Readings:
Sermon:
‘Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Holy Spirit will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.’
Words of Jesus from today’s gospel, John 16.7.
I remember when was a Curate, and the Vicar saying to me that he was going away. Moving on to another parish. It was a very busy parish and I’d only been there a year. It certainly didn’t feel it was ‘to my advantage!’
Now here I am as a Bishop of Dudley, and my senior colleague the Bishop of Worcester has announced that he too is ‘going away’ this time to a well deserved and we hope long and happy retirement. How can that be to our ‘advantage?’
John 16.7 is part of the Farewell Discourses in John’s gospel, when Jesus is pictured sharing his last thoughts with the disciples on the night before he was to die on the cross. If they understood him at all they can’t have felt encouraged. They had built their lives around this man, Jesus. They didn’t want him to go and leave them, let alone in the way he did. And yet that saving death on the cross was for their salvation. And three days later, on Easter Sunday Jesus rose gloriously from the dead. He was alive! Never to die again! He appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, filling them with joy, faith and belief until finally, the time came to depart from their sight forever. What we call the ascension. And yet that too was not the end. In fact it was just the beginning, the birthday of the church that we celebrate today, the Feast of Pentecost. When the living presence of God, the Holy Spirit, came upon the disciples in the form of a mighty wind and in tongues of flames. That motley group of men and women, uneducated, afraid, found a voice, and began to proclaim the mighty words and works of Jesus Christ. It was the beginning of a whole new movement, one that would change the world forever. It was the birthday of the church. Jesus had left them in one way, but through the Holy Spirit was alive and with them for ever more.
When my Vicar left, I did learn many things. Not least to rely not on him or on myself, but to rely on God the Holy Spirit, and his power at work in me. When Bishop John leaves us at the end of September we will need to lean afresh on God, to rely on his grace alone, and in our weakness to know his power to save.
‘The church grows only as it gives Jesus room to grow’ wrote the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. May that be true for us this Pentecost and always.
Amen.