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| Tending the Fire |
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(Please feel free to email a response or a question) May 31, 2009 John 15: 26-27; 12-14, Acts 2: 1-21 I’d like to open with a prayer that’s quite different than the ones I normally use, but that I think is particularly appropriate this day. It’s attributed to Hildegard of Bingen, an amazing German Benedictine nun, musician and mystic from the 1100s. So would you join your hearts with me in her prayer: Holy Spirit, making life alive, Moving in all things, Root of all created being, Cleansing the cosmos of every impurity, Effacing guilt, anointing wounds, You are lustrous and praiseworthy life, You waken and re-awaken everything that is. And so as we begin this time of reflection, may God’s Spirit re-awaken our minds and our hearts. Amen. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ As I’ve been working with our confirmation students over the past year, we have had a theme that ties together the whole confirmation process. It’s called the Ten Essentials. It’s based on a list developed by a hiking and mountain climbing club in the 1930s defining what items are essential if you are to survive in the wilderness. It’s a pretty common-sense sort of list – a map, a compass, sunglasses and sunscreen, extra food and water, extra clothes, a first aid kit, a knife, a flashlight, fire starter and matches. The project for the students over the two years as they are deciding whether to be confirmed as members of our congregation is to find the ten stories from our Bible that they consider essential to their spiritual survival in the wilderness of life. What are the stories that will give them direction, nourish their souls, tend to their wounded hearts and light the way? I would suggest that for people who are part of a community of followers of Jesus, today’s Pentecost story would be a contender for one of those ten essentials. It tells us so much about how the story of Jesus became the story of his followers and spread out far beyond the place and time where it all began. In the reading from John’s Gospel we heard today, Jesus is with his followers around the table at their last supper together. He tells them that God’s Spirit will be with them even after he goes away. That Spirit will carry Jesus’ words, Jesus’ presence forward into the future. The story of Pentecost is the story of how Jesus’ followers experienced that. It’s a story filled with special effects, literary allusions and a reshaping of the early Christians understanding of who they were and what they were to be about. As such, it is a foundational story for us some 2000 years later as we try to figure out what it means to be a community of people who have chosen to be followers of Jesus. We added some special touches to worship on this day. The glitter of the red around us catches the image of the tongues of fire. The joy of the instruments reflects the enthusiasm of that day. Even the song – “Give Me That Old Time Religion” – is a nod to long and varied traditions that are part of Christianity. And in honoring our teachers this day, we honor the efforts of so many people who tell and retell the stories that help shape our lives – the stories that become essential in how we define ourselves as Christians. They have been tending the flame of the Spirit for a new generation growing up in our midst. Somebody described the story of this first Pentecost like a composition played on a theater organ with all the stops pulled out. A violent wind! Tongues of fire darting all over the place! A cacophony of voices and languages! A huge crowd trying to figure out what is happening, some of them jeering, others hearing strange words that somehow make sense to them. The imagery at Pentecost draws on ancient stories from the Hebrew Bible. At the very beginning, in that poetic account of God creating the universe, we read of a wind from God sweeping over the face of the waters. And then God said, “Let there be light.” In the story of Noah and the ark, seeking to keep life alive in the midst of overpowering floods, the writer tells us, “God made a wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided.” God takes the form of a burning bush to call Moses to lead the Hebrews to freedom, God becomes a pillar of fire to lead them from Egypt through the wilderness, God uses the power of wind to part the Red Sea to bring the Hebrews to safety. In some of the early stories of humanity, people get so wrapped up in their own pride and their lust for power that they try to build a tower to heaven, only to have their languages confused so they can no longer understand one another. It was how our ancestors explained why people spoke in so many different tongues. Can you see all of those images being woven into the Pentecost story? The Jewish people who had come from many places to Jerusalem for this festival of the first harvest of the year would have known these stories. So the writer of the story of Pentecost made full use of these vivid images of God’s spirit moving among God’s people. But this is not simply a great tale about something from long ago and far away. I’d like to suggest that it can have a lot to do with how we think about ourselves right now as a church, as a congregation. The followers of Jesus were huddled together in a room, not sure what the future held for them. They had experienced the horror of Jesus’ crucifixion, they had experienced his presence back among them in a new way after Easter Sunday, and now they were on their own. The rush of wind, the tongues of fire were the way the early Christians described how they were propelled out of the security of that room with courage to encounter the world in all of its variety. As they connected with people from many different places, that small community became a large, sometimes contentious, but always interrelated group that came to be known as the church. We are part of that entity that stretches across 2000 years and around all of the earth. Here at Memorial, we are one little part of that tapestry as we sort out with each other how we express in worship and in what we do for the world the meaning of Christianity for us. But we do not do that alone. Within our own denomination of the United Church of Christ, we work with other congregations in the Madison area, we are part of a regional, state and national entity. When Memorial moved from downtown to Fitchburg, our partners at every level helped make that move possible. When Katrina tore apart the Gulf Coast, we joined with the wider church in crafting responses. And we are part of a wider church that includes many expressions of Christianity – the high liturgy of the Episcopalians, the frenzy of a Pentecostal service, the structure of Catholicism and the individuality of people on their personal quest for meaning. We have an explicit partnership with a Lutheran congregation in Bethlehem, but we are also related to Christians at an orphanage in Kenya and a food program in Haiti and people worshipping in Korea or in South Africa. That sense of universality is part of the Pentecost story. So is a sense of possibility. After Peter tried to convince the crowd that these folks were not drunk, he invoked the words of the prophet Joel, written about 400 years earlier. That image of God’s Spirit moves from just pushing Jesus’ followers out into the world to the Spirit being poured out on all people, opening them up to new visions of what can be. That, it seems to me, is what church at its best is about. We catch a vision of the way God created the world to be – a place where people experience their connection to the divine, a place where differences of language or race nationality or gender or sexual orientation are not seen as barriers but as part of the beautiful variety in God’s garden, a place where we learn what it is like to live together and a place that can then offer a model to the world of how this can be done. We don’t always achieve that, of course, not in the widest understandings of church nor in our little corner of church right here at Memorial. There have been plenty of missteps along the way. We are all human, after all. What the Pentecost story gives us is a sense of the energy that is there for us as God’s Spirit moves among us. It’s up to us to figure out how to harness that energy, to tend to the flames that keep it alive. When Jesus was just starting his public ministry, he went into the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth and read a passage from the prophet Isaiah – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That same Spirit of God was with those early Christians and that same Spirit of God is with us this day. We may not feel the rushing wind this morning or see flames flickering over our heads – at least not real flames. But the flame of God’s Spirit is within each of us. Remember the list of the ten essentials? Three of those ten had to do with light and heat – a flashlight, fire starter and matches. To survive on their journey, the hikers and mountain climbers need to tend to matters of light and heat. Today, we are tending to the divine spark that exists in us, letting the breath of God’s Spirit ignite that spark into a flame and then letting the energy from that divine fire carry us forward as a community whose vision can shape the way we live and can bring new hope to a troubled world. |