The Spirit and Difference
John 4.5-26, 39-42
Acts 2.1-8
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 27th August 2006

When Joseph and Mary and their baby, Jesus set out from Nazareth to Egypt, they joined a procession of refugees that has walked down through history and across every continent of the globe. They retraced the steps of their ancestors, fleeing from Egypt a thousand years before. They joined a caravan of reluctant pilgrims that has wound through Europe, crossed African deserts and Asian jungles. Most recently they have been joined by all those who drove their battered an overload cars across the perilous roads of southern Lebanon to Tyre and Beirut.

Refugees are people on the move, fleeing drought and famine, war and oppression as they walk or hitchhike or sit packed into the backs of trucks. They are largely forgotten, unless there is a great crowd of them on the doorstep of the nation. On this Sunday, we intentionally remember them, pray for them, and ask ourselves how they fit into the world and how they fit into our views of faith and life.

In recent years, refugees have figured large in public policy and political life in this country. In the lead up to the 2001 election our Prime Minister galvanised a strong sentiment of the Australia when he said “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come ”. Even Mark Latham, the hard man of the opposition reflected in his diaries that the rule of law was important, that protection of our borders was an important function of the state. Was this just  the nation protecting itself? Was it an expression of the xenophobia and deep insecurity of Australia people? What is (as Latham suggests) an issue of defending the rule of law?  Whatever it was, it did strike a deep chord in the Australian populace and the government carried the election convincingly.

The social issue of how we respond to refugees is one on which the Bible speaks quite directly. The Old Testament makes clear we have obligations “to the stranger that is within your gates”. The alien, the visitor, the stranger is one to whom the people of God have special responsibility. They are reminded that they were once slaves, strangers in Egypt, so they should remember those who are strangers amongst them. Jesus told his followers that whenever they look after the poor, the naked and defenceless the imprisoned and oppressed they are in fact caring for him (Mt 25). In the book of Hebrews the church is reminded to show hospitality to strangers for many have thereby entertained angels unawares (Heb 13). These are basic issues of justice and faithfulness to the Bible and we could quite rightly ground our reflection on Refugee Sunday in this central teaching of Scripture.

But I wish to take another starting point, exploring not how refugees need us and how we are obliged to care for them by the law, but how we need them, how the church cannot find its life without the gift they bring.

In John 4 Jesus sat by the well in the heat of the day and spoke to woman, a Samaritan. We have heard many sermons on this well know and extensive story in John. There were many barriers between them, each of which Jesus dismantled one by one as they spoke together. There was the barrier of gender, that a man who should not initiate contact with a woman, broken by Jesus who displayed his vulnerability and asked for a drink. There was the barrier of ethnicity, of national feeling, transgressed by a Jew willing to have dealings with a Samaritan. There were the barriers of morality, flouted by a Rabbi, a teacher, engaging with a person he clearly knew to be morally compromised, living in sin. Finally there were the barriers of religion, of the ‘proper’ ways to worship in one’s respective religious centre, in Jerusalem or on the holy mountain of Samaria. This final barrier Jesus sweeps away with the statement that the Father will be worshipped ‘neither in Jerusalem nor on in this mountain’ but those who worship him will worship him ‘in spirit and in truth’.

In this crucial passage Jesus dismantles all the ‘otherness’ of the woman’s identity, every aspect of her sense of self (and his) that protects them from having to interact with each other. Instead of affirming, I am Jew and I will determine who will allowed to come to me and how they will come, Jesus points to the sweeping away of all such distinctions in the new freedom of a worshipping community grounded solely in spirit and truth.

We in the church need to be careful with this text: did Jesus ‘unfreeze’ Jewish and Samaritan practices only to immediately ‘refreeze’ them in a new Christian practice? Do we think that our Christian tradition is the domain of ‘spirit and truth’ supplanting Jerusalem and Samaria? OR is Jesus unleashing a new and continuing dynamic in spiritual life. Is he saying to us: the days are coming when you won’t worship at the Western Wall, or at St Peter’s at Rome, or in Mecca: those who worship God must worship him in spirit and in truth?  Is the teaching of Jesus, fixed in a Christian tradition he initiated, or is it a continuing dynamic at work in the world, transcending  “otherness”, removing differences, rendering communal barriers obsolete and calling people into a shared experience? What might that experience look like?

In Acts 2 we have the decription of the founding of the church of Jesus Christ. The writer of Luke-Acts gave us about a quarter of the New Testament. Lucan theology shapes the liturgical structure of the church’s life more than any other NT theologian. In Acts 2 he depicts the early church exploding into being in the wonder of Pentecost. After a period of waiting and praying suddenly there comes dramatic action. There is a rushing wind and noise and flames like tongues resting on the heads of those gathered together. Then other ‘tongues’ take over and suddenly the congregation are all shouting and declaring the mighty acts of God in all the languages of the ancient Near East. People in the street gather and watch and listen. And they turn to one another and ask “What do these things mean?”

This is they key question not just for the church then but for us now: what do these things mean? What does this story tell us about what it means to be the church?

It tells us first that the acts of God are not confined to some official, dominant language. It means that visitors and late-comers, migrants and foreigners have just as much purchase on the truth of God as those who belong to the heart of the religious community and were close to the founder and his community. It means that the community of God spills over the levee banks of traditional religious stakeholders into ever new groups of people. It is what happens in Acts 2 when the disciples start telling the story in different languages. It is what happens in Acts 8 when Philip encounters an Ethiopian, a eunuch, and the gospel spills over and draws him into the community. It’s what happens in Acts 9 when Saul, the bitter persecutor of the church is converted and drawn in to the story. It’s what happens in Acts 10 when Cornelius the Roman centurion is welcome into the church, in Acts 15 when the Council of Jerusalem opens the door to Gentiles, in Acts 17 when the secular philosophers of Athens are engaged by Paul’s preaching and on and on to the uttermost parts of the earth. The work of the Spirit is to engage those who are different and excluded and draw them into the community of Jesus.

It means that the church is empowered when the story of God comes through different languages, different histories, different cultures, different peoples.

We need to remind ourselves about this, perhaps more than anyone. As a church we have a strong sense of history – a sense reinforced a few weeks ago with the launch of Ken Manley’s book. A sense reinforced by the buildings around us, the many memorials, the strong sense of family history that is live within the church.

But we are also a blended community. There is a genre of story: when I was called I met with the search committee:  this community is important to me – you must value it carefully…. We came to Canberra in 1954, in 1968, in 1973.  Our story was joined with the community’s story at this point.  So often we hear the community’s story, not the blended and enriched story of many strands that makes a strong cord, strands of tradition that are woven together to form our story, a story that binds us to the past. These different stories comes as a gift, as a source of great strength and diversity, a source of the Spirit’s newness and energy. Tonight we are having three members of the congregation tell their story – of displacement – of surrendering the old place, and discovery – finding a new place here in Australia. For some it was fifty years ago, for another 5 months ago. It is a story of growth and encounter, a story of God at work in different lives and varied stories but leading us to a shared future. This is the work of the Spirit and it is what gives us life! And note this: it is the direct opposite of saying: “We will decide who comes to our community, and how the circumstances in which they will come.”

It is when the mighty acts of God are told with different accents, and are heard in the tones of our own tongues, whatever those tongues may be, that the church is empowered to be the church. It is then that the Spirit moves among us. The Scriptural demand for justice reminds us that refugees need us. But the message of Pentecost is that we need them. The Spirit who is found in difference and otherness, has a story to tell through their journeys, their struggles.  The Spirit who leads us into truth beyond communal boundaries and old tribal loyalties touches us in their suffering and in their seeing of our lives, our ways of being, our cultures.