Spirit of St Louis - Sermon 2nd March 2008
Lent 4: Holy Communion.
John 9: 1-41
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes, saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, "Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?" Some were saying, "It is he."
Interesting reading, that! A blind man, who challenges the disciples. How does he fit in? Which for them means - how quickly can we fit him into our scheme of how the world is? He's blind - punishment from God! Whose fault was it?
Hours pass. The man, now healed, returns home. Now, it's the neighbours who can't fit him into their view of the world. Is it even him? Seeing as he doesn't fit... We all have a need to be able to fit things into frameworks, or we feel unsettled. Jesus unsettles, because so much of what he does doesn't fit in...
At the last Communion Service, Barbara Ann shared with me a fair amount of the actual rite at the Table. Today, Annette will do so too. Where do they fit in? I want Barbara Ann and Annette, at their different stages, to experience as many dimensions of ministry as possible. Every time I have had someone working with me, as a student, or an enquirer, or a probationer, I have always done this, and because I have my sources, I know that this raises a lot of fascinated speculation in the congregation. Now that I've been here five years and you know that you are stuck with me for another three, I can say things like this!
You know that only Ministers are allowed to celebrate Communion. And I'm a fairly high Presbyterian, with, I hope, a sense of how things should be done! But it looks as though people who aren't ordained are coming awfully close to celebrating Communion! But that can't be right, can it? "What's going on?", you ask. Surely Owain knows where the dividing line is? Surely "the safety catch is on"!
Like Barbara Ann at the last Communion, today Annette, at the Table, will read out Paul's account of the Lord's Supper from 1 Corinthians 11. This passage embodies Jesus' own words:
...and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."
Isn't it those words - Jesus' words (usually as handed down by Paul)- that consecrate the elements? Make them the vehicles of the body and blood we received by faith?
Well, no. In our tradition, they are spoken outside of, and before, the great consecrating prayer. They are usually called the "Scriptural Warrant". They are the statement that what we do, we do in accordance with the Scriptures. In our tradition, the whole service consecrates, but if you were looking for a "moment of consecration", it would be in the invocation of the Holy Spirit "on us and these elements of bread and wine". Here Calvin agrees with the great Orthodox tradition of Christianity, Greek and Slavic. (Our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic tradition understand the words of Jesus to consecrate, with all that that implies to them, but our understanding is different.)
We're OK! The safety catch was on!
So if the important thing is the calling down of the Holy Spirit - why do we have Jesus' words in there at all?
Well, there's another dimension to all this, and it's called anamnesis. Big fancy Greek word, connected with "amnesia" and “mnemonic“ - a memory aid. "Anamnesis" means "remembering", or "memorial". But that's seriously misleading - because for us, in the twenty-first century, "remembering" is a matter of trying not to forget. A memorial is an aid to help us remember something that might otherwise get away from us. The past, slipping ever further into the past. Things that happened, that become fuzzier and fuzzier memories. "Keep it with Kodak!" the adverts used to say - because if you didn't , you would forget.
But that's not what "Anamnesis" means. Not in Scripture - "do this as an anamnesis of me..." Not in the Communion service.
As someone put it beautifully, ana-mnesis is a re-membering, a putting back together, of the past. It's what happened in the past invading the present in such a way that it completely dominates it. We don't "do these things" as some people imagine, to try to remind ourselves of what Jesus did two thousand years ago. We do it on his command so that what he did can become what he does. That's why, when, in a few minutes' time, when you receive the bread and the wine from your neighbour, you should understand that in the very reallest sense you also receive them from the hand of Christ.
But you see, looking at remembering in that way also has the profoundest effects on how we read the Bible - or hear it read. On how we encounter Scripture...
Here's the next part of our Gospel reading this morning...
Some were saying, "It is he." Others were saying, "No, but it is someone like him." He kept saying, "I am the man." But they kept asking him, "Then how were your eyes opened?" He answered, "The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight." They said to him, "Where is he?" He said, "I do not know." They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind.
Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, "He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see." Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath." But others said, "How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?" And they were divided.
So they said again to the blind man, "What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened." He said, "He is a prophet." The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, "Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?"
His parents answered, "We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself." His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, "He is of age; ask him."
Sermon split here by Hymn 643: For me to live is Christ
You all know the story of Charles Lindbergh. Most of you will have seen the film about him, with Lindbergh played by James Stewart, "The Spirit of St. Louis", made in the vintage year of 1957. You will probably be able to recall some facts about him - the kind of stuff that is useful in quiz-nights. He made the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1957, landing in Paris. (The landing is one bit of the film you'll probably remember!) His child was kidnapped, found dead, and there was an infamous trial of the man accused of the Lindbergh baby murder. If history is your thing, you may know that before Pearl Harbour, Lindbergh was a prominent isolationist, wanting America to keep out of European politics as they drifted towards war. Controversially, he accepted a medal from Hermann Goering, though it is almost certain that this was sprung on him in such a way that he couldn't politely refuse.
If you are a bit of an anorak, you might know that he served with, but not in, the United States Marine and Army Air Forces in the war against Japan, and distinguished himself. He found ways of flying planes, such as the twin-engined P38 Lightning, so that their fuel-efficiency was about doubled. (If you are really of an anoraky disposition, you might know that the way he did this was to increase the "bite" - the angle of attack - of his propeller blades while throttling right back on his engines. His mechanics said he would shauchle his engines - but he didn't.)
And he died in 1974. He was a human being with a life-story that is, more than most of us, written down and recorded, in books and in films.
I saw that film, "The Spirit of St. Louis" when I was about nine, and had just discovered the joys of making plastic Airfix models. This was back in the stone age, when a nine-year-old child could not just try to, but actually could, buy polystyrene cement in the corner shop without social services being involved! I duly bought a plastic model kit of the Spirit of St. Louis, 1/72 scale, and built it. It had a wee 1/72 scale Charles Lindbergh, whom you were meant to glue, painted, into his seat in the model - which was a bit odd, because you could barely see him through the tiny clear plastic window, about five millimetres square, or the open square hatch on top of the fuselage between the wings - which was very authentic, because the hatch on the original Spirit of St. Louis had also been just an open square on the fuselage roof between the wings.
Now at the age of eight, though I was building models, I was still disposed to think of them as toys. Even yet, if I were left on my own in a room with a model aircraft for a few minutes, I would eventually pick it up, and start "flying" it between thumb and forefinger, going "NeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeAAAAOOWWMMMMMMMM!" and "eeeeeeEEEEE-EEEEEEAAAAAAAaaaaaooooummmmm" as I made the thing perform all sorts of arm's-length aerobatics. Laugh if you like - but show me a man of any age who wouldn't!
But the point with my model of the Spirit of St. Louis was this. I knew that Lindbergh was a hero of aviation, because I'd seen the film. I knew that Lindbergh had had one stunning, world-changing adventure - because I'd seen the film. And I wanted my Lindbergh - my 1/72 scale Lindbergh - to have yet more adventures, my adventures for him, in my imagination, invented and told by me.
So what did I do?
The point was what I didn't do.
I didn't glue him in.
For months, I would put him into the model, and then get him out again - by turning the thing upside down and by a fair bit of undignified shaking to get him to fall out through the tiny hatch. And he could have adventures in and out of his plane, adventures that were no part of the "Lindbergh story", no part of the life of the real Lindbergh. I knew nothing of accusations of dodgy far-right politics. I knew nothing that wasn't in the film I'd seen. I knew he'd flown the Atlantic. And beyond that I could have adventures with Lindbergh - my 1/72 scale toy Lindbergh - just the way that my children could have adventures, in the nineties, with their toy Star Wars figures - adventures that were never in the Star Wars films. In fact for several weeks, Lindbergh even came to church with me in a matchbox. In those days of afternoon Sunday School when children were in for the whole morning service, he used to get out and have quiet adventures among the hymnbooks and the pew cushions.
It occurs to me that that's the difference between a model and a toy. One spot of glue. If I'd glued Lindbergh into his seat, the way the plans said, I'd have had a model. Because I wouldn't just have glued him into his seat, I'd have glued him into his story. I would have had a plastic representation of the most glorious 33 hours, 30 minutes and 29.8 seconds of the real Charles Lindbergh's life. By not gluing him into the story, I could let him go on to have far greater adventures, do far greater deeds, in our garden, in my room, and even in church.
In other words, I could play with him. And because I played with him, he became my friend.
How are we to hear the stories of Jesus in Scripture? How are we to be true to the texts we have, yet understand that Jesus can become unglued from them in a way that Lindbergh could never be unglued from the stories that go to make up his life? How, in other words, are we to make sense of what Scripture itself says - that Jesus Christ is bigger than Scripture? Let's hear the last part of the Gospel reading. And we can now hear it as the story of people who were desperate to glue Jesus back into the framework that Scripture and tradition gave them. Listen to how frantic the Pharisees become when they confront a man who is only telling them the truth about what happened to him - because that truth doesn't fit their framework.
Then listen how the man whom Jesus has healed is the one for whom Jesus has become unglued from all preconceptions. The man whom Jesus healed is the one who can only say "Well, whatever you say, I can only tell you - I know this to be true. It may not fit into your neat, pre-packaged truth. It may not fit in with what you already know. It doesn't fit in with what I thought I knew. But I can't see it any other way now..." It turns out that Jesus was bigger than the framework...
So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, "Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner."
He answered, "I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." They said to him, "What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?" He answered them, "I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?"
Then they reviled him, saying, "You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from." The man answered, "Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."
They answered him, "You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?" And they drove him out. Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" He answered, "And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him." Jesus said to him, "You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he." He said, "Lord, I believe." And he worshiped him. Jesus said, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind."
Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains.
In one way, we can't deny that the stories of Scripture are all we have of Jesus, and we don't have Jesus apart from the stories of Scripture. But the astounding thing is the way that Jesus unglues himself from these stories, and becomes woven in with ours. Jesus remains a contemporary figure. The past invades the present, and becomes a living presence for us. But these aren't stories we make up, like the stories I could make up about my little Lindbergh, 1/72 scale, discovering lost castles among the hymnbooks in church! These stories aren't stories we are in charge of. These are stories that draw us in, and confront us with the Christ who, greater than the stories about him, greater than Scripture, the Christ who just doesn't fit, but makes new space for himself by enlarging our understanding of God. Oddly, they are stories that take charge of us - so that we are stuck with them, just as the blind man healed was stuck with his story, and couldn't change it if he'd wanted to - but which then set us free.
They are stories that challenge and change our way of seeing. If we let them...