Sermon
delivered at All Saints’ Parish Church, Whiteparish – Sunday 2nd June 2019 – Morning Worship
Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14,16,17, 20-end, John
17:20-end
May
I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and may my words be a
blessing to all who hear them. Amen
Today is the first Sunday after Ascension Day which we
celebrated here at Whiteparish at our Team Service on Thursday morning when
Simon preached on the topic of waiting; and here we are, indeed, in that period
of our Church Year once more waiting. It
seems that much of our church year is taken up with waiting of one sort or
another – Advent that period when we wait for the coming of Christ at
Christmastide; Lent, as we wait for the Holy Period of Easter – the Crucifixion
and the Resurrection and now that period of waiting between Christ leaving
Earth and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We are in that period which is being
celebrated by the Anglican Church in the form of “Thy Kingdom Come” – waiting
for God’s Kingdom to come down to Earth.
We are in those most important nine days after Ascension Day until
Pentecost which we are expected to observe as days of prayer and preparation
for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
I have always felt greatly inspired by the story told in
our first reading from Acts and often wondered how I would have behaved had
been in the position of Paul and Silas or indeed in a similar position in later
years as many have been imprisoned for their Faith.
We read that Paul and his assistant, Silas are in
Philippi – which we are told is a leading city in the Roman Colony of Macedonia
(in modern day Greece) where they remained for some days. Earlier in the chapter we learn that they
converted and baptized a woman called Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth and she
and all her household were baptized and Paul and Silas stayed on in her
house. During their stay they continued
to go to a place of prayer (we are not told precisely what format this took –
whether it was some temple or other or whether it was simply a spot chosen by
Christians to meet and pray). On their
way, one day they meet a slave girl – which indicates that she was owned by someone
who made his money from her spirit (an evil spirit we surmise) of divination or
fortune-telling. However, the spirit,
whatever it was, made her follow the two men and proclaim to all and sundry
that they were “slaves of the Most High
God who themselves proclaim the way of salvation”. We are told that she
followed them around doing this for many days until Paul became thoroughly
cheesed off with it and using the power of the Holy Spirit which had come upon
him and Pentecost turned to her and ordered the evil spirit to come out of her,
which it duly did. What this shows is
that the Holy Spirit was more powerful than any other form of spirit which the
poor girl possessed.
However, what then happened was that the girl’s owner, no
longer having the girl’s fortune powers available to sell, was most aggrieved
and had Paul and Silas dragged before the local magistrates by declaring that
Paul’s actions were contrary to the laws and customs of Rome and in this attack
many in the crowd joined in and eventually after being beaten they were placed
in a dark innermost cell with their feet shackled to stocks so that escape was
almost impossible. We read that rather
than simply licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves they spent
the night praying and singing hymns to God which itself inspired the other
prisoners who heard them.
This part of the story has an almost direct similarity
with the story of Maximilian Kolbe, a priest imprisoned in Auschwitz during the
Second World War who took the place of a condemned prisoner in that death
camp. He was placed in a dark solitary
confined cell in Auschwitz I Camp together with a group of other prisoners
condemned to die through starvation. Kolbe induced the prisoners to join with
him in praising God and singing and reciting psalms such that the Kolbe himself
and others lived for much longer than expected and Kolbe had to be shot by his
guards in the end.
In the case of Paul and Silas, the area was subjected
that night to a huge earthquake which resulted in the prison’s foundations
being so undermined that the cells became opened and their chains fell
free. The jailer thinking that all his
charges had escaped and he himself would be brutally punished by the
authorities was prepared to commit suicide which Paul prevented by assuring the
poor man that all his charges were still in place and none had used this
seeming stroke of good fortune to escape.
So grateful was the jailer that he bathed their wounds and he and his
whole household, just like Lydia, were baptized, we are told, “without
delay”. They all rejoiced that they had
become believers in God. So too,
figuratively , we can say that Paul and Silas created an “earthquake” wherever
they went – upsetting the status quo of a society where secular customs and practices
and rules and not Christian love as taught by Jesus were the root of life - by
showing that Christian love is far greater and more powerful.
So in the space of a single chapter in Acts we read of
two amazing examples of people becoming Christians by the power of the Holy
Spirit, and being Gentiles too. What a
wonderful gift it is which awaits all who believe and ask for it. Perhaps too,
the celebratory feast which followed in the jailer’s house is a precursor to
that wonderful joyful banquet which awaits us when all Christians realise that
they belong to the same table.
In our Gospel Reading, Jesus emphasises this need for
great unity – he says “I ask not only on
behalf of these [the disciples] but also on behalf of those who will believe in
me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and
I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have
sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may
be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me that they may be completely one”
In other words, acknowledging that God is the Father and
the Son and that the two are one and that through the Holy Spirit, which was
received at Pentecost and by whose power Paul and Silas and the rest of the
disciples did those great miracles as related in Acts, we are ourselves part of
that oneness in Christ. We are today’s
modern disciples with the power and ability to bring others into the great fold
of Christian love. We can create
earthquakes, and face up to and show that great unity of love which Jesus asks
of us. What can we do ourselves this coming week to show that Christian love,
that oneness with Christ as we await the celebration of the coming of the Holy
Spirit at Pentecost? Remember, it is a
celebration of that first Pentecost back in the First Century. The Holy Spirit is actually here now and we
can ask for it at any time. Just like
the tyres on our car, though, we need to be pumped up with that Spirit and
especially at times of great anxiety or sadness.
At our Ecumenical Services which we hold once a month we
celebrate our Christian oneness in the words of the Unity Prayer which I
adapted from the Clarendon Team Prayer and which I would like to say now:
Lord
God, the source of our unity, faith and love
Bless
your churches here on Earth
In
all their denominations
That
sharing the gifts of the Holy Spirit as Christ’s Disciples
We
may proclaim the gospel
And
reveal your glory
In
Jesus Christ our Lord
Amen
MFB/010062019
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