Feast of Pentecost A June 8, 2014
Acts 2:1-11 Psalm 104:25-35, 37b
1 Corinthians 12:4-13 John 20:19-23
There is perhaps a most challenging idea that
is offered by St. Paul on this feast day of Pentecost. It is challenging because involves the
greatest struggle that each of us faces in this life. It is also ambiguous since it requires that
we try to define the practice of this ideal in various community situations.
And what is this most challenging idea of
life? It is what St. Paul called the
common good. This notion of the common
good has also been the challenge of all political thinking. The common good can be stated in very broad
notions like the freedom all members of a society to pursue life, liberty and
happiness. It is much easier to confess
ideals of the common good in broad terms than it is to specify the details in
actual situation. Whether it is the
world community, our nation, state, city, business, school, parish community,
or family, the common good is an ideal and a challenge. And we can preach the ideal but we also must
get our hands dirty in the details to make the common good function for all
members.
St. Paul wrote about the meaning of the
knowing the Holy Spirit in our community life: “ To each is given the manifestation of the
Spirit for the common good.”
Why is it important to know the Holy Spirit
within our lives?
It is important to know the Holy Spirit
within our lives because diversity in every order of life seems to be a rule of
life. When diverse persons and things in
life seem to complement each other, we call it the unity of harmony. When diversity is experienced as reciprocity
amongst difference people and different things, we celebrate Beauty. We also know that diversity can be
experienced as chaos, disharmony and as conflict and war. When diversity is experienced as clash
between particulars, diversity seems to threaten quality of life.
On this day of Pentecost, we celebrate our
belief in the Omni-presence of God in this World as the Personality of God’s
Holy Spirit. Sometimes in our
Trinitarian Theology, we can view God the Father as an absent creator, who
lives away from us. And we can view
Jesus Christ, as God’s Son, who only had a short 30 something years of ministry
with us. We do need to understand that
God has been present with us as a personal, creative energy of life
itself. We need to understand God as the
Holy Spirit. We need to discover God as
personal force of life who is the giver of gifts.
Why do we need to know God as the personal
and present force of the Holy Spirit? I
think that the experience of God as Holy Spirit gives us a different kind of
accountability in life. The great
problems in human life are caused because people do not have a profound sense
of accountability to someone greater than themselves or their own narrow
interest groups. The Holy Spirit as the
creative force of life itself and the giver of all gifts and the creator of all
diversity, can be dishonored and unrecognized.
But even when the Holy Spirit is dishonored and unrecognized, the Holy
Spirit keeps on giving to all. The Holy
Spirit is like the sun that shines on the good and evil without
partiality. Great works of charity can
be done under the cover of sunlight and great works of evil can be done under
the cover of sunlight.
It makes a great different in how we are
related to the Holy Spirit, as creative, personal and present force of
life. It makes a difference because if
we are in touch with the Holy Spirit, we will weave our diversity into
beautiful rainbow productions. If we are
in touch with the Holy Spirit, we do not let our diverse and special gifts
dominate or over-whelm or hoard, we seek the kind of direction that will help
us blend for the common good.
Our patient choir director, constantly wants
us to look up from our music at her, not because she needy for visual
attention, she wants us to look up so that we don’t commit inadvertent solo
events in places where solos are not called for. The goal of choral music is to blend and
harmonize for the common good, and the way to common good in choral music is to
follow the direction of the director.
St. Paul uses two metaphors to speak about
the effects of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the life of the church and
the world. St. Paul wrote about the
gifts of the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit.
And why do we need to understand both effects
of the Holy Spirit? Well, I can be a
gifted singer but never follow any direction in the choir and so ruin the choral
presentation. In short the gifts of the
Spirit have to be directed by the fruits of the Spirit. And what are the fruits of the Spirit? Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Gentleness,
Goodness, Kindness, Meekness, Faith and
Self Control. (Certainly, in choir our director wants the
practice of self control).
On this day of Pentecost, let us celebrate
the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in our lives, in our world and in our parish
life. This world needs a diversity of
gifts to bring quality of life and justice to all people. And we know that we have massive failures in
our world in the ways in which the gifts of God are being deployed toward the
common good. And we can be over-whelmed
by the great failure of the common good for the peoples in our world.
But what is our response to this great
failure of the common good in in our world?
Our response is to celebrate where the common good is evident. Rather than worrying about global matters
over which we have no direct control, we need to respond within our own
circumstances to bring the experience of the common good to our own immediate
communities.
We need help in our efforts to promote the
common good in our lives. We need to
know and acknowledge the Holy Spirit of God as the personal creative force who
is present in our world to whom we are accountable for the deployment of the
gifts of our lives.
God the Holy Spirit gives enough gifts for
the common good of the world. God the
Holy Spirit has given enough gifts for the well-being and common good of St.
John the Divine. God the Holy Spirit is
not a stingy giver.
The issue for us today is taking up and
deploying the gifts that we’ve been given.
How and where are we directing the gifts of our lives today? Are we using our gifts for the best creative
purposes in our lives and in the lives of our community? As we take up our gifts today, left us also
seek the direction of how our gifts are to be deployed; let us also seek the
fruits of God’s Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and self control.
In the choir of life, we look to the Holy
Spirit as the conductor of our gifts, so that what we produce with our lives is
the beauty of the common good. O, Spirit
of God, we thank you that you give us gifts, and we thank you that you also
give us the fruits of the Spirit to help us deploy our gifts for the common
good. Amen.
Have
you thought recently about your spiritual gift?
Well, what is a spiritual gift? How does it differ from a natural gift? And maybe you have found your gift but it has
no place to be expressed. If you told me
that you had a gift with the Swahili language and wanted to use it in the
parish, I might be hard pressed to find an outlet for that gift. So discovering our gifts and finding a place
where our gifts would be received is a major task of life. Each of us at some time and some place has
felt out of place with our particular gift.
Have you ever given a gift, or a present, to someone and it was obvious
that they had no use or appreciation for the gift? (Certainly if you’ve been a
parent, you often had that unrequited feeling).
But even in our employment, if we feel that our abilities are not being
received, it can contribute to our eventful burn out. That unrequited feeling is one of the worst
feelings to have, since in our basic altruistic impulses, we at the very least
want to be useful to other people and make a contribution to the common good.
I would like for us to look at the Feast of
Pentecost as the opportunity to view this world and our lives as gifts from
God. But it is not enough just to be
gifts from God; we also have to have the gift of wisdom and discernment in the
deployment of our gifts within the communities where we are living. When the competition amongst gifted people
abound, there is much confusion and one wonders how having so many gifts can go
awry.
St.
Paul wrote about the Holy Spirit giving gifts to the
members of the Corinthian church. The
Corinthian church was like every church and like every family with the same
basic issue of life: How can a community
experience the unity of peace in the midst of a diversity of gifts and
personalities. How did St. Paul’s address this dilemma? He said
unity was possible because we have all drunk of the same Spirit. But what does that mean in a practical sense?
In a practical sense, I think it means that
in our worship of a very great God, our own significance is dwarfed and the
contrast allows us in humility to check our egos at the door. When we are able to do this, we are able to
deploy our gifts in winsomely persuasive ways and we can avoid the competitive
and coercive deployment of our gifts.
After St. Paul saluted the Corinthians for
all of their gifts in the 12th chapter,
what did he write about in the 13th chapter? In the 13th chapter, he wrote that
you could have all of the gifts, even spectacular gifts, but if we do not have
love, St. Paul reminds us that our gifts account for nothing and can even cause
harm and discord.
The Feast of Pentecost reminds us about the
great art of living. The great art of
living involves how to live in unity in the midst of all of the diversity of
peoples, languages and human experiences.
The problem in our society, our world, our communities, parishes and
family is that we often do not find or access the Holy Spirit of unity in our
lives. Instead of putting together the
puzzle of diversity into a celebration of complementing common good, we often celebrate
an egotistical or separating tribalism or nationalism centering on superiority
and dominance.
We believe that God created great diversity
in nature and in humanity. And we
believe that God called creation, good, very good. And we are told that the Spirit of God moved
over the face of the deep in the process of creation.
In the feast of Pentecost, this same Spirit
of God becomes evident to us as God’s presence behind everything in this
world. There is a seemingly infinite
amount of diversity in this world and diversity can mean war and competition
unless behind this screen of creation we can come to know the creating Spirit
of God. The One who created us, created
us to fit together with a reciprocity that represents the beauty that God
created us for. The human sin is that we
have lost touch with God’s Spirit behind the curtain of diversity of life and
now too often diversity does not contribute towards the reciprocity of Beauty;
diversity is used to serve open war and hatred.
Pentecost is the day when we celebrate the
fact that the followers of Jesus got back to the Spirit of God and it was a
great awakening for the church. It was the birth of the church. And the Spirit of God is the very life of the
Church. It is our task in life to get
behind the curtain of diversity of life and experience the Spirit of God, within
and underneath all of our lives. And
when we can do this our diverse gifts can be wonderful contributions to the
common good of the families and communities of our lives.
If you are worried about whether you have a
special spiritual gift, don’t worry. One
of the gifts that God gives to us is to hide ourselves from ourselves. Some of the most important mentors in my
early life did not ever know what they really did for me; they were just
faithful and kind in important ways. If
in our prayer and worship, we are making ourselves available to God, God is
using us even if we don’t know it. And
that’s okay.
As I look around St. John’s, I see evidence upon evidence of
God’s Spirit working through our members.
And most of you probably don’t even know it, but everything here gets
done because of the gifts of the people who come here. The gifts of people who have been here in the
past still bless us today. And we keep
our doors open because of the gifts of so many people. And every gift is important. The Spirit of God is so awesome that we have
no problem checking our egos at the door before divine greatness, and so we can
receive wisdom and discernment in the deployment of our gifts for the common
good.
We are a gifted people for sure, but beyond
our gifts, I experience our community as a loving community and as a community
of God’s Holy Spirit. And today, God’s
Holy Spirit asks us to continue to offer our selves and our gifts to be used
for the common good. Thank you, Holy Spirit for giving gifts to us. And thank you people of St. John’s for sharing your gifts for our
common good. Amen.
Another Sermon
Feast of Pentecost A June 8, 2014
Acts 2:1-11
Psalm 104:25-35, 37b
1 Corinthians 12:4-13 John 20:19-23
As firm and fixed as the
leaders of religious traditions like to present them, they are in fact very
fluid. They are living traditions and they change according to the
ways in which people use what they have received. They change
because every community and every person is charged with adopting the
traditions to one’s own context and situation.
It so happens that the
followers of Jesus in the decades which followed his life on earth became
predominantly people who were not raised with the traditions of
Judaism. But Jesus was a Jew and he lived within that tradition and
so Judaism was appropriated and adapted for the mission of the Jesus movement.
We observe Pentecost as a
Christian feast fifty days after the resurrection. But Pentecost was
a Jewish feast, a harvest feast, fifty days after Passover. It was
also a feast which commemorated the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai to Moses.
The giving of the law to
Moses occurred on Mt. Sinai; this is the greatest event in the Hebrew
religion. It is told with descriptions of special effect; smoke,
fire and cloud and thundering sounds are written about to characterize the
glory of God’s presence kissing earth so closely in the giving of the law.
But the laws were written
on stone tablets; the prophets found this to be a problem so they had visions
and wished for a time when people could have the teachings (the torah) of God
written upon the human heart.
The followers of
Jesus were looking for solutions in their time for the anticipations of the
prophets of old.
What happened within the
followers of Jesus? Jews and Gentiles began to show evidence
of their life conditions changed and converted by the message of Jesus
Christ. They had to explain and teach this new dynamic.
There was a new Mt. Sinai
event. It occurred in Jerusalem on the 50th day
after Passover when the giving of the law was commemorated. The law
was given again in the Pentecost event; the law was now to be written on the
hearts of many. It was no longer limited to the stone tablets; it
was no longer limited to the Hebrew language.
The Pentecost event
in the sacred story of the church was created to teach this transition of the
teaching of Jesus from being only to the Jewish community to being offered and
valid to anyone who found it to be meaningful and relevant to the
transformation of their lives.
In reading the account
from Acts of the Apostles about this Pentecost event at a pilgrimage feast for
Jews gathering in Jerusalem, we find that the apostles in this Mt. Sinai Event
suddenly became polyglottic. They spoke in the languages which were
known by Jews who lived in places around the Roman World and who had taken on
the languages of these various places as their own native tongue.
One can see how
these polyglottic disciples were symbols about the universalization of a form
of Judaism which took place because of the success of the message of Jesus
Christ.
Christo-centric Judaism
could be translated and embraced in the experience of a person from any place
or culture.
The unity of the Spirit is
a very complex unity; it isn’t simplistic. It is not just suddenly a
magical fix of the differences which exist in human experience between people
of different cultures and background. The unity of Spirit of Pentecost
means that God’s Spirit can interpret to anyone the relevance of Jesus Christ
to anyone in the world.It means that anyone can come to know about this very
unique and rare person Jesus Christ. We have taken this unity of
availability of the message and made it into a political unity of Christians
who align themselves with pope, bishops or pastors.
Pentecost is not about
political or administrative unity of people get religious passports to receive
sacraments and ministry in various Christian bodies.
The unity of Pentecost is
based upon the ability of the message of God’s love being able to be translated
and to be understood, relevant and powerful in the life of anyone who wishes to
know God’s life changing presence.
The presence of God’s
Spirit comes in as many diverse ways as there are people. God
empties or reduces the aloofness of the divine to become relevant to the
peculiar life story of each person. The ways in which God becomes
relevant to people is endlessly different.
God can even change lives
for people who do not use God or Christians words. The success of AA is a
testimony to the fact that Sublime grace can work without specific religious or
Christian sub-titles.
The unity of the God’s
Spirit means that the Sublime is available in so many ways to everyone who is
drawn in this life to be breathless with “O my God” awesome acknowledgment. Or
simply “O my.” The moment of awe of the sublime is the moment
of true worship because in those moments one does not have try to pretend that
one is being worshipful in public places of worship. (though in fact
the sublime can occur in the places of worship, particularly if one has an
experience of wisdom to expand one’s heart and mind).
Pentecost is a Day when
celebrate the fact that Christ as Word from the beginning became a polyglottic
experience so that everyone could know one is free to anthropomorphize God in
one's very own language because God empties the divine self and lays down the
divine life to be known by each of us.
Pentecost means that the
language we speak is God's language because God is humble enough to be known by
those of us who have reason to be humble because we are truly small. But
God's humility is to love us and to accept the way in which we love God on our
own terms, never having a final form of love, or love language, but a growing
and continuing love. This means we have the possibility to be polyglottic
forever in how we will speak of Christ in as many ways and languages as we can.
God has a future in human language, because the Word of God became many
ways of relating the closeness of God to humanity.
The one heart of God gave life blood to all of the
capillaries of each and every human situation and this is what we celebrate on
the day of Pentecost. Amen.
