SERMON 118 - SUNDAY 27 MAY 2018

Sermon delivered at the Roman Catholic Chapel, Whaddon, Wiltshire on Sunday 27 May 2018

Psalm 104: 1-10; Ezekiel 1; Revelation 4

May I speak in the name of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day, characteristically, when many priests hand over the preaching of the sermon to newer members of the clergy or lay ministers – like a baptism of fire!  Never an easy task to preach the Trinity and especially this evening when the two main readings we had, one from Ezekiel and one from Revelation, are so full of allegory and symbolism which most of us find hard to understand let alone follow. My immediate instinct was to grab the nearest summary or concordance I could find and draft my sermon around it – then I thought again and decided before doing so I should first of all try and understand its meaning from my own reading and interpretation of the descriptions used in the passages.

Ezekiel itself is very descriptive with its whirring wheels and flying angels and description of what can only be described as God in all his glory – which is really something quite indescribable.  I think that is why we have such trouble in interpreting Ezekiel’s vision in terms we can understand today.

I have even heard the vision described in more modern literature as an illustration or narrative of aliens coming down from another planet in their spaceship – works of fiction themselves such as “Chariot of the Gods” by Erich von Daniken.  To us, visitations from aliens is something which most of us cannot believe in but there again, who is to say that such visions of the glory of God cannot arise today.

Revelation 4 gives us a description of a similar event – the Heavens opening up to reveal God in all his glory seated on his throne of gold in Heaven.  The two narratives are quite similar and the whole of the book of Revelation is concerned with the vision or dream which the aged John had whilst exiled on the Greek island of Patmos.

Modern day visions such as this are, however, not so uncommon as we might think and there are numerous examples of people experiencing the glory of God in dreams and visions. 

We have just finished that glorious period of the church’s calendar which celebrates Jesus’s Resurrection, Ascension and then Pentecost when the gift of the Holy Spirit was bestowed upon all of Jesus’s disciples and gift brought with it its own gifts and fruits so that everyone, yes everyone including you and me, who follows Jesus would have the Holy Spirit freely available to carry on Jesus’s works and ministry when he was on Earth in human form.  As Teresa of Avila says “we are now the hands, feet and eyes of Christ” – through us, with and by and through the Holy Spirit alone can healing and ministry continue here.

But the Holy Spirit was not a new creation out of the New Testament.  The Spirit, like Jesus the Son has existed for all time.  We read in the very first few sentences of our bible – Genesis 1 – that the Spirit moved across the face of the yet to be formed Earth; we read numerous examples of where the Holy Spirit has been given to specific individuals to carry out God’s work – Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Saul, David, Jonah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and so on and in some cases where it has been removed – Saul for example.  Specific people to do specific tasks to bring god’s people back in line with God’s vision and hope for his people.

Finally he had to send his only son, Jesus, but unlike the prophets of the Old Testament, as we know Jesus left us the Holy Spirit for ourselves with a means of direct communication with the God for forgiveness without priestly intervention and the  gifts and fruits revealed at Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit is truly a mystical and supernatural phenomena.  It is God’s direct power handed down to us for his greater love and glory.

On Pentecost Sunday I, together with 1,500 other people, was in the cathedral for an amazing service of celebration.  Suspended from the roof were hundreds of white paper folded doves – symbols of the Holy Spirit as it descended upon Christ at his baptism and of peace.  Similar folded paper doves I am sure you have noticed have appeared in the windows of many shops in the centre of the city – as though they have flown out of the cathedral (sent by God) and settled amongst those secular symbols of commerce – into the every day world outside of the church.  Symbols of Hope, Peace and Love – a stirring of the Holy Spirit I am sure – a feeling of Spiritual Healing for a city that has suffered much in these last few weeks. We should never under-estimate the power of God’s healing through this wonderful Spirit. 

God speaks to us continually – through visions and words which we hear in our inner self (and very occasionally externally) ; through the products of his creation – the trees and shrubs, flowers and plants, the birds singing their song – singing as they were created to do; through other people.  When we pray we need also to spend time listening for God’s word to us.

In a moment of silence I ask you to think of a time when you have received a vision or word from God – perhaps you can’t directly recall any clear time – and that is okay – but I am sure there is a time when you felt amazingly happy and alive.  Perhaps at the birth of a child, that moment you first fell in love, the most beautiful sunset you have ever seen, a clear starlit night and so on. That will almost certainly have been a time when God was active in your life and almost certainly had a hand in what made you happy. 

Iraneus wrote “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive”. When you are feeling fully alive then that is a time when God’s glory is being revealed to you.  Perhaps not through whirring wheels and flashes of light as for Ezekiel, or the Heavens opening up as for John, but simply in the wonders of his creation.

May the Peace and Glory of the living God, Father , Son and Holy Spirit be revealed to you each and every day.

Amen          

MFB/24052018