In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
It
has been argued that in the collective consciousness of humanity, as we have
evolved we have also had different questions that haunt us. In times when minor
illnesses could lead to death and infant and mother mortality rates were
considerably high, our ancestors primarily struggled with the fear of death.
Death was a constant companion, and really, there wasn’t much to be done about
it, other than hoping for good luck. But as medicines improved and life
expectancies lengthened, the fear of death was no longer the thing that made us
most afraid.
When our ancestors
started to live longer lives and could reasonably expect to live 60+ years, the
fear of guilt took over as the thing that haunted our conscience the most. Will
I be found to be worthy at the end? What can be done to make up for the mistakes
that I’ve made? Guilt though doesn’t keep many of us awake at night. Because of
globalism, we are disconnected from the ways our lifestyles cause suffering to
others and we tend to live segregated lives so that we do not come face to face
with human pain on a regular basis.
The place that we find
ourselves today is living with the specter of meaninglessness. Does my life
really matter? There has to be more to life than work, bills, and even
vacation. We are hungry for meaning, to know that life is not arbitrary, to
know that there is something deeper than our jobs, something that provides true
joy in a way that cars, homes, and fine dining just can’t.
It’s no coincidence that
anxiety disorders are at an all-time high. Our current population is the most
over-weight, over-medicated, over-addicted, and over-booked group that history
has known. We look for meaning everywhere, and when we can’t find it, we turn
to other things to fill in those holes in our lives. Well, if I can’t find true
joy, at least I can have pleasure. If I can’t find my purpose, then I’ll just
plan to have a drink and forget about it. Google has a fascinating search
feature that allows you to search for the usage of any word or phrase going
back centuries. You can then see a graph of how often that particular word has
been used through the years in books. Since 1950, the terms “searching” and
“meaning” have grown exponentially in usage – a clear indicator that our
culture is haunted by a sense of meaninglessness.
You can see this manifest
even in the Church. Many so-called church growth experts talk about the idea of
creating a “seeker-friendly” church, one where instead of letting people dive
into the deep end of spirituality and mystery, we make them to swim in the
“kiddie pool” of shallow slogans. And so the one institution that deals in the
business of meaning-making has rendered itself irrelevant by adopting a
consumeristic approach; the very consumerism that people are fleeing from has
become the operating strategy of the Church. It’s no wonder that people turn to
vices instead of the Church when searching for meaning – neither gets us closer
to alleviating the anxieties of modern life, and vices are a lot more fun.
You might wonder what any
of this has to do with Pentecost, which is supposed to be a joyful celebration,
is it not? And I’ll agree that the sermon thus far hasn’t been very joyful.
Pentecost though is an antidote to this sense of meaninglessness, to the
anxieties of our world, to the search that seems to never end. The gift of the
Holy Spirit changes everything.
The first way that
Pentecost actually makes a difference in our lives is that it makes us holy.
Now being holy doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re better than anyone else –
holiness isn’t a competition. But to be holy, in the Biblical usage of the
term, means to be “set apart” or “different.” So, take, for example, our
communion chalice. It is holy not because it has magic powers or anything like
that. But it is holy because it is given a special purpose, it is set apart for
a special task – holding the wine for communion. As far as being a cup, it’s no
better than a plastic cup or a thermos, it holds liquids just as well as, but
no better than, any other cup. In the same way, you are holy, you are
different, you are set apart, because you are a vessel for the Holy Spirit.
Again, this doesn’t make you any better than anyone else, but it does give you
a very clear and very holy purpose.
This differentness can be
uncomfortable though, and so sometimes we’re not so comfortable with letting
the Holy Spirit flow through us. In both the reading from Numbers and Acts,
when the Spirit fills people, others immediately dismiss them. In Numbers,
Joshua asks Moses to command Eldad and Medad to stop being vessels for the
Spirit. And Moses sees this as jealousy on Joshua’s part.
One of the ways that the
Spirit changes us is that it reorients our fundamental way of seeing the world.
We live in a culture of scarcity – that is how capitalism works: supply and
demand. If there is always enough supply to meet the demand, then markets
collapse. Our ultimate meaning and dignity though is not found in things. No
collection, no accumulation, no object can ever save us or make us worthy of
being loved. Our worthiness comes from the abundant love of God. While the
world may say things like “You don’t have enough time,” or “You don’t have
enough education,” or “You don’t have enough beauty,” God refutes those claims
by saying “My love for you is enough.”
But Joshua, like us all,
rather liked being one of the “chosen” elders who had the Spirit. He saw the
spread of the Spirit to others as a challenge to his own specialness. He was
operating out of a different sense of economics – one where there is a limited
amount of Spirit. But with God, there is always enough. We have been blessed
with a planet that has enough space for us all, enough water, enough food,
enough beauty. But because don’t see it that way, because we want to have more
than enough, just in case, it means that others get less than enough. The Spirit
though can help us to see things differently.
The Holy Spirit is
graciously democratic, not in the political sense of the word, but in an
egalitarian way. The Holy Spirit doesn’t care if you’re one of the elected
elders, or just some random Eldad or Medad. As Peter quotes from Joel in the
reading from Acts, the Spirit is poured out upon all flesh: sons and daughters,
young and old, slaves and masters, Jews and Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and the
rest. There is enough Spirit for everyone, and if there’s enough Holy Spirit
for each of us, then we don’t have to climb over each other for stuff that’s a
whole lot less important that the very Spirit of God.
In Acts as well, we see
that people who have the Spirit are derided for being drunk on new wine. When you
are full the Spirit, you are different, and so you might not worry about the
things that the world wants you to worry about, you might live as if the Gospel
is more important than Wall Street, you might take selfless actions that don’t
make any rationale sense, you might love people that the world has told us
aren’t worthy of being loved, you might put discipleship over patriotism, you
might not compete for the things that everyone is climbing over each other for:
things like prestige, popularity, and wealth.
When someone throws a
wrench into the mechanisms of the empire, the empire strikes back. You’ll
probably be labeled, you’ll probably be discredited, you’ll probably be
excluded, you might even be arrested or persecuted. But that’s okay because God
doesn’t play the same games that we do. And deep down, I think that most of us
have come to realize that what really matters is love. But to really and truly
love, it takes a lot of courage. It takes so much courage that, by ourselves,
we could never muster up enough courage to actually love in the radical ways
that God does.
This is where a second
point of Pentecost is helpful, this one coming from John. Jesus says that “Out
of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” John then clarifies
that by “living water,” Jesus is referring to the Spirit. The Holy Spirit isn’t
something that we have to earn. It isn’t something that we have to cultivate.
It isn’t something that we have to ask God to give us. The Holy Spirit is
already within us.
Most translations of the
Bible say that this living water, or Spirit, flows out of our hearts, and
that’s a nice sounding translation, but not an accurate one. The word that
Jesus uses doesn’t mean “heart,” the Greek doesn’t use the word kardia, which we recognize as being
related to our word “cardiac.” No, the word that Jesus uses is koilia, which is where we get the word “coeliac,”
as in Celiac disease.
And with that bit of
knowledge, it’s easy to see that Jesus isn’t speaking sentimentally about your
heart, but rather he is speaking viscerally about your bowels. It means that
the Spirit isn’t a fleeting feeling or a thought, but rather God is in your
gut. When you have that sinking feeling in your stomach that you’re supposed to
do something, that’s the Spirit. When you see images of war or starving
children and you become sick to your stomach, that’s the Spirit in you being
revulsed. When you experience a joy that just bubbles up for no logical reason,
that is the Spirit that lives within you.
The Spirit’s residence in
you means that you don’t have to search for your own meaning, it means that you
don’t have to summon up the courage to be holy because God has already put that
Spirit of courage in you. It does though mean that it will be important to pay
attention to your gut. If you’ve ever had lingering stomach issues, you know
that you can only ignore it for so long. It’s important to take time to be
quiet so you can listen for the Spirit that lives within you. Just as is true
with our physical diet, it’s important to pay attention to our spiritual diet.
You can really mess up your gut with bad food, and you can really mess up your
spiritual gut with things like grudges, anger, resentment, greed.
The Church though stands
ready to help you in this. You might think of the Church as a dietician. You
can come to be filled with Holy Communion to feed that indwelling Spirit. When
you need to get stuff out of your system, you can come for Confession. When
your system is out of balance, you can come for anointing and prayers for
healing. When you need to get back in touch with your core, you can sing, you
can pray, you can sit in the beauty of this space. When you are healthy, you
can share that health with others by serving those in need, by bringing peace
to brokenness, by reminding others that the Spirit is in them too.
Our culture and time is
one in constant search for meaning, and our world offers us many ineffective products,
many empty promises, much false nourishment. On Pentecost, we are reminded that
our meaning and purpose is found in God. Because the Holy Spirit dwells deep
within us, at our very core, we are holy and set apart. The Spirit enables us
to live differently – not according to the economy of scarcity, not needing to
prove or earn our dignity or worthiness, not as subjects to empire. Rather, the
Spirit resides in us to give us the courage to believe that we are enough, to
give us the grace to live for love above all else, and to give us a peace that
passes all understanding. Thanks be to God.
