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.