Descend, O Spirit, purging flame and brand us with
Jesus’ name. Confirm our faith, consume our doubt; sign us as Christ’s within,
without. Amen.
There’s a story of a
parish secretary who wrote all of the priest’s sermons, but never got any of
the credit for doing so. Finally, she could stand it no longer, so on Sunday
when the priest was in the pulpit he said “and this is the most important thing
to understand, it is an example of the most complex feature of the human
condition as expressed by the great fourth century theologian…” The priest
turned the page and saw a blank sheet of paper marked only with the words
“You’re on your own now.” Last Sunday, our Collect prayed, in part, “Do not
leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit.”
That’s a bit like what
the disciples must have been feeling as they gathered that day. They didn’t
know that this would be day on which the Holy Spirit, if they could even fathom
what that meant, would descend on them. Pentecost was a Jewish holiday that went
by the name “Feast of Weeks” and was the time when Jews offered the first
fruits of the grain to God, and took place 50 days after the Passover. It was a
day to remember and celebrate all that God had given to the people, and most
especially, the Torah which was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. As they
gathered, it was without their leader, it was with a blank page in front of
them. So they did what was normal for them, they celebrated a holiday, giving
God thanks for the gifts that had been bestowed upon them, and as they did,
they received in the Holy Spirit the greatest gift of all.
If I had to summarize the
message of today it would that “God is not done!” We see this expressed in the
first lesson from Ezekiel, which has to be one of the best texts in all of
Scripture. Imagine yourself in the place of the prophet. God leads you out into
a valley full of bones. And these are not just bones, but they are dry bones.
As the munchkin coroner in The Wizard of
Oz might say of these bones “As coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined
her. And she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.” And so
there you are, in this valley of dead bones, and you immediately think back to
that old Psalm that you know, realizing that you are now standing in the valley
of the shadow of death. And God says to you “tell these bones to get up and
live.” There you are, standing in a graveyard with the message “don’t lose
hope; the story isn’t over.” How might you react? I’d laugh, and I might quote
Macbeth to God that this proposition “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing.”
This is absolute
foolishness. But that’s the thing about hope, it is absolutely foolish. Have
you ever stopped to think about what our faith proclaims? An invisible deity
that is somehow outside of existence created everything that exists, and then
this deity takes on human flesh and is killed, but then rises from the dead and
ascends back to the realm of non-existence, but still speaks through an
amorphous Spirit. Giving a word of hope to a valley of dead, dry bones is
absurd. Why do we bring water to dry places? Why do we visit the sick? Why do
we vote in a broken political system? Why do we do humanitarian work in places
around the world with corrupt dictators? Though these are seemingly hopeless
situations, we proclaim that with God, nothing is impossible. Hope is
revolutionary. Hope transcends the confines of possibility. Hope proclaims that
God is not done.
The sermon that I
preached two Sundays ago revolved around the question “do you believe in
continuing revelation?;” and given these Pentecost texts, it remains a valid
question today. Pentecost, you might say, is the third most holy day in
Christianity behind Christmas and Easter. But have you noticed that Hallmark
doesn’t have any cards with tongues of fire to sell today? I’m assuming that
none of you are having family over tonight for a Pentecost dinner. Why don’t we
celebrate Pentecost beyond 60 minutes on a Sunday morning?
Because the Holy Spirit
is dangerous. One preacher has said of this text from Acts that “the Holy
Spirit descends, disrupting our patterns and configurations, thrusting us into
some wild, new, and uncharted territory. We are drunk with new possibilities in
a world where God is active.” Pentecost just might be the most subversive thing
that we find in Scripture. Yes, it was unthinkable that the limitless took on
limits in the Incarnation of Jesus; of course, the idea of a dead man being
Resurrected is ludicrous, but the notion that the source of all being is active
and transforming the world before our very eyes is even revolutionary.
Take Peter from example,
before the Holy Spirit descended on him, based on what we know of him from
Scripture, we’d be correct in labeling him as a hot-headed coward who denied Jesus
three times. But with the Holy Spirit, he became a great preacher, probably
something that he never saw in himself. On most Sundays, at least one of you
will say to me about the sermon, “you were saying exactly what I needed to
hear.” That’s not me, that’s the Holy Spirit. A group of parishioners spent
Mothers’ Day at Rowan Helping Ministries preparing a gourmet meal for the
homeless- that’s a revolutionary act because it goes against what the world
says about the homeless. The youth that led our service last Sunday were a
testament to the fact that the Spirit is moving in their hearts. Some of the
older youth had prom last Saturday night and were at church last Sunday with
about an hour of sleep, but yet, they were here and they stayed awake; that’s part
of the Spirit’s witness. When a member falls ill and is in the hospital, you
visit each other. When we have a Wednesday night meeting to discern as a
community, over 100 of you show up. That’s the Holy Spirit, and it is vibrant
here at St. Luke’s. Where have you felt the Holy Spirit moving? There’s a wind
blowing- it blew through that valley and did the impossible, giving life to the
dry bones; it blew among those gathered on Pentecost; and it blows through our
lives.
But there’s a reason why
people get uneasy when it comes to the Holy Spirit. Sometimes you are sent
places you’d rather not go, sometimes you have to be with people whom you’d
rather ignore, sometimes you have to rethink everything you thought you knew
because God is bigger than we can comprehend. People tried to dismiss this as
“drunkenness.” And we still do this today, don’t we? When we disagree we label
each other as “heretics,” or worse. We see the other side as “misinformed and
stuck in the past” or as “betraying the Bible,” depending on what side of the
issue we’re on. It has been said that “it’s not that the Church has a mission
to fulfill, but rather that God’s mission as a Church.” The Holy Spirit is
given for a reason, as a means to empower and enable God’s mission in the
world. And I’d like to spend the rest of this sermon considering what the end
of the Holy Spirit might be.
The Book of Common Prayer notes that “the mission of the Church is
to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” St. Paul
puts it slightly differently by saying “God has given us the ministry of
reconciliation.” Pentecost is a celebration primarily about God’s desire and
power to unite us, despite our division. You have to go back to Genesis 11 to
find the starting point of the reconciling message of Pentecost. In this mythic
story, humanity was getting a bit arrogant and thought they might function as
their own god. And so God says “come, let us go down, and confuse their
language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” Acts
records that “At this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each
one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” The confusion and
miscommunication of Babel is reconciled through the Holy Spirit.
I mean this with no disrespect
to those of the Pentecostal persuasion, but it is crucial to understand that
the gift of the Holy Spirit is not the gift of tongues, that was the curse of
Babel. Instead the gift of Pentecost is that of understanding; it is the
ability to be reconciled across our divisions. One fascinating aspect in that
list of languages that were understood on Pentecost is in the inclusion of the
Medes. They, as a distinct people, had been extinct for over 500 years. So this
reconciliation transcends even space and time. Pentecost is about
reconciliation.
There’s a great story
behind the man who authored the great hymn Amazing
Grace. It was written by John Henry Newton, who was a slave trader in the
1700s. As the story goes, one night he was out on the seas in a slave ship and
there was a terrible storm and he cried out to God for mercy. He was saved, and
that was the beginning of his conversion experience. He would leave the
deplorable profession of slave trading and took up theology, becoming a priest
in the Church of England. Newton wrote the words to the hymn for a New Year’s
Day sermon in 1773. Amazing Grace has
always been considered to be his autobiography in poetry. He was a wretch in
his eyes, was blind, but it was only through God’s amazing grace that he was
able to see. The Holy Spirit did in his life what would have been impossible
otherwise, it reconciled him to God and others.
As St. Francis is
reported to have prayed, “Grant that we may not so much seek to be understood
as to understand.” How much time though do we spend trying to understand the
other? Not as much as we should. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who might the
greatest example of the power of truth and reconciliation, has said that “in
the act of [reconciliation] we are declaring our faith in the future of our
relationship.” Reconciliation is about the radical and deep trust that God is
not done with us or our relationships. Reconciliation knows that we are all
members of the Body of Christ, and the Body will be stronger when we are
united.
One theologian has
defined sin as the “human propensity to mess things up,” though in all
fairness, the actual quote uses a phrase a bit strong than “mess things up,”
but you get the point. And that is exactly why we need reconciliation, why we
need the Holy Spirit’s gift of understanding. When our worldview is challenged,
when conflict arises, or when we are pushed to new places or encounter new
ideas, we experience anxiety. And sometimes that anxiety causes us to act in
ways that would not be characterized by the term “amazing grace.”
Many of you were at the
parish discernment meeting two Wednesdays ago. It was a good meeting in that it
was an opportunity to listen to each other and hear about our collective
emotions, needs, and questions. But there is reconciling work to be done. There
was a person at the meeting who is not a member of St. Luke’s and came with an
agenda of causing a stir. As a priest, I read the situation through the
metaphor of a wolf coming into the sheep pen to cause harm, and I reacted from
that assumption. I openly confess that it was not how I would have liked to
respond; and for that, I am sorry. My response was firm, and given the anxious
situation, normal. Very few people would react differently in a such a
situation; there’s a reason why it’s called “amazing grace” and not “everyday grace.”
The Holy Spirit enables the unbelievable and the otherwise impossible. In that
moment, amazing grace did not come through, but I pray that in the future it
will.
I make this confession to
you because I think it’s important, as a priest and as a follower of Jesus, to
admit and own my sin, but also to speak to the reconciling power of Pentecost.
What has given me more hope than anything is that though we don’t all agree on
the topic of same-sex marriage, we are still together. I can’t read minds, but
I can read those cards you filled out. I’ve either met with or scheduled a time
to meet with every person (that I know of) at that meeting who “speaks a
different language” when it comes to this topic. And if I haven’t spoken to
you, please let me know. I hope and pray for reconciliation. Not one person has
said “we don’t want you here” or “I’m leaving,” and if that isn’t a testament
to the strength of this community and the power of the Holy Spirit, I’m not
sure what is. And that’s the message that the Church needs to spread- that
reconciliation is, indeed, possible. There is a lot out there that divides us,
but division and dissention need not dictate our relationships. We are defined
not by our politics, the color of our skin, our net worth, our thoughts on
church pews, or even our approach to the Bible; no, we are defined as beloved members
of the Body of Christ. We are defined by the same Holy Spirit that flows
through us all. We are defined by our need for reconciliation and our hope that
through God, new life and new possibilities exist.
Imagine what our world,
government, and personal relationships would look like if reconciliation was
our primary mission, if we sought to understand each other. Well, it would be a
miracle and Pentecost shows us that through the Holy Spirit, it is within our
reach. Dry bones can live. Disparate tongues can be understood. Strained
relationships can be healed. God’s dream can be realized. “Come, Holy Spirit,
heavenly dove, with all thy quickening powers; come, shed abroad the Savior’s
love and that shall kindle ours.” Amen.
