Sermon of Pentecost, 27 May 2007
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Readings: Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:25-35, 37, Romans 8:14-17, John 14:8-17, (25-27)


The story of Pentecost is one of our best known stories from throughout the church year. The tongues of fire dancing over each of the disciples’ heads is one of the images I remember most clearly from my childhood along with baby Jesus in the manger, Jesus walking on water, the crown of thorns, and the empty tomb.

As the most straightforward example we have in Scripture of the Holy Spirit’s presence with human kind, this story needs little in the way of explanation; but as one of the most profound examples in scripture of God doing a new thing, Pentecost is one of the most important opportunities we have in the church year to really take a deep look at our own present day chapter in salvation history – beginning with the coming of the Holy Spirit that Christ promised to us all.

Most of you by now have heard me say at some point that the disciples just didn’t get what Christ was about, what he was doing in the world, and what he was calling them to do as his followers. They were hard-headed and hard-hearted about who and what Jesus was supposed to be and do; they sought to arrange themselves into a political hierarchy that would define their positions of power once Jesus took David’s throne in Jerusalem; they sought to stay on mountaintops and when the deep valley of death finally came, they turned tail and ran away. After Christ’s death and even after his resurrection, they disbanded and headed back to their former ways of life. Finally realizing that Christ was indeed risen, and being told specifically by Christ to go back to Jerusalem to await the coming of the Holy Spirit, the disciples watched him ascend out of their sight into the heavens.

Today it is my profound joy to finally get to say that the disciples GET IT.

Gathered together in a single house, the disciples all sat together, likely chatting about old times or about the addition of Matthias to take Judas’ place as the new twelfth disciple. Suddenly there is such a loud rush of wind that people all over Jerusalem rush to find the source of the cacophonous sound to find out what has happened. Meanwhile, the disciples are at the epicenter of chaos. Wind howls through the house, filling their sitting room with a breathtaking force. From the midst of the gale fire erupts, dividing into tongues which come to rest atop each of the assembled disciples’ heads. And then… silence. Filled with awesome wonder, each of the disciples begins to speak, only to find that they each speak as if with a new tongue.

The gathering throngs, eager to find what has happened arrive to find the disciples speaking about the wonders of God’s awesome deeds of power and about God’s kingdom. What is most astonishing, however, is that each hears the disciples as if speaking in their own native tongue.

Peter, with his head as hard as stone throughout Christ’s ministry on earth, finally becomes the Rock that Christ named him for and speaks to the gathered crowd with insight, understanding, eloquence, and power – claiming his place as the leader of the early Church.

This is the Holy Spirit.

So often throughout the history of the Church we have found ourselves clinging to simpler, more containable descriptions of the Holy Spirit. The form of the dove is one that has the time honored stamp of tradition in paintings, sculpture, education, and story – a beautiful and yet tamed image for the third person of the trinity. The Holy Spirit of today’s readings, however, is anything but tame: the rush of a violent wind, filling the house and dancing in tongues of fire over its recipients who find themselves profoundly changed forever. The disciples could no longer sit on the sidelines, hiding behind Christ or hiding behind closed doors after his departure. In that moment, they became more than they had ever been, and more than they could ever have hoped to be.

In many ways, the power of the Holy Spirit can be frightening. The idea that God might just blow into our living room someday and upheave everything we know and find comfortable – leaving us changed forever – is not a comforting thought for many of us. And so we reach for the one image of the Holy Spirit that we can handle – the dove. The sign of peace, the sign of the end of the great flood, the sign that God sent to descend on Christ at his baptism. How quickly we forget that it was the same spirit that drove him into the wilderness for forty days immediately thereafter.

So what is the Holy Spirit if it can’t simply be defined as a Sweet Heavenly Dove, or even simply as wind or fire? Defined, as I believe the trinity must be, in terms of relationships, I think of the Holy Spirit as that which provides volition to God’s will and that which provides breath to drive God’s word. In Greek, a feminine word couplet “hagia pneumati” translated into English as the “Holy Spirit” literally translates to Holy or Sacred Breath. The Holy Spirit was God’s breath or wind that moved over the waters of chaos at the time of Creation. The breath of life breathed into Adam and Eve and into the Dry Bones of Ezekiel’s vision, the same breath that returned to Jesus’ body on Easter morning. She is the Spirit of prophecy that came to God’s chosen prophets in the Old Testament and, except for during Jesus’ lifetime on earth, She is God’s means of interacting with, through, and in human kind, suffusing creation with the awesome, life-changing power of God. While the Holy Spirit could be defined in countless other ways, "tame," "safe," and "docile" would not likely make the list.

As Christ promised before his death, again after his resurrection, and again at his ascension, the Holy Spirit is also, for us, the continuation of God’s salvation history amongst us in the present day.

Each of us blessed with faith has been touched by some manifestation of God in our lives, bringing us personally into this ancient and yet continually renewed history of God working very personally in and through the lives of individual people.

I was first invited to examine my faith by The Rev. Guitarman, a man who has become a dear friend and an incredible mentor to me. During my early phase of coming into the Episcopal Church as a teen, Guitarman encouraged me to become involved in the parish life at MyOldChurch in Thetownwhereitis where as many of you remember, I was tricked into attending youth group by my best friend, Grasshopper. After getting hooked on Youth Group, I started attending services and soon began looking for ways in which I could serve in the parish community. Sensing a divine opportunity to draw me further into the Church, Guitarman trained me as an acolyte, which quickly turned into me training others as acolytes, and then when I graduated high school he invited me to begin helping to lead youth group…

To make a long story short, I ended up helping to teach a confirmation class, for which Guitarman asked me to write a talk on Faith to present to the youth for our Confirmation class retreat.

It was the first opportunity I had at that point in my life to really sit and reflect on my faith and where it had come from. In retrospect, I could see that at each of the myriad crossroads I’ve encountered in my life, God was there to provide just the right person at just the right moment – almost as a signpost – to guide me in the right direction.

I have felt claimed in a very personal way by God since the time I was a very young child. At two-and-a-half, I had my first near death experience when a strep bacterium infected my right cheek. I had tripped over my cousin’s foot at my grandmother’s house and had hit my face on the corner of her oak framed television. The opening in my cheek was microscopic and after a few tears, the moment was forgotten. Within a few days, however, my cheek had turned black and blue, and had swelled so much that it swelled my eye shut. I was rushed to the hospital, where I was refused care by a medical staff that believed I was the victim of child abuse. At some point in the next few days, still awaiting care and with a life-threatening fever, I woke up in my mother’s arms, looked into her eyes and said, “Garnabus is going away now,” and promptly slipped into unconsciousness. Under what I can only imagine involved threats of malpractice, I promptly received medical attention and was scheduled for surgery for after my condition stabilized. However, when released for a night at home before the surgery a few days later, my family stopped off at a park to get me some fresh air and a stranger’s dog jumped up and scratched my face from about the corner of my eye to the middle of my infected cheek. Our own family dog, next stepped on my face in the back seat of the car, continuing the same scratch to the middle of the infected area. My cheek spontaneously drained itself and I never required the surgery that would have left a sizable scar on my face. What I have in its place is a dimple on my right cheek. – It’s been a family story ever since that God used these two dogs to perform a fairly miraculous surgery on my face.

Whatever the cause, it was a short two and a half years later, at age five, that I first articulated my desire to my parents to become a priest when I grew up.

Other signposts have come in the form of my best friend Grasshopper, who brought me to the Episcopal Church, The Rev. Guitarman asking me to write that Faith Talk in which I learned so much about where my faith had come from, and also found profound healing in my relationship with my Dad, the Happening youth retreat in which I truly experienced the movement of the Holy Spirit in a very close and personal way that profoundly changed my life and convicted me of my childhood call to the priesthood.

Again, a dear friend in 1993 convinced me that it was time to admit that “paying off my bills” could no longer be an excuse for not re-enrolling in college. She also encouraged me to become more involved in the leadership of diocesan youth ministry where at a youth minister’s retreat the following year, I spoke with an energetic young priest about my calling and, with his help, started a calling support group that has resulted in the ordination of four of our original members and the enrolling of a fifth in seminary starting last year. Of course, this also led to my staffing the Happening at which I met Fuego, introduced me to diocesan leadership that hired me in 2001 and ultimately led to my being reunited with Fuego at summer camp where we fell in love – which involved another major crossroad in my life leading to our marriage, seminary, and my eventually coming home here to St. ECWIW’s.

Looking back, it is easy to see where the Holy Spirit has profoundly touched my life in so many ways and in so many places, such that, like the disciples, I found that I could no longer sit on the sidelines, hiding behind a faceless God or hiding behind my own limitations. Each of us has our own story, our own personal salvation history in our developing and ongoing relationship with God. For Peter it involved denying Christ only to be confronted with the powerful and painful affirmations that strengthened his resolve to the point that, with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, he could take his place as the leader of the early church. For Paul it involved a blinding encounter on the road to Damascus that shattered his previous life and set him a completely opposite course.

On this day of Pentecost, we are reminded that God has been and continues to be an active part of our personal and individual lives, and we are called to look back on that history with a profound new understanding that, through the Holy Spirit, God has been calling us to our own works of power in the world. Calling us to become more than we have ever been, and more than we could ever hope to be.

This is the Holy Spirit that the disciples encountered on Pentecost – a whirlwind of God’s breath and holy fire that baptized them with the strength, the wisdom, and the power to carry on Christ’s ministry in the world.

And this is the legacy left to us, who through Christ are baptized into the continuing family of God’s children who invite God into our lives and invite God’s Spirit to change us forever.

Paul describes the ongoing work of the Spirit as the Gifts or Fruits of the Spirit, some of which – particularly healing, pastoral care, teaching, faith, leading, and showing mercy, we celebrate right here at St. ECWIW’s today in the commissioning of our new Stephen Ministers. As a powerful example of Christ’s love and the indwelling of the Spirit, StephenMinister1, StephenMinister2, StephenMinister3, and StephenMinister4 have undergone over fifty hours of training in preparation for this ministry, which represents just one of the many Spirit filled ministries offered, led, created, and gifted by the members of our parish. In honoring their commitment this day, we honor four more lives that have been changed forever by their willingness to open their hearts to the Spirit of God that suffuses us and all of creation.

Where do you hear God's life altering winds of change blowing in your life?

Sermon of 22 May 07, Tuesday of Easter 7
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Readings: Acts 20:28-38, Psalm 103:1-2, 19-22, John 17:11b-19


We find ourselves this week in one of the several liminal spaces in our church year. This past Sunday we celebrated Christ’s Ascension into Heaven which marked this past Thursday the fortieth day of Easter and the end of Christ’s presence with human kind on Earth in human form. This coming Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, the fiftieth day of Easter and the day on which the Disciples, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke to the assembled masses, who each heard them as though spoken to in their native tongue.

This week, however, we are in a between time, beyond an ending and yet just at the threshold of a new beginning. Somewhere between the closing words of Luke’s gospel in which the Disciples watched Jesus ascend into heaven and and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and the coming of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of Luke’s Act’s of the Apostles.

During this time, the disciples are said to have blessed God ceaselessly in the temple, that they chose a new twelfth disciple to replace Judas, and that they spent a lot of time in the upper room in which they were staying.

Our readings today reflect this liminal space – an almost but not yet. Paul bids a tearful farewell to the elders at Ephesus, lamenting that he will never see them again and commissioning them in the name of the Holy Spirit to carry on as shepherds of the Ephesian church and commending his own model to them of working to support the weak. Jesus prays for God to watch over and protect his disciples in his own extended farewell address in John’s telling of the Last Supper. Jesus claims the disciples as his own, drawing them apart from the world in which he will leave them in just a few short hours seeking their sanctification and protection through God’s truth which will come fifty two days later in the coming of the Holy Spirit.

The importance of the liminal space is one that we tend to lose sight of in our modern, Western, civilized world where we seek to do everything possible to circumvent these priceless spaces of reflection and personal growth. It is the journey that is increasingly shortened as we enhance technology to get us to and from with increasing speed. It is the process that we continue to abbreviate through computer shortcuts and “virtual” experiences. It is the courtship that we continue to devalue until we arrive today at one in every three marriages failing. It is the infancy that we label as manipulative and gluttonous such that we conform it to scheduled feedings and self-soothing. It is the childhoods that we schedule and arrange to our adult schedules until there is no space for spontaneity and fun. And it is our spirituality that we increasingly diminish until it survives as a one-hour per week phenomenon that has no place in the rest of our buy lives.

There is a concept of liminal space in Celtic myth and legend that is referred to as the thin places. These are the times and places where the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual or fairy world are at their thinnest. The hour at dusk and dawn just before the sun rises and just after it sets, when colors appear almost alive with an eerie brilliance and the air itself seems to tingle with a living energy. Hidden forest glades and dells, mountain glens and hidden pools, dense fogs and mountain tops. Particularly these places during the times of dawn and dusk are where these two worlds collide and the music of fairy folk can be heard eerily piercing the silence of our physical world. And whether it be imagination or simply a profound understanding of the powerful importance of these liminal spaces and their capacity to change us in our own lives, there is something in this tradition that calls to me. It calls me out to the woods, to the ocean, to the mountains. It calls me back into those liminal spaces where my own boundaries are thin enough and my own guard lowered enough for the divine to truly touch my life.

This is the space that we are in this week. It is a similar space to that which we experienced between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. A time of introspection, a time of preparation, a time to allow ourselves and to prepare ourselves to be changed.

Paul is in such a space as he prepares to leave Ephesus, knowing that others will come and try to lead his small vulnerable church astray. Christ is in such a space as he prepares for his own death – leaving his small vulnerable disciples behind to face the world and continue on in his stead. We experience much the same feelings as we watch those we care for venturing out on their own. Our children become more and more independent until one day they leave for college and we are left in the space of worrying and praying for their protection just as Christ and Paul did for their precious followers.

I am reminded, as a parent, just how important these liminal spaces are. Infancy itself it seems is one extended liminal space. I am honored and blessed to be brought closer to God through my daughter, Emjay, as she teaches me so much about the patience to experience and enjoy this time of boundary crossing, this time of journey, this time well spent in the thin place of her first few months on earth.

It is this awesome space that we are reminded of so poignantly in today’s scriptures. We are encouraged by Paul and by Christ’s examples to take seriously those places in our own lives, to celebrate them, to cherish them, and as the Psalmist exhorts us, to Bless the Lord for these opportunities to think about, pray about, and live in the thin places God gives us as a means to be changed forever.

God of Love, bless us this day with the presence of mind and spirit to cherish the moments of liminal space that you build into our lives and hearts. Bless us with the wisdom to seek your presence in these times and to open ourselves to your Holy Spirit that we may be profoundly touched and changed by you.

Amen.

Sermon of 15 May 2007, Tuesday of Easter 6
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Readings: Acts 16:16-34, Psalm 138, John 15:26-16:4


There is an interesting interplay of point and counterpoint in today’s readings. In the story of Paul and Silas’ imprisonment we see a story of the kind of persecution Jesus predicts in John’s gospel, as well as well as the truth that they do it because they have not come to know God in Christ. When the jailor encounters God, he not only releases Paul and Silas, but asks them to his home to baptize his whole household and to share a meal with them. The same joyous proclamation is made in Psalm 138, “All the kings of the earth will praise you, O Lord, when they have heard the words of your mouth.” It is as though the Psalmist, like Christ, is telling us that when the people of this world – even the great rulers – come to experience God, they cannot help but to celebrate the encounter in joyful praise. Again we are drawn back to the Gospel where Christ tells his disciples “You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning,” drawing them, and us, into the ministry of proclaiming the Good News of God’s amazing and inexhaustible abundance and love for us.

Christ’s message and the underlying theme in today’s readings seem so simple: If those who have not known God are the source of persecution, make God known to them! Yet the most important piece of this theme and the interlinking foundation between today’s readings is something profoundly important, necessary, and mysterious.

The Advocate, the God’s Spirit of Truth – the Holy Spirit is what transforms the dense, unrefined, frequently crass and almost always misguided disciples, especially as evidenced in Peter, into the leaders of the early church and it is the same missing transformative piece that is necessary to fully grasp the importance of today’s readings.

It is not enough to simply talk about Christ or talk about God’s abundance and unfathomable love for us, but it is through God’s Spirit that we are emboldened and empowered to LIVE God’s abundance and God’s love through reaching out to those around us.

One of the amazing things that I have witnessed countless times in my life is the life-changing impact of personally encountering the Living God. It is usually the case that sometime within the first year of truly coming into a relationship with God, people want to shout the Good News from the mountaintops, to tell everyone they meet about the awesome power of God’s Spirit and how it changed their lives. What I also find is that we all too often want others to have OUR experience of God rather than simply living our lives as our “testimony” to God’s grace.

There is so much surprise in the early church when non-Jews are found to be filled with God’s spirit. There is even consternation and collective outrage when Peter first baptizes Cornelius and his family – a family of Roman gentiles, yet these stories, as the story today of the captor turned saint demonstrate so much to us still about how we understand and limit God and God’s Spirit to what WE experience as Truth.

I think one of the most eye opening experiences of my seminary career came in the winter break of my first year. Steven Charleston, bishop of Alaska and president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge Massachusetts was the keynote speaker for Epiphany West, a three day conference of workshops and lectures held at CDSP that draws clergy and lay people from all over the US.

Steven, as a Native American, spoke to us about conversion and how he could be both Christian and yet still take pride in his Native heritage and honor the religion of his ancestors. He stated that God has a first covenant with all people of this world. If one looks at the Hebrew testament with God as a guidebook to understanding how Christ's teachings offer a corrective to how Israel had strayed from their original covenant with God, one will find that Christ offers a similar corrective to one's own people's original covenant with God. He explained that one does not honor God's original covenant with one's ancestors by adopting another people's covenant with God, and so he did not become an Israelite in order to become a Christian -- rather he continues to seek to follow Christ's teachings as they apply to his ancestor's covenant with God.

I hear in Steven’s explanation an amazing truth about God and how important it is for me to bring my enthusiasm and overflowing joy in how God’s Spirit has changed me into conversation with how others experience God. In the climate of debate and mutual mistrust that we currently find our Anglican Communion, it seems to be an awesome reminder that God’s Spirit touches each of us in profoundly personal and life altering ways, but as Ernie said a couple of weeks ago, that if we insist that another experience God as we experience God, we rob them of having their own experience.

It seems to me that part of living in the awesome abundance and love of God’s kingdom is finding the kind of point and counterpoint that can only come through the intersection of our different perspectives on God.

Much in today’s scriptures demonstrate a deep and interconnected conversation about what it means to live in a world where those who have not yet come to know God will inevitably misunderstand and persecute those who have experienced the profound and life changing Spirit of God. Indeed even those who do come to know God tend to misunderstand and persecute one another! And so we are called in our lives today into that same, timeless interchange between God’s Spirit and humankind, where there are no neat and tidy ways to uniformly live out our faith, but rather we are called to engage with and act through God’s Spirit in all the myriad ways God touches our individual and collective lives. We are assured that there will be no small cause for celebration and praise for the effort!

God, give us the wisdom and grace to offer our gifts freely to one another, enhancing and deepening our faith through the multiplicity of perspectives that can only be gained through the challenges of seeing you through countless eyes of the other. May it be your will for us to know you ever more deeply through your Spirit working in us and those around us.

Amen.