I want to use this blog to say some things that should be obvious. Why? Because they don’t appear to be known by the very people to whom they should be best obvious. Every Sunday morning I listen to a clergy person who either has learned these really obvious things, or has decided that they have found something more important to say, something from some other source. What should be most obvious is that we have to hear from him or her what the Scripture readings that we have just heard, say. The job of the minister, teacher, clergy, whoever, is to say again what the Scripture readings say, to open the Scripture to us. It is not sufficient to refer to a line or two of one of the New Testament readings in passing. Opening the Scripture means talking us through all three readings please. Their job description, to which they gave their promise at their ordination, is to serve the Word of God, and to serve us by serving that whole Word up to us. They simply have to repeat what we have heard, using other words so that we hear it again, and clearer, in all its strangeness and directness. So, this blog is just a response to the sermon I heard and the service I took part in part in on Sunday. For this reason it is full of things that are really obvious to most of you. It is my questions about what was and wasn’t said in that sermon, and my questions about what we heard and said and sung in that service and it is my ‘thank you’ and my ‘Amen’.
being obvious
December 21st, 2005 · 2 Comments
Tags: Church
2 responses so far ↓
1 Chris Roberts // Jan 21, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Tell me something obvious: what/who is the Holy Spirit?
2 douglas // Jan 23, 2006 at 7:33 am
Who/what is the Holy Spirit? That is the kind of question I like. The Holy Spirit is our Lord. He is God, the real, the holy, the only God. There are many masters and authorities that have power over us (the Christian tradition calls them ‘gods’), but they all want something from us because they are needy. Only the real God does not need anything from us, and this is what we mean by saying he is holy. He does not engage with us because this is in his own interests, but he is interested in us anyway, and is determined that we should know this, which involves us becoming holy too.
There is no way to know God except as the Holy Spirit. When we say he is holy we mean amongst others things that he is ungraspable, we don’t grasp or get him or know him via any route we establish without his cooperation. He makes himself known, and he does so in the (holy) Son of the (holy) Father. He provides the breath, life and words by which we come together and praise God, and say publicly that God knows us, and wants us to know that he knows us. Simply by praising him we will move a little way out of the dim half-life we presently know and will shuffle very slightly closer to reality, in which you will be holy to me, me holy to you, and thus, as his holy people, you and I will become real to each other.
As the Holy Spirit powers our praise, which is our acknowledgment and appreciation of reality, we will grow into the life that he shares with us, so we won’t ever run out of things to say about him – or to one another. It is fine to ask ‘what’ questions about the Holy Spirit (or about anyone), but the answer can only be in terms of ‘Who’. The Holy Spirit is the source of all ‘Who-ness’, even yours and mine.
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