Pentecost 1999
The Rev. Karen Wacome, Celebrant
Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
Psalm 104.25-37
Acts 2. 1-11
1 Corinthians
12.4-13
John 14.8-17
God At Work
When people start invoking
the Holy Spirit you never know what’s going to happen. I vividly recall an experience I had with
this when I was a junior in high school.
It was the late 60’s, apocalyptic times, anything seemed possible. Idealistic young people envisioned a return
to a purer, more authentic form of Christian faith. Purple VW microbuses packed
with Jesus people crisscrossed the countryside on which Christian communes
sprouted. I was open-minded and curious
to see what went on in the charismatic movement. Along with two adults from the
Reformed Presbyterian Church I belonged to I attended a service in Traveler’s
Rest,
Up front the preacher
explosively expostulated into a hand-held microphone: Yes Jesus! Thank you Jesus! hopping up and
down in sync with his exclamations. (Not much like Karen…) As the service
progressed he got louder, faster and higher.
Meanwhile in the front row of folding chairs a woman gasped for breath
and pitched forward, here head almost hitting the floor. Her hyperventilation apparently
was in aid of the little girl who sat beside her, from whom demons were being
exorcised. Between this pair and the
hopping preacher a fellow walked in circles, singing and playing a ukulele
badly (I don’t think it’s possible to play one of those things well…) Meanwhile
most everyone else in the congregation held forth in a cacophony of unknown
tongues. The scene was utter
pandemonium. In the midst of these
proceedings we were implored to come forward and share in the baptism of the
Holy Spirit. It wasn’t long before I, and the two people I had come with, were
the only ones still seated. The message
clearly conveyed was that those of us still stubbornly seated at the end were
surely on the outs with God and in all likelihood in league with Satan.
To this day I do not know
what was really going on there. These
folks obviously had not internalized the first principle of Episcopalianism: be willing to do anything for God…so long
as it isn’t tacky. My inclination is
to suspect that what I saw was self-deluded people who had mastered techniques
for inducing in themselves exotic psychological states. But that might be too fast: when God goes to
work there’s no guarantee that he’ll respect our notions of what’s orderly and
respectable. God is in the business of
saving people and he’s ready to do whatever it takes, however wild and crazy it
might look to us.
It seems to me that many
Christians who focus on the Holy Spirit and his work succumb to the temptation
of treating the power of God as a kind of magic their religious exertions can
control, and of excluding those who haven’t been ‘filled with the Spirit’ in
some dramatic way. In some groups you’re
a second-class Christian until you’ve received a “second blessing,” above and
beyond merely having faith in Christ, manifesting itself by speaking in
tongues.
But it’s a bad idea to dwell
on other people’s mistakes. Instead, I
wonder where we, people far removed from the charismatic movement,
Episcopalians intent on doing things ‘decently and in order,’ can deepen our
understanding of what it means to live in the power of Pentecost.
Our difficulty lies on the
other side of things. We know that God
created the world and, in some abstract and metaphysical sense sustains it in
being today, and we of course believe that in some profound way God was truly
and fully present in Jesus of Nazareth.
But we don’t have much to say about the Holy Spirit. It’s hard for us to take seriously the idea
that God is at work in the world – in people’s lives — today, in specific
ways.
We’re cautious when it comes
to identifying things as God’s work now, as the work of the Holy Spirit. We believe God works but we tend to treat it
as a mystery. But there’s a sense in
which it’s not a mystery at all: God, in
the person of the Holy Spirit, makes things happen wherever and whenever people
who have faith in Jesus act on the basis of that faith.
This is an outrageous thing
to say: God’s work in this world is our
work, the work of the community of faith, acting in his name.
We tell people the good news
that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, and there’s the Holy
Spirit at work. As St. Paul wrote
earlier in the chapter we read from this morning: “No one can say ‘Jesus is lord!’ except by the Holy Spirit.” (1
Corinthians 12.3)
We do what can be done to
heal the wounded, to comfort the dying, to free the prisoners, to include the
excluded, to bring life and hope, to make peace and to push back the darkness.
In all this is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Could there be greater presumption than to identify our efforts, paltry
and ineffective, coming out of who knows what mixed motives, as God’s very
own? Yet this is, I think, the plain
truth. There’s an inevitable logic to
it.
At our faith’s center is the
miracle of the incarnation: God was embodied in the world as Jesus. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
we see God himself. Now that he has
ascended we say that we, the people called to live by faith, the Church of
Jesus, are the body of Christ. Jesus embodied in the world today. Humanity
communing with God by means of the Holy Spirit.
It’s easy to take that as a nice metaphor. But it’s more than that. This Church, this body of which we are a
part, is God made flesh, God
incarnate in this sorry world. That’s a deep truth here and no mere metaphor
because what makes us Christ’s church is that we are bound to him in faith and
love and hope by the Holy Spirit. The
same Holy Sprit who binds God the Father and God the Son into an everlasting
loving communion of persons draws us — mere creatures! — up into that same
communion. In a different, but still
real, way God is incarnate in the world right now. Here we are.
Here he is.
As Karen said last week, now,
after Jesus’ ascension, we live ‘between the times,’ in the time of the
‘already’ and the ‘not yet.’ This is the
time of the Holy Spirit. One of the many
things that have fueled my skepticism over the years is this question: God, we say, has acted in Christ to save this
unhappy world; it’s already happened…but on the other hand we’re still
waiting. Jesus has come and gone and
things are still a mess. Death, we say,
has been defeated but we still die. Evil
is vanquished…but we’re still sinners.
It’s easy to see the ascension story as just too easy, as an ad hoc
tying up of loose ends, a conveniently concocted story of Jesus floating up
into the clouds that avoids the question: where is he now?
The answer to this has to
come out of getting a clearer view of who the God we encounter in Jesus is, a
deeper insight into his character and purposes.
God did not have to create but he did: he ‘made room’ for creatures. The God who has no need nonetheless wants to
give of himself; he wants us to share who in he is and in what he does. God invites us to share in letting us do his
work of reconciliation instead of simply doing it himself. God calls us to build his
kingdom.
We shouldn’t think that it’s exclusively in God’s church that God
acts today: God’s grace is extravagant; bidden or not, recognized or not, he
will be present. No one nowhere, religious or irreligious, Christian or
non-Christian, is ultimately safe from the relentless grace of God. God’s love
for people is not limited by human faithfulness; where would any of us be if
that were true? But we are entitled to
say that it’s principally in the
Church – by way of the likes of us, with our faulty and faltering faith in Jesus
— that God does his great work in the world.
No doubt God takes great
risks in putting his work into our hands.
Who can count the ways in which believers have acted in ways that make
no sense in light of God’s good news? Too
many times and in too many ways Christians do things in God’s name that do not
bring him honor. Christians have allied
themselves with wealth and power, with comfort and respectability, bending
faith in the crucified God into just one more religion of condemnation, control
and exclusion, into one more scheme for human self-improvement.
God invites us to trust him
but the relation into which he calls us is not one-sided: God gives us his work to do and trusts us to
do it. He trusts us to trust him and
boldly to act on that trust. Boldness is
called for; it is after all God’s
work you and I are called to do. And of course humility — what some might call
fear and trembling — is called for: it’s God’s
work we are called to do.
Where, then, is our
continuing Pentecost? Where does the Spirit descend in grace and power? Where
is God making things happen in our world?
There’s no mystery here. Look at
yourselves and at one another: visiting people in the hospital, caring for
animals, polishing pews, painting pictures, counting rebar, doing your daily
work in the hope of bearing our small witness to the God whose love and grace
we meet in Jesus. God who is mighty has
chosen us to be God at work in the world.
Amen
Father God,
Momma and the Holy Spirit
Melissa Sarat