Still, the various “reformations” of the Western Church in the 16^th century introduced a whole new wave of iconoclasm, and has left among many Christians a distrust of images; fortunately this is not the case for Episcopalians.  I say fortunately, because images – properly understood – are foundational to theological language, they are essential in our poor attempts to say anything about God.  Without them we falter into the pits of literalism and fundamentalism.  They liberate us from the world of the definitive or purely intellectual and draw us into a more immediate experience, challenging what we think we know.  As Peter Pearson writes in his book, A Brush with God:  “Icons challenge our perception of what is real….An image points to reality but never exhausts the reality to which it points.”  And so we can think of an icon, an image, as a window which, as we look through it, challenges our ideas about what we believe to be true, or what we think we see before us; a window which allows us to look through it to a more distant reality.  Without such windows, encountering the ineffability of God, the ineffability of ultimate truth becomes impossible.

We need images to speak about God, we need images to speak about God working in our lives.  What Christians who hold to the primacy of the Bible – the Word – and decry images fail to recognize is that words are images too; and the scripture readings for the feast of Pentecost particularly are resplendent with them.  Paul uses images of labor pains, childbirth and adoption in order to begin to comprehend the ongoing process of creation made manifest in us “who have the first fruits of the Spirit”. (Romans 8:23)  In telling the story of the first Pentecost, the writer of Acts uses images of a violent wind and of fire to convey the disturbing nature of the Spirit, and the image of speaking in various tongues to convey God’s will to knit together all people, to convey the comprehensiveness of the Good News as it transcends the divisions of language and cultures.  Like icons, these images fall short of the reality which they seek to represent – an icon of Our Lady is not Our Lady – and yet what other language have we but images with which to approach truths too deep, too mysterious to be fully comprehended?  The deepest truths can never be fully plumbed, their ultimate meaning never fully grasped, and yet God has ordained and gifted the created order, even the works of human hands and minds to be vehicles by which we can approach truth, vehicles by which parts of that truth can be revealed, even experienced.  Ultimately, this is what it means to believe in the incarnation: that because God revealed himself definitively in the human and created person, Jesus of Nazareth, we can trust creation as a continuing vehicle of God’s revelation.  Moreover, that we are made in the image of God the creator, and that we human beings ourselves can create images of all kinds which in their beauty or power, in their magnificence or simplicity can tell us something of the truth of God, of the truth of the divine economy, of the divine glory.

The Pentecost event points to the profound mystery that somehow God has entrusted the his mission of reconciliation to human beings whom he has called into partnership, and that God has shed abroad his own Holy Spirit in order to empower us.  How awesome – in the classical sense of the word – is that prospect.  It is a mystery; because no matter how we approach it and attempt to grasp its full meaning we always fall short, or – if we are fortunate – fall deeper into its ramifications and significance, into its demands and challenges.  When we come into the presence of that mystery and begin to sense its call,  it may feel as if our entire lives have been set on fire, it may feel as if a violent wind is sweeping through our minds, blowing away past failings, past dreams, out-moded plans, inadequate understandings.  In our desire to participate in God’s plan we may find how far need to go, we may recognize the hard work, sweat and tears it may require in order that God’s vision may truly become our vision, in order that something new may come into the world.  We may feel ourselves as if “groaning in labor pains” with the whole of creation as we await the redemption promised.  And so we use the images of wind and fire, of child-birth and adoption – images taken from our experience of the created order – and we use them to articulate our feelings, while the whole time knowing they can only weakly point to the true reality they seek to represent, the true reality in which we seek to participate.

Images, icons, symbols, they are the language – albeit the imperfect language – of ultimate truth, the vehicles through which we can make any attempt to come into the presence of truth, explore its manifestations, while at the same living with the knowledge that in no way can we ever completely grasp it, but rather only approximate it.  Peter Pearson notes, “All our images of God, heaven, the angels, the saints, whether in poetry, prose, ritual, music, or icons, are our limited attempts to speak the unspeakable.”  Now, certainly, there is a problem when we begin to think our images are the realities to which the point – we call that fundamentalism, or more appropriately idolatry, the concretization of an image.  But that is perhaps a sermon for another day, another time.  Today, we contemplate images – verbal or pictorial – as imperfect, but reliable vehicles of truth.  We are invited to contemplate them in their multitudinous forms as windows enabling us to look into the distant horizons of reality, to participate even if only partially in the truth they seek to reveal to us.  They offer us – again, as Pearson describes it – “a glimpse into things through God’s eyes and invite us to enter into the mystery of a world made new by the light of God’s presence.”  Spend some time with an icon, with an image and contemplate truth by its light,  allow yourself to fall into the mystery offered and pray that its partial truth and by his Holy Spirit God will little by little “guide you into all truth”. (John 16:13)