spirit | hughdbryant

Sermon – St David’s Day 2026

John 3.1-17

I suppose that I ought to start by telling you what I am not going to talk about. I’m not going to talk about the Gorton and Denton by-election and I’m not going to talk about the safeguarding scandal involving the former Bishop of Swansea.

The only thing that I would say about both of those things is that they both illustrate the need for us, and the need especially in Lent, to reflect on our Christian faith and to try to apply it to difficult questions that we come across in our lives. For that purpose I want to look at our reading from chapter 3 of St John’s gospel. It’s the bit which contains the verse which is supposed to be the best known verse in the whole of the New Testament, verse 16, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ I suppose that sums up Christianity in one sentence. You could spend weeks and weeks teasing out every little bit of meaning from it. But don’t worry – I’m only going to look at one or two of the things come out of this and perhaps bear on our lives today.

The context is the story of Nicodemus. I rather like Nicodemus. I think he’s one of my heroes, a bit like doubting Thomas. I like the way people like him meet Jesus and don’t quite get it right.

Actually when I went to Oberammergau in 2010 for the Passion Play I discovered that in the script which has been used for the Play, pretty well unchanged, since 1600, Nicodemus takes quite a big part and he is a bit of a hero.

Although he seems not to get it completely right in this passage in the Bible, in the story in the Passion Play he becomes an advocate for Jesus in the discussions in the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council, which is what I think is meant by him being described as a ‘leader of the Jews’, and indeed Jesus referred to him as a ‘teacher of Israel’, although he says that although Nicodemus is a teacher, he still doesn’t get it.

In the Passion Play he’s obviously learned from his encounter with Jesus and he speaks up for him, but unfortunately to no avail. Here Nicodemus questions Jesus in a way that I think that any of us might have done. Jesus answers, rather mysteriously, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ I have to share with you that that’s not necessarily an agreed translation. If you read it in the New English Bible, for example, it says, “…unless a man has been born ‘over again’”, not born ‘from above’. The same word in Greek can have both meanings, so neither translation is necessarily wrong. It does look as though Nicodemus takes it as meaning born ‘over again’ – and he obviously started something, because you’ve certainly heard of the expression a ‘born-again Christian’. Nicodemus is clearly thinking about being born ‘again’ because he then asks how he can literally go back into his mother’s womb and start again.

So Jesus talks about being born from water and the spirit, which is usually interpreted to mean being baptised, somehow washing away the old sinful self and being filled with the spirit of God. We do see instances in the New Testament where Jesus or Saint Paul, talking about Jesus, where they talk about a distinction between body and spirit. Incidentally, the word for ‘spirit’ both in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament can also mean ‘wind’, and that’s perhaps why these days we tend to refer to the Holy Spirit rather than the Holy Ghost, because a ‘spirit’ is literally something breathed, like a wind or a breeze, and that definitely comes into what Jesus is talking about here. Here the version of the Bible which we are reading today doesn’t really hang together very well, because it has Jesus saying, “Don’t be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born again, from above’” and then goes on to talk about the wind – in the King James Bible, ‘the wind bloweth where it listeth’. You will recall in Romans chapter 8, St Paul makes a big distinction between body and spirit, and then in his first letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 St Paul argues that eternal life, life after death, consists in being born again spiritually.

It would have been a familiar way of thinking to people in the ancient world, because many Greek philosophers, notably Plato, believed in what is sometimes referred to as mind-body dualism. If we refer that back to the first thing that we were not going to talk about, the result of the by-election in Manchester, I think the challenge for us as Christians is, what do we think about the non-spiritual side, the social side, of people who are not as well off as ourselves, who are in need? What do we think about how best to arrange society?

Do we have a Christian outlook on that question or is it something where we say, ‘No, that’s politics; we are concerned with spiritual things.’ Are we saying, effectively, that that is simply a concern of the body as opposed to the spirit, and is Jesus making that distinction too?

It’s 40 years this year since the publication of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, as it was called, better known as Faith in the City.

There is an interesting discussion in there, a chapter under the heading ‘Theological Priorities’ and in that chapter it says, “The question at issue is whether the acknowledged Christian duty to ‘remember the poor’ should be confined to personal charity, service and evangelism directed towards individuals, or whether it can legitimately take the form of social and political action aimed at altering the circumstances which appear to cause poverty and distress.”

The report goes on to trace the history of both sides, spiritual, inward-looking religion addressing personal salvation, and social, political action: and it says that Christians should be involved in both.

It points out that this is in line with most of the history of the church. Fairly soon after the death of Jesus, obviously there was conflict with the Romans, when the Christians refused to worship the emperor as a god, and then down the ages there have been important pieces of social action, for example the Victorian campaign against slavery, inspired by Christian belief.

Perhaps the result of the by-election in Manchester was to some extent influenced by a desire to look for a more idealistic solution, reducing the gap between between rich and poor and welcoming the stranger. Some of the things that Mr. Polanski was saying have come from his Jewish background, where he referenced compassionate teachings from the Jewish law, which Jesus himself endorsed. So that’s the first thing that I am not talking about.

And then the second thing, which is much more difficult, is the scandal of the former Bishop of Swansea. Maybe the only thing we can say about it, say, if we were to try to imagine what Jesus would say about it, and perhaps if we read on in chapter 3 of St John’s Gospel, is that there is a very clear indication from Jesus at verse 19. He said, ‘Here lies the test: the light has come into the world, but men prefer darkness to light because their deeds were evil. Bad men all hate the light and avoid it, for fear their practices should be shown up. The honest man comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that God is in all he does.’ There must never be cover-ups, and the best way to avoid terrible abuses in future is for our safeguarding always to involve complete openness. We should always be open to have the light shone on everything we do.

You may say, having heard what I’ve just been talking about, that I have in fact failed to mention another very important thing today, and that is that it is Saint David’s day. I have to share with you that in the Church in Wales’ lectionary, Saint David’s day is, as they put it, ‘transferred’ to tomorrow because it would otherwise fall on a Sunday in Lent; it is a transferrable feast, if you’ve come across those, and here it’s because you are not allowed to celebrate a saint at the same time as you are having one of the Sundays in Lent – and anyway, Sundays are actually not counted as one of the 40 penitential days. Anyway that’s all far too technical for me, and I would just mention that it is Saint David’s day and we are allowed to feel good about being Welsh or being in Wales, as I am. I should tell you that my dearly beloved Mrs, Kenny, exclaimed to me, as we were crossing the Prince of Wales Bridge from Bristol for the first time together, ‘We are in a different country now!’ Well, it’s something to celebrate, I’m absolutely sure, and I’ve had a very happy five years here in Wales. Long may it continue.

Hugh D Bryant

Sermon for Holy Communion at 1030 on Wednesday 4th November 2020 at St Mary Oatlands

Matthew 5:1-12

See http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=471270293

If you had to say what was the real essence of Jesus’ teaching, the true essence of what it means to be a Christian, I think that a good place to start would be Saint Matthew’s Gospel chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount.

In his great sermon, Jesus built on the foundations of the Old Testament. He put himself in the tradition of the prophets, like Moses. For instance, Moses went up on Mount Sinai to meet God, and Jesus, who was God, also went up a mountain to give his most important teaching.

Jesus highlighted the old teaching, according to which, if somebody did you harm, you should pay back ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Jesus took that much further by saying you should turn the other cheek, go the extra mile; again under the old Jewish law, the rule was to love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but Jesus taught that you should love your enemy and pray for your persecutors.

Jesus said that he had ‘not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it’. He was not rejecting the old Jewish law, but rather developing it. It would be a mistake for us to ignore what is in the Old Testament, but Jesus went much further.

The ‘blessed are they’ sayings, these Beatitudes, are at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. I’ve always thought the first one was rather difficult to understand. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Or, as the New English Bible translates it, ‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor.’ Poor in spirit – what does that mean? Is it really that they ‘know that they are poor’?

I’m not really sure what it means to be ‘poor in spirit’. It might have connotations of lack of character, being weak-willed or spineless, not, on the face of things, what Jesus might want to give a prize for, in the kingdom of heaven.

The Greek word which many Bibles translate as ‘spirit’, as in ‘poor in spirit’, is the same word, πνεύμα, that is used for the Holy Ghost, sometimes as a translation for the Hebrew word ‘ruach’, meaning a sort of rushing wind, reminiscent of the events on Whit Sunday, when a sort of rushing wind came upon the assembled disciples, lighting tongues of fire on their heads (which didn’t burn them, just as the burning bush which Moses came across was not burned up: again, another parallel between Old and New Testaments in the Bible: it’s a sign of God’s presence.)

That word in Greek, πνεύμα, is related to the word that you have in French for a tyre, pneu, or for something inflated like a tyre, pneumatic; they all involve wind or breath. So, what are the poor blessed in? – they are blessed for being short of wind. Blessed are the people who don’t know which way they’re blowing, don’t know whether they’re blowing hot or cold, say.

Or is it in fact better translated the way the New English Bible has it,‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor’? There, the translation has taken the ‘in spirit’ bit and turned it into a sense of consciousness, knowledge. They know that they are lacking, deficient – but deficient in what? On this interpretation, it doesn’t say. They are just ‘poor’.

But the word which means ‘poor’ in this passage goes grammatically with the word for ‘spirit’ the other way. You are not spiriting out the poverty, the being poor, but being poor, deficient, in spirit. In Greek it says, ‘Blessed are the deficient in wind’. To say they are simply ‘poor’ isn’t really right. They’re not short of money, but short of puff.

On Sunday, the preacher said it meant, ‘Blessed are the humble’. Humble. Not people who think they are big-shots. People who know their limitations. Again, that’s not what the Greek says literally, but you could argue that it’s closer to what the words really imply. In need – lacking; in spirit – in self-esteem, say: so, humble, lacking in self-esteem.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Think about it a bit, and think what it means for you. Are you humble? Are you running out of puff? Never mind. You are blessed.

But when are you blessed? The other thing you can say about the Beatitudes, and obviously specifically about this first one, is that they are a vision of the future, a vision of the kingdom of God, which Jesus is promising to his followers, but which hasn’t happened yet.

Things may be awful now, but in the world to come it’ll all come right. There might be a snag in this; because you might think, on the basis of this passage, that it was all right to tolerate slavery and oppression in this life, keeping people oppressed, but pacifying them by giving them an assurance that they are on target to inherit heavenly blessings later. That would conflict with what I think is the the heart of the revolutionary message that Jesus gives us.

Those bits of the Sermon on the Mount don’t mean, put up with bad things now because you will be all right later in heaven; but rather, you must do this extra thing, go the extra mile, and not just pay back evil for evil: you must even love your enemy. And the reason for doing that is because it’s the right thing to do, not because it leads to a payoff in heaven.

People often say that the Sermon on the Mount is all very well, but it is just not practical. It demands more than mortal man is capable of. But then you read about people like Nelson Mandela. People can do those impossibly generous things that Jesus recommended. They really can. Really? People like that must need to be saints, you might say.

It’s a good point to make, especially at this time in the Christian year, when we do think about saints. Sunday was All Saints’ Day and the list of the various Beatitudes is, if you like, a list of the things which mark out a saint. Saints – in Latin the word is ‘sancti’ – are people who are marked out, distinguished, holy – holy, which is another word which means the same thing, separate, kept apart from the general run of people. But not necessarily marked out because they’re exceptionally virtuous.

The things that Jesus blesses are all characteristics of saints; but they aren’t superhuman; they are ordinary characteristics, ordinary virtues. Anyone can be a saint. Anyone in any of our churches could be a saint.

St Paul addressed his letters to the ‘saints’ in the various churches he was writing to, and it’s clear that he was just writing to the people in the pews. For example in his First Letter to the Corinthians he wrote: [This is from] ‘Paul, …. unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints’. Sanctified – there’s the ‘sancti’ word – but I don’t think there’s any suggestion that he was only writing to part of the congregation, just to the good guys. He was writing to all of them.

When you work through the list of the Beatitudes you will realise that it is far from being a catalogue of success or perfection; it’s a catalogue full of weakness and need, the sort of thing that ordinary people suffer from. Jesus is affirming that. He is saying that in the kingdom, people like that, ordinary people, will be saints. Just as they are, they will go marching in.

So be a saint: be a peacemaker; be gentle in spirit, care about justice; you are allowed to be sad; people may make fun of you or even actively persecute you for trying to do all these things as a Christian. But don’t worry; you are a saint; you are blessed, and you do have a place in heaven.

Not Talking about Things

The Beatitudes – Humble Saints