Wednesday, May 22, 2013

What Does This Mean?



May 19, 2013
Acts 2:1-21
1When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes 11Cretans and Arabs — in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
14But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 


17  ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, 
     
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, 
          
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, 
     
and your young men shall see visions, 
          
and your old men shall dream dreams. 

18  Even upon my slaves, both men and women, 
          
in those days I will pour out my Spirit; 
               
and they shall prophesy. 

19  And I will show portents in the heaven above 
          
and signs on the earth below, 
               
blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 

20  The sun shall be turned to darkness 
          
and the moon to blood, 
              
 before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. 

21  Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord
shall be saved.’”

Sermon:
“What does this mean?” 

It was the question asked by a diverse crowd gathered in the middle of noisy, dusty Jerusalem.  There were people milling about speaking a cacophony of languages, but mostly just sticking to their own kind. 

There were Parthians, and Medes, Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, visitors from Rome and folks who called Jerusalem their hometown.  There were Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, Republicans and Democrats, Northerners and Southerners, teenagers and grandparents.  There were even Duke fans mingled with Carolina fans.  Like I said, it was a diverse crowd!

Suddenly the scene turned into a combination of Gone With The Wind and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  A great wind blew through the place and fiery tongues landed on each of Jesus’ disciples’ heads.  They began to speak about God’s deeds of power and everyone heard and understood in their own language. 

The Southerners asked, “What does this here stuff mean, y’all??”
The Northerners asked, “Pardon me everyone, but might you know, perchance, what this occurrence signifies?”
The Presbyterians just stood in the corner muttering to themselves, “Well THIS is certainly not decent or in good order!”

Many in the crowd answered that question with a logical assumption: those disciples were drunk (and not on sweet tea)!
Peter got annoyed at that idea, and stood up to speak to this varied crowd, and said, “Drunk?!  Please!  It’s only 9 a.m., and we don’t drink Irish coffee, people.”  Recognizing that what was happening was not a meteor shower or some mass hallucination, Peter quoted the prophet Joel:

“When the time’s right, God says, 
     
 I will pour out my Spirit upon all people, 
          
sons and daughters will speak the truth, 
     
teenage boys will see the way the world’s supposed to be, 
          
old men will dream of that reality. 

Male, female, young, old: my Spirit will be poured upon everyone, and they will prophesy.”

He went on to say something about blood, fire, mist and darkness, and portents, signs and the coming of the Lord’s great day.  And he finished with Joel’s words, “Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Now we’re not told whether people believed Peter.  No doubt some still believed that they were enjoying spirits with their breakfast cereal and not the Holy Spirit.  But whether they accepted the answer or not, they did ask that most important question, “What does this mean?”
This is a question we should keep asking all of our lives.

On this Pentecost Sunday, where we commission our high school graduates for the next stage in their lives, I am asking this question on behalf of Brandon and Karen.  We can ponder the meaning of the coming of the Holy Spirit for ourselves as well, but today, I want to tell those two what I think this whole “Pentecost thing” means for them.  I know they absolutely love being singled out like this.

Karen and Brandon, you need to know that when the Spirit of God was first poured on all people, they didn’t really understand what was happening (hence the thought that they were drunk).  But the Spirit was poured on them anyway.  So, embrace those times of questioning, when new experiences in life and challenges cause you to reconsider what you always thought you knew about God.  Do not fear uncertainty.  A deep connection with God and those around you is not found in being afraid to challenge and question…it is found in the courage to ask questions.  No amount of questioning will take the Spirit away from you.  That Spirit set up camp in your soul at your baptism, and will never leave you.

Which brings me to another thought: it’s not enough to say that the Spirit is in you, that you have a “personal relationship” with God through Jesus and just leave it at that.  Like that group of disciples and strangers in Jerusalem at Pentecost, you need a faith community where you can most fully experience the Spirit at work.  The Spirit was not poured on all people so that they could walk around with their nose in the air like Hermoine getting another answer right.  (You know I had to get another Harry Potter reference in there!) 

The Spirit was poured on all people so that they could prophesy.  That there is a scary word!  Here’s what it means: speak the truth, all the time, no matter what the cost to your popularity or pride.  When you see that things are not as they should be, when someone is left out and no one will speak to them, when alcohol is seen as the solution to social awkwardness, when people are looked down on because they come from a different background, it is your job to prophesy.  To tell the truth.  The Spirit is in you so that you will speak for those who have no voice, so that you will encourage those who are beaten down, and show another way of life simply by being exactly who God made you to be, and no one else. 

I wish I could tell you this was easy.  The truth is, telling the truth is a lot harder than just going along with what everyone else is doing.   But I don’t need to tell you that being a prophet is hard…you know that.  Because you already are a prophet.   I’ve seen it. 

Karen, you are a prophet filled with the Spirit when you pray with boldness and defy peer pressure to be yourself no matter how hard that choice can be.

When the burden of being a prophet, of being a bearer of the Spirit, gets too great, you will always have this place.  Here, you can always come back to remember who you really are.  Here, you can experience the Spirit refilling your spirit with hope.  Here, you can be reminded of what we all see: that you are a child of God, and that you are not the future of the church but that you are the church right now, as God is using you to bring light to others. 

We are so grateful to be your church family and that, promised in baptism and reaffirmed in confirmation, you will always belong here.  And we make a promise to you (you might even call it an “unbreakable vow”:  we will pray for you, we will support you as your continue becoming who God has called you to be, and we will listen to you as you continue to teach us all what it means to be a prophet filled with the Spirit.  Amen.

Monday, May 13, 2013

"Set Free"

Image Source

Acts 16:16-34
16One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation." 18She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour.
19But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. 20When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe." 23After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.
25About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains were unfastened.  27When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. 28But Paul shouted in a loud voice, "Do not harm yourself, for we are all here." 29The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas.
30Then he brought them outside and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" 31They answered, "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." 32They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. 33At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. 34He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.

Sermon: “Set Free”
“I was not born with a hunger to be free,” writes Nelson Mandela.  He continues, “I was born free: free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother's hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls. 
It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken from me, that I began to hunger for it.
I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free.
I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next person, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free.
Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.
It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black.      I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
I think Nelson Mandela and the writer of Acts might have been friends.  You see, they are telling the same story of freedom, for oppressed and oppressor alike.
The central story of freedom in this passage is the earthquake that releases Paul and Silas from prison, but there are several other stories of freedom here that are easily overlooked.
The first person to be freed is that unnamed slave girl.  She had an evil spirit which helped her tell fortunes, the fortune from which she of course never saw.  Her owners enjoyed that. 
I wish I could say she was freed because Paul was compassionate and kind to her.  In actuality, it seems like he was more irritated and annoyed with her following them around and being so loud, so he shouted, “Okay, that’s enough!  Spirit, in the name of Jesus, it’s time for you to go.”  And it did.  She was freed, though we do not find out about her fate after that.  Her owners were irate, but they were freed in a way, too: from a life of greed and exploitation. 
Paul and Silas were beaten and then chucked into prison for that act of liberation, and they sang hymns and prayed into the night.  Let us never forget that worship is a great act of resistance to evil! 
An earthquake came and all the prison doors were opened.  But they weren’t free yet; they didn’t leave.  The jailer thought they did, though, and was about to take his own life.  But Paul stopped him, freeing him from his despair.  “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!”  What powerful words of hope that we need to speak over and over again whenever despair overwhelms and people, in their pain, cannot see a way out of that darkness.
Paul wasn’t willing to take his freedom, and the freedom of his friends, if it meant taking the life of that guard.   The unnamed guard was overcome with the grace of that moment, and we’re told that he brought them all outside.  Because he was first set free, he could then be an agent of God’s freedom.
And we hear of the fifth and final account of liberation in our story: his entire household sees and experiences the good news of Jesus and are all set free and baptized into faith.
Each of these accounts of liberation teaches us something different about the sort of freedom God brings. 
In the young slave girl, we see that God’s freedom breaks chains of greed and exploitation, chains that need to be broken in Bangladesh and in our own supermarkets.  In her owners, we see that God’s freedom calls us to change our way of life, and that it is often easier to respond with anger and bitterness to this change than to embrace it.  The jailer shows us that even in those places of deepest despair, God is bringing freedom through those who stay and say, “Do not harm yourself, we are all here.”  The prisoners who said those words, including Paul and Silas, reveal that this freedom is not just for those who sing hymns and pray long into the night, but also for those who are simply sleepless with curiosity or worry.  And, finally, in that entire household being saved, we see that acts of grace and generosity pave the way for the gospel, resulting in the freedom that comes from faith in our Risen Lord. 
As people set free from greed and exploitation, from despair, hopelessness and the power of death, we are called to set others free.  For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Thanks be to the God who sets us free, to the Spirit who stirs in us a holy passion to liberate others and to the Son who was emancipated from the grave that all may know that liberty.  Alleluia!  Amen.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

"The Healing Tree"



Revelation 21:10, 21:22-22:5
10And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.
22I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 23And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25Its gates will never be shut by day-and there will be no night there. 26People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 27But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life.
1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; 4they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.








Sermon:

When I was a child, I had a bizarre habit:  I liked to talk to trees.  I could be found off in the corner of the yard having a whole conversation with my favorite leafy friend.  It gets stranger…I haven’t yet told you why I talked to trees.  I wasn’t talking just to the trees, you see.  I was actually talking to the elves who lived in the trees.  (Perhaps I was influenced by some Keebler fellows.)  The smoothed-over places of hollowed-out trees were the doors, naturally.  So I would talk to invisible elves in those trees, and I would even make little leaf boats and stick houses for them, leaving them presents under an oak tree.

Trees still stir something in me.  Pine trees are actually a large part of why I love it so much here, except of course when they are blowing out yellow pollen like exhaust from an old pickup truck.  John Muir, that great American naturalist, captured my fascination well when he spoke of trees after a storm saying,

“A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.”

You see in all that time I spent talking to elves in trees, I always felt that those trees spoke back.  And I kind of feel like they still do: speaking of things that last, of deep roots and constancy, of watchfulness and resilience. 

Which is why I adore this passage in Revelation.  If there were ever a tree that elves would like to inhabit (ha), it would be this one.  This tree in Revelation is a part of God’s vision for a new heaven and a new earth: where the God’s glory replaces the need for the sun, where barbed wire and concrete walls give way to a city with perpetually open doors, where the polluted waters of our world instead flow crystal clear, and where the leaves of a tree bring healing to all nations.

But as we heard this morning, this is not the first tree in scripture.  There was another tree—a quite opposite one—in Genesis, where Adam and Eve succumbed to the temptation of making themselves equal with God.  Having every single thing they could possibly need, they did not go to that tree for a little snack.  They went to fill their craving for knowledge of what humans were never meant to understand.  They went craving power.

We live – all of us – between these two trees: one of self- destructive greed for power, the other of healing and peace.  Between these trees, there is poverty and injustice, hunger, racism and war.  There are stories of genocide and slavery, of crucifixions and despair.  In our own time between the trees, there are bombings and explosions, and our own private sorrows that never make the news. 

But we are not left alone in this troubling forest between these two trees.  Between the trees, there is also the promise of a covenant and freedom.  There is Jesus: God breaking into this anxious world.  There is grace poured out on a cross, saying once and for all that though death is a reality, it will never win.

Because, more than anything else, between these two trees there is resurrection.  Easter happened.  And it did not just happen once, but Easter comes over and over again as God rains down new life like healing leaves gracefully falling from a tree. 

Like me as a child wandering through the backyard and deciding which tree to go have a chat with, we have to make a choice.  We have to choose a tree, and we only have two options: the first, or the second.

If we choose the first, we are choosing power and knowledge, and with it sin and pride and self-destruction.  We are choosing to put ourselves before all of the good creation God has made, and to make God in our image rather than be made in God’s image.  We are choosing to perpetuate cycles of ego and status, and to only believe in what we can completely understand, leaving no room to imagine another person’s perspective, much less to imagine the ways God is already working in this world.

But if we choose the second, that tree we cannot yet fully see, much less climb to escape our troubles, we choose life.  We choose resurrection, the imaginative trust that God is not yet done with this world.  We choose the promise that God is already bringing healing to the nations, even as the sinful pull of that first tree is strong, and that God brings this healing through ordinary people like us.

Whichever tree we choose, we will move towards: either backwards in old paths of selfishness and worshipping only what we can see and buy, or forwards in new paths of resurrection and healing. 
So, what is your choice?  What is mine?  The tree of that first sin, or the tree of eternal hope?  I really want to be able to choose that second tree: the healing tree.  And I think you probably really want to as well.  But we need one another to make that choice.  We need one another to embody God’s vision of a world united and made new.  We need one another to choose healing over hatred and life for God’s creation over our own need to consume. 

Let’s choose the healing tree together today.  And then, like God choosing to bring resurrection over and over again, let’s make that choice again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, until the day comes when there will be no more need to choose: no more night or pain or sin, when all that remains will be light, healing and life.  Oh, and a tree.  There will always be a tree.  Alleluia!  Amen.