On Ascension Thursday the dismissal gospel ended with the disciples returning to the upper room where they were staying and, with one accord, devoting themselves to prayer; waiting for the promised Holy Spirit.

In these 10 days between Ascension Day and Pentecost (next Sunday) we, with them, find ourselves waiting.  We have prayed in the words of the Golden Sequence for the sevenfold gifts of God’s spirit: understanding, counsel, courage, knowledge, piety, fear, wisdom (Isaiah 11: 1-5).

As we recall their waiting, what can we imagine is happening in them?

There is a sense of loss.  The One they had loved and followed; who they had betrayed and for whom they had lost their desire (because they wanted to be on the winning side,) had come back to them from the grave to console and teach them; and now he had gone, disappeared.  There is a sense of absence.  But as they pray, as they recall his gracious words:  “I will be with you always even to the end of the world”, a new sense of his presence is being awakened in them.  For the Lord had breathed into them his Spirit; and it is taking hold of them, guiding and instructing them.  This waiting in prayer allows the Spirit to move in them.  The sense of loss is becoming a sense of gain.

And what is being gained is a new sense of who they are and what they are about because they are losing that false sense of identity which is about owning and possession of a truth and excluding those who don’t fit in.  This is how God’s chosen people had become.  The Jews had become a chosen people not for the sake of others, but for the sake of their own elitism.  Remember Jonah, how infuriated he was to discover the filthy pagan Ninevites more ready to repent than he, a proper Jew.  

The apostolic band is losing any sense that they are right.  How could they continue to think like this? - after all they were the ones who had deserted Jesus.  And the victim of their story is the one who is reconstituting a new People, the New Israel.  So they are brought low so that their very desires can be reconstituted, more malleable for the service of God to be shaped like clay in a potter’s hand.

Now the founding of a New People, the Church, is no accidental thing.   The Church is often thought of as something ‘over there’, a mere human construct, an institution, ‘them’; or it is a theological something that doesn’t really exist, it is invisible, not tangible, a nice idea.  This way of thinking is rather convenient because if we did take the Church, ourselves as the Body of Christ, seriously; ourselves as a People founded by God’s intention, we might find it a bit too demanding.  We might need to think about our commitment to it and re-prioritise our time and money, the efforts we put into so many other areas of our lives.  The demands might be too much.  

And so that there is no doubt about what the Spirit of God is doing in the disciples in these early days we must notice that the Spirit moves them and they are beginning to discern how the Spirit is leading them…. to elect Matthias as the 12th apostle in place of Judas who had killed himself: twelve apostles for the twelve tribes of Israel.  This little, group is to be the foundation of a New Israel.  And the foundation of this new People is unlike any other group: it is founded by a victim.

John the Seer of Revelation expects to see the Lion of Judah, the conquering lion, the victory of the Jewish over the Gentiles; instead he sees a lamb standing as one slain – a victim, the Victim from whom life is to be received through forgiveness, reconciliation, healing.

And this victim is saying you don’t have to create your own identity by condemning anyone else or by being against anyone; you don’t have to grasp at being special – so as to possess it - because I have given you your ‘specialness’ already.  And because you are beginning to understand this as you wait for my Spirit to inhabit you -  you are and will be a People who will exist so that others may be included so as to discover their ‘specialness’ too.   This new people is being founded, reconstituted from the excluded one so that no-one may ever feel they are excluded again.

This discovery of God’s will to found and reconstitute a new people will be confirmed on the day of Pentecost, with power from on high.  

So the Church is a visible and living sign of what God is doing in the world.   And it is out of the lived experience and the prayerful recollection of all that Jesus said and did that the gospels and the rest of the New Testament will arise.  And the Spirit of Jesus, breathed into them by the Risen Lord (St John), and poured out at Pentecost (Acts), will continue to lead a People into all truth through human history.

We sometimes forget that the New People, the Church is prior to the New Testament scriptures.   There is a bit of a see-saw about which gets the most weight – the living People of God, i.e. the Church, or the Bible.

It seems to me that the division that is emerging in the Anglican Communion is a division which is arising in Christianity at large.

We are experiencing the growing division between those who believe that the Bible is primary and all else is secondary; and the other where the Church is primary and the Bible is it’s foundational record.  The first is the protestant strain: a presumption to have a first-hand grasp on what Christianity is, has led to further and further schism and break-up in the church through the ages.  After all if you have the truth and only need the bible what should stop you from starting your own church tomorrow?  

I was reading recently that during apartheid in South Africa most of the protestant churches divided along racial lines.  So there was a black Dutch Reformed Church and a white one.  By God’s grace, the Anglican Church in South Africa remained one and united.   In my church in Cape Town, blacks and so-called coloureds continued to worship alongside us in a white suburb.  We need a strong sense of a Church.

The catholic and historical truth is that a tradition grows through a people over time.  The record of God’s dealing with us is the Scriptures as a ‘touch-stone’ of truth – a way of testing the ongoing developing tradition of the church.  The Bible is thus part of the living tradition; arising from the same period when the church was being formed by the Holy Spirit with the gift of Holy Orders: bishops, priests and deacons among the various other ministries of service and inspiration. Holy Order would become more and more important to maintain order and unity through the various heretical deviations and calamities of the church.

On this Anglican Communion Sunday I think it may be appropriate to remind us of the classical Anglican methodology of discerning how the truth is evolving over time. The Anglican three legged milking stool of faith, is the means by which we engage in the ongoing way of seeking the truth: Holy Scripture, Christian Tradition, and Reason.  This method is now under threat in the tension between two poles. But we are not a sola scriptura church; not a ‘scripture only’ church.  

The classic Anglican view is that we believe that the Scriptures contain all things necessary for salvation and that nothing should be believed that isn’t in Scripture or can be proved from Scripture as implicit in Scripture.  Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, what is implicit is made more explicit through history.  

We do not believe scripture is the inerrant word of God.  Along with Scripture we consider the ongoing workings of God’s Spirit in humanity through history – Holy Tradition; and this, in the light of modern scholarship and scientific Reason.  

The Spirit whose gifts we pray for is leading us into all truth.   We have never arrived; the truth is never possessed, always beyond us.  We are losing our insights to be given new insights afresh.  To resist this ongoing dynamic is to shun the Spirit of God who is always making all things new.

So we pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit to come upon us and sustain us.  We look back in thanksgiving to our foundation as a New People by our Victim Lord; we give thanks for the gift of our Anglican Communion, and pray for that malleability so that we may continue to be led into all truth.

Of this malleability we sang in the Golden Sequence too, praying to be delivered and spared intransigence and obstinacy:  

What is rigid, gently bend; what is frozen, warmly tend, Straighten what goes erringly.
Here thy grace and virtue send: Grant salvation in the end.  And in heaven felicity.  Amen

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