Things in a bag
The Fifth Sunday
of Easter
Year B
I have three
things here in a paper bag. Let me pull them out and name them: jack-knife, envelope, rose petal. I lay them on the edge of the pulpit - three
individual things which, a moment ago, were all together. They were
part of a set. We’ll call that set
“things-in-a-bag”
I can pinpoint, in terms of time and place, the beginning of my mild obsession with the relationship between
things: I’m in southeast Alaska in the late summer of 1982. I am looking at a river. The shutter of my mind opens and captures the
water of Ketchikan creek flowing swiftly downstream to the sea. The dimly visible shapes of large Chinook salmon
can be seen swimming upstream slowly and with determination. Somewhere in the trees over to one side, a
raven croaks loudly from a high perch. An
animated couple ambles upstream along the trail on the other side of the creek,
meeting a single person walking briskly into town with his head down. A fox crosses my path up ahead. A few fallen leaves tumble in the strong
breeze at an angle across the gravel bar.
I am struck by it – the whole thing – no one part of it but the whole
together, creating within me a colour or a flavour, a picture, an impression, even
a story. Forty years on I still remember it. I can tell you about it this morning.
Unrelated things are
gathered in to a set. For a moment, completely one and in
relation to one another.
In our first
reading this morning, Philip the deacon travels south because he’s been told to
go by the Holy Spirit. He catches up with a diplomat from the court
of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, on his way home, who is seated in his chariot reading
the copy of the Book of Isaiah that came into his possession in Jerusalem – a
work produced by a people not his own – a voice, centuries old, speaking to him
for the very first time. He is moved by
the words but perplexed by the book. Philip
is invited up into the chariot to explain. They approach a stream - water tumbling over stones, creating rapids and eddies. The Ethiopian diplomat says “See, here is
water! What is to prevent my being
baptised?”
This handful of things and persons are gathered together in a bag. God’s will is worked out not by the visible and substantial individual things but by the invisible and insubstantial relationship between them – providing from the mix itself novelty, opportunity and occasion.
This handful of things and persons are gathered together in a bag. God’s will is worked out not by the visible and substantial individual things but by the invisible and insubstantial relationship between them – providing from the mix itself novelty, opportunity and occasion.
Much of the Acts
of the Apostles relates the experience of people tumbling through the invisible but undeniable tumult of the Spirit's fresh progress in the world. Freed from
fear and filled with the power of the Spirit, they are thrown
together and set upon the road. The saints emerge from that mixed bag.
Communities of faith are cobbled together in peculiar circumstances.
The waters of baptism erode the borders between classes and
languages. The fire of God’s spirit defies conservative and self-preserving
tendencies. Love covers its multitude of faults. Forgiveness
releases people from isolation and loneliness. What could prevent such a thing from happening? If you stood in its way you might get knocked over.
Teased apart into their strands, these things mean little. Seen whole from within as a participant, however, they begin to make
eminent sense.
