pneumatology

Of Vines and Eunuchs: Sermon Preached on 28st April 2024 (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

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A cross section of an icon of Christ the True Vine, surrounded by the apostles as branches, by 16th Century Cretan artist Angelos Akotantos

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 8: 28-40; John 15: 1-11

“I am the vine – you are the branches.”

Just as it is today, the Holy Land of Biblical times was great winegrowing country. The terminology of winegrowing is a frequent part of Jesus’ parables and teaching, and indeed large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, the grapevine was often a metaphor for the Jewish people.

The eunuch, very African in appearance, dressed in opulent appearance, and accompanied by a dog, bends down to be blessed by St Philip. Five retainers, one holding the Scriptures watch from the eunuch's horse and carriage.
The Baptism Of The Eunuch (1626), by Rembrandt. Hangs in the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, Netherlands.

The language of the vine and the branches in the Gospel reading is so rich, that it is easy to ignore our reading from Acts this morning – and nobody wants to preach about eunuchs in case children in the congregation ask awkward questions. But Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch is tremendously important to the revolution in thought that clearly affected the apostles in the years after the Resurrection. This shift in mindset is all about who could be considered one of God’s chosen people. Acts records it as being clearly directed by the Holy Spirit.

The “Ethiopian” is, of course, a foreigner from a long way away; in fact, he’s described as a court official of the Candace, who was the ruler of the great city of Meroë, located in the present day Sudan. He was probably much darker-skinned than the people in the Holy Land, but that will have mattered much less in the Ancient world, which was much less race-obsessed than we are.

Although we often hear that to be a Jew, you have to be born a Jew, this isn’t actually the case. People from Gentile backgrounds can and did convert to Judaism in Biblical times, and they do so today. As this Ethiopian “had come to Jerusalem to worship”, he was clearly interested in the God of the Jews. The thing that ensured that he could never convert to Judaism wasn’t that he was a foreigner, but that he was a eunuch. That prohibition dated back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Ethiopian was reading from the second part of the prophecy of Isaiah when Philip approached him, and shortly after the section quoted here, it contained a brief reference to a future time when God would give eunuchs something “better than sons and daughters… an everlasting name that shall not be cut off”. (The reference to things being cut off is, almost certainly in this context, meant to be funny.) Yet writings from contemporary Jewish writers made it clear that prejudice against eunuchs was still very much alive in Judaism at the time of the apostles and that Isaiah’s prophecy was yet to be fulfilled.

So something revolutionary happens when the Ethiopian says, “Look, here is water! What is to stop me being baptised.” The apostles by this stage have no sense of themselves as being anything other than Jews, Jews who believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. When Philip baptises the Ethiopian, it is a powerful sign that the followers of Jesus Christwill come not just from the Jewish people but from a myriad of ethnicities and nationalities, and will come even from people who had been forbidden from becoming Jews because of their state in life. This isn’t, for the apostles, a rejection of Judaism, but a clear fulfilment of Jewish prophecy.

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Ye Must Be Born Again: Sermon Preached on 5th March 2023 (Second Sunday of Lent)

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Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Romans 4:1-5, 4:13-17; John 3:1-17

“How can anyone be born after having grown old?”

 “Ye must be born again.” I saw this phrase a lot when I was a kid growing up in Belfast, on the noticeboards of churches and sometimes on posters stuck up on lamp-posts. It made very little sense to me, just as it initially made very little sense to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel reading.

A young and powerfully built man holding a big yellow sign with the text "John 3:7" on it in black writing. Several young women and men, one holding a pram, are standing behind him.
Is this what being born again is about? Street preachers in Belfast 6 April 2013. Photo © Allan Leonard and used underCreative Commons 2.0.

As I became older, I started noticing that the street preachers who popped up in the city centre on Saturday afternoons liked using it. They were quite clear that they were born again, and therefore that they were proper Christians: and they were also clear that the rest of us were not proper Christians – especially if we happened to be Catholics.

Aged around eighteen, I found myself walking past a church where an Evangelical youth rally was about to start, and going in out of curiosity. I came forward at the altar call because I did indeed want a closer personal relationship with Jesus; perhaps, in the way of the young, I wanted some of the obvious sense of certainty that the people leading the rally seemed to have. I was quickly disappointed, however – on hearing my obviously Catholic name and the strongly Republican part of the city I came from, the people holding the rally clearly coveted a convert and a ‘conquest’. I found it the experience so nauseating that I bade my farewells and left as soon as I politely could.

I’m sure I’m not the only person here who has had experiences like this. This makes us rather nervous when we hear the phrase “you must be born again”. Indeed, it might seem that the translators of the Bible version we use in St John’s are nervous about it as well. They prefer the phrase: “You must be born from above”. Now, let’s be clear that this is not some get-out-clause invented by liberal New Testament scholars. The same Greek word “anōthen” can be translated either way. In any case, this matters little – whichever word is chosen to translate this phrase, Jesus is very clearly speaking of the idea of a rebirth – a heavenly, spiritual, rebirth.

But here’s the rub – in this story, being reborn isn’t something that people choose for themselves. “The wind blows where it chooses”, as Jesus says. If we are ‘born again’ it is because the Holy Spirit has blown its way into our lives for reasons of its own. It is not in our gift or our choosing. It isn’t something that we should wear as some sort of badge of pride or see as a prize for our achievements. To be born again is a gift of God the Holy Spirit.

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Jubilee and the Holy Spirit: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th June 2022 (Pentecost)

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Readings – Acts 2: 1–21; Romans 8: 14–17; John 14: 8–17, 25–27.

“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever”. 

Seventy years and a few months ago, a young woman was on an exotic holiday with her husband in Kenya. She was staying in the Treetops Hotel, which was literally a very fancy and well-serviced treehouse, watching the big game animals play on the savannah below, when she heard the news that, half a world away, her father had died.

The death of a parent, as many of us know, is a wrenching moment in life, when one’s own personal world is knocked off its axis. What was different for this young woman was that she not only had to grieve as any child does a parent, but she also had instantly to become a Head of State, for this was the moment when Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father, King George VI.

Among the many tremendous changes that have taken place over the seven decades since, perhaps the most profound has been that in the status of women. The world of 1952 was still a man’s world. Women in positions of power were rare: Elizabeth’s first cabinet had not a single female minister. It was essentially unheard of for a young woman – and Elizabeth was only twenty-five – to be in any position of authority in society except with respect to children.

It took remarkable strength of character to thrive in that context – and she did thrive, through staggering changes. Her reign began as head of an Empire that stretched from Malaya to Jamaica, and continues into the age of Brexit. China was an impoverished global backwater seventy years ago, while the now-disappeared Soviet Union was one of the world’s superpowers. The Queen has seen two female Prime Ministers come and go, something unimaginable when she took office. Her reign began when homosexuality was against the law yet eventually saw marriage opened to couples of the same sex. In 1952, the Pill had not been developed, Elvis Presley and John Lennon had not been heard of, human beings had yet to set foot in Space, and the world’s few computers occupied vast sheds of tape reels and valves.

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