Geoffrey Wainwright - "Seen One, Seen 'Em All" (June 18, 2000)

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	The third reading is written in the third chapter	0:05
	of the Gospel according to St. John.	0:08
	There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus,	0:14
	a leader of the Jews.	0:16
	He came to Jesus by night and said to him,	0:19
	"Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher	0:23
	"who has come from God.	0:25
	"For no one can do these signs that you do	0:28
	"apart from the presence of God."	0:31
	Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you,	0:35
	"no one can see the kingdom of God	0:39
	"without being born from above."	0:42
	Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be born	0:46
	"after having grown old?	0:49
	"Can one enter a second time into his mother's womb	0:52
	"and be born?"	0:55
	Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you,	0:58
	"no one can enter the kingdom of God	1:01
	"without being born of water and the Spirit.	1:04
	"What is born of the flesh is flesh,	1:08
	"and what is born of the Spirit is Spirit.	1:12
	"Do not be astonished that I said to you,	1:17
	"you must be born from above.	1:20
	"The wind blows where it chooses.	1:24
	"And you hear the sound thereof,	1:27
	"but you do not know where it comes from	1:30
	"or where it goes.	1:33
	"So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."	1:35
	Nicodemus said to him, "How can these things be?"	1:41
	Jesus answered him, "Are you a teacher of Israel,	1:45
	"and yet you do not understand these things?	1:50
	"Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know,	1:54
	"and testify to what we have seen,	1:57
	"yet you do not receive our testimony.	2:01
	"If I have told you about earthly things	2:05
	"and you do not believe,	2:08
	"how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?	2:10
	"No one has ascended into heaven	2:15
	"except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.	2:18
	"And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,	2:24
	"so must the Son of man be lifted up.	2:29
	"That whoever believes in him may have eternal life.	2:33
	"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,	2:39
	"so that everyone who believes in him may not perish,	2:43
	"but may have eternal life.	2:48
	"Indeed, God did not send the son into the world	2:51
	"to condemn the world,	2:55
	"but in order that the world might be saved through him."	2:57
	This is the word of the Lord.	3:04
-	We preach Christ crucified	3:28
	says the apostle Paul.	3:31
	Christ crucified and risen.	3:33
	The Christian message is therefore a very simple one.	3:39
	What do we confess?	3:45
	What is our faith as Christians?	3:47
	We believe and confess that Jesus is Lord.	3:52
	Again, a very simple matter.	3:57
	Christ crucified and risen,	4:00
	Jesus is Lord.	4:03
	Why then all this stuff	4:09
	about glory be to the Father, and to the Son,	4:10
	and to the Holy Spirit?	4:13
	As it was in the beginning,	4:15
	is now and ever shall be,	4:17
	world without end, amen.	4:20
	Is it the theologians who are complicating a simple faith?	4:24
	Especially on Trinity Sunday,	4:32
	some preachers get embarrassed.	4:33
	There is, by the way,	4:37
	no truth in the rumor that Dean Willimon chickened out	4:38
	for this Sunday.	4:40
	And the embarrassed preacher	4:45
	will then start to talk about shamrock leaves.	4:49
	I happen to have one here.	4:57
	If you can't see it in the back,	5:01
	here's an even bigger one.	5:02
	Three lobes, one leaf,	5:08
	all of it green.	5:13
	The divine nature as chlorophyll.	5:16
	No, we won't talk that route today.	5:22
	Or the preacher starts to talk about water.	5:27
	Well that's a bit more promising,	5:32
	we might be getting towards baptism	5:33
	if he talks about water.	5:35
	But no, the preacher will say,	5:37
	well water exists in three forms.	5:40
	Liquid, steam, and ice.	5:43
	The divine nature as H2O.	5:49
	No, we're not going that route either today.	5:54
	The Holy Trinity is not a metaphysical puzzle,	6:00
	not a mathematical puzzle.	6:05
	St. Basil, one of the great theologians	6:11
	in the fourth century,	6:13
	when the whole matter was under debate.	6:14
	St. Basil of Caesarea very wisely said,	6:18
	that number belongs to created things.	6:22
	Number belongs to created things.	6:27
	So let us go another route.	6:35
	The text to bear in mind, all along this morning is this,	6:39
	"He who has seen me, has seen the Father,"	6:45
	saying of Jesus, in the fourteenth chapter of John's Gospel.	6:51
	Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father.	6:57
	You remember the episode, perhaps.	7:02
	Jesus is instructing his disciples	7:04
	that he's about to leave them	7:07
	and go to prepare a place for them.	7:09
	They don't understand.	7:12
	Thomas puts the question, Phillip puts a question.	7:14
	Phillip said to Jesus,	7:19
	"Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied."	7:20
	Jesus said to him,	7:27
	"Have I been with you so long	7:29
	"and yet you do not know me, Phillip?	7:32
	"He who has seen me, has seen the Father."	7:36
	How can you say show us the Father?	7:39
	Do you not believe that I am in the Father	7:44
	and the Father in me?	7:48
	Sam Hammond reminded me, earlier this past week,	7:55
	that the verse to think about this morning,	7:58
	whoever has seen me has seen the Father,	8:01
	was said by William Temple	8:05
	to the great archbishop of Canterbury	8:07
	in the middle of the last century.	8:09
	That verse was said by William Temple	8:11
	to be a verse from which	8:14
	you could unfold the whole of the Christian faith.	8:15
	Whoever has seen me, said Jesus,	8:21
	has seen the Father.	8:25
	We're not going to begin quite there though.	8:30
	Let's begin with the Holy Spirit.	8:32
	Last Sunday, Pentecost Sunday,	8:36
	you saw the Holy Spirit come down, didn't you?	8:38
	Or did you?	8:43
	You heard a sound as of	8:47
	a mighty rushing wind.	8:54
	You saw light,	8:59
	tongues of fire,	9:02
	come down on the heads of the apostles.	9:05
	Thunder and lightening.	9:11
	The Lord makes the oak trees whirl,	9:16
	it said in the Psalm for today.	9:20
	Yet, the wind, you don't know where it comes from	9:26
	and you don't know where it's going to,	9:30
	said Jesus in our Gospel reading.	9:32
	I remember when we were in West Africa,	9:40
	when a great tropical storm would brew.	9:44
	We'd go and sit out on the porch and watch the mighty wind	9:50
	swing the palm trees, bend them over.	9:55
	A mighty wind, you don't know where it comes from,	10:01
	you don't know where it goes to,	10:06
	but you kind of see it	10:10
	or don't see it.	10:14
	You see it in its effects.	10:16
	The Holy Spirit is the wind from God like that.	10:22
	You see the Holy Spirit,	10:27
	and yet you don't see the Holy Spirit.	10:29
	You see the effects of the Spirit.	10:35
	You might say, perhaps,	10:38
	that you see through the Holy Spirit.	10:39
	They Holy Spirit enables you to see what you do see.	10:46
	That great hymn by Charles Wesley	10:53
	that at last has found a place	10:55
	in the United Methodist Hymnal.	10:57
	"Spirit of faith, come down,	10:58
	"reveal the things of God,	11:02
	"and make to us the Godhead known,	11:03
	"and witness with the blood.	11:05
	"'Tis thine the blood to apply	11:07
	"and give us eyes to see."	11:09
	Give us eyes to see.	11:14
	That's what the Holy Spirit does.	11:19
	We see him and we don't see him.	11:25
	We see the Holy Spirit in what the Holy Spirit	11:28
	enables us to see and do.	11:31
	And what the Holy Spirit enables us to see, above all,	11:38
	is Jesus.	11:44
	Conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.	11:49
	The Holy Spirit said Jesus,	11:57
	continuing his final conversations with his disciples,	11:58
	the Holy spirit will take what is mine	12:02
	and declare it to you.	12:06
	The Holy Spirit brings Jesus to mind.	12:10
	How does the Holy Spirit do that?	12:18
	How does Holy Spirit enable us to see Jesus?	12:21
	Well, by various tracks.	12:27
	The Holy Spirit enables us to undertake faithful reading	12:32
	of the scriptures and above all, of the Gospels.	12:37
	It's a commonplace, running right through	12:44
	the history of spiritual writing and of theology	12:46
	that the scriptures must be read	12:49
	in the same spirit as the spirit in which they were written.	12:52
	The Holy Spirit presided over the recording of those things	13:00
	which are in our scriptures.	13:06
	That same spirit gives us eyes to see	13:08
	when we read those stories.	13:12
	And at the heart of those stories, is of course, Jesus.	13:16
	prophesied in the old testament,	13:19
	promised in the old testament,	13:21
	come in the flesh, in the new.	13:24
	The Holy Spirit enables us to see Jesus	13:30
	as we read the scriptures.	13:36
	Read them on our own,	13:38
	read them with a group of Christian friends,	13:40
	hear them read in church, study them.	13:42
	The Holy Spirit takes what belongs to Jesus	13:47
	and declares it to us.	13:52
	Or another way in which the spirit allows us to see Jesus.	13:56
	There's a phrase I like very much	14:00
	in the Lord's supper service	14:02
	of the Eastern Orthodox Churches.	14:05
	There the presiding minister calls upon God	14:09
	to send the Holy Spirit to show	14:11
	the bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ.	14:16
	The Holy Spirit enables us,	14:25
	when we gather at the Lord's table,	14:27
	to take that bread and to receive that wine	14:29
	as the body and blood of Christ.	14:32
	What a shame that we are not doing it	14:35
	in the main service today,	14:37
	but you are invited afterwards, into the side chapel.	14:38
	The Holy Spirit enables us to see Jesus	14:46
	in the midst of us,	14:51
	as we gather at his table.	14:53
	It's an old cry, isn't it?	14:59
	Sir, we would see Jesus.	15:00
	That's what the Greeks said,	15:06
	who came up to Jerusalem	15:07
	and heard about this strange character.	15:10
	"Sir, we would see Jesus."	15:13
	So then we kind of see	15:19
	and kind of don't see the Holy Spirit.	15:20
	We see through the Holy Spirit	15:25
	and we see the one to whom the Holy Spirit points us, Jesus.	15:29
	Who do we see or what is it that we see	15:40
	when we see Jesus?	15:44
	Looking backwards this time in St. John's Gospel,	15:50
	to the very first chapter,	15:53
	after that glorious beginning,	15:56
	in which John talks of the word	15:58
	by whom everything was made	16:00
	and this word became flesh as Jesus Christ.	16:02
	Then, to sum it up, the Gospel writer says,	16:07
	No one has ever seen God.	16:10
	But the only son who is in the bosom of the Father,	16:15
	he has made him known.	16:21
	One of the few successful bits of translation	16:26
	in the New English Bible is that verse.	16:28
	Where it says that the Son, the only Son,	16:31
	who is closest to the Father's heart, makes him known.	16:34
	If you look at the Greek,	16:44
	it says that the Son gives the exegesis of the Father.	16:45
	He explicates, unfolds, makes the Father known.	16:50
	Looking in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus himself says,	16:57
	no one knows the Son, except the Father.	17:00
	No one knows the Father, except the Son	17:03
	and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.	17:05
	Son, Jesus, the word made flesh,	17:13
	allows us to see the Father.	17:19
	(speaking in German)	17:27
	As the Germans say.	17:29
	The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.	17:31
	We speak about people as the spittin' image	17:37
	of their parents.	17:41
	That's exactly what the letter	17:44
	to the Hebrews says about Jesus.	17:47
	He's the spittin' image of the Father.	17:50
	In Jesus, the incarnate Son,	17:57
	we see the Father.	18:01
	Who then or what is this God whom we see in Jesus?	18:05
	He's the one whom Jesus addresses	18:14
	throughout his ministry as Abba, Father.	18:15
	A reverent, but affectionate form of address.	18:21
	Kind of thing I always wanted my children to say to me,	18:27
	but they somehow never managed to.	18:30
	That combination, it's Father's Day, after all.	18:32
	I have to mention that somehow.	18:35
	That combination of respect and affection, Father.	18:38
	Who is that Father?	18:50
	That Father is the God who so loved the world.	18:53
	Now today's Gospel reading,	18:59
	that he gave his only Son,	19:02
	that whoever believes in him should not perish,	19:05
	but have everlasting life.	19:07
	The Holy God he is, the Holy God who so hates sin,	19:13
	that he wants to deliver the sinner from it.	19:19
	I came to invite sinners, says Jesus.	19:24
	Luke's Gospel, chapter five.	19:30
	I came to invite sinners to repentance.	19:32
	Just as I am, but not as I mean to stay.	19:40
	The love and mercy and wrath of God,	19:48
	against all that disfigures,	19:53
	God's plan for the world and for humankind	19:56
	is revealed in Jesus.	20:00
	But there's always a plus	20:01
	on the saving side.	20:05
	He came so that the world might not be condemned,	20:08
	but so that those who believe in him,	20:13
	might have everlasting life.	20:16
	We see and we don't see the Holy Spirit.	20:25
	We see through the Holy Spirit to Jesus.	20:29
	Testified to in the scriptures,	20:33
	and coming to meet his people,	20:35
	day by day, Sunday by Sunday, year by year.	20:38
	And that Jesus is the one who reveals the Father.	20:43
	Now what's all that mean for us?	20:50
	Here we need to look at it	20:52
	in the terms of our Epistle reading for this morning.	20:54
	Romans chapter eight,	20:57
	'cause that's one of the great passages	21:01
	that allows theologians to build up	21:05
	the doctrine of the Trinity.	21:09
	The Holy Spirit, Paul tells us in that passage,	21:14
	the Holy Spirit liberates people.	21:17
	The Holy Spirit liberates people from slavery to sin.	21:20
	The Holy Spirit leads people, says St. Paul.	21:25
	In the paths of righteousness and all that jazz,	21:31
	as Louis Armstrong used to say.	21:34
	The Holy Spirit liberates us, leads us,	21:38
	witnesses with and to our spirit,	21:43
	and tells us that we are sons and daughters of God.	21:47
	Those who are in Christ, by faith and baptism,	21:50
	we are sons and daughters of God, in the Son, Christ.	21:53
	And we have the great privilege	22:01
	of being able to address the Lord of heaven and earth	22:04
	as Father.	22:08
	This Holy Spirit going on in chapter eight of Romans,	22:12
	is the same spirit who is at work throughout the world.	22:16
	Prompting dis-satisfactions	22:21
	with the present state of affairs.	22:23
	Starting to bring about changes,	22:27
	so that the whole creation may one day be filled with God.	22:29
	For us, the Holy Spirit is starting to transform us	22:39
	into the likeness of Jesus.	22:46
	That's probably the hardest work	22:51
	that the Holy Spirit has to do.	22:52
	Much harder than spreading the heavens and the earth.	22:56
	Transforming us, giving us the mind that was in Christ,	23:01
	enabling us to walk as Christ walked,	23:06
	so that one day	23:11
	we may, this time, perhaps, really see the Lord.	23:14
	The Lord, without whom,	23:24
	without holiness, you cannot see, says Hebrews.	23:26
	The Lord, himself, is of purer eyes,	23:34
	than to behold in equity, says the prophet Agatha.	23:38
	This Lord who dwells in unapproachable light,	23:44
	says Paul writing to Timothy.	23:47
	Isaiah sort of got a glimpse of him,	23:51
	high and lifted up.	23:57
	But it was smoky in the temple.	24:01
	Incense burning, seraphim getting in the way.	24:05
	Isaiah, sort of saw	24:11
	the Lord in the temple.	24:15
	He was being serenaded by the seraphim.	24:21
	Holy, holy, holy.	24:26
	The threefold holy that we sing	24:31
	every time we gather at the Lord's table.	24:34
	You see, the three divine persons, here I am now.	24:39
	Finally, as a theologian.	24:42
	The three divine persons in-dwell one another.	24:43
	Did you not know, Jesus said to Phillip.	24:51
	That I am in the Father and the Father in me.	24:56
	Extrapolate a little bit from that to the Holy Spirit.	25:02
	We have the mutual in-dwelling, as we say in the trade.	25:06
	The mutual in-dwelling of the three persons,	25:12
	Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.	25:16
	They receive a single worship	25:23
	because they are one God.	25:27
	One day, we'll get a better view.	25:33
	But meanwhile,	25:40
	turn your eyes upon Jesus.	25:44
	Look full in his wonderful face.	25:51
	Seen one? Seen 'em all.	25:58
	Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,	26:03
	and to the Holy Spirit,	26:06
	as it was in the beginning,	26:09
	is now and ever shall be,	26:11
	world without end,	26:13
	Amen!	26:15

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Title:

Geoffrey Wainwright - "Seen One, Seen 'Em All" (June 18, 2000)

Description:

Sermon start time: 03:28. Sermon end time: 26:16.
The Holy Spirit enables us to see Jesus, and in Jesus we have seen the Father, for all three persons indwell one another. It is the same Spirit who shows us Jesus, and therefore the Father, who is making us into the likeness of Jesus so that we too might call God Father. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “For us, the Holy Spirit is starting to transform us into the likeness of Jesus. That’s probably the hardest work that the Holy Spirit has to do. Much harder than spreading the heavens and the earth. Transforming us, giving us the mind that was in Christ, enabling us to walk as Christ walked, so that one day we may, this time, perhaps, really see the Lord.”

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4pg1j34c

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June 18, 2000

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Wainwright, Geoffrey

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Duke University. Chapel

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ref10193_umx
uachapelsermaud
duke:321287
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Geoffrey Wainwright - "Seen One, Seen 'Em All" (June 18, 2000)

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