Spirit Imaginings

Picture if you can the moments following the Big Bang. Picture the intense concentration of matter and energy exploding outwards into the vacuum of space. Theologically, the uncreated source and first cause of all energy we name as God the Creator.

In your mind’s eye imagine the arresting image of dark, empty-formlessness covering an impenetrable deepness and the Spirit of God brooding over the dark emptiness of deep space. To my modern mind, this is an image of an organizing energy, an intentional energy that brings order out of chaos, creating form out of formlessness.

The Hebrew word used for Spirit is the feminine noun Ruach. It’s a surprise for many English speakers to realize that the Spirit of God carries the pronoun – she. The feminine principle evokes the images of bringing order out of chaos. Out of chaos, the universe is birthed- a process St. Paul in Romans imagines as the whole creation [which] has been groaning in labor pains until now.

Paul fashions this metaphor further as he tells us that as we too, have a part in the universe’s laboring. We groan, we pant, and we push driven by the hope of imminent new birth. In this state of travail, the Holy Spirit, like a midwife comes to our aid, brooding over our birthing of a new world.

For Luke, God’s Spirit brooding over the empty darkness of the deep at the beginning of creation now broods over the world a second time in a display of pyrotechnic, splendid, terror. For Luke, in this Pentecostal coming the Holy Spirit impregnates our DNA with God. Jesus has now ascended and God becomes built into our very nature empowering us to continue Jesus’ work as the agents for the coming of the kingdom.

*

Having seen the new Wonder Woman movie with my granddaughter Claire on Friday afternoon, I am reminded that Luke’s purpose is not to impress us with pyrotechnics like the latest blockbuster special effects. He wants to draw our attention, not to the manner of the Spirit’s descent, but to the effect upon humanity of the descent of the Spirit. The tongues of flame and the noise and rush of wind are metaphors for a new birth. At the Day of Pentecost the curse of Babel was lifted; difference no longer a scourge of division becomes the source for enrichment. Paul, in I Corinthians reminds us that in each of us, the Spirit takes appropriate expression so that our differences and diversity contribute to the building up of the whole.

Luke’s theological message is that for those born anew as members of the Church, it is no longer the business as usual of the old order;  a business based on discrimination, exclusion, and oppression of differences.

**

In the sonnet God’s Grandeur, the 19^th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, proclaims that:

The World is charged with the grandeur of God. 

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil – Crushed.

Yet against the background of this optimistic proclamation, Hopkins questions why humanity is so reckless of God’s gift of creation: 

Why do men then now not reck his rod? (not recognize God’s rule?)

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil and wears man’s smudge

and shares man’s smell:

The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Spirit Imperatives

In 21^st-century America the Holy Spirit broods over us still; birthing through us a new world order. If our commitment is not to the common ownership – from each according to ability, to each according to need – of the first Christian Communities, then it must be to the continual renewal of the ideal of the common good.

Among our politicians, lawyers and more latterly businessmen are overly-represented, producing a politics dominated by transactional thinking. This is not a phenomenon invented in the last four months. The early decades of the 21st-century have seen the complexities of society reduced by transactional thinking into a division between winners and losers. Transactional thinking corrodes our civic life to the point where now investment in long-term development is routinely sacrificed to short-term gain. Ideals degenerate into deals and the art of the deal has become the new way of being smart.

As a result, the disproportionate influences of transactional thinking produce a society where childcare, education, support of the elderly and infirm; where access to both legal representation and effective health care are all reduced to buying-power transactions.

Hopkins images our social relations: seared with trade, bleared, smeared, with toil wearing man’s smudge, sharing man’s smell. We have become a society where the differences of race, gender, and class most often translate into differentials of power and privilege. A society where access to the protections necessary for all in a thriving civic society are afforded the few but denied to the many.

We continue in our insensible stupor, failing to believe that climate change is not something that happens to other people, but is actually happening to us. Hopkins: The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod., gives us an image, of dangerous mental insulation in the face of the disavowed realities of lived experience.

***

The birth of the new Spirit-filled order comes as a challenge to the human propensity to distribute power, unequally. Luke’s vision of the Holy Spirit is of the anima – the feminine energy of new birth, embracing and celebrating the rich diversity of being human. Difference, no longer the scourge of division becomes the celebration of diversity as the Holy Spirit broods to birth the Kingdom among us.

The real point in Luke’s description of the Day of Pentecost lies not in the pyrotechnics of the Spirit’s arrival but in the transformation brought about in those gathered on the day. Lives were changed. A community of the fearful was transformed into a community of risk taking, radical living.

The question that should obsess us is not how to mimic early Christian social structure, but to ask what does the experience of transformed risk taking, radical living look like in our own time and place?

For many of us, a key agent for feeding personal transformation into the process for social change is our Christian faith. Yet, we have an expectation of the life of faith letting us off lightly. I believe this is what prevents us really taking this question seriously. We want to enjoy the comfort and sustenance of religion while expecting to escape largely unchanged by its radical imperatives.

We engage in acts of charity towards the less fortunate while failing to contend against systems that deprive whole communities of access to the fruits others of us expect to enjoy. We want to preserve our self-contained privacy from one another’s demands, and to be left untroubled to enjoy the fruits of our own material success, insulated by faith, carefully avoiding any imperative to change our worldview and shift our emphasis for our daily living.

God as Spirit is brooding over the abyss of the world continually calling forth order from chaos, creation from emptiness. At Pentecost God, as Spirit impregnated deep within the human DNA, filling the God-shaped space within us and the emptiness between us empowering us to now become co-creators with God in the healing of a broken world. I give way before the eloquence of Hopkins:

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;  

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods –

with warm breast and with ahhhhh! – bright wings. 

Vada Roseberry’s Creation Window, Trinity Cathedral, Phoenix, Arizona.

Listen to God’s Grandeur  Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

A sermon from the Rev Linda Mackie Griggs for the Sunday after the Ascension

For about two precious weeks each Spring, the scent of lilacs sweetens the air around my house. During that time I never miss the chance to stick my nose into a cluster of the blooms and take a big whiff. The key is to exhale, completely, so there’s nothing left in your lungs but anticipation. Then inhale—completely. Breathe it all in.

Bliss.

There’s something about finding that tiny point of emptiness before breathing in that makes the scent all the sweeter. Finding that point where you’re waiting to inhale.

Now, hold that thought.

“…as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

Believe it or not, Luke, the author of Acts, wasn’t really concerned about physics. You might think that the focus would be upon this great upward movement of Jesus into the clouds. My mother (a post-Enlightenment woman if there ever was one) used to scoff and mumble about staring at the soles of Jesus’ feet, and if you google the Ascension you will find a number of interesting images. Actually , mom was in good company—there are theologians who find the whole episode to be a little embarrassing.* The Incarnation? No problem. Resurrection? We can handle that. Ascension? Please. Even laying physics aside, the very idea of God as being exclusively UP THERE no longer works, cosmologically or theologically. While we often still gesture upward when talking of God in heaven, most of us on reflection will acknowledge God as immanent—being all around and within Creation and not just above it.

But Luke was part of a world that believed in a three-tiered universe of Underworld, Earth, and Heaven. In the first century the idea that Jesus would ascend was not in the least bit out of the ordinary. Of course the Son of God would ascend and be exalted to God’s right hand. If you look more closely at Luke’s description of the disciples’ reaction, you see that they just gaze upward—they just watch him go. They don’t fall down in fear like, for example, the shepherds on that first Christmas. In the conventional wisdom of multiple cultures of the time, ascension was what happened to those who were especially favored by God or the gods. Hercules, Moses, Enoch, Elijah, even the Roman emperor Augustus were said to have ascended from earth into the heavens. If Jesus hadn’t ascended; now that would have been a surprise.

But to dwell on this argument is really beside the point; it’s the equivalent of standing and staring upward with our mouths hanging open long after Jesus is gone. The angels bid us to move along; nothing more to see here.

But just because we shift our gaze away from heavenly acrobatics doesn’t mean that this episode isn’t significant. The Ascension story is not as important for what the disciples saw as it is for the fundamental nature of the moment itself. It is in fact an existential moment in the life of the Body of Christ.

I have talked before about something I called the “liminal millisecond”—that fleeting yet infinitely deep moment of God’s time in which everything can change. And the fact is that liminal milliseconds happen all the time; it’s just that you can see some more clearly than others. Like now.

A liminal millisecond is a threshold between the past and the future, when (theoretically) virtually anything is possible. It is moment that often requires a decision: Who or what is God calling me to be now?

It was in such a moment—this Ascension—that we see the completion of Incarnation: When the two men (or angels) tell the disciples to stop looking upward, and when they return to Jerusalem, Luke’s focus shifts from Jesus in the world to the community in the world. What he shows us here is the singularity that will become, on Pentecost, the Body of Christ.

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, to the ends of the earth.”

As usual, this was not the response the disciples expected when they asked if NOW Jesus was going to restore the kingdom. It wasn’t what they expected, but when has Jesus ever given them an answer they expected? But it was the answer they needed. This was not the time to revisit old expectations. This was a time to prepare for something new. The purpose of Jesus’ ascension was to make room for his promised gift of the Holy Spirit.

Waiting to inhale. Just like the lilacs.

What Luke describes here is that liminal millisecond when all is emptiness and anticipation. Waiting to inhale the Spirit.

The disciples, a couple of them perhaps reluctantly, turned toward Jerusalem and an uncharted future, equipped with each other and a promise from Jesus. They faced a world in pain and turmoil. A world of empty places just waiting to be filled with the Gospel.

So here we are, like the disciples, at a pivotal moment between Ascension and Pentecost, facing a world still in pain, still broken and begging for hope. Where do we find the empty places just waiting to be filled with the power of the Spirit?

The thing about emptiness is that it contains its own kind of fullness. On the one hand it can be filled with anxiety about an unknown future. This carries the risk of denial—a desire to dwell nostalgically on a (allegedly) simpler (and arguably rosier) past in order to avoid confronting the challenge of seeing things from new perspectives. That’s a form of gazing upward into the clouds. All we get is a crick in the neck. So what is the alternative? Instead of anxiety we can let the empty places that await us be sources of invitation, drawing us forward to new opportunities for formation and ministry.

For example: St. Martin’s was invited a few weeks ago to the 9^th Annual Interfaith Poverty Conference, and those of us who attended were blessed to hear a bracing keynote by The Rev. Dr. James Forbes of Union Seminary calling us out as God’s “Dream Team” in the fight against poverty in Rhode Island. Conference attendees participated in workshops on immigration issues, minimum wage issues, racial and economic disparities in education and housing, and challenges faced by low-income seniors.

The facts presented were startling. 13.9%. That’s the percentage of people in poverty in Rhode Island in 2015; that’s 141,000 people, mostly people of color living in poverty. 19.4% of children- children—again, mostly youngsters of color, in poverty. And 9.2% of children living in extreme poverty between 2011 and 2015.   Almost one in ten? I have to confess something here. These figures shouldn’t have startled me. And they wouldn’t have, if I had been paying attention. These people are our neighbors. 

You may have heard (and if you haven’t, you have now…) that the Episcopal Church and the ELCA (Lutheran) Church have joined together in a call for fasting, prayer and advocacy on the 21^st day of each month through the end of the 115^th Congress to stimulate awareness and action in combating poverty in this country and throughout the world. Why the 21^st of each month? Here’s another statistic: That’s when 90% of Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program benefits run out. For our neighbors. You do the math.

In our Gospel today we are reminded that God has given us to each other, that we may be one, as Jesus and God are one. And to be blind to our neighbors is to be blind to God’s call to oneness with all of God’s beloved; to commit to compassion, service and justice.

For those of us coming up for air in our first week of The Bible Challenge, there may still be at the back of our minds the lingering question of why we do this—what is the point of reading the Bible all the way through? Here’s a little more encouragement: Did you know that there are over 2000 references in the Bible to issues of the poor, wealth, poverty and social justice? Over 2000. As we engage more and more deeply every day with Scripture, I pray that it becomes not just an intellectual exercise or isolated spiritual discipline that we pick up once a day, like a set of free weights, and then lay aside until tomorrow. This work should be building our muscles to be fit for God’s purpose—the fulfilling of God’s dream of healing and reconciliation. We are not learning just to speak of the faith that is in us, but to live it, in how we engage with the world and with all of our neighbors.

This liminal moment in which we find ourselves as Pentecost approaches is an existential moment. Who are we? What are we becoming? As we wait to inhale the Spirit, filled with nothing but anticipation, may the God who surrounds and enfolds us draw our gaze, not upward, but into the eyes of our neighbor, because it is there that we will find Jesus.

*”Rudolf Bultmann in his essay The New Testament and Mythology: “We no longer believe in the three-storied universe which the creeds take for granted… No one who is old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local heaven … And if this is so, the story of Christ’s … ascension into heaven is done with.”

 

 

 

In the lead up to beginning The Bible Challenge at St Martin’s, there are two key questions that will focus our attention as we go forward. Firstly, how do we approach the language of the Bible? Secondly, how are we to understand what we read there?

The Bible contains multiple literary genres and they can’t all be approached in the same way. For instance, the New Testament contains gospel, letter, historical, and apocryphal literary genres. They are not all nails for which the hammer is always the right tool.

Gospel language is narrative language. Stories unfold through parables, i.e. confrontational tales drawn from ordinary life. Gospel language is rich in metaphor and allegory, both devices hinting at meaning beyond the literal face meaning of the words used.

The N.T. letters use the language of instruction, guidance, and often condemnation. Yet here we find metaphor and allegory used to nudge us in the direction from what is, towards what should be.

Biblical historical writing, unlike modern history, is not an objective analysis of events but a highly constructive arrangement of events to communicate a clear theological meaning.

Apocryphal writing evokes the language of dreams as a response to unendurable suffering, made endurable by a vision of victory in the end.

Acts 17:22-31 is an example of the historical genre. Luke is the historian of the early Church and in this sense, his history is very close to, if not is actual propaganda. His intention as a propagandist is two-fold. Firstly, he writes a history of the early years of the Church to commend Christianity to the wider pagan world of his time. His history is also intended for later generations of Christians, commending us to emulate in our lives the patterns of the first generation of Christians. Luke intends for us to read his history in order to develop a certain spiritual worldview.

A case study in reading history: Acts 17 

Paul had been cooling his heels in Athens for a few days after arriving from Borea, a town south of Thessalonica. It had been a tense time in Jerusalem during the recent council with the other Apostles. But at the council, Paul had won the argument. Gentile Christians did not have to submit to circumcision and the Jewish dietary codes.

Of course, he had known that Peter would eventually be won over; Peter, whose gregarious and generous personality led him to want to agree with everyone. But James? Paul had not been so sure that James, the leader of the conservative faction could have been persuaded. But in the end, James and the others had all agreed to give Paul a free hand in his mission among the gentiles. Buoyed up by his victory, Paul, accompanied by Silas and Timothy had set out immediately on a second missionary journey, swinging through the house church communities in Asia Minor and Greece.

Things had gone badly in Borea, however. There, Paul had encountered strong opposition from the Jews who came to hear him in the synagogue. It had been agreed with Silas and Timothy that Paul should hightail it out of town and go down to Athens and wait for them to join him there.

Paul had spent the last few days just ambling about splendid Athens with its many temples and impressive public buildings. He had never before found himself in such a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city and had been taken aback by the plethora of sects and cults all competing in a boisterous religious marketplace for custom among the curious Athenians. He had to admit he had found it all more than a little shocking. But yesterday, he had come across a temple dedicated to the unknown god. He had been a little amused at how these Athenians liked to hedge their bets. He realized that it really was true what they said about the Athenian insatiable craving for the latest novel idea and exotic practice.

Athens remained the center of learning and philosophy in the Classical World. Rather like the Great Britain of its day, Athens’ political and military power had long ago been usurped by an upstart new power centered at Rome. Yet, Rome still bowed before the hallowed Athenian Oxbridge[1] halls of learning.

This very morning Paul had found himself at the Areopagus, the rocky outcrop where the philosophical schools of Athens met to debate and dispute the pros and cons of various approaches to religion.

He hadn’t intended to speak and no one was more surprised than he when the learned Stoic and Epicurean scholars invited him to address them on this new teaching that seemed so strange to their ears.

In such august company, he had begun by measuring his words; not his usual preaching tactic. He had praised his audience for the quality of their religious thought and identified his new teaching about God with the object of their worship at the shrine to the unknown god. They had recognized his reference to Epimenides, one of their great poets when he had described God as the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being. They had also recognized his reference when he told them that we are the offspring of God, the god they recognize in the unknown one.

Oh yes, things had been going well. They had applauded when he had launched into a blistering critique of the pagan idols all around the city. This sophisticated audience had no truck with the popular worship of gods of gold and stone. Had he not ridden the rising energy of the crowd, now emboldened to proclaim that hitherto God had overlooked times of human ignorance but now called all to repentance through the raising of his son Jesus from the dead.

Having arrived at the crux of his thesis he had been stopped in full flood by the deafening silence in that moment before the whole Areopagus had erupted into scoffing cries of ridicule. Stoics and Epicureans, who agreed on nothing, both scoffed this Hellenized Jew’s ludicrous claim of resurrection from the dead.

Amidst the cries of derision, a small group had come to him and said we will hear you again. Compared to the thousands added to the church day in and day out through Peter’s preaching this was small success. But Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, both seemingly important citizens had been among the small group who had been persuaded by his words. Yet, Paul was kicking himself because he had so easily forgotten that those who consider themselves wise by worldly standards have no need of God.

Reading Luke’s history in Acts is a different kind of experience from the metaphor-rich language of the gospel writers. Historical narrative is less impactful – less heart changing in the moment.

Luke’s historical narrative functions in the same way that we might go to a play. We don’t attend Shakespeare to dismiss his characters because of their lack of historical plausibility. Watching Lear or Macbeth on the stage, they become knowable to us because we are drawn into identifying with them.

There is a tendency in some circles to idealize the characters we encounter in the Bible. We read about Paul’s exploits and we imagine him to be a much better Christian than we can ever be. I don’t regard idealization ever to be very helpful. On the other hand identifying with Paul, allows us to see him as a human being struggling with life in the same way we struggle with life.

I have viewed Paul standing on the rock of the Areopagus through the lens of my own speculations. Paul’s dilemmas and his challenges are so familiar to me. Paul’s way of resolving them offers a model for how we might do the same. Our context differs from his in so many ways and yet across all historical contexts the experience of speaking faith into a faithless world is remarkably the same.

At this point, I could take the direction of drawing out the parallels between the challenges facing Paul in 1^st century Athens and our challenges in 21^st century America. Idolatry – the placing of a lesser object in the place of ultimate concerns, still abound as much now as it did then. Like then, so also now. How are we to speak our faith into our public lives, not for the purpose of telling other people how to live their lives, but because we long to give a good account of the hope that is within us? How do we share the good news with others who like us, are struggling, seeking, and searching for that something more to living? In the midst of a world of material preoccupation, the longing for that something more to living seems to elude us as never before.

Yet, I want to stay close to the questions I mentioned at the outset: how do we approach the language of the Bible, and how are we to understand what we read there?

I propose these as questions to guide us forward as on May 22^nd we begin day 1 of The Bible Challenge. As we have moved closer to the date, the immensity of the challenge comes home to us more and more. Will we be up to it?

The answer will be at times yes we will. But at other times, our answer will be no we are not. The relentlessness of a 365-day reading program that doesn’t even let up for weekends will mean that there will be days, maybe even weeks when we are not up to it. The point will be – are we prepared to keep going or will we take this as a sign to give up?

Any discussion of reading Scirpture has to engage with the really big question. Why should we even consider reading the Bible?

Have you wondered why it is that in a community where most of us pride ourselves on our levels of education and skill amidst the sophistication of our ways of viewing the world, we seem prepared to remain as children in the life of faith, undereducated, unformed, the products of a spiritually arrested development – grappling to apply faith concepts learned as children to the adult complexity of the world? It’s a question to ponder.

To meet the demands of The Bible Challenge within the concept of life-long learning is the only way for us to grow up in our faith lives so that developmentally, our spiritual perspectives match the other aspects of our worldview.

As in all other areas of our lives, this will require commitment, dedication, and most of all perseverance in the face of the temptation to give up because we imagine reading Scripture is all too much for us, or worse, we don’t need it.

Paul’s life mission was to give a good account of the hope that was within him. This is our life mission also. This will require us to bring our faith life up to levels of emotional and intellectual maturity that characterize the way we live, and work, and have our being in all the other areas of our lives?

[1] A term conflating the names Oxford and Cambridge to refer to these centers of hallowed learning.

 

In the 12th-century, St Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the great Cistercian reform of Benedictine life described Holy Scripture as: 

a vast sea in which a lamb can paddle and an elephant can swim.

When it comes to our encounter with the Bible through a regular practice of reading Holy Scripture, most of us will be lambs paddling. Yet maybe some of us if not already elephants swimming the depths will be encouraged to grow in that direction.

In 2015 St Martin’s engaged with a process called RenewalWorks. Our first strategic priority emerging from this engagement became and remains embedding the Bible in parish life. This is a tough sell because Episcopalians have come to share the Liberal Protestant dis-identification with the importance of reading the Bible.

Our dis-identifcation takes two forms. The fruits of 150 years of what’s known as Biblical Criticism has left us feeling that the Bible is for experts, scholars, and clergy trained to be able to unpack the sitz im leben,  which simply means the ability to interpret the text guided by the historical, cultural, and theological settings in which the text was originally written. This has led to a propensity among Episcopalians to encounter the Bible through the lens of commentary. Thus learning about rather than engaging with the text keeps us in our detached comfort zone.

The second form of dis-identificaiton from the reading of Scripture resides in the attitude that the Bible no longer belongs to us because it has been appropriated by them – them – being a reference to the fundamentalists. We not only find literal interpretation uninteresting, but we deeply reject many of the social and theological attitudes such an approach fosters.

Yet our Anglican Tradition speaks in the imagery of the three-legged stool in which Scripture, Tradition, and Reason are held in a mutual tension of equal relationship. We still honor Scripture, but we now only hear it within the context of worship. Outside of the formality of liturgy, we attempt to sit on a two-legged stool of Tradition and Reason. Straddling a two-legged stool requires considerable acrobatic dexterity.

St Martin’s is a community where few of us find it possible to accept faith as a matter of unquestioning obedience to the literal interpretation of words on a page. We are a community where faith depicted as an allegiance to a major life shaping narrative now finds deeper resonance and is taking root. Many of us enjoy the way meaning is conveyed through language that is complex, and nuanced. We are beginning to understand the way story shapes us individually and communally. We believe that metaphor more effectively conveys truth-plus, and that truth is poorly conveyed when limited to the face value of the words on the page.

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The language of the Bible is such that meaning is conveyed imaginatively. Meaning is fluid and open-ended able to speak to the challenges encountered in our lived experience. Stimulated by the power of curiosity we are encouraged to explore beyond the simple meaning of words on the page. A rich appreciation of metaphor allows us to echo the words of the prophet Jeremiah[1]:

When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, Lord God Almighty.

Approaching the text for Easter 4 can we discover our experience revealed as truth-plus through the way text uses of metaphor and poetic figures of speech?

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The Fourth Sunday after Easter conveys the arresting metaphor of The Good Shepherd conveyed through the powerful imagery of the 23^rd Psalm and John 10. In 2015 when I last preached on these texts I drew upon what for preachers can become a clichéd contrast between biblical and contemporary images of shepherding. However, coming from a country where sheep outnumber people by 40-1, I am very familiar with the contemporary experience of shepherding sheep.

In 2015 I spoke about my nephew Hamish who on his sheep station in The Lord of the Rings high country of N.Z’s. South Island, shepherds his Marino sheep either from the seat of an ATV or the saddle of a horse, depending on the terrain. In response to a complex set of whistles and verbal commands from Hamish, his dogs dive and dart among the sheep barking and nipping at their heals. With his dogs, he drives his sheep before him in the direction he wants them to go. Hamish and his dogs, together with all New Zealanders regard sheep as animals gifted by the Creator with a double dose of stupidity.

How often our human relationship with God is depicted as a version of modern New Zealand sheep herding; God in the rear driving us on with the dogs of guilt barking in our ears and fear nipping at our heals. Yet, contrast the words of Psalm 23 in which God is the shepherd and we the sheep. God as the Good Shepherd does not drive us before him, setting his dogs upon us whose bark frightens us, and whose teeth nip us into line. Instead, he leads us beside still waters so that we may lie down in green pastures. Even through the valley of death, he accompanies us so that we need not fear any harm befalling us. His rod and staff are not symbols of discipline and control, but of protection and comfort. The Biblical image of sheep is one of cherished objects upon which the shepherd lavishes love and concern.

Again, a contrast between sheep and people reveals that it is not sheep who are created with a double dose of stupidity. Jesus, teaching in poetic metaphors discovers again and again that it’s the human beings that fail to hear his voice. The biblical image draws a distinction between the sheep who hear his voice and the people who are deaf to his voice. Hearing in this sense is a metaphor for knowing, for recognition. 

In John 10 Jesus uses a number of figures of speech centered on the notion of the sheepfold. He speaks of robbers, identified as those who do not enter the sheepfold by the gate. His metaphor for the entrance shimmers between images of gate and gatekeeper before Jesus finally identifies himself as the gate. Jesus is not some arbitrary gatekeeper but with his body becomes the gate across the entrance of the sheepfold, so that those who seek to enter to do us harm must first encounter him.

In response to hearing his voice, the sheep come and go, responsive to the shepherd’s voice, in pursuit of the green pasture. The mention of green pasture is a metaphor for life lived to the full takes us full circle back to the imagery of Psalm 23.

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As lambs paddling on the edge of a vast sea of Scripture we begin to hear in the imagery of the Good Shepherd’s voice our own experience of the world as a place of both safety and danger. Both in Psalm 23 and John 10 danger surrounds the green pasture and still waters. Beyond the safety of the sheepfold lies the valley of death where we risk being catapulted to the precipitous heights of the illusion of self-sufficiency or cast down to the depths of isolation and despair.

As elephants swimming beyond the safety of the shore we face the prospect of no longer living in a place of security, but with a trust in God’s leadership –we swim heeding the sound of God’s voice as we follow with confidence and trust into the more turbulent waters of life’s sea.

But how can we know God’s voice when we have not learned to hear it? The narrative of faith provides a safe space within which our lives can be shaped in the direction of living with confidence and courage. Yet the shepherd does not keep the sheep penned up in the fold. He leads them out, but they can only follow if they follow secure of being able to recognize the sound of his voice.

As we count down the days until we launch The Bible Challenge to guide the next phase of our deepening engagement with Scripture on May 21^st -22^nd, I would like us to understand that rather than ceding control of the Bible to either scholars or literalists, we recommit ourselves to an older and more venerable tradition of engaging with Scripture through concepts of story rich with imagination stimulated by poetic figures of speech.

The ancient tradition of reading the Bible shared by Benedict and Bernard, that reads text through the images of allegory and metaphor invites us to a similar kind of engagement with reading the Bible. Despite the great distances of time, place and mindset separating us from Bernard of Clairvaux, John the Evangelist, the prophet Jeremiah, and the psalmist of the 23 Psalm, we share the experience of being shaped by the power of a poetic imagination whose rich language of allegory and metaphor opening our ears to recognise the distinctiveness of God’s voice among the cacophony of competing, false voices in the world. We may remain lambs paddling on the shores of the great Scriptural sea so long as like lambs we come to recognize the Shepherd’s voice.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Jeremiah 15:16 New International Version

 

 

Easter Day remains one of only two days in the year when it’s possible to catch an echo of the way things used to be as far as church-going is concerned. St Martin’s will be fairly full at 8 o’clock and full to capacity at the 10 o’clock.

Among those attending will be core members of the congregation. These are the regular Sunday worshippers, those also known to the treasurer – which is quaint Episcopal speak for regular financial supporters. Among others moved to attend church on Easter Day will be people visiting friends and family for Easter, and the members of greater St Martins’; those with historical connections with the church, along with those living nearby.

In an increasingly nonchurch-going society, and in a region which ranks with the Pacific North West as the least church-going in the country, I for one am delighted to see the Christmas and Easter congregations swell, yet this also poses a dilemma for the preacher. What needs to be said on such occasions that will not simply confirm conventional default expectations?

I assume that among those moved to come to Church this Easter will be those for whom the music of the Anglican Tradition is the draw. For others, it’s one of two times a year when the atmosphere in an Episcopal Church approaches the experience of a crowd buzz. For some, it’s the importance of renewing past echoes of childhood as a time when church – or more probably church school or youth group remains a good memory. What I do not assume however is that many moved to come to Easter services will have come with an expectation of hearing anything remotely useful – in equipping them to face up to the very real challenges of life as we encounter them in the early decades of the 21^st-century.

***

In the 19^th and 20^th-centuries, Christianity placed increasing emphasis on the content of belief. The crucial thing was that you believed the right things and not the wrong things. Thus believing the right things was meant to guarantee that you did the right things and not the wrong things. More often for Episcopalians, this equation went the other way around. Doing the right things and not the wrong things evidenced that you believed the right things and not the wrong things. The thing is, that most of us no longer think in this way. 

The language we encounter in church expresses a mindset – representative of a world in which God was an inseparable part of the material universe. God was experienced in very real ways; in places, through objects and people, inhabiting the very spaces between us. God, alive and present within the experience of time and space, was never absent from our sensory and imaginative experience of this world where miracles held meaning. The resurrection of Jesus was regarded as just such an event, i.e. a miracle.

Then the Enlightenment happened and Western civilization became increasingly shaped by rational materialism. Rational materialism, with its increasing dependence on the physical sciences to come up with a theory of everything paradoxically locked God out of the material universe. God became merely an echo of the original watchmaker who long ago departed from the scene leaving humanity center stage, struggling with the responsibility to tend the machinery of the creation. Having become a rather cold and unimaginative space this mechanical universe was no longer a place of mystery and miracles.

Shaped by this worldview, we no longer expect to bump into God as we go about our business in the material world. God, in so far as God remains a meaningful concept for any of us, is now predominantly a personal experience. The mystical-spiritual, the metaphysical-poetic, has now receded from the material world into the non-material domain of the personal imagination. As a consequence, resurrection understood as a miracle – by which our prescientific forebears meant something more than real, a kind of truth plus, has become downgraded into a subjective experience, something the rationalistic mind regards as infinitely less than objectively real.

In our post-Enlightenment experience of the world, people are either alive or dead. They don’t die and then come back to life. The binary alternative of life or death appears to us to be a natural law of the universe. This Newtonian view of the universe takes its name from the great 17^th-century English philosopher, Sir Isaac Newton. St Martin’s even has a window dedicated to him.

Newtonian physics still reflect our experience of the way the universe works. Yet, a new and seemingly mysterious view of the universe is revealed to us by Quantum Mechanics. In the Quantam universe objects behave differently and much of the behavior of subatomic bodies remains a mystery to us. For instance in the Quantum universe elements exist in a super-positional state. Energy is both wave and particle simultaneously. That is until the act of observation determines energy as one or the other, wave or particle for the sake of observational measurement.

In the resurrection, might Jesus have existed within the tomb in a super-positional state, with being alive or being dead as the two alternatives that become determined only in the act of observation? The act of observation, i.e. the experience of the disciples on this third day after the crucifixion determined that Jesus was alive. What’s most strange about their conclusion is that they observed him alive even though they had witnessed his death only two days previously.

For those of you who get really excited by the application of Quantum Theory to spiritual experience, I fear I am about to disappoint you. This is not the direction in which I wish to take the discussion about the resurrection – at least not this year – although as someone who invariably has to preach every Easter Day I will keep my options open for the future.

My point is that we have a growing awareness of a multilayered universe – even of the possibility of multiple parallel universes. That which Enlightenment thought regarded as impossible may actually be possible after all. The watchmaker may be more than the ghost in the machine, affecting material reality in ways that strict Enlightenment thought is unable to conceive of.

***

The way I want to approach the mystery that is Jesus’ resurrection is to understand it as a narrative event. I fear that those who attend St Martin’s regularly will be getting sick and tired of me telling them that humans are storied beings. We build meaning by constructing and sharing stories whose function is to articulate our experience of the world around us. Our perception of reality is always conveyed through language and the narrative organization of language. In other words, stories are all we have.

Now there are different kinds of stories. There are big stories that offer us lots of room to grow and realize our fullest potential. Then there are small stories that confine our imaginations and constrain the quality of our experience. What can make life confusing is that without always being aware of the fact, we draw on multiple stories that often conflict with one another, running simultaneously along different narrative tracks to make sense of our lives. The gift of truly big stories lies in their ability to synthesize the many smaller and cconflicting stories that compete for our attention.

The first Christians had an experience at the empty tomb that gave rise to the creation of the big story we call Easter. This is a story about the triumph of life over death, not just literal life over death but all the figurative iterations of the triumph of flourishing over failing to thrive, of victory over defeat, of light over dark.

The big story of Easter is a later chapter in the epic story of the Exodus Passover – a story about the experience of liberation from bondage, not just liberation from the literal slavery in Egypt but from all the iterations of bondage to all false illusions and fake idols.

The Easter story is not a small story of optimism. Optimism and its active application of positive thinking are modern small stories that seek to organize our experience around concepts like personal satisfaction, happiness, fulfillment, self-improvement, achievement measured in terms of material success. Optimism is the longing that things will continue to be on the up-and-up.

When events take a downward turn, optimism crashes and burns to be replaced by pessimism. The Easter story is a story of hope. Hope is not an expectation that things will continue to go well. It is the expectation that something new is happening, something that is beyond our ability to generate or create. This new thing intervenes and comes about through the correct alignment of our hopes and actions, refining expectations and reinterpreting experience in the direction of greater clarity of vision and a deeper realization of purpose.

Was Christ raised from the dead on the third day after his physical death on the cross? For many who cling to materialist stories – small stories that lock out the transformative power of God from our here and now experience, the answer is no. Yet if the answer is yes, the yes is not dependant on being able to explain the mechanics that underpin the event. The yes, articulates our desire to be shaped by a greater story than the one we are able to imagine for ourselves. When we let ourselves become molded by a story that liberates from illusions created by the be-devil-ments in our lives- the small, impoverishing, life denying stories we cling to, we come into relationship with a story capable of reorganizing our perceptions of the universe and how it functions.

The disciples on the first day of the week experienced the power of a new and larger story than they had hitherto known. They could not explain it, but they felt it and they created a large story that reframed their worldview so as to be able to articulate an experience of transformation. They were not transformed as isolated autonomous individuals. They became transformed through their participation in a community that was being transformed.

***

I don’t fully understand why many of you are here today, doing something that is, given the rest of the Sunday’s of your year, uncharacteristic. May I suggest that you may not know either why you are here today. Not knowing matters less than you might think. What matters is that you are. I invite you to take this more seriously than you otherwise might.

We live in a world where the old certainties based on shared stories are collapsing to be replaced by uncertainty and a fearful fragmentation fed by many small and viciously self-serving stories. I believe that the big story of Easter is something that helps us better navigate our way forward in a world where the very notion of true and false seems now contested – up for grabs. Human beings cannot thrive in such a world. Becoming transformed by the big story of Easter empowers us to offer alternatives through holding together into the face of prevailing trends.

At St Martin’s we are working to become a community that is more and more fit for God’s purpose, which we understand as becoming transformed as together we journey deeper into the mystery God’s vision for our jaded world hungry for the promise of new life. We are a community that increasingly believes that our work is to be agents for transformation in the world around us. We know this is possible only if we work together. One of the insights of the Easter story is that God primarily addresses us through our participation in communities where solidarity rather than individualism guides our values settings.

We are a community on a journey and we are strengthened on that journey every time someone new joins with us. To those of you who find yourselves in Church on Easter Day, I strongly suggest that you consider being there as an indication of your search for a story big enough to revolutionize your longing for deeper meaning and purpose in your life. If this is so, I believe you have come to the right place. Come back, taste and see.

He had come to celebrate the Passover. Having traveled from Bethany, Jesus entered Jerusalem through one of its eastern gates to wild acclaim from the crowds that greeted him by stripping the fronds from the palm trees lining the road.

The waving of palms was a gesture that tells us something of popular expectations for Jesus. Some 160 years before the triumphant Judas Maccabeus led his victorious partisans into the Temple, bearing palm branches with which they cleansed and rededicated it after the defilement by the Syrian tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanies. The waving of palm branches reveals something of the expectations of Jesus as another liberator, who in the mold of Judas Maccabeus had come to free them from the hated Roman occupation.

At the same time as Jesus was entering from the East, another triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the West. The Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, at the head of his Roman Legion had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Pilate did not live in Jerusalem. He chose to avoid the city’s ancient warrens seething with civil and religious discontent. Pilate and his Roman administration preferred the sea breezes and Mar A Largo conveniences of Herod the Great’s former capital at Caesarea Maritima, now the administrative center of the Roman occupation of Judea.

Pilate hated and feared the crowds of Jerusalem most especially during the Passover celebrations. But he had to come up to the city on his once a year visit with a show of preemptive force in order to forestall the potential for insurrection during the flashpoint of the Passover. A wise move, for the crowds that hailed Jesus, were in insurrection mood.

Holy Week commemorates the events beginning on Palm Sunday of Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before the Passover. Three narratives or storylines intersect and clash with alarming result as Pilate, the crowds, and Jesus all become caught up in an escalation of events none could control. The storyline of worldly oppression and political violence intersects with a storyline of populist resistance and nationalist longing for liberation at whatever cost. Both confront the third storyline which concerns the next installment in the epic narrative of God’s love and vision for the world.

Events take an unexpected turn and rapidly spiral seemingly out of control, culminating on the eve of the Passover with Jesus celebrating the Last Supper with his disciples, followed by arrest, mock trial, and crucifixion the following day.

On Maundy Thursday we will gather to celebrate Jesus’ Last Supper during which he washed his disciple’s feet, mandated (maundy) them to love one another, before instituting the Eucharist by establishing a lasting association between the Passover bread and wine and his body and blood soon to be broken and shed on the cross.

Holy Week is the week during which we accompany Jesus on the way of his passion. For some of us, this can be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion surfaces in identification with that of Jesus. For most of us, however, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal. We journey with Jesus as part of a community that journeys to the cross bearing within us not only our individual maladies and sufferings, but the maladies and sufferings of the world around us.

Liturgy is a form of dramatic reenactment through which as a community, we are transported into sacred time. In ordinary time and space, we remember. In sacred time we become participants in the timeless events that engulf Jesus.

By timeless, I mean that liturgy is more than ordinary remembering, it is remaking again the past in the present. Liturgy ushers us into a dimension called sacred time where the temporal divisions of past, present, and future blend together in the eternal now. In sacred time we become participants with Jesus – as if we too are part of his band of disciples during that eventful last week:

• Like them at his Last Supper, we experience the uncomfortable intimacy symbolized in his washing our feet.
• With them, we share in the breaking and sharing of Jesus’ Passover bread and drink from his Passover cup.
• With the disciples, we accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane and with them witness his arrest, trial, and crucifixion.
• Over the following 15 hours of Thursday evening and into the Friday we call Good, we follow as part of the band of his disciples viewing with dismay and from a safe distance, the unfolding of frightening events.

On Good Friday, in addition to the two liturgies of Stations of the Cross at noon and the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday at 7 pm, we also keep another tradition; one of action and solidarity in memory of Jesus with the current state of our world. In the Good Friday Walk, we join other Christians’ en-route to the State House for a public marking of this day. The Good Friday Walk is not an action taking place in sacred time but in the here and now. It is an action of solidarity that looks in two directions; towards solidarity with Jesus, and at the same time solidarity for the alleviation of hunger among God’s sons and daughters, our sisters and brothers. I hope that many of you will find time for both forms of participation on the Friday we call Good.

At the end of the Solemn Liturgy on the evening of Good Friday, we sing a hymn based on Jesus final words from the cross – it is finished. With the death of Jesus on the cross, the old order dies as Jesus begins his journey into hell where he vanquishes the ancient hold of evil over world. We mark Jesus’ descent into the realm of the dead on Saturday. On Saturday evening we gather in the waning twilight to celebrate the ancient liturgy of the Easter Vigil. Here in dramatic and timeless actions:

• we kindle the new fire and welcome the new Light of Christ into the world.
• we listen to highlights from the long epic story of our communal relationship with God
• we renew our baptismal covenant and welcome the newly baptized into the Church
• we celebrate with joyful noise the resurrection followed by an Easter party with champagne and chocolate.

On Easter Day we continue, joined by many from our wider community and beyond who are drawn to celebrate with us the resurrection – the new chapter in the epic narrative of God’s promise of new life.

Our memory fails us if we think of Jesus’ resurrection only in terms of “then” and not also in terms of “now.” We are not re-enacting Jesus’ resurrection; we are reappropriating Jesus’ resurrection power.-Br. Curtis Almquist SSJE

Visit our full Holy Week and Easter schedule here.

 

John the Evangelist tells the best stories! True, he does have a propensity to put long and theologically complex speeches into the mouth of Jesus that easily tax the attention span of the modern listener. Yet even in his set-piece discourses, John gives Jesus some pretty arresting sound bites, e.g. servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them is a good one for today’s political class to heed. Or, by this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.

Nevertheless, John’s whole understanding of Jesus unfolds within the framework of seven stories commonly referred to as signs of the kingdom[1]. These are undoubtedly among the best stories in the New Testament.

The story of the raising of Lazarus is the seventh in the series of seven signs. As with all John’s stories, it is complex and multilayered. The Raising of Lazarus constitutes a kind of prologue to the events that begin to spiral, culminating over the course of a Thursday night and Friday morning, two weeks from now.

***

Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis was an early disciple of the great Sigmund Freud. However, Freud was notoriously cantankerous and brooked no disagreement from his disciples. Consequently, like Jung, Assagioli eventually parted company with Freud over Freud’s discounting of the spiritual component in human development.

I mention Assagioli because of a method of listening he advocated that employs something called bi-focal vision to distinguish personal psychoemotional elements from spiritual transpersonal ones within and individual’s life story. Bi-focal vision tracks two distinct elements that are nevertheless interconnected and intertwined in ways that create the confusion and conflict that brings a person into therapy in the first place.

Applying Assagioli’s concept to a text rather than a person, the use of bi-focal attention allows us to separate out the way John weaves a transpersonal -theological meta-narrative, i.e. an overarching inclusive story about salvation, into what is also a story of love, loss, and recovery at a human-relational level.

The story so far

Jesus, with his disciples, received a message from the sisters of Lazarus that their brother is ill and dying. Jesus greets the news with what appears to be detached disregard, saying Lazarus is not going to die, rather that what is happening to him is an opportunity to glorify God. He then delays setting out for Lazarus, Martha, and Mary’s home in Bethany by two whole days. In the meantime, Lazarus does die and is interred in his tomb. On the fourth day, Jesus nonchalantly declares that now Lazarus has died it’s time to visit his friends in Bethany, situated in Judea about a day’s walk from Jerusalem. His decision fills his disciples with dismay for Judea is now a very dangerous place for Jesus to go. Last time he was there he narrowly escaped being stoned to death. Nevertheless, they all set-off and as Jesus nears Bethany, first Martha, having been looking out for his approach rushes out to greet him. Likewise a little later Mary, when Martha tells her (privately) of Jesus’ arrival also goes out to greet him. Despite his seemingly enigmatic delay in coming, Jesus, now in a state of some emotional distress, is taken to the tomb and calls Lazarus to awaken and come out. To the amazement of most of the onlookers, Lazarus emerges still wrapped in his winding sheet.

***

When we apply bi-focal attention to this story, we can begin to see that there are two narrative strands flowing simultaneously,  throughout. This is a theological story about God and at the same time it is also a human relational drama. One strand is transpersonal in that it transcends individual experience, while the other is deeply personal.

We’ve already noted that the disciples are puzzled by Jesus’ response to the news of Lazarus’ imminent death. Instead of rushing off to Bethany he simply says that Lazarus’ plight is not one that will lead to his death but is an opportunity for the glory of God. At the human-relational level, this seems a callous response. However, here we have in John’s story the first indication of the transpersonal-theological motive of the glorification of God. But then Jesus immediately throws his disciples off the theological scent by mollifying their human fears in declaring that Lazarus merely sleeps, so no need to be alarmed.

The next puzzlement lies in the contrast between the two encounters Jesus has, first with Martha, and then her sister, Mary. Incidentally, we know both these women independently of John’s account. Both Martha and Mary appear in Luke 10:38-42, from which we learn that Martha is the active, doer, always on the go, while Mary is the contemplative one. John does not mention their Lucan biographies because like us, his hearers would already know them, and it’s no surprise that while Mary is being comforted indoors, Martha is out, pacing the road on the look out for Jesus’ approach.

Both sisters greet Jesus with identical words: Lord, if you had been here my brother Lazarus would not have died. We puzzle over how Jesus’ response to the sisters could not be more different. In his response to Martha, we see Jesus responding in theological focus. In response to what is in effect Martha’s rebuke – really Jesus, how could you not have come at once for now Lazarus is dead! – he subjects her to an examination of her belief in the resurrection. I have to say that this is not evidence of a very good pastoral manner here. He then identifies the resurrection with himself leading Martha to proclaim: Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world. 

In the theological strand within John’s story, Jesus understands the death of Lazarus as an opportunity, not for sorrow, but so that God might be glorified in the presence of the bystanders who come to believe. The absence of concern and anxiety can be explained because the outcome is already preordained, so no need to worry. Bi-focal attention allows us to see how John presents the encounter between Jesus and Martha at the level of the theological significance of Lazarus’ death.

By contrast, Jesus response to Mary who greets Jesus with exactly the same words as her sister has used, reveals Jesus now identifying with the human-relational level and thus he is profoundly overcome by grief and sorrow. John describes Jesus being greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. The result is that Jesus too begins to weep with Mary. Bi-focal attention allows us to see John now presenting Lazarus’ death at the human dimension of a relationship of love and loss. Nowhere else, does Jesus appear more vulnerable and human than in his response to Mary, and together both now weeping, they go to the tomb of friend and brother.

It is at the tomb, we begin to see for the first time how the transpersonal-theological and human-relational strands come together because both are actually about relationship. Standing, publically weeping over the death of his friend Jesus now invokes his transpersonal relationship with God: so that they [the onlookers] may believe that you sent me! Lazarus come forth, is not only an expression of deep human compassion but is also a public proclamation of God’s glory.

***

John now tells us that many of the bystanders came to believe when at Jesus’ command they see Lazarus emerge still encased in his death shroud. It’s here that the Lectionary ends the story. But by ending the story here we are in danger of missing the larger point John is making in this story. This is not an all’s well that ends well, story.

For John, the raising of Lazarus is the turning point at which there is no escape from the path to the cross. When we read on in the text we learn that as well as some of the onlookers coming to faith others reject the theological message of salvation and go off to conspire with the Temple authorities. On hearing of events at the tomb of Lazarus, the authorities now have the evidence they need and vow to put Jesus to death; justifying their decision in terms of the murky politics of national security. Don’t let anyone convince you that the cross is not a political act. 

***

The raising of Lazarus is not a premonition of the resurrection, a kind of trial demonstration. Lazarus’ emergence from his tomb is simply resuscitation. Lazarus is returned to life for the somewhat limited purpose of glorying God in the presence of some of the bystanders. It is not to set up a happily ever after ending. For in the act of glorifying God, Jesus drives others of those who witness his action into the arms of the authorities, setting in motion the very resolve that will end in his arrest and death. Lazarus’ return to life is a limited time offer only and ensures that at some future date he will die again.

The theological point for John is that what begins in resuscitation will end in resurrection. If you want to know what the difference between the two is, you will need to tune in on Easter Day. You will only comprehend the difference, having first traveled the way of his Passion – liturgically speaking – with Jesus. In the meantime we pray:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy before he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it no other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. 

[1] The seven signs of the kingdom are:

1. Changing water into wineat Cana in John 2:1-11 – “the first of the signs”
2. Healing the royal official’s sonin Capernaum in John 4:46-54
3. Healing the paralytic at Bethesdain John 5:1-15
4. Feeding the 5000in John 6:5-14
5. Jesus walking on waterin John 6:16-24
6. Healing the man blind from birthin John 9:1-7
7. Theraising of Lazarus in John 11:1-45