Scripture for the Day of Pentecost includes Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17, 25-27
What’s there not to like about the Day of Pentecost? Streamers and mobiles help us imagine the free flight and sheer grace of the Spirit of God. Music for the festival brings us favorites, old and new. All this red holds our minds and hearts and feet to the fire of the love that binds us to each other, and to God.
All this, and baptism! This 50th day of Eastertide became one of the Church’s chief days for baptism, giving it the nickname Whitsunday, White Sunday, white for baptism.
And our candidate for baptism today is named Sophie. How wonderful is that? From Sophia, wisdom, Sophie’s name reminds us that in both our Jewish and our Christian legacies, special place is given to celebrating God’s Spirit as the spirit of wisdom—and, in places, scripture speaks of this divine attribute and gift in feminine form, speaks of her as a woman.
That strikes a nice balance when the scriptures heard today tell us what happened to those eleven men who were companions in ministry with Jesus, and when our Gospel is interested in how the Holy Spirit relates to God the Father. Sophie’s name will remind us to tell the story of this day so as to include all the women on whose heads the flames of spirit danced, whose hearts became dwelling places of the divine Spirit, and were freed to tell and show God’s deeds of power and astonishing love. Sophie’s name will spark us to learn how to speak of the motherhood of God.
Which is itself an exercise that may test the patience of the saints. I slip in the word Mother in our opening verses this morning, but do it with no authority except my own persuasion (and impatience) that if we don’t take little public steps with our language of faith, we’ll lose our ability to hear the Advocate whom God sends to teach us what we don’t yet know, and to empower us for those “greater works” that Jesus promises his people will do.
I’ll bet that some of you wish I wouldn’t tinker with language that the Prayer Book gives us to say in a certain way. And others of you are more impatient for progress than I am, and wonder why it’s in only one or two dressy places that we get to add language expressing feminine aspects of God.
So isn’t it intriguing that our first reading gives us the story of the tower of Babel, where it is said that God confused (we could say diversified) the language of mortals? This story is timely also because this month the organization that governs Internet domain names began allowing addresses without any characters from the Latin alphabet. Countries using Cyrillic and Arabic characters have been the first to change; more will follow. Will this make the Worldwide Web wider—or will it lead to isolation?
How timely, and how ancient is our first story. The Book of Genesis is like a tapestry woven of stories that explain how things came to be—in this case, how there came to be so many languages on earth. And in this story there’s a bias at work: that human beings cannot be trusted with power. It will corrupt them.
That’s a belief in sharp contrast with the premise of Pentecost, that on this day God fulfills Jesus’s promise, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words,” opens our first story today. And earth’s inhabitants say to one another, more or less, “Come, let us use our one language to build technology.” Well, bricks—but catch the point that this was primitive technology, and advanced the building of cities and towers. With that one language, the best way to make bricks can be passed on. We can become contractors and architects and designers. With more perfect bricks and more experience building, we can erect taller and taller towers. We can open branch offices in Dubai, Shanghai, Chicago, and New York. We can make a name for ourselves. There’s no stopping us!
“This is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them…” agrees God. (Notice how, in this story, people are t not talking to God, and God is not talking to people.) They may be one people, one genus, but the seeds of division are sown in those few words, “let us make a name for ourselves…”
And so is born the advertising business. What is that name? Superior… Best…First…Only…One and True… Words in this one language are on their way to being used to isolate, compete, and promote self-preservation.
To derail this train, God resolves to confuse their language, so that mortals may not understand one another. “Come, let us go down and do this!”
Wait: “let us go down?” Is there a touch of confusion in heaven? Is there not one God? Are we dealing with such ancient literature that we hear an echo of belief in gods (plural)? Not quite, say Bible scholars, but this story comes from a layer so old, so primitive, that in those days it was believed that God had a council of advisors in heaven, and in this story they’re all agreed that the earthlings need to be reined-in, punished, for their own good. Otherwise, they’ll destroy the earth.
People are talking among themselves, and God is talking to the divine advisors: but a great gulf has opened between humanity and God. And on the human side, life, isolated from God, becomes all about self-preservation (Come, let us make more bricks, more technology!). Humanity’s isolation from God sows the seed of division on earth: the one people are learning to isolate and promote and compete among themselves, and away from God.
If this story explains why there are many languages, it’s not a pretty picture: it’s not what God intended, not God’s Plan A. It’s Plan B for Babel, the best that could be done, given the facts on the ground. The annoying effect: “they will not understand one another’s speech.” And so is born the need for statesmanship and diplomacy. And so is born their opposite, war.
Those heavenly advisors were right on the money: we do have the capacity to destroy the earth. Has it helped any, the advisors’ choice to confuse language? Not that I’ve noticed. Sounds exactly like what politicians do in every age.
Fortunately for us, another story is told today. It is the more famous one, the story Pentecost is known for. Fast-forward thousands of years from the setting of our first story, and we find ourselves in the great city of Jerusalem where one language holds sway, Hebrew. A small number of men and women are speaking to a growing crowd in a public square, telling everyone about the love of God that has come to them in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, filling them with God’s Spirit that pours out of them as a love like their world has never seen. These men and women who speak are from the fishing villages of Galilee, and have little education—but the story they tell is being heard by people from many different countries (some are there as pilgrims, some as merchants), and each visitor hears the story in his or her native language! You heard the list: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, all those countries from the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean Basin.
God is pouring out the Holy Spirit upon all people, all nations, all social classes, male and female. God is gathering all people: this is just the opposite of our first story, not scattering, but gathering. And in this story of the first Pentecost, it is not a problem that we speak in many languages; it is the very providence of God, who uses what is special to the culture of each nation as a pathway into the community of God.
We hear a different attitude in this story. God’s Plan A requires diversity, humanity’s many languages are intended for God’s use in saving the earth from destruction. In this story, you might say that God has new advisors. One is Jesus Christ, whose public ministry—his life and death and resurrection in Galilee and Judea-- has turned upside down the destructive power of people whose chief desire is to make a name for themselves. From beyond the grave, Jesus Christ, the agent of God, shows the world the power of love that will humbly serve in his name, love that will revere life because it bears the imprint and purposes of God.
The Holy Spirit is God’s other advisor—or, more accurately, the Spirit is our advisor, the Advocate, the one who knows the whole truth about God, and the whole truth about us, is able to represent us to God and God to us so that the reconciling love of God in Jesus Christ will play its unique part in saving the earth from destruction.
Sophie, today you are united with Christ in baptism through his Spirit. Yours be his wisdom, yours be his Spirit that holds our minds and hearts and feet to the fire of the love that binds us to each other, and to God, in Jesus Christ. And yours be the courage to love with the love that is our highest privilege and our deepest responsibility.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
What is the Unity that Jesus Wants?
The Gospel for the 7th Sunday of Easter is John 17:20-26
“…that they all may be one…”
Jesus’s prayer for his Church presents a goal that is as elusive as ever. We could picture him praying this prayer for his global network of Christians, numbering in the hundreds of millions, but divided into thousands of denominations, each a movement decidedly (even stubbornly) away from its nearest likeness, its closest relative.
And we can picture him praying his prayer over each and every one of those thousands of differently-named, differently-defined, differently-cultured denominations because—oops, there’s another one!—they do keep dividing.
And within each of them, he’s praying for the unity of each congregation and local community bearing his name, for that’s the most intimate location for the world to see and know (in his own words) “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
Here’s a possibly heretical thought: Perhaps the unity Jesus seeks isn’t at any of these institutional levels of the Church. If it is at those levels, wouldn’t he feel mighty defeated by now? If it is at those levels, wouldn’t unity require conformity that would be more legalistic than life-giving? Can we really picture the Holy Spirit, the one who blows where it wills, confining and homogenizing believers to adhere to one set of beliefs printed on a page (or a hundred pages)?
What has evolved in the nearly two thousand years since Jesus first offered his prayer is Christianity’s stunningly diverse range of belief and practice. Why would we think that Jesus does not delight in this diversity? If evolution is part of the delivery system of God’s astonishing gift of life, would Jesus argue with its outcome?
What is the unity that Jesus wants for his followers?
Do you remember the time when Jesus was asked which is the greatest of the commandments? From that moment we get his great summary of the law: You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind and heart and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That he would stake the whole enterprise of religion on this mandate to love, introduces us to our unity.
And that mandate isn’t complete until he adds his final lesson, taught at the Last Supper when he washes his disciples’ feet and says to them, This is how I love you; you must love one another as I have loved you.
As we hear it today, the unity he wants for us is that the same love with which God the Father treasures him may be in us, and that he, Jesus, may be in us.
Aren’t there moments when you feel that unity?
As differently-opinioned as we are, when we say a creed together—and I find especially when we say the Iona Creed that we will recite today—we speak in one voice with a confidence that sometimes make me catch my breath.
And I won’t soon forget the whoosh of response when so many of you rushed to lay hands on one of our company, last Sunday, surrounding her with a love that she’s still talking about, days after her surgery.
We are united in our anguish over dear friends who are fighting back against cancer, and we experience the unity of our love for them shaping our prayer for them, and our support of them.
How many other heartfelt intimate experiences of unity ring true to the prayer of Jesus, that the same love with which God treasures him should dwell in us, as Jesus meets us within those experiences?
A family united in tender celebration as the first anniversary of the death of one at their center brings them together…
A study group united by their enthusiasm for their adventures in learning…
A team of leaders working together for the good of a community, considering differing viewpoints not to exclude but to include wisdoms and insights that the community needs…
Different generations gathering for food and song—common denominators, food and song—and finding provided a menu (both in food and in music) that gives everyone some of what they want because of its familiarity, and opens everyone to what’s not familiar, but they discover they can love it anyway… (Yes, that’s a commercial on behalf of our next Singing Supper!)
The unity Jesus wants for his Church is the unity he gives, and God gives, the very love that is between them, binding them as one. That treasuring love is the Holy Spirit, whose great festival day, Pentecost, will be ours to celebrate, next Sunday.
This unity is given to us to hold our minds and hearts and feet to the fire of the love that binds us to each other, and to God-- the love that is our highest privilege and our deepest responsibility.
“…that they all may be one…”
Jesus’s prayer for his Church presents a goal that is as elusive as ever. We could picture him praying this prayer for his global network of Christians, numbering in the hundreds of millions, but divided into thousands of denominations, each a movement decidedly (even stubbornly) away from its nearest likeness, its closest relative.
And we can picture him praying his prayer over each and every one of those thousands of differently-named, differently-defined, differently-cultured denominations because—oops, there’s another one!—they do keep dividing.
And within each of them, he’s praying for the unity of each congregation and local community bearing his name, for that’s the most intimate location for the world to see and know (in his own words) “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
Here’s a possibly heretical thought: Perhaps the unity Jesus seeks isn’t at any of these institutional levels of the Church. If it is at those levels, wouldn’t he feel mighty defeated by now? If it is at those levels, wouldn’t unity require conformity that would be more legalistic than life-giving? Can we really picture the Holy Spirit, the one who blows where it wills, confining and homogenizing believers to adhere to one set of beliefs printed on a page (or a hundred pages)?
What has evolved in the nearly two thousand years since Jesus first offered his prayer is Christianity’s stunningly diverse range of belief and practice. Why would we think that Jesus does not delight in this diversity? If evolution is part of the delivery system of God’s astonishing gift of life, would Jesus argue with its outcome?
What is the unity that Jesus wants for his followers?
Do you remember the time when Jesus was asked which is the greatest of the commandments? From that moment we get his great summary of the law: You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind and heart and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That he would stake the whole enterprise of religion on this mandate to love, introduces us to our unity.
And that mandate isn’t complete until he adds his final lesson, taught at the Last Supper when he washes his disciples’ feet and says to them, This is how I love you; you must love one another as I have loved you.
As we hear it today, the unity he wants for us is that the same love with which God the Father treasures him may be in us, and that he, Jesus, may be in us.
Aren’t there moments when you feel that unity?
As differently-opinioned as we are, when we say a creed together—and I find especially when we say the Iona Creed that we will recite today—we speak in one voice with a confidence that sometimes make me catch my breath.
And I won’t soon forget the whoosh of response when so many of you rushed to lay hands on one of our company, last Sunday, surrounding her with a love that she’s still talking about, days after her surgery.
We are united in our anguish over dear friends who are fighting back against cancer, and we experience the unity of our love for them shaping our prayer for them, and our support of them.
How many other heartfelt intimate experiences of unity ring true to the prayer of Jesus, that the same love with which God treasures him should dwell in us, as Jesus meets us within those experiences?
A family united in tender celebration as the first anniversary of the death of one at their center brings them together…
A study group united by their enthusiasm for their adventures in learning…
A team of leaders working together for the good of a community, considering differing viewpoints not to exclude but to include wisdoms and insights that the community needs…
Different generations gathering for food and song—common denominators, food and song—and finding provided a menu (both in food and in music) that gives everyone some of what they want because of its familiarity, and opens everyone to what’s not familiar, but they discover they can love it anyway… (Yes, that’s a commercial on behalf of our next Singing Supper!)
The unity Jesus wants for his Church is the unity he gives, and God gives, the very love that is between them, binding them as one. That treasuring love is the Holy Spirit, whose great festival day, Pentecost, will be ours to celebrate, next Sunday.
This unity is given to us to hold our minds and hearts and feet to the fire of the love that binds us to each other, and to God-- the love that is our highest privilege and our deepest responsibility.
On Mothers' Day
The Gospel for the 6th Sunday of Easter is John 14:23-29
I don’t often bring Mothers’ Day into the pulpit. And I excuse myself on two grounds: first, it’s not a religious observance. And second, what message is there for a preacher to bring on Mothers’ Day?
This year, I want to give it a try. That’s largely because Wendell Berry came to town a few days ago. Like some of you, Diana and I were regaled by that 76-year-old poet-essayist-novelist-critic-activist-farmer, and for me the crowning moment of that evening was his reading one of his poems, at the request of someone in the audience who had come armed with her favorite Wendell Berry poem.
Hunting for it later in the anthologies I have at home, I found not that poem but another, entitled “To My Mother”, published in his 1994 volume “Entries”, when Berry was sixty. And if you’re thinking you’re about to hear it, you’re right.
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.
So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,
and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it
already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
Now, that could be a good moment to just sit down and leave the rest of this sermon up to you.
But I have it in mind to read that poem once more before I’m done (if Mr. Berry were reading it, this might not be necessary—but I’d like one more chance to do justice to his words), and between now and then I’d like to visit our Gospel.
There we hear Jesus say, “I have said (many) things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
The unique impact of inspired words, Jesus speaking to his disciples, Wendell Berry speaking to his audience, embodies a message not just by the rightness of the words, but by the truth and integrity, the beauty and the appeal, of the speaker. The Word becomes flesh before it becomes memory, and the Word becomes indelible memory when inspiration is conveyed by incarnation. Truth becomes personal when the truth-bearer succeeds in conveying to us love. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, comprehends all things.
Jesus has done this embodying for his disciples, by the time we hear these words of his. And now he prepares them for his departure by assuring them that there is more to come, more experience of truth, beauty, inspiration, and love, because God will send the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to keep teaching them/us and to remind them/us of all that Jesus has said and done and been. The Spirit, the Advocate, is the very presence of the One we can’t do without.
Which convinces me, all the more, that we’re right to conceive of the Holy Spirit as revealing the feminine in God. If you have your mother as advocate, you are represented by one who may know you better than you know yourself.
An advocate is one who intercedes for another person, pleads the case of a person, defends that person, sees and speaks the truth of that person, to ensure justice and wellbeing for that person.
The most and best I know of motherhood I learn from watching the mother of my/our children. She knows them in full, intuits what may not yet be explained, finds ways to teach them by calling to mind what they know and what she knows, all in a knowing so complete that by it can be seen the best that they, her/our children, might do and be.
I think it’s time to hear Wendell Berry’s words again.
To My Mother
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.
So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,
and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it
already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
I don’t often bring Mothers’ Day into the pulpit. And I excuse myself on two grounds: first, it’s not a religious observance. And second, what message is there for a preacher to bring on Mothers’ Day?
This year, I want to give it a try. That’s largely because Wendell Berry came to town a few days ago. Like some of you, Diana and I were regaled by that 76-year-old poet-essayist-novelist-critic-activist-farmer, and for me the crowning moment of that evening was his reading one of his poems, at the request of someone in the audience who had come armed with her favorite Wendell Berry poem.
Hunting for it later in the anthologies I have at home, I found not that poem but another, entitled “To My Mother”, published in his 1994 volume “Entries”, when Berry was sixty. And if you’re thinking you’re about to hear it, you’re right.
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.
So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,
and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it
already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
Now, that could be a good moment to just sit down and leave the rest of this sermon up to you.
But I have it in mind to read that poem once more before I’m done (if Mr. Berry were reading it, this might not be necessary—but I’d like one more chance to do justice to his words), and between now and then I’d like to visit our Gospel.
There we hear Jesus say, “I have said (many) things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
The unique impact of inspired words, Jesus speaking to his disciples, Wendell Berry speaking to his audience, embodies a message not just by the rightness of the words, but by the truth and integrity, the beauty and the appeal, of the speaker. The Word becomes flesh before it becomes memory, and the Word becomes indelible memory when inspiration is conveyed by incarnation. Truth becomes personal when the truth-bearer succeeds in conveying to us love. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, comprehends all things.
Jesus has done this embodying for his disciples, by the time we hear these words of his. And now he prepares them for his departure by assuring them that there is more to come, more experience of truth, beauty, inspiration, and love, because God will send the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to keep teaching them/us and to remind them/us of all that Jesus has said and done and been. The Spirit, the Advocate, is the very presence of the One we can’t do without.
Which convinces me, all the more, that we’re right to conceive of the Holy Spirit as revealing the feminine in God. If you have your mother as advocate, you are represented by one who may know you better than you know yourself.
An advocate is one who intercedes for another person, pleads the case of a person, defends that person, sees and speaks the truth of that person, to ensure justice and wellbeing for that person.
The most and best I know of motherhood I learn from watching the mother of my/our children. She knows them in full, intuits what may not yet be explained, finds ways to teach them by calling to mind what they know and what she knows, all in a knowing so complete that by it can be seen the best that they, her/our children, might do and be.
I think it’s time to hear Wendell Berry’s words again.
To My Mother
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.
So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,
and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it
already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
The Problem with Religion
Scripture appointed for the 5th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
If religion has a public relations problem, it may be the perception that religion takes the raw produce of spirituality and processes it into institutional cooking. Takes, that is, the sparkling dance of human spirit and divine Spirit and puts it in a box, trying either to preserve it or to tame it.
What the soul dislikes and protests is the turning-hard and unyielding of what is by its nature soft and fluid. The Church’s doctrine, worship, and leadership can trap the soul like a bee in amber, like a fern planked in the shale of a fossil.
And when this happens, as seems too likely and too frequent, the Church’s concept of its work and mission may be to serve itself rather than the world. Its point of fascination may become more a looking for God’s presence in the Church than a recognizing of God’s presence in the world.
These risks are inherent in the very root of the word. “Religare” in Latin is “to bind back”, as in staking a sapling to grow straight. A close English word, new to me, is religate (the emphasis is on its second syllable), meaning to tie—to sew up—a vein that is bleeding.
Why mention that? Because human needs play a large role in shaping religious practice and experience. “Religare” is just what’s needed when we’re being blown about by life, or when we’re bleeding out, feeling drained dry.
So the first definition of religion in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is: “a state of life bound by religious vows, the condition of belonging to a religious order.”
Bound, order, belonging, vow… these are powerful words that may evoke mixed feelings as you hear them. Consider just one of them: bound.
A swaddled infant may feel secure, a sick person may take to his bed—but we want neither of these bindings to be permanent. Respect boundaries because, like good fences, they can make for good neighbors—but misuse binding laws to regulate the crossing of boundaries and, as we see in Arizona, you threaten the basis of a free society. Bind a sapling to a stake to help it grow straight, but when it comes into its own, cut that cord and pull that stake. Celebrate the binding-together of two people in holy matrimony as they become one—but what’s to be celebrated when one oppresses the other, or when one neglects the other?
In religion, as in all forms of culture, customs bind people to keep doing certain things in certain ways. There may be good reasons for this repetition. What is familiar may help us feel comforted, centered, put back together again. What is done faithfully may confirm our confidence and help unite us to God. And there are bad reasons for repetition in our practice of religion. Unexamined habit, prejudice, superstition, and ignorance explain some customs that bind people in their religion.
The story of Peter’s vision takes us to a time when the first Christians expected that what they were doing in following Jesus as Lord would make their age-old religion freer, more powerful, better at fulfilling the law and the prophets. They were eager to help God renew their religion, but they did not expect God to create a new religion: the council of apostles in Jerusalem, nearly all the original team hand-picked by Jesus, were quite certain that God expected them to keep observing the basic customs and requirements of the old law belonging to the old religion.
It appears that Peter was slowly parting company with them. Last Sunday, we heard the story of his raising Tabitha from her deathbed. Tucked into that story is the detail that in Greek her name was Dorcas. What sounds like a footnote is big news: Peter has just ministered the healing grace of God to a Greek lady, there in the port city of Joppa, where ships from many countries docked. This report might have made the apostles nervous on two counts: by tradition, he wasn’t supposed to be alone with a woman not related to him, and he wasn’t supposed to be associating with Gentiles.
“Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” the apostles press him, responding to yet another report of Peter’s missionary work. Peter was pushing the Jesus movement outside the Jewish religion, and the apostles didn’t yet know that this could be God’s doing.
Peter explains his actions by describing a vision he had, there in Joppa. This took real chutzpah, standing before the apostolic council that he belonged to, saying to them, “I think you’re too rigid, and here’s why: I had a vision.”
What he saw was like an inverted parachute being lowered from heaven, containing all sorts of birds, animals, and reptiles which were not lawful to eat, according to the laws of the old religion. Someone’s voice calls to him, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat!”
Is that Jesus’s voice? Peter calls him “Lord”. But on the heels of this vision, Peter says that the Spirit of God spoke to him, and in the New Testament sometimes the Holy Spirit is called “Lord”. Either way, the apostles’ eyebrows are up to their hairline as they hear all this, for Peter is insisting that God has directed him to preach the Gospel to Gentiles outside the old religion, and when Peter obeyed, the Spirit of God was poured out on those Greeks just as it had been given to the apostles.
Now, if one visionary experience isn’t enough for us today, we get two. In our second reading we hear the famous story of the revelation to John the Seer on the island of Patmos. He sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city of God coming down from heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
How often is it that you and I hear about new paradigms, and the imperative to think outside the box? Social networking has reached even our older generations (who knows, it may even reach me some day). Conferences are held and columns written about the impact of social networking on the Church’s life and mission.
We have set loose, this spring, a new Website for St. John’s, a thing of real beauty as well as a bearer of information and inspiration. We’re showing it after worship, this Sunday and the next two, on the big screen in the library.
“See, I am making all things new,” says the voice from God’s throne in John’s vision.
Don’t these two vision stories make you wonder how the Christian religion could get so bound-up in doctrine, tradition, and social attitude? Doesn’t the Spirit of God constantly move where it wills? Aren’t we required to learn, not just how the Spirit moved in times long past, but how that Spirit moves right now?
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” That’s Jesus speaking to his home team, the same ones who years later would grill Peter for stepping out of bounds by loving too freely, too broadly, too indiscriminately.
“The Spirit told me not to make a distinction between them and us,” Peter responds.
Peter gets it, comprehends how radical this new commandment is, and forever will be. Peter, who cringed by the seashore when, three times, the risen Jesus Christ asked him, “Do you love me?” And three times Jesus instructed him, “Then show it by feeding my lambs, by tending my flock, by feeding my sheep.”
Peter no longer needs to cringe.
He recognizes the sovereignty of God’s love and bears the freedom and the burden of being bound to the Spirit whose mission field is the world.
This Spirit who teaches not to make distinctions between “them and us” needs to be heard and followed as this nation finds just ways to reform immigration law.
This Spirit who would unite them and us calls political parties to reach across the aisle and the sad history that divide them.
In this tragic decade of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this Spirit is calling all people to learn to walk in the way of understanding.
If religion has a public relations problem, it may be the perception that religion takes the raw produce of spirituality and processes it into institutional cooking. Takes, that is, the sparkling dance of human spirit and divine Spirit and puts it in a box, trying either to preserve it or to tame it.
What the soul dislikes and protests is the turning-hard and unyielding of what is by its nature soft and fluid. The Church’s doctrine, worship, and leadership can trap the soul like a bee in amber, like a fern planked in the shale of a fossil.
And when this happens, as seems too likely and too frequent, the Church’s concept of its work and mission may be to serve itself rather than the world. Its point of fascination may become more a looking for God’s presence in the Church than a recognizing of God’s presence in the world.
These risks are inherent in the very root of the word. “Religare” in Latin is “to bind back”, as in staking a sapling to grow straight. A close English word, new to me, is religate (the emphasis is on its second syllable), meaning to tie—to sew up—a vein that is bleeding.
Why mention that? Because human needs play a large role in shaping religious practice and experience. “Religare” is just what’s needed when we’re being blown about by life, or when we’re bleeding out, feeling drained dry.
So the first definition of religion in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is: “a state of life bound by religious vows, the condition of belonging to a religious order.”
Bound, order, belonging, vow… these are powerful words that may evoke mixed feelings as you hear them. Consider just one of them: bound.
A swaddled infant may feel secure, a sick person may take to his bed—but we want neither of these bindings to be permanent. Respect boundaries because, like good fences, they can make for good neighbors—but misuse binding laws to regulate the crossing of boundaries and, as we see in Arizona, you threaten the basis of a free society. Bind a sapling to a stake to help it grow straight, but when it comes into its own, cut that cord and pull that stake. Celebrate the binding-together of two people in holy matrimony as they become one—but what’s to be celebrated when one oppresses the other, or when one neglects the other?
In religion, as in all forms of culture, customs bind people to keep doing certain things in certain ways. There may be good reasons for this repetition. What is familiar may help us feel comforted, centered, put back together again. What is done faithfully may confirm our confidence and help unite us to God. And there are bad reasons for repetition in our practice of religion. Unexamined habit, prejudice, superstition, and ignorance explain some customs that bind people in their religion.
The story of Peter’s vision takes us to a time when the first Christians expected that what they were doing in following Jesus as Lord would make their age-old religion freer, more powerful, better at fulfilling the law and the prophets. They were eager to help God renew their religion, but they did not expect God to create a new religion: the council of apostles in Jerusalem, nearly all the original team hand-picked by Jesus, were quite certain that God expected them to keep observing the basic customs and requirements of the old law belonging to the old religion.
It appears that Peter was slowly parting company with them. Last Sunday, we heard the story of his raising Tabitha from her deathbed. Tucked into that story is the detail that in Greek her name was Dorcas. What sounds like a footnote is big news: Peter has just ministered the healing grace of God to a Greek lady, there in the port city of Joppa, where ships from many countries docked. This report might have made the apostles nervous on two counts: by tradition, he wasn’t supposed to be alone with a woman not related to him, and he wasn’t supposed to be associating with Gentiles.
“Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” the apostles press him, responding to yet another report of Peter’s missionary work. Peter was pushing the Jesus movement outside the Jewish religion, and the apostles didn’t yet know that this could be God’s doing.
Peter explains his actions by describing a vision he had, there in Joppa. This took real chutzpah, standing before the apostolic council that he belonged to, saying to them, “I think you’re too rigid, and here’s why: I had a vision.”
What he saw was like an inverted parachute being lowered from heaven, containing all sorts of birds, animals, and reptiles which were not lawful to eat, according to the laws of the old religion. Someone’s voice calls to him, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat!”
Is that Jesus’s voice? Peter calls him “Lord”. But on the heels of this vision, Peter says that the Spirit of God spoke to him, and in the New Testament sometimes the Holy Spirit is called “Lord”. Either way, the apostles’ eyebrows are up to their hairline as they hear all this, for Peter is insisting that God has directed him to preach the Gospel to Gentiles outside the old religion, and when Peter obeyed, the Spirit of God was poured out on those Greeks just as it had been given to the apostles.
Now, if one visionary experience isn’t enough for us today, we get two. In our second reading we hear the famous story of the revelation to John the Seer on the island of Patmos. He sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city of God coming down from heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
How often is it that you and I hear about new paradigms, and the imperative to think outside the box? Social networking has reached even our older generations (who knows, it may even reach me some day). Conferences are held and columns written about the impact of social networking on the Church’s life and mission.
We have set loose, this spring, a new Website for St. John’s, a thing of real beauty as well as a bearer of information and inspiration. We’re showing it after worship, this Sunday and the next two, on the big screen in the library.
“See, I am making all things new,” says the voice from God’s throne in John’s vision.
Don’t these two vision stories make you wonder how the Christian religion could get so bound-up in doctrine, tradition, and social attitude? Doesn’t the Spirit of God constantly move where it wills? Aren’t we required to learn, not just how the Spirit moved in times long past, but how that Spirit moves right now?
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” That’s Jesus speaking to his home team, the same ones who years later would grill Peter for stepping out of bounds by loving too freely, too broadly, too indiscriminately.
“The Spirit told me not to make a distinction between them and us,” Peter responds.
Peter gets it, comprehends how radical this new commandment is, and forever will be. Peter, who cringed by the seashore when, three times, the risen Jesus Christ asked him, “Do you love me?” And three times Jesus instructed him, “Then show it by feeding my lambs, by tending my flock, by feeding my sheep.”
Peter no longer needs to cringe.
He recognizes the sovereignty of God’s love and bears the freedom and the burden of being bound to the Spirit whose mission field is the world.
This Spirit who teaches not to make distinctions between “them and us” needs to be heard and followed as this nation finds just ways to reform immigration law.
This Spirit who would unite them and us calls political parties to reach across the aisle and the sad history that divide them.
In this tragic decade of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this Spirit is calling all people to learn to walk in the way of understanding.
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