| ||
 |
||
|
|
|
|
The Day of Pentecost
|
||
Come Holy Spirit and kindle the fire that is in us. I offer that prayer before almost every sermon I preach, but there’s no Sunday when it’s a more appropriate petition than it is today; the great feast of Pentecost. “Come Holy Spirit and kindle the fire that is in us.” For the uninitiated, Pentecost creeps up without a whole lot of fanfare. Peter Leithart notes, “Pentecost is culturally invisible. There are no Whitsunday sales at the department stores, no gift exchanges around lighted trees, no jolly elf, no crèches, no heart warming Hollywood holiday films with Jimmy Stewart, no Bing Crosby crooning about the rushing mighty winds. There are no eggs or bunnies either; no jelly beans or chocolate. Unfortunately many churches follow suit, ignoring the Spirit. We dress our kids up as shepherds, as Mary and Joseph, for the annual Christmas pageant. We put them in armor to be Roman soldiers at the open tomb. But I’ve never seen a kid with a flaming head and speaking in tongues in a Sunday school play.” (Of course, Peter may never have never had the experience I am having this morning of seeing an entire congregation resplendent in red! I don’t think there has been this many people wearing red in one place since Arkansas played Nebraska!) Pentecost should be one of the most intimidating of all the great feasts of the Church, because this is day when we remember one of the most chaotic and harrowing moments of the Early Church. The Book of Acts says the believers were “all together in one place and suddenly, from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.” And if that wasn’t terrifying enough, they all began to understand one another…people from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem…all began to hear one another speaking about God’s deeds of power…and they understood every single word that was said. And this new “understanding”, this wonderful miracle of insight, well that may have been the most terrifying thing of all. Just think about it! What do you do when God makes the world work differently than you always thought it worked? What if the boundaries of reality get moved within your hearing? Are you crazy, or was that just the Holy Spirit? What do you do when the racial and social stereotypes you’ve held all your life no longer hold true? …when you learn that people you’ve never understood or trusted before…turn out to be just as intelligent… and just as full of God as you are!?! That great ancient preacher, John Chrysostom, wrote, “So now the Holy Spirit descends upon (the people of God) in fiery tongues to unify a divided world. The result is something new and strange.” Because, some 2000 years later, we’re still working, by the power of the Holy Spirit, on this “new and strange” mission to, “unify a divided world.” And I believe my greatest (and most consistent) failure as a preacher of the Gospel has been my singular inability to help the people of God believe the amazing things which happened in biblical times are still possible in our time! We ALMOST believe it…but no one wants to say it very loudly. It reminds me of the Norwegian farmer who loved his wife so much, that he almost told her… There’s something always something dangerous about God, especially in the form of the Holy Spirit…. a fact seldom preached by smiling people who suggest the Christian faith is sure to make us wealthier, more attractive…and very likely, much thinner. That is the “fools gold” of a theological approach which doesn’t dig nearly deep enough to discover the true gold of the authentic faith. It is a cheap alloy untested by the fire. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, didn’t mince words when he wrote about the Holy Spirit. “The Holy Spirit will burn us. If we are to have vision, and if we are to have warmth of love, we must be exposed to the pains of burning. All that is unloving, selfish, hard, must be burnt out of our existence, burnt to destruction, burnt to ashes. The Spirit will burn his way into the core of our being in the ever painful process of disclosure, of penitence, and of divine forgiveness. Only by such burning can our heart be fully exposed to the warmth and our mind be fully exposed to the light. There is no seeing and no warming without that burning. It is thus that we realize the saying of Jesus Christ found in one of the apocryphal documents; “He that is near me is near the fire.” And whoever stands near the fire, risks being burned. Come and stand near this holy flame. Believe in that which you cannot see… and join Lili, Rochelle, Christi, Melanie, Joanne, Shirley, Helena, Kalyssa, Katie, Grace, Morgan, Karla, Amy, Kristopher, Madeline, Jim, Doug, Shawn and Vicki in embracing the Spirit of the Living God which, recognized or unrecognized, burns in our very midst. Come Holy Spirit and kindle the fire that is in us. Amen.
|
|
|