The Inclusive Spirit

The Inclusive Spirit
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b;
Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17, 25-27

I go through this routine every year as I prepare worship for Pentecost: Do I have all the place names read as part of the Acts lesson? They are a mouthful. Not every mouth can spit them out in an orderly sensible way. It’s like reading all the names in the “begats” from Numbers, Matthew or Luke. May be I should just edit the text to say, “And how is it that, each of us, in our own native language, hear them speaking about God's deeds of power?” That would just delete all the names.

Another choice that presents itself is to replace the unfamiliar ancient names with contemporary ones, so that the passage might read something like this: “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?  Portugese, Mexicans, Ethiopians, and residents of Montenegro, Japan and China, Poland and Australia, Patagonia and Pakistan, Egypt and Libya, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Gentiles and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power.” Modern day place names don’t trip off the tongue any easier than ancient ones.

So what is with all those names, regardless of whether they are ancient or modern? It’s Luke’s attempt to demonstrate that the Holy Spirit of God, as well as the Gospel which the Spirit unleashes and empowers, is universal, is for everyone, is for enemies as well as friends, is for foreigners as well as homebodies, is for people not yet met as well as bosom buddies. There is no one who cannot access the Spirit or be accessed by the Spirit. The Spirit is God’s witness that God desires to be in contact with everyone. Not some, not just the deserving, not just the beautiful, not just the poor or the rich, not just the politically savvy, not just the religious elite, not just the smaller sizes to whom  Abercrombie and Fitch prefers to sell. Everyone. All.

And that means that there are a lot of things that are different among all those diverse people. And the Spirit doesn’t play games with those things. The Spirit enables a variety of gifts which are necessary for the useful and efficient spread of the Gospel through human agency. But those gifts are spread evenly across all the lines of division that human beings would lay down: language, race, gender, nationality, education, economic status, political persuasion, physical capability.

The Spirit breaks down the divisions that we build to include and exclude, to separate and conquer, to esteem and to belittle, to shame and to promote. The Spirit unites and celebrates what we have in common: one body, one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

The gift of the Spirit to the church in particular and the world in general is all part of God’s grand design. Remember the words of the psalmist, in No. 24: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it. That’s the same message as the psalmist gave in No. 104, from which our reading today came. God’s creative work extends from heaven to earth. The psalmist has a long list of things that God has created: clouds, winds, fire, water, cattle, plants, people, wine, oil, bread, trees, birds, goats, moon, sun, darkness, light, lions. O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

God has designed everything in wisdom. In Hebrew, wisdom is more than knowledge. It includes technical aptitude and construction skill. God is the divine engineer as well as the architect. Creating out of nothing is an art. God dreams, God imagines, God envisions, God thinks, and God tinkers. That is Spirit-work. That is God inviting our participation in the ongoing work of creating order out of chaos, life out death, joy out of mourning, wholeness out of pieces, love out of indifference.

We see that in the image of the Leviathan. The ancient world thought of Leviathan as a great chaos monster, a terrifying image, a piece of early science fiction if you will: Godzilla, Jurassic Park, and Jaws all rolled into one. Yet the psalmist sees that with God the Leviathan is as harmless as a bath toy, a simple rubber duck floating in bath bubbles.

God doesn’t just design in wisdom. God also nourishes everything that God creates. God doesn’t abandon creation. Even in the midst of the rubble of a collapsed building in Bangladesh, or tornado broken homes in Texas, car bombings in Damascus, fighting in South Sudan, rambunctious rocketry in North Korea, or global warmed rising sea water in the Maldives. God nourishes the world – all the world – with the presence of the Spirit. God gives his creatures exactly what they need for life.

The Spirit is a spirit of generosity. The tongues of flame that descended were not sparingly given. They touched everyone. The Spirit is not to be hoarded any more than anything else in all of creation. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives that is that we are torn apart.” Brueggemann says that what tears us apart is the conflict between scarcity and abundance. We are torn between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief that the things of life are limited. As a result we become greedy, mean, unneighborly.

The gift of the Spirit at Pentecost was – and is – God’s affirmation that there is more than enough of the truly important things to go around. They cover the world. They are for everyone. The cup of life overflows; surely God’s goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives. We shall dwell in the house of the Lord as long as we have breath, and beyond.

All this, God freely offers us. The Spirit overflows. Brueggemann says that there is something like a table prayer in the midst of these verses. God is thanked for giving “food in due season” and filling all of his creatures “with good things.” The psalmist describes God as the great respirator, breathing life into the world. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.

The first Christians discovered all this abundance in the midst of the Pentecost experience. The Holy Spirit rushed like a wind into the gathering of the apostles. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Pentecost is about the generosity of God. The message of the Gospel is for all people, is available in all languages that were then known. And Christians continue to bring the gospel into the languages of the world, one dialect at a time. No wonder the crowd was amazed and perplexed and astonished. Here was something so important, so special, so particular, that it couldn’t be bottled up in one language, one society, one nation, one synagogue.

The breath of God fills everyone with good things and creates something new, unimaginable. The church was blessed to be multi-cultural, multilingual, multi-generational, international, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

From the outside Pentecost looks like a mess. But from the inside, it is pure genius, designed by God, nourished by God, freely offered by God, and so fully abundant that it swept through Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, to Rome, Europe, Asia and beyond. It is still sweeping today as, against all human odds, the Spirit grows the faith in ever expanding numbers in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, and in places where to believe anything other than another faith is a cause for death. The flames of Pentecost have been fanned across the world and across the centuries. They are here, even in our midst, even in our time, even in our lives. The Spirit of God is inclusive, abundant, effervescent. The Spirit of God is life itself.

Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Praise the Lord!


Sources:
Walter Brueggemann, “The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity.” Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999.
Homiletics, May-June 2013.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

In the After-Glow of Easter

In the After-Glow of Easter
John 17:20-26;
Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21


It was easy to get caught up in the fervor of all the “Alleluias” on Easter Day. Worship does itself. We know the story, although it is always good to hear it again. We are in the mood for the occasion. It is special, with lilies and tulips, boutonnieres and corsages, new clothes, and visiting family. “The Lord is risen!” trips off our tongues so wonderfully well. And we really do affirm it.

But now it is the forty-third day after the Resurrection of Christ. The Easter exuberance has waned. The flowers have faded and withered. Easter is just a memory. What did we eat and where? Who were we with?

Added to that, the church calendar says that last Thursday commemorates Christ’s Ascension. The risen Christ isn’t with us any more. He’s gone off and left us. And two white-robed men appeared and had the nerve to say to us, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Where else are we going to look if not toward heaven? And if Jesus is coming back that way, shouldn’t we be looking that direction?

So not only are we in the dying after-glow of Easter, the one who made it light up so well has left us in the darkness of the world. After all, wasn’t Easter about lighting the darkness? Didn’t Jesus the Christ, God’s only Son, cross the barrier of death and return triumphant not only over what kills the physical body, but also over what snuffs out the eternal spark of the divine image in us? Now he’s up and gone away. What good is a risen Savior if he isn’t with us?

Well, yes, he did tell us that if he went and prepared a place for us, he would come again and take us to himself, so that where he is, there we may be also (John 14:3). I guess that is all well and good, but it sure leaves us in an in-between time, after resurrection and before return. And we have been in this time for ever. Not just “you-and-me” we, but lots of other “we”s – generations of people who heard about Jesus and were blessed because they believed in him even though they never met him face to face. So what are we supposed to do, while we wait, while our bodies give out in the endless waiting for eternity?

The closing words of Jesus’ last prayer with his disciples before he was arrested and crucified helps us to know what to do during this in-between time, this eternal waiting. Jesus prays for the remaining disciples (Judas had already left to make his final betrayal arrangements). He includes the close hangers-on, the women and others, in his prayer as well. Jesus widens his prayer. He prays for the innumerable multitude of people in countless generations who will come to know of him because the disciples will be spiritually compelled to remember him and teach about him after the pain of crucifixion and the shock of resurrection has come and gone.

Jesus prays for a unity, a oneness already modeled by the Son and the Father, a oneness which will be so compelling that the world will know that Jesus was sent by the Father to be with us and to save us and to love us just as God has loved him. Jesus further prays that those whom the Father has given to him will be with him in his place of glory. They will witness his eternal and abiding glory which is the gift of God’s love. In that divine love believers cannot be separated from Christ or from God.

Well, Lord, we are not one, and as far as any of us can see, it isn’t going to happen, not sooner, not later neither.

It’s true. Our eyes don’t deceive us. We aren’t one. And it isn’t for lack of trying. But the oneness which Jesus talks about isn’t human oneness. Human beings will never unify themselves. The power of sin and evil will always thwart every attempt by human beings to be united. There’s a force field set up by sin that keeps us from doing it. It’s all we can do to unite two people in marriage, and we don’t do that very well. One out of two, isn’t that the current average? Fifty percent doesn’t constitute a passing grade. Batting .500 may be fantastic for a baseball player, but the gospel deserves better.

The unity for which Jesus prays comes through divine will and action. The harder we try, the harder we fail. But God brings about the kind of oneness that God desires and affirms. It is a oneness that creates some strange companions in this life’s journey of faith. After all, Peter had no intention of giving the gospel to those pork-eating gentiles of Cornelius’ household or any other house, but God told him it was all right to do it. Saul was the least likely candidate for winning people to Christ, but that’s what God had in mind for him. Let’s face it, we can’t even imagine who all God is planning to unite us with. And if some unchurched people knew who it was that God was going to unite them with, they wouldn’t be very keen either, I’m sure.

The three key concepts which Christ leaves us with – belief, unity, and love – are crucial, and vague. They roll so easily off the tongue. We use them like a giant game of keep-away, tossing indefinable faith in Christ from one to another one term after another, and we little understand what we’re talking about. I don’t purport to know all the ins and outs of those things, and you haven’t the time to sit here until we do figure them out completely. Perhaps brevity will stimulate your thoughts better than completeness.

As far as the gospel-writer John is concerned, belief is always focused in relation to Jesus Christ:  “Those who believe in him are not condemned” (3:18). True belief in Jesus means perceiving and confessing something of the vital – unique – relationship between him and God. Belief also has consequences. Whoever believes in Jesus Christ as God’s Son will do the work which Jesus himself did in the name of his Father. That’s daunting. That’s scary. Through our belief in Jesus, which we proclaimed through baptism, confirmation, and profession of faith, we have taken on the ministry which Jesus himself did. It sets a mind to thinking:  What did I do yesterday, last week, last month that was Jesus’ ministry? Ask yourself that every evening as you prepare for bed, or on Saturday night when you prepare yourself for Sunday’s worship. There’s a set-up for the prayer of confession if ever there was one.

Then there’s unity. No one ever said unity’s easy. Unity is more than the harmony of a single congregation. Jesus said he had other folds of sheep who listen to his voice. John makes no pretense of calling for one mega-church to serve the world. Rather unity is multi-dimensional. Unity has to do with divine-human relations and with human-to-human relationships. All unity is the result of God’s power, and it has a purpose: so that the world may believe that God has sent Jesus. That’s the final outcome of the unity that God is bringing about, universal belief that Jesus is the Christ sent from God. There’s a whopping pile of stuff we need to repent of, stuff that we throw up before potential believers that confuses the true unity which God seeks. Forgive us, Lord.

Like Paul’s big three at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, this threesome includes love. Perhaps only in tennis and the Fourth Gospel can we really be certain what this word “love” means. In tennis, love means zero, no points. For Jesus, according to John, love means to will the well-being of others to the degree that one would give one’s own life for the benefit of others (15:13). That has been his ministry, from day one. “I give you a new commandment:  ...just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (13:34). His words of resurrection greeting to the trembling disciples reflect that love:  “Peace be with you” (20:19). Such love serves as a testimony to “the world” concerning Jesus Christ.

So maybe we haven’t got the energy that we used to have, even 43 days ago when we got up early to go to discover that the world’s entombment of saving grace had failed miserably. The cares of the world weighed like a feather back then. Now their weight has grown to crushing. Yet Jesus’ words are remembered: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

With belief, unity, and love – embodied in us – the after-glow of Easter can and will be strong, warm, and inviting, that the world may know and believe.

The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.

Begin with the End in Mind

Begin with the End in Mind
John 14:23-29;
Revelation 21:10; 21:22-22:5; Acts 16:9-15; John 5:1-9

Whenever we use the onboard GPS system in our automobile or search for directions on Google Maps, we have to put in the destination. The nice thing is the current programs allow us to alter the route. On the computer screen we can drag the suggested route to include a stop along the way at the bakery or Aunt Millie’s house. That doesn’t change where we are going, just the path we use to get there.

In Stephen Covey’s well-known book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he tells us the second Habit is very simple: “Begin with the End in Mind.” Or, in other words, determine where you want to end up in the future, and plan the present in light of those goals. Covey makes the shift from the Google Map kind of geography to the map of human geography, human fulfillment. What is the end that each of us have in mind for our lives? I often joke that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. Others echo that same sentiment.

There is some truth to the notion that we haven’t reached our final purpose. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine sister, says in her current book, Following the Path, that there are actually three calls in life. The first is the call to adulthood. As we move into the season of graduations – Ohio State’s is today, with President Obama bringing the commencement address – we think of all the graduates wondering if they will get a job to pay off the college debt, let alone get a job in the field for which they have trained. Chittister says that the “culture is full of criteria for success that have almost nothing to do with happiness, with Aristotle’s notion of ‘virtuous activity,’ with the recognition that we have all been born to make the world a better because we have been here.”(1)

She goes on to say that the culture demands that we get money, or power, or prestige, at least; “get the trappings of the good the life, the rumor of the great life, the reputation of success, the culture says, and that will be enough.” Except that it isn’t. And the result is that we are a culture of misfits, because we are accustomed to becoming things we aren’t.

Chittister’s second call is the mid-life crisis when we have outgrown the young life that we thought would go on forever and we find within us a whole new person. We get stuck in a rut that is comfortable and complacent and is a creeping kind of death. We realize that we haven’t gone where we thought we would. It may pay the bills, but does nothing for the spirit. Chittister says of this point in life: “Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.”(2) What she says is that somewhere in the course of the years between the first and second calls, we chose static and confused it with stable. We failed to change with the changes around us that prodded change within us at well.

I’ll return to Chittister’s third call in a moment. I want to pause here to look at the man at the pool of Beth-zatha. This pool has been found and excavated by archaeologists. It is 315 feet long, trapezoidal in shape and between 165 and 220 feet wide. That’s about the size of a football field. It was identified in part by the porticoes, in which, as John tells us, many invalids lay waiting for healing. Beth-zatha pool (which means ‘house of mercy’) was evidently roiled up periodically by an intermittent spring. The theory was that if you were first into the water you would be healed. There is no proof for that theory. But the man in our text believed it for 38 years!

That is a long time. Perhaps he had grown used to the waiting. He may have given into despair, who knows? We could look down on his paralysis at helping himself, but we, too, invest so much hope in external attempts at security – money: our IRA’s; power: our guns; prestige: our delusions of control – that we might as well be invalids ourselves. It is worth noting that this man’s years of waiting roughly correspond to the years of Israel’s journey in the wilderness. More importantly his healing is a sign of resurrection, a path from death to life.(3)

The man didn’t know Jesus at all, did not ask Jesus for healing, and faith was no pre-requisite for what Jesus did. It was not about whether he was worthy. Jesus asked him one simple question: “Do you want to be healed?” The man did not answer the question, but started listing of excuses: “I have no one to out me in the pool; someone always gets there ahead of me, etc. etc.” Jesus was not interested in the litany of excuses, and simply said, “Stand up, take your mat, and walk. You don’t need the pool.” The man was healed, took up his mat and walked out of Beth-zatha.

Do you want to be healed? Do you know where you are going? What is the end for which you are living?

Resurrection. New life. That’s where we are supposed to be heading. Once in a while when I read a novel, I will read the last couple of pages first. They might or might tell me something about the ending. Even if they don’t, the fun is not in the outcome butin experiencing what happened first and how it proceeds to the conclusion. We do that with scripture. We know the stories. We know the high points if not all the details. We need to remember where we are going. Revelation tells us where we are going:

The angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ...  The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in [the city], and his servants will worship him; ... they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

We know the end of the story. We know where we are headed. And we know who we are headed there with. Jesus has promised that the Paraclete – Comforter, Advocate, Companion – will go there with us. And we are going to where God reigns.

Princeton Seminary professor Darrell Gruder writes,

A definitive answer to the question, ‘What is the reign of God?’ cannot be given. But we can at least sketch some of its contours by listening to the Old Testament’s prophetic forecasts of the coming day of God and the prophets’ expectations of God’s intended future for the world. Philosopher Arthur Holmes summarized that prophetic vision as shalom. It envisions a world characterized by peace, justice, and celebration. Shalom, the overarching vision of the future, means “peace,” but not merely peace as the cessation of hostilities. Instead, shalom envisions the full prosperity of a people of God living under the covenant of God’s demanding care and compassion as the rule.(4) 

We all know Revelation 21, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth....” What would it be if we localized that? “I saw the holy city, God’s New Waverly, coming down out of heaven ...” What would our ‘new’ city look like, envisioned in light of God’s vision of hope? This is an exercise in ‘borrowing the eyes of God,’ as the German theologian Dorothee Soelle describes our mystical sight. We see our world as God sees it. This is what happens in Revelation’s New Jerusalem vision.

Gruder picks up the theme:

Eschatology is not only about the end of the world. It is about the future breaking in today with an alternative order known as the reign of God. The announcement of Jesus that in his coming the kingdom of God had drawn near (Mark 1:14-15) was a declaration that God’s future—the eschaton—was present in the world.(6)

Like Paul seeing the vision of invitation to evangelize Macedonia, we are called, beckoned into God’s future which is already here, right now.

That brings us back to Chittister’s third call. She says that the secret of life is the willingness to grow into something that is beyond our present. The third call, leaving behind all the cosmetics of life – titles and money, positions and schedules, civic committees and public service activities – is the call to completion.(7) We are constantly trying to explain, define “shalom.” “Peace” doesn’t cover all the possibilities. We are called to be complete, to be whole, to be at peace with the image of God entrusted to us. We are called to stop making excuses, be resurrected to the life that Christ freely offers us, take up our mats, and live in the knowledge that God’s saving work is happening right now in the new creation which is bathed in God’s light- and life-giving love.

We know the end of the story. We know where we are going. We have the end in mind. Don’t just think it. Do it now.

(1) Joan Chittister, Following the Path : The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose and Joy (New York: Image, 2012), p. 115.
(2) Ibid., p. 120.
(3) J. Shannon Webster, “Do We Want to Be Healed,” www.midrash@joinhands.com, Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 10:01 PM.
(4) Darrel Gruder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 90-91.
(5) Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 166.
(6) Gruder, op.cit.
(7) Chittister, op. cit.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.