Commencement in the School of Jesus

Youth Sunday Sermon, June 29, 2014

2 Pentecost, ap8, June 29, 2014 

Jeremiah 28:5-9 Psalm 89:1-4,15-18

Rom. 6:1b-11    Matt. 10:24-39

 Lectionary Link

(Connor begins by serving pouring cups of water and serving them to the people in the front.)

Kalum:  Connor, what are you doing?  And could it not wait until after the service?

James:  I know what Connor is doing.  I give him credit for reading today’s Gospel.  But will his shameless showboating really get him extra brownie points in heaven?

Connor: You talking head preachers can preach the Gospel; some of us actually do the Gospel.  Jesus said whoever gives a cup of water to these little ones will not lose their reward.

Kalum: Well, excuse me, Saint Connor; I did not know I lived so close to a holy one!

James: Saint Connor, please could I get your autograph before you become a relic? 

Connor: Are you being ironic or just plain mocking? 

Kalum: We are sincere……..in our mocking, that is.  But you have initiated a very worthy topic for discussion.

Connor: I have? Accidents do happen.  What worthy topic do we have to talk about?

James:  Well, you are right about the importance of doing the Gospel rather than just talking about it.

Kalum: Yes, actions do speak louder than words.

Connor: That’s a cliché which happens to be true.  But what else can we learn from the Gospel?

James: Well, we have just graduated from high school.  And we now have a diploma which is an official record of our achievement.  And it is a piece of paper which represents more than just being piece of paper.

Kalum: What do you mean?

Connor: I think that he means it stands for 12 years of blood, sweat and tears of all of the work and study that we had to do to get it.

James: When we present our diploma, grade average and test scores, we are able to gain admittance into colleges and universities.

Kalum: The Gospel lesson is about accreditation and the credibility of the disciples of Jesus.

Connor:  Once Jesus was gone, his disciples worried about their credibility.  They worried about whether people would accept their teaching.  They did not have seminary diplomas and official ordinations so how could they be sure that people would accept their teaching as valid?

James: What it shows us is that authority and respect comes from one’s wisdom, learning, character and the reputation that one gets from studying with good teachers.

Kalum:  I guess if you studied physics and you had Albert Einstein as one of your professor, you might get a little more attention for your resume than if you just studied with Joe Blow.

Connor: So if the disciples were worried about whether they would be accepted, Jesus reminded them that he had taught them well.  He had taught them not just to preach the Gospel but to live Gospel.  So if people did not accept the teaching of the disciples then they probably would not of Jesus either.

James: Did you know that the church had its own way of issuing graduation diplomas?

Kalum: What would that be?

James: It is called apostolic succession.  It is an unbroken record of church leadership which has lasted these two thousand years.

Connor: Is that why we have bishops?

Kalum:  Each bishop is ordained by three bishops who were ordained by three other bishops and so the Gospel has been passed down in an unbroken chain.

James:  I don’t think that this means only bishops can do valid ministry.   I think that a bishop represents that the basic message of Jesus Christ has been transmitted from one generation to the next over these many years.

Connor: Because we have this unbroken tradition from Jesus, it means that we can believe and trust that Christ is still present in the life and ministry of the church. 

Kalum: We have the example of Christ which has been preserved in the writings of the New Testament but we have 2000 years of people who have tried to follow the teaching of Jesus.

James: Even though we have bishops and priest and official ordinations, the proof of the authority of the Spirit of Christ is to be found in how we live.

Connor:  And how are we supposed to live?

Kalum: We are supposed to live without sin.

Connor: How can we do that?

James:  St. Paul wrote that living without sin is about learning impulse control.

Kalum: I have impulse control; I choose chocolate over strawberry all of the time.

Connor:  Bravo Kalum!    How did you manage to set the bar so high?

James:  I think that St. Paul was trying to teach his students about the goodness of our lives but also about the responsibility that we have because of freedom.

Kalum: It is like he’s saying that life and the energy and desire is good; but it still needs to be directed.

James:  If we get too fixated on idols or things which are not worthy we can become enslaved to bad habits.

Connor:  So sin is not about being bad or despising ourselves; it is about understanding that we can always be better.  Sin is like pain.  Pain sends us a message about doing something about what is causing us discomfort.  Sin is the awareness and we need to and can always do better than we have done before.

Kalum:  So, being a sinner is not such a bad thing.

James:  Well, we don’t have to be proud of our sin but always learning from the condition of feeling inadequate.  Being a sinner is good, if it means were always looking to amend and improve our lives.

Connor:  The character of Christ comes from learning the power and freedom of impulse control.

Kalum:  I don’t think that we will ever graduate from the School of Sinners.

James:  Well, you really don’t want a diploma for sin; not really the life achievement that one wants to be proud of.   But the goodness of Christ is like knowledge and learning.  In the field of learning we are ignorant of what we have not yet learned.

Connor:  So we are always sinners because there is always more goodness to achieve.

Kalum: Well, now we know how baptism is like commencement; we are always ending something in order to begin something else.

James: At baptism we all have received our diploma in the school of Jesus.  And it is an important diploma.

Connor:  But it also means that we have to choose each day to live up to the standards of love and kindness that we’ve learned from Jesus Christ.

Kalum: We sure have our work cut out for us.

James:  Just think of it in this way; we will never be unemployed Christians, because there will always be more Christian things to do.

Connor:  Let us thank God today for our baptismal diplomas today!

Kalum: We are now guaranteed a life time of much more Christian work!  Let’s get to work!  Amen.

Divine Providence Is Often Like Sausage Making

2 Pentecost, A p 7, June 22, 2014 

Genesis 21:8-21 Ps. 86:1-10, 16-17

Rom. 6:1b-11    Matt. 10:24-39

 Lectionary Link

    History is about how and what we remember what has happened.   History involves selection of what is to be remembered.  Selection of what is to be remembered is determined by the stand out value of any particular event or happening.  History is highly editorialized because events stand out because of their value in comparison with  ordinary mundane events.  You might remember the day of your graduation but not distinctly remember brushing your teeth on that day.  Some things stand out and some things don't.   In the community of faith, the twenty-twenty hindsight of history's highest designation of the editorial selection of an event is often called "divine providence."  Divine providence is such a confident "after the fact faith" that one believes a past event to be evidence of God's intervention.

  And so we ask what is it that makes ordinary history turn out to be divine providence?  In the events surrounding the crucifixion a person witnessing this event would be hard-pressed to call the dying of someone upon the cross an obvious event of God's providential intervention.  Such would be absurd.  But St. Paul years after the crucifixion,  writes about this crucifixion event being a remembered narrative providing the power of personal spiritual transformation.  Our old selves are crucified with Christ and so this terrible event becomes post-facto designated as God's providence, God's wonderful intervention and a source of continuous transformation.

  Providence that is known in advance is called prediction or clairvoyance or prophetic utterance.  And wouldn't every gambler playing the horses love to know providence in advance?  People who confess wonderful providence like to enhance that wonder by suggesting that there was prophecy or foreknowledge for such things.  It is like the recovery technique of the teenager who accidentally slips and falls in front of a large crowd and instead of being embarrassed by the laughter, he says, "I meant that to happen." Responding to an accident by claiming to be in control.

  The Bible is written from the point of view that these things "were meant to happen."  This is effort of people of faith to try to survive, cope with and find meaning for things that happened to them.  Word is spirit and word is life and word is creating.  We use word to re-shape the things in life that often are experienced immediately as chaos because they do not submit to the way in which we would control things.

  In hindsight we can find creation that arise out of chaos and we can find redemption which happened after severe hurt and loss.  And without trivializing the poignant pain of the events themselves we use the creative words of faith and the survival excellence of subsequent events to remake history into providence.

  One could say that the task of our lives of faith is to remake ordinary history into divine providence through the creative words of faith when we did not give up but kept going and we did not always know why we kept going.

  Our Scripture readings give us examples,  messy examples of finding the divine providence even in the earlier events of human weakness, pettiness and the crisis of major family and community disagreement which result in painful conflict and recriminations.

  The fact of history is that the Jews and the Arabs are two dominant branches of the sons of Shem, otherwise known as Semites.  The Jews and the Arabs became great peoples of tribes who came to have the mutual respect of great rivalry.  What was the providence of these two great nations?  These two people came to know the success that the ancient people believed to be God's blessing.  But what was the source stories of the blessing of these two people?  The writers of Genesis cite incidents of sheer human doubt, fickleness and petty rivalry.  Sarah, the wife of Abraham laughed when God's angelic messengers told Abraham that the elderly couple would have a son.  And so her first son was named accordingly, Isaac, which means laughter.  But before Isaac was conceived Sarah began to doubt whether she would conceive.  And in the good old family values of the Old Testament, Sarah ordered Abraham to try to conceive with their slave woman Hagar.  So, Ishmael was born before Isaac was born.  Later when Sarah conceived and bore Isaac, the boys grew up together as half-brothers until Sarah became petty in her jealousy.  She was worried that Ishmael might share in some of the affection and prosperity that came with being raised with Isaac in the presence of their father Abraham.  So she demanded that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away into the desert.  And it was there that Hagar and Ishmael received the promise of God's blessings.  So the human pettiness is made to seem as though it was God's providential acts. Past acts that seemed doomed and motivated by human folly and pettiness are re-shaped and re-designated as providence, by a trumping subsequent blessing.

  The Gospel writings derived during a period of transitions between families and community caught in the aftermath of the success of the Jesus Movement.   The Jesus Movement grew as a prominent interpretation of the Judaic tradition.  A chief part of the success of the Jesus Movement is that many Jewish followers of Jesus allowed their Jewish customs to be dispensed with so that the success of the message of Jesus could be fostered and promoted for the non-Jewish believers.  This promotion of a Christo-centric Judaism to non-Jews and allowing them to forgo circumcision and many ritual practices caused great division within Judaism and particularly within families.

  If Jesus within his own time was a significant challenge to the existing religious authorities in Palestine, the challenge of the Jesus Movement to Judaism became more pronounced as Gentiles began to fill the gatherings of the Christian communities.

  The phrases of the Gospel of Matthew that we've read today are evidence of the incredible community and family pain of this major paradigm shift in the religious communities because of Jesus of Nazareth and the aftermath of his life on earth.

  Many people have been in families where people are passionately divided by having a common God and a common religion.  Christian, Jew, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Mormon, Jehovah Witness.....the division among people who claim be devoted to the same Christ has been known.  How can Jesus as the prince of peace bring peace to an individual soul even while that soul comes to anger and strife with members of his or her own family?  People change faith persepctive; that new faith perspective which is meaningful is suddenly designated as a sectarian cult and people are shunned, excommunicated and persecuted as the outcome of the new faith experience.

  How many people today embrace the notion of atheism because of the extreme conflict and hateful behaviors of people who claim to have faith in a loving God?

  Let us not believe so naively that the Gospel communities resolved issues of faithful living in such a final way.  What we find in the Gospel communities are people who are seeking to find the narrative and oracle of Jesus as inspiration for words of wisdom which try to give context for the conflict which was evident in their communities.  If people can believe that creative advance does not always occur with peaceful transition, then they can decide to keep following the path of creative advance.  We know that the American experience came about with great conflict and there were many who would have wanted to return to the security of being but a colony of Great Britain.  We have come to regard the conflict as providential for the incredible experiment in government that we know America to be.

  We can look back at the Gospel communities as communities which survived some very conflicting times of their birth and separation which were providential in forming this Christo-centric Judaism which traveled around the world.  The Gospel words are words of trying to make sense of the chaos of conflict that was occurring as this new universal Christo-centric Judaism was being formed.   Let us be thankful that they endured lots of discomfort and conflict to survive to be links in a great and wonderful movement.

  Let us pray that we can have the faith to come to providence for our religious history both on the personal level and on the parish and community level.  Conflict is a fact of life.  But let justice and love be the final judgment about the divine providence of conflict:  Are more people invited to know God's love and justice because of the conflict?  If this is so, we can embrace the conflict as the divine providence of God's Spirit helping us to make creative advance in love and justice.  And this, loving and just outcomes are the good and providential news of conflict for us today.  Amen.

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The Trinity: A Mere Footnote on Plato and Aristotle?

Trinity Sunday A   June 15, 2014   

Gen. 1:1-2:3       Ps.33

2 Cor. 13:5-10,11-14  Matt. 28:16-20     

Lectionary Link

 Today is Trinity Sunday and a day to remember that the Trinity is our community’s formulation of what we believe about God.  The formulation of the Trinity has a history but such is a cliché that could be used about everything.  Every use of language has a history and so history itself is about how words of meaning come into being and how they get changed in their meanings and values.

  If the Trinity has a history in the history of words, it still has what is not yet history, namely the future.  The Trinity has a past, a present and the Trinity will have a future in human usage.

  Historians would like to proclaim the Council of Nicaea as a high water mark in the formulation of God as a Trinity of Persons.  By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 of the Common Era, the Hellenization of Christian thinking had become quite advanced.  Alfred North Whitehead said that European philosophical tradition  is but a series of footnotes to Plato.  And Plato and Aristotle might as well have been at the Council of Nicaea, because the influence in thinking  evident at the Council of Nicaea made its documents seem like some of those repeating foot notes.  The foot note to Nicaea might have said, “See Plato and Aristotle.”   It is interesting that Pope Benedict XVI tried to reassert the significance of such a Hellenistic footnote by requiring his flock now to use “consubstantial” in the Nicene Creed. 

  Do you think it is demeaning to the importance of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to make such a reference to Plato and Aristotle or Greek philosophical categories?  The New Testament Writers inherited both the Hebraic and the Hellenistic traditions.  If one wanted to say that someone new and marvelous had arrived upon the scene one could only use the illustrious past to speak about the surpassing greatness of what is newly revealed.

  We are living in a long tradition about God.  This tradition about God has many tributaries in the cultures of people within the world.  We as Christians believe that the tradition about God arrived at a new distinction in the life of Jesus Christ.

  But we know that more has happened regarding the tradition of God after Jesus Christ than what happened during the life and ministry of Jesus.

  Humanity was given this surpassing great person who manifested such a rareness of existence that he has been remembered more than any person in history.

  The life of Jesus is proof that there is a mystery in how human values get determined.  After Jesus we have had to readjust human values.  We have had to change what we thought and believed about ourselves, the afterlife and about the life of God.

  The Holy Trinity is an expression about how we have come to value God and how we have come to express the meaning of God in our lives.  The Holy Trinity is an expression of relationship values.  And while we may want to reduce relationships to the precision of mathematical formula and philosophical logical statements; relationships do not allow such precision or such reductions.

  The Nicene confession about the Trinity is an effort to make philosophical statements about our relationship with God.  And it fails to do the relationship justice even as it succeeds in stating our most important way of speaking about God.

  We can decry the use of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to speak about the Trinitarian relationship but we cannot dismiss the human motive to attempt always to find the best possible explanations for the best in things in our life.  If Jesus and God the Father and the Holy Spirit are the best things in life, then we cannot cease to find our best possible ways to speak about the best and highest relationship of our lives.

  And so some may say we are Trinitarian because of Greek philosophy; I would beg to differ.  I would say that we are Trinitarian because of Jesus Christ.  You cannot artificially invent a person like Jesus.  You can’t just develop such a person with an advertisement or propaganda campaign.  Jesus happened and the people of his time had to deal with him.  They dealt with him as honestly as they could.  They tried to keep the traditions of his life and words alive in the ways in which they could.

  Jesus came and he re-valued how we have come to know, relate and speak about God.  So we need not blame the Trinity on Plato or Aristotle; we should credit the life of Jesus as he lived it before his friends as the inspiration for the arriving at the value of the Holy Trinity.

  The followers of Jesus believed that he taught us to call God our Father.  The followers of Jesus in the community of the writer of John’s Gospel believed that Jesus stated his Oneness with God his Father.  So how does one use the Greek language or any language to deal with this expression: Jesus said, “The Father and I are One.”  The early church believed that Jesus told his followers to pronounce the initiatory words at baptism: In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  So the literature which derived from apostolic times required that church deal with this Equality of Persons in understanding the dynamic Unity of God.  If we speak about the Trinity today, we can blame it on Jesus and the traditions which derived from him.

  It behooves us to understand the relationship nature of the Trinity in our lives today.  You and I are not limited to the words of the creed or to the philosophy of Aristotle or Plato to speak about God in our lives.  We make a commitment to use the very best that we can to tell this world about how worshipful God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in our lives.

  For me the meaning of Jesus as the Son of God is both the incredible presumption of humanity and the humility of God.  It means that no one can have a non-human experience of God; so any experience of God is funneled through human experience, otherwise it could not be humanly understood.  We are hopelessly anthropomorphic; indeed it would seem that God seems to orbit around and within human experience as we force upon God a humility to be reduced to our level to be understood by us.  We confess God to be Jesus the Son because we might be able to imagine other kinds of beings but in our experience we have to assume human existence as a valid way to come to know God.  Human experience forces upon God a humility by reducing God to human understanding and language.

  But that does not mean we cannot appreciate greatness; we confess that we came from a pre-existing plenitude and a plentitude will exist after we are gone.  We believe that plenitude will retain the memory of us having been here.  We believe that God's memory of us will be our resurrection and continuing life.  We confess God as Father because Jesus did and because as sons and daughter we believe we came from someone and if a Father has known and loved us that Father will also continue to know, love and remember us.

   We also believe that when Jesus confessed his Oneness with God as his Father, that there was a transacting Spirit which was present in their relationship.  We confess a Spirit who is like copper wire for electricity.  Copper wire allows electricity to be carried and conducted between points.  The Holy Spirit is the very condition of mutual conductivity between beings with different levels of consciousness.  You and I do not live isolated and unaware of our environment or the people and things of our environment.  The Holy Spirit is the omnipresence of God which is the very condition for mutual consciousness of each other.

  I believe that we can embrace the Trinity as a meaningful way for us to understand our relationship to the One defined by St. Anselm as the One that which none greater can be conceived.  And if one can conceive of such greatness, the property of existence is but a basic requirement of the Greatest of All.

  But we can move on in faith from awareness of sheer existence of God to experience God as one who is intimately friendly with us, even as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Pentecost: Ab uno in plures, E pluribus Unum

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           

 Lectionary Link

  What is the official motto of the United States?  Is it: E pluribus Unum?  Or, In God we Trust?

E pluribus Unum was the de facto but not the legal motto until 1956.  The American Congress got really religious in the 1950’s:  They codified “In God we Trust” as the official motto of The United States.  And in 1954 on Flag Day, the Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, which had survived without that addition since its composition in 1892 and official adoption in 1942.

  The Day of Pentecost is a very “E pluribus Unum” day.  From the many One.  The foundation of any mystical body whether it be a country or organization or the church has to deal with the basic complex dynamic of life itself.  The one and the many.  One could turn the phrase around.  Ab uno, in plures.  From the one, the many.

  The Gospel of John begins with, “In the beginning was the Word…and everything was created by the Word.  So from the Word came many languages, many textual creations which are the very basis for people understanding themselves and their own life stories within their culture settings The culture setting makes it profound imprint as people take on their languages within their own families.

  Word is what unifies all but Word is able to be reflected into endless diversity.  Word is perhaps the only thing which cannot be falsified.  One can say or think, “Word does not exist,” but one has to use word to say or think such a thing and so a denial of word cannot be true.  Word is undeniable in human experience.  It is the unity of human experience.

  But it is not enough to confess the simplicity of the Singularity of Word; we speak many words.  Our bodies articulate many kinds of body language words of action.  Word is the very condition for the many tongues of the Day of Pentecost.  Many from the One; One from the many.  We live in the tension of these two meaningful truths each and every day of our lives.

  One from the many is the great faith adventure of life?  Why?  Because once the great egg Humpty Dumpty has shattered from his fall, it is harder to put him back together again.  All the king’s men and his horses have tried forever to use the glue of power and government to force the shattered outer shell of the diversity of life back into one situation of unity.

  As we ponder the unity in difference which is celebrated on Pentecost, the day of many languages confessing a common message, we are required to ask of ourselves what this unity means.

  Unity cannot mean the extreme simplicity of monochromatic experience.  White and black are colors but if we only had one color in life to experience we would live in boredom if there was no differentiation in color.

  I have some very ambiguous feelings about some modern optical art.  When I went to a gallery in Washington D.C. and saw the Rothko panels covering the wall, an entire wall of large canvasses all monochromatic and worth millions of dollars.  I couldn’t help but think the joke is on us, this whole system of how artistic value is made in our culture.  Yes, I understand the philosophy and the revolts within schools of art and such canvasses are not just canvasses but also expressive of paradigm shifts within our culture.  And I like many of Rothko’s paintings.  His monochrome canvasses are not just valued art because they are single colored canvasses, they stand in the tradition of aesthetic value being the contrast between the one and the many.  One could say that Rothko’s monochromes have value because he did so many other polychromatic works.

  It was given to the followers of Jesus to find a way, to put unity back together from the many.  This is the great faith adventure of life itself if we want to preserve life for the future.  Our tradition is a worthy tradition to persist within because of this adventure to put unity together from the many.

  It is easier to separate and contemplate as a single agent meditating on one’s breath and navel on the mountainside.  Living and working and praying among the many is often messy.  It is very messy to go among the many languages which people speak in words and in their life styles and experiences.  The day of Pentecost calls for us to look for the One within the many.  The Day of Pentecost is not over; we are still in the hunt for the One within the many.

  But the one is not having everyone fold into the background of a single white color and becoming invisible.  The oneness which we seek is an experience of the total play of difference towards some higher purposes.  And what would those higher purposes be?  What would unity be known as if it is to be true to the many?

  We have words for the higher unity from the many.  One word might be harmony.  Harmony is a word which expresses the honoring of differences in a unity expressed as beauty.  Harmony can co-exist with solos and with melody.  In actual life practice another name for harmony is justice and love.   Love and justice express the freedom of the differences of gifts to be expressed and the result is not a competition which destroys the individual but of a harmony which creates something beautiful.

  Do you know why people like to sing in choirs?  They like to work on the individual parts over and over again and add them to the other voices because in the performance there is the beauty of getting truly lost as an individual voice in the greater work.  The harmony of the piece of music both elevates the many and the one in a singular event.

  If we can grasp this experience we can grasp the mission of Pentecost.  The mission of Pentecost is to bring back the events and expression of unity from the experiences of the many.  This mission is greater than the church; it is the American experiment which has known successes and failures.  Today, it would seem that E pluribus Unum has been reduced by greed to the power struggle between groups.  It’s almost like the basses in the choir getting so strong they decide that they don’t need the other sections or they only want the other voices for occasional contrast in service of the superiority of the basses.

  The work of Pentecost is not over; we in the church need to live this tradition of the One from the many so that the collateral effects of our success will be known in family, business, education and politics.  We owe it to God, to Christ, to the Church and to our world to devote ourselves to the One from the many.

  The Spirit is One who speaks in many tongues and languages of the diverse experiences of all people.  It is a daunting task to find harmonic unity among so much diversity.  The task is even more daunting today because instant communication allows us to know such manifold diversity in a deluge of information.  It seems almost too difficult to process such complex diversity into workable harmonic unity.

  But the Spirit is One; the Spirit inspires us to new harmonies where differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as the Spirit inspires the egos behind the differences to be checked at the door for the purpose of those higher harmonies.  Let us on this Pentecost Day re-commit ourselves to these higher harmonies of Jesus Christ as they are known in justice, love, service, sacrifice, joy and peace.  Amen.

A Couple of Pentecost Sermons, Discards from the editing room

 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 

Lectionary Link

 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 12^th  chapter, what did he write about in the 13^th chapter?  In the 13^th 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 50^th 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.

The Ascension as Confession of the Absolute Past of Jesus

 7 Easter Cycle  A      June 5, 2011    

Acts 1:6-14        Ps. 68  

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11   John 17:1-11               

Lectionary Link

   Today is the Sunday after Ascension Day and it is a time for us to ponder the meaning of the Ascension.  We who hold to the artistic, the aesthetic, the literary meanings of sacred tradition and story can also be hard core scientists at the same time?  Why, because we do not believe that what is meaningful is limited to statements which can be verified by the scientific method.  While believing in the scientific method we also believe that the languages of faith give us meanings and truth not to compete with science but to complement science in filling out the fullness of the human capacity for many kinds of meaning.  The kinds of meanings we derive from the sublime experiences of art and music are further complements in the fullness of human life with the capacity for multiplicity of meanings.  One could define truth as that which is meaningful.

  The fullness of human life but particularly lived through the continuous experience of one person is such that each of us can say about our past life, it is absolute.

  We are not some smoky, cloudy spirit wafting around; we are the fullness of experience funneled through body, soul and spirit to attain an absolute past.

  And the same can be said about Jesus Christ.  Jesus is God attaining particular human experience and becoming a person in a history with an absolute past.  God in Jesus having an absolute past which was attained through all of the occasions of the human experience of Jesus is central to the meaning of Christianity.  It is central to how we take unescapable license to speak about God, who is more than human, in merely human terms.  When we are using human terms to speak about what is more than human or not human we use terms like, God, divine and heavenly.

  Mozart as a human musician was quite a rare person; how does one come to such musical excellence in so many ways at such an early age.  How did it happen that he had an advanced music ability from the very beginning.  Such rarity baffles us even as we speechlessly acknowledge the truth of such rarity.

  Jesus was the same sort of rare person and human speech created sacred story to try artistically to account for this very rare person indeed.

  I would like for us to center upon some meanings of the Ascended Jesus and the post-Ascension Jesus today.

  The Ascension event gives the Sacred Story event of Jesus a kind of ending or significant transition.  Jesus as Word from the Beginning.  Announced by Gabriel to Mary.  Mary Over-Shadowed by the Creating Spirit.  Jesus born in Bethlehem.  A genius in the Temple as a loquacious boy.  Jesus baptized.  Jesus Tempted.  Jesus healing.  Jesus speaking in Wisdom stories.  Jesus walking on water.  Jesus confronting the powerful, the rich and the religious.  Jesus forgiving the stigmatized sinners.  Jesus being a political figure in the religious political discussion of a messiah and son of man.  Jesus hailed as a king by country pilgrims to Jerusalem. Jesus betrayed and denied by friends.  Jesus tried by Pilate.  Jesus died on the cross.  Jesus re-appeared to many people.  Jesus Ascended and left.

  Why is it important to have the ascension in sacred story?  It is a way to identify Jesus with the God of the Psalmist who said that God rides in the heavens   After Jesus was gone and no longer seen, it was important to proclaim that Jesus had attained an “other worldly” existence because even while he was with us he was so rare in his words and deeds he was “other worldly.”  But this “other worldly” rare person had a specific, particular and absolute past in the life occasions of Jesus of Nazareth.  And it is important to know that this concrete past of Jesus as a person who had human history is still maintained.  Jesus arose and Jesus ascended and we confess the same for ourselves because we actually believe that we happen as body, mind and soul beings who attain a particular and specific and absolute history in our bodies.   The particular human being can never be said to not have happened.  This is why the sacred story of Jesus is enshrined using the ascension as a way of saying that the life of Jesus is so much a fact of history, it can never be untrue.  And the same can be said for each of us.  The Ascension is the way of affirming the substantiality of actual and particular occasions of human experience.  It is a confession of faith; it is saying, “The life of Jesus was substantial and so is ours.”

  There are people of faith who try to convert sacred story to science and journalistic writing of historical events.  They miss the art of the story, even though I would not doubt their faith in what they think they want to affirm.

  We use sacred story to confess the uniqueness and rarity of Jesus.  We don’t make Jesus unique or rare by trying to assert that the virgin birth, resurrection and ascension are verifiable occasions to hold according to the scientific method.  Remember we never have to defend sacred story in the wrong way by applying the wrong discursive practice to the sacred story language of the Bible.

  Today, we must also speak about the aftermath of the ascension because what we believe about the ascended Jesus is that Jesus is still one who prays and who intercedes.  Jesus assumes all of the suffering of the world as God’s own suffering in his ascended role of the intercessor.

  The seventeenth chapter of John is a very long prayer of Jesus confessing his unity with God his Father but also the unity of the Father and himself with the people of the world.  The life of prayer is the life of the ascended Jesus.  The life of prayer is not the few times we gather in church to say the corporate prayers.  The life of prayer is the expression of the total solidarity of God with us and us with God.

  The only way that we can say that God and us and everyone is winning in this life is to confess this total solidarity with God and with All.  If we are one with God and the all, then we are winning by the very sustaining of everything by God. 

  We only begin to focus on losing and the sometime apparent ascendency of evil when we forget that the free conditions of evil and those who practice evil and are sustained by God, the great one.

  The ascended Jesus is the Jesus who prays and invites us to pray as the expression of God’s solidarity with us and all and our solidarity with God and all.  The ascension of Jesus is a confession that the life of Jesus was absolute in history and cannot be dissolved or vanished.  But it also means that you and I have an absolute past as well and it is significant to believe that our substantiality as people with an absolute past remains forever.

  It may seem like a very subtle and clever philosophical point but the sacred event of the ascension of Jesus means that the experience of Jesus in history was an absolute past and retained as substantial forever.  And we too accept the substantiality of our lives as we ride on the coat tails of the Ascension of Jesus Christ.  Amen.