June 12, 2011
Texts: Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-12
Today is Recommitment Sunday. We moved it from the fall to Pentecost Sunday because this day marks the birthday of the church, the day of the descent of the Holy Spirit, the day of possibilities.
The overarching possibility is a new kind of community, a community of people experiencing personal healing, and in the process of healing finding ways to witness to the grace of God and to act for the healing of the world.
That’s a pretty highfalutin description, and you might ask “Is he talking about this community or some ideal community?” Everybody knows that we are not an ideal community. At the same time we are not an ordinary social group. There are some things that set us apart. I want to talk about four marks of identity that set the Christian community apart which I see in today’s scripture texts. In doing this I am also talking about the meaning of recommitment. Membership in this community at the three levels of covenant, intern or community membership is for one year. Each year we make an intentional decision to recommit or not.
I will be talking about four marks of belonging that we are embracing when we recommit. In other words, this is some of what we are getting into when we take membership seriously. There are other marks, but let’s focus on these four: 1) a community of gratitude and longing; 2) a community of deep listening, hearing and reconciliation; 3) a community who sees itself as a continuation of the Jesus movement; and 4) a community that sits in darkness without repressing the darkness and at the same time holds forth light.
Our main text is the Pentecost Story in the book of Acts. I trust that most of you are familiar with this story. It’s a wild and crazy story of a group of people, maybe twice our size, having an encounter that launches them like a rocket not into space but into the world about them.
The text of the Pentecost story is confusing about what literally happened in that time and space. It describes the happening from the perspective of three of the five human senses – the sense of hearing, the sense of sight, and the sense of speech. The text says that a sound like the rush of a violent wind filled the house, then a flame of fire extended from each person and thirdly, each person spoke in a language other than his or her own, and each person understood what his neighbor was saying. The combination of the gifts of hearing, sight and speech powerfully describe a life changing event. At this point it is fair to ask, how are we to understand this story? The details are important and at the same time they point to something deeper.
The closest I can come to a modern example corresponding to this story is a charismatic revival in which everyone in the room starts speaking in tongues that enable them to voice their praise and gratitude to God. Then the revival spills out into the street attracting the attention of visitors from away.
I have had friends, some at the Church of the Saviour, who had the gift of tongues and used it in their private prayer times. I have also witnessed this in services and in praying with another person when she spontaneously starting praying in tongues. I have never been given this gift, but I respect others who have it and see its value.
Having read this wild and crazy story it is fair, perhaps inevitable to ask, is the Pentecost story fact or fiction? According to the dictionary, fact means that which actually exists or reality or truth. Fiction, on the other hand, means the class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration. It means something feigned, invented, or imagined, a made-up story.
I take a middle position that there are elements of both here. Clearly imagination is at work. Luke is creating a picture of movement toward universality. As you know, Luke and Acts together are two volumes of one work. Luke ends the first volume (Luke) describing the risen Jesus telling his followers “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father has promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” (Luke 24:46-49). In Acts 1:8, Luke repeats and adds to this pronouncement, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Biblical writers were not newspaper reporters. They tell stories with powerful meaning and give clues as to what explains the event. It is difficult to distinguish fact and imagination at play in these stories. The best approach I have found is to listen for what the story has to say to that time and to us today.
One clear message in the Pentecost story that bridges then and now is as a story of fulfillment of deep longing for experiencing the presence, assurance and peace of God. The story depicts the fulfillment of that longing which causes those so gifted to erupt in gratitude and praise.
Jennifer Ireland, eager to break out of a negative mindset one day reflected on a Native American song describing being carried by the wind across the sky. Jennifer said, “I thought of being carried by the Spirit of God across a vast unfathomable expanse that is life. If this were to happen, this experience of being carried by God in life, I would live in a state of utter gratitude.”
When the Holy Spirit is vividly present, life shifts to a different level, a level of joy even in the midst of unresolved troubles. There is an invitation to peace in the midst of storm. Gratitude wells up.
This mark is related to a second – namely, the Holy Spirit enables deep listening, hearing and reconciliation. For Luke the Pentecost story embodies reconciliation. And reconciliation in a given community spreads out to infect the world. The Pentecost story is the reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.
At its oldest level the Tower of Babel story gives an explanation for how the human race got into the state where we are divided by language. The multiplicity of languages sets a limit to human ability to make ourselves invulnerable, that is to build a civilization which no longer needs the guidance and blessing of God and does away with accountability to God – that is to say, a totally self sufficient civilization. Scripture says in effect, “That’s not going to happen – not then, not now.” In our inability to understand our neighbor’s speech our ability to work together to meet civilization’s challenges is compromised, with the permanent temptation to rely upon coercion to get what we need and want.
In contrast to the tower of Babel story, at Pentecost each person under the influence of the spirit is able to hear what his neighbor is saying. The story is far deeper than a ten minutes outbreak of ecstatic speech. It represents the beginning of a new creation – each person tuned in to the messages of the heart of her neighbor. As this happens they bond and are transformed from strangers to brothers and sisters, and when they work together from this kind of base the fruits increase geometrically – 30 fold, 60 fold, 100 fold as Jesus put it in the Parable of the Sower.
For a modern example of reconciliation in process, let us look around this room at the diversity in community that blesses us as it challenges us – black, white, affluent, poor, female, male, old, young, mentally challenged, mentally gifted, faith challenged and faith gifted. How does such rich diversity that reflects the diversity of the Jesus movement happen?
Over the years Dottie Bockstiegel and others have brought a stream of mentally challenged persons from the L’Arche community who have found a home here, love it and participate actively. John, Harriet, Gail, Carol, Wendy, David, Ann and others have taken victims of torture from abroad into their homes which has created an international path into this community as a place of healing and starting over. Some of you just walked in off the street and liked what you found and stayed.
Gail Arnall put her finger on it last week when she said that this is a community where anyone who walks in the door is welcomed and taken seriously. She said this is who we are called to be. The gift of diversity follows obedience to call.
That’s one example of reconciliation reflected in the Pentecost story. Whoever shows up is welcome. But receiving the spirit happens in different ways for different people and each of us brings our history, our wisdom, our health and our brokenness. We also speak in different languages. Some of us are most at home in the language of the Christian tradition. Others find that language stale.
I have been part of the Church of the Saviour for close to 50 years. Over that time the world has changed dramatically and the language that seemed so clear and straightforward then does not seem so clear today, and at times we have a hard time understanding each other when we work with scripture, wrestle with our calls, and speak our faith.
If you recommit today, you are recommitting to belonging to a community with unresolved issues, such as this one. I come from a conservative evangelical background, Southern Baptist, in my case like Gordon and Mary Cosby and many others who have gravitated to the Church of the Saviour because we found here an expression of the best of our tradition. A scholar friend of mine, also raised a Southern Baptist, recently said to me, “We come from a rich religious tradition. It was neither fundamentalist nor non fundamentalist. It was pre-critical. The challenge is that we can’t go back to the pre-critical. We must find a new place.”
Some of you come from the liberal end of the spectrum or you have shifted from conservative to liberal as an adult. You too are vulnerable, if you are willing to listen to many of the prophets over the last century. The liberal end of the spectrum faces as many contradictions as the conservative end and must also move to a place that the spirit will show us.
Historically, congregations have had a propensity to divide over issues of faith and interpretation of scripture or else ignore or repress the differences. This kind of division and repression reflects the Tower of Babel story. Pentecost holds up another possibility of each person hearing what his neighbor is saying.
All of us at times feel like frustrated children who see things but lack the language to put it into words. This is true of our faith and our doubt. Blessed is the community that can go deep with each other, get beneath the walls that divide us, and help each other bring those thoughts and feelings too deep for words into understandable expression. That happened at the first Pentecost.
So far in this teaching we have talked about two marks of Christian community and recommitment: Christian community as a place for the expression of longing and gratitude and Christian community as a place of hearing, seeing and speaking that leads to reconciliation with God, with our deepest selves and with each other.
Let’s turn now to a third mark of the church which is a community that sees itself as a continuation of the Jesus movement. This distinguishes it from a happy social group, although I am quick to say that, like you, I love happy social groups. Their warmth and graciousness is contagious, but while there is overlap, a community that identifies as a continuation of the Jesus movement is distinctly different.
As I was preparing for this teaching I ran across this arresting statement in the Interpreter’s Bible which gets at that difference: “Pentecost is the story of forces drawing people together in a kind of unity that empowered them to resist the forces that were destroying them.”
Happy social groups rarely talk about forces that threaten us. Instead there we talk about fun experiences and happy things we have in common. That’s why happy social groups by in large are mostly homogenous, people who like each other and are like each other at least on the surface. Diversity and complexity pose problems. Christian community is different.
The people to whom the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost were Jesus followers. The texts in Luke and Acts leading up to this story describe three crucial events that happened to these followers leading up to the Pentecost event. First, they had the common experience of knowing Jesus and being infected by his life and their day after day exposure to what Jesus said and did. They were not the same people as when they started the journey. The people gathered on the day of Pentecost had a history with Jesus and with each other. They were a mutual support system. They were like a small army moving from place to place. This is a mirror of church – a bunch of ordinary people who are part of a movement which gives everybody who identifies with the movement the chance to pitch in with who they are and what they have to offer. To put it in the succinct language of the Church of the Saviour tradition – “all crew, no passengers.”
It is clear from scripture that Jesus was launching a movement whose mantra was “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” The phrase “God’s righteousness” is important. With God not everything goes. Some private and public behaviors, policies and ways of thinking are not acceptable. Behaviors and policies that support human well being across the board and the earth itself align with God’s righteousness. According to scripture, God stands for freedom in opposition to slavery and exploitation. While God encourages singing and dancing and all kinds of self expression, it is never at the cost of the neighbor whose rights and needs are as important as one’s own.
This “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness” movement embodied what Douglas John Hall calls “a new way of being in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi said that we must become the change we seek in the world. That’s what Jesus did and that is how he shaped his movement.
The Jesus followers, gathered on the day of Pentecost, are experiencing the joy, the toughness and vulnerability of their movement at that point in time. Their leader has been taken away from them in the most heart rending way imaginable – a man of God who was bringing hope to thousands unjustly condemned, tortured and hung naked to die on a cross as a warning to the public that his kind of deviance would not be tolerated by the powers that be.
You can imagine some of the thoughts of his followers. “If this happened to one so good and strong and faithful as Jesus, what might it mean for the rest of us in the movement? Who will be next if we persevere? Do I stay or should I run now while I can and save my life? One of the reasons that we miss so much of what the New Testament is saying is that we fail to read it as the document of a passionate, highly vulnerable movement.
Let’s keep going. Acts 1:3 says, “After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.”
Here we get deeply into our fact and fiction issue? How shall we as a community work with the Biblical witness to the resurrection of Jesus? For me it confronts us with the critical question: is our leader back there in a tomb or is he among us still leading now? If only back there, in whom and in what is our hope?
Don’t ask me to explain this rationally. The resurrection of Jesus is a belief and a perspective that I believe one must take on faith and then try to understand what it means. It is not rational. It is not irrational. It is mystery. It is miracle, not miracle that is the opposite of science, but miracle that can’t be accounted for by science and by human technology.
Lastly let’s consider a fourth mark of the church and Christian commitment that is embedded in the Pentecost story. This is the church’s call to live with the fact of darkness without capitulating to the darkness.
The 21st century increasingly looks and feels like a time of descending darkness. We see deep, complex, costly long term issues denied, avoided and contested. Our well being, indeed our survival as a nation and perhaps as a human species is in question as powerful forces work to distract us and gobble up short term gains. Walter Brueggemann, translating the prophet Isaiah to our time, says that we, like ancient Israel, are being sucked into a covenant with death.
Jesus foresaw the destruction of Jerusalem because she could not see the things that make for peace. Pentecost did not displace that approaching future. That would require repentance as Jesus said very clearly.
Jesus’ prophesy reminds me of that of John Maynard Keynes, the great English economist, in his 1919 polemic against the Versailles Treaty. He declared that the victors of the First World War were bungling the peace. The punitive reparations they were demanding of Germany, he argued, would plunge that country into an economic crisis. After that would come the political backlash.
Keynes prophesied “If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing.” (Newsweek, 6/13/2011).
Keynes’ warning was ignored as Jesus’ warning was ignored by the leaders and the public at large. In the unfolding events culminating in the crucifixion, the Jesus followers sat in darkness, their hopes crushed, their adored leader arrested, convicted by trumped up charges, and hung naked on a cross as a criminal as an warning to all who dared defy the power of Rome and his Jewish conspirators.
Isaiah said, “Israel does not know, my people do not understand. … The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it.” But along with naming the darkness, Isaiah also prophesied, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.”
The book of Acts is an account of people seeing a great light and acting on what they saw. Filled with the Holy Spirit who is also the risen Christ, they come out fighting. They call a spade a spade, not in condemnation but in truth telling. The fisherman Peter, answering the sneering explanation of the outpouring of the Spirit as drunkenness, responds to the scoffers and later the authorities saying, “this man … you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law.” What spunk, clarity! Where did it come from? These followers now sound like Jesus, speaking with the same courage and compassion.
We are accustomed to reading the Pentecost Story as the Holy Spirit descending and dissolving all doubts, fears and struggles. That is an idealized account. Reading between the lines we get a more complex picture of struggle, of two steps forward and one backward. They never forgot the suffering of their leader or God’s vindication of his life and death giving him back to them to comfort, confront, support and lead them in continuing and expanding the movement. As a bottom line, this is what recommitment in our understanding of church is all about. It is longing, celebrating, reconciling, continuing the Jesus movement in darkness and light.