Another one

 There are a lot of these! I've been a priest for a long time and Pentecost comes once a year....

PENTECOST 2006

 

          The lesson from Acts today ended two verses too soon. We heard all about the wind and fire and falling of the Spirit on the disciples. We heard all about how everyone from the known world at that time understood the disciples, no matter what language was their own tongue. Great drama. Remarkable story. Yet the lesson ended two verses too soon.

          The two verses that came after all the excitement on the first Pentecost in Jerusalem was simply this: Acts 2. 12-13…

          All were amazed and perplexed, saying, “what does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

 

          Two first hand reports on the events of the very first Pentecost—and they are very different.

          One report is: “what is going on here? What does this mean?” And the other is, “these guys are drunk….”

 

          There is a saying a dear friend of my uses when she thinks she truly has something to contribute to the conversation. What she says is this: “I’m not just a guy at a bar….”

          There are lots of insights and opinions you can get from a “guy at a bar”. Some of them are wondrous and helpful and most of them are “filled with new wine” and not worth much.

          There are lots of people who think Christians like us are “filled with new wine” and that what we have to proclaim makes next to no sense. However, there are more folks out there who are asking “What does this mean?”  They are wondering about the good news of God’s love. They are pondering the teachings of Jesus. They are engaged in the questions and the inquiry of how to find “meaning” for their lives.

          And Pentecost is the day that compels us to move into the world and spread the news, to invite others to the journey and the joy, to share the wonder of God’s love.

          On Pentecost, when the fire fell and the wind blew, the disciples were blown out of hiding into the streets of Jerusalem. And whatever they said was heard—clearly and without translation—because they were speaking of the Spirit of the God that loves us all best of all.

          It is no different for us. God’s love compels us “into the world”—into the streets and out of our hiding places. God’s love commands us to include everyone in the Hope and Wonder of the Kingdom. We are driven—as individuals and as a community—into the world to spread the news of God’s remarkable Love.

 

          We do that as a community quite well. There is always room for improvement, but I’d say we, as the people of St. James, have opened ourselves to the world in life-giving ways.

 

          As individuals…well, I’m not sure. But I know this: Pentecost commands us to go into all the world and proclaim the good news of God’s love.

          I’m inviting you as individuals to go into the world—out to the streets of Jerusalem—and tell others of God’s love.

          I don’t mean you need to get a floppy Bible and stop people on the street as ask them it they are saved. But I do mean, just like the wonderful love song from My Fair Lady that says “don’t talk of love—SHOW ME”, each of us need to “show” the world compassion and inclusion and a commitment to justice and equality. So that the world might wonder: “what does this mean?” and we might be able to tell them….

         

A Pentacost Sermon (more to come...)

 

PENTECOST 2020

Welcome to Pentecost! This is the day the fire fell and the wind blew and the Spirit began the church.

Pentecost was a Jewish holiday commemorating the Spring Harvest. It was one of the most important holy days and people came from around the known world to celebrate in Jerusalem. For Jews, Pentecost was 50 days after Passover (‘pente’ is 50 in Latin). For Christians today, it is 50 days after Easter.

My early years were spent in the Conklintown, West Virginia, Pilgrim Holiness Church. They did not speak in tongues. Pilgrim Holiness was a break with the Wesleyan Church which had broken from the Methodist Church—each break declared that ‘we are holier than those we left behind’.

No tongues, but they were ‘holy rollers’! During prayers people would be ‘slain in the Spirit’ and fall to the floor quaking. That was very unsettling to the children, as you can imagine, seeing people lying on the floor, twitching.

But the Pilgrim Holiness people had a hymn that went—“Come on Holy Spirit, but don’t stay long!” These were people who appreciated the power of the Spirit.

Another thing they did was ‘testify’. They would stand up and tell how God had touched their lives—give ‘testimony’ to the power of the Spirit.

I want to ‘testify’ today about my spiritual journey.

When I was 14, my cousin, Mejol, locked me in her room with a Bob Dylan album and a copy of Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. My Spiritual journey began that day.

When I was a sophomore in college, I had an hour between classes on Tuesday and Thursday. I didn’t want to go to the library but I found a church a block from campus that was open all the time. So, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I would go there and sit in the silence to read. But one day, before I could get out, a funeral began. They used the Episcopal Burial Office and I had never known a church could be so solemn and formal, yet joyous in a way. There was lots of standing and sitting and kneeling and I couldn’t get it right at a funeral for a stranger. When it ended an older woman behind me touched my shoulder. She said, ‘don’t worry, young man, we never know when to knell or stand either.”

Only a few weeks later, I was in the student union with a friend and a big, red-headed man came over to talk. He invited us to a party at his house that night, so we went. He was the Episcopal chaplain to the university and the ‘party’ was the Eucharist around a huge table. After the service, we all finished the wine. I knew I had found my ‘church’!

I went to Harvard Divinity School on a Rockefeller Fellowship two of my professors nominated me for. It wasn’t in my plans. I was going to get a Ph.D. in American Literature, but it kept me out of Viet Nam because Divinity Students were the only ones eligible for a deferment in 1970.

After two years we moved back to Morgantown so Bern could finish college. The next Episcopal Chaplain had ‘house church’ in the attic of Bern’s and my third-floor apartment. Every one who came was under 30 except the chaplain and a woman in her 70’s named Mariah Cartledge. Once at what we called ‘coffee hour’ but was really ‘wine hour’ and even ‘pot hour’ for some since the service as on Wednesday night, Mariah came to me and said, “Jim, when are you going back to seminary and getting ordained?”

Being even more of a smart aleck then than I am now, I answered: “Mariah, when God tells me to.”

Not missing a beat, she replied, “Jim, who do you think sent ME?”

My blood went cold. I called the bishop the next week and he said, “I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

God speaks in mysterious ways. Through Dylan and Salinger and my cousin. Through being in a church for a funeral for a stranger. Through two different college chaplains. Through Mariah.

God speaks in many tongues—different ways to different people. BUT GOD SPEAKS.

(Together in a room, the twelve gathered, missing their Lord, and the Fire fell and the Wind blew and the church was born!)

I want to invite you to get in touch with ‘WHY YOU’RE HERE’. I don’t mean on the zoom call, but why are you in the place where you are in your life.

How has the Spirit moved you? How has God spoken to you?

When and where did the fire fall in your life? When did the wind roar? How did God’s still, small voice sound in your ear.

It can be something small, almost incidental.

It can be that someone…or something…touched your soul.

Maybe the breath of God breathed into your fear and confusion.

Maybe, as if by accident, something moved you and warmed your heart.

Maybe it was a gradual thing, over years…a longing in you, some itch you couldn’t scratch.

St. Augustine said we all have a ‘God-shaped empty place’ within us that only God can fill it up.

“My soul is restless, Lord, until it rests in thee…”

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “faith seeking understanding….”

That’s what I’m asking of you. Let your faith ponder where it came from and seek to understand how the fire fell in your life. How the wind blew. How God spoke to you ‘God-shaped empty place’.

What GOT YOU HERE? Not just today, but ultimately.

Fire and Wind a still small voice…

Happy Pentecost.

This week's sermon

 

Easter 7,2024

          Listen again to how Jesus ends his prayer for his disciples in today’s Gospel.

“…now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. SANCTIFY them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I SANCTIFY myself, so that they also may be SANCTIFIED in truth.”

          What I find compelling in that passage is the use of ‘sanctify’ and ‘sanctified’.

          The first definition of ‘sanctified’ in the dictionary is “set apart”. To be ‘set apart’ from other things. That explains why Jesus says of his disciples that he “sent them into the world” they do not ‘belong in the world’. They are ‘set apart’ from the world.

          The other definitions are “holy”, “consecrated” and “hallowed”.

          “Hallowed” is a synonym for “Holy” as in the Lord’s prayer—“hallowed be thy name” could be “holy be thy name” just as easily.

          And to ‘consecrate’ is to bless a church or worship space by a Bishop to “set it apart” and make it ‘holy’.

          (A short aside about ‘sanctified’: I grew up in an Evangelical Methodist Church. It was not like a Methodist Church in Litchfield—it was a ‘mountain Methodist’ church—with revivals and hour-long sermons! When I was 12 I went to a revival and the preacher scared me so bad about hell and damnation that I went to the altar rail to be ‘saved’. But being ‘saved’ was just the beginning, you had to be ‘prayed through’ as they put it, to be ‘sanctified’. So, a half-dozen or so adults surround me and ‘prayed me through.

          It was a tiny town (500 or so) and everyone knew Jimmy got ‘saved’ last night. I was in my seventh-grade math class, very embarrassed, when I dropped my pencil and when I bent over to pick it up I looked up Bonny Tilly’s dress.

          “Oh, no,” I said to myself, “being saved didn’t take!”)

          And “holy” in and of itself is an interesting word. In her book A History of God, Karen Armstrong writes about ‘holy’ in a astonishing way. She writes, “When we use the word ‘holy’ today, we usually refer to a state of moral excellence. But in Hebrew,” she continues, “the word KADDOSH has nothing to do with morality as such, but means OTHERNESS; a radical separation.”

          ‘Sanctified’ is ‘to be set apart’ and Holy is “other”.

          Makes me want to sing the ‘Sanctus’ (there’s a form of ‘sanctified’) by saying, “Other, Other, Other Lord God Almighty”.

 

          So where am I going with all this word study?

          I hope I can explain it to you.

          Our God is “Other” from us, distinct from us, separated from us.

          And yet Genesis tells us that humans were ‘created in the image and likeness of God’. So, some piece of God’s ‘otherness’ is a part of us.

          But we are not gods. We are flawed and damaged creatures because God is not the only ‘other’ in us. We are all plagued by an ‘other self’ that rebels and cries out against God.

          We need to become aware of our ‘other self’ and coax it out of the darkness into the Light of God.

          No one has said this better than Elsie Landstrom, a poet. Let me close with her poem.      

          Song to My Other Self

Over the years I have caught glimpses of you

In the mirror, wicked,

In a sudden stridency in my own voice, have

Hear you mock me;

In the tightening of my muscles felt the pull

Of your anger and the whine

Of your greed twist my countenance, felt

Your indifference blank my face when pity was called for.

You are there, lurking under every kind act I do,

Ready to defeat me.

Lately, rather than drop the lid of my shock

Over your intrusion,

I have looked with you with new eyes

Opened to your tricks, but more,

Opened to your rootedness in life.

Come, I open my arms to you, once dread stranger.

Come, as a friend, I would welcome you to stretch your apartments

Within me from the cramped to comforting side.

Thus I would disarm you. For I have recently learned,

Learned looking straight into your eyes,

The holiness of God is everywhere.

Amen and amen.