Life in the Spirit!

Life in the Spirit
June 12, 2011
Franktown United Methodist Church

What if you threw a party and everybody came? I mean everybody. Earlier this month a teenaged girl named Thessa in Hamburg, Germany decided to have a party to celebrate her 16th birthday. So she did what many people do to announce a party these days, she put it on Facebook. Only when she did it, she forgot to check that the invitation was only for her friends - or the smaller group of her "friends" who were really her friends. (It's so confusing to know who your friends are these days.)

So her invitation to a small party became a public event. By the time she realized what she had done, 15,000 people had responded that they were coming. Thessa and her parents tried to get the word out that it was a mistake. They changed the settings on Facebook. But on the day of 1500 people showed up outside of her small house in Hamburg. They brought homemade cakes and they danced in the streets. They trampled fences and broke some glass. 100 police officers had to be called in to control the crowd. Neighbors were not happy. And Thessa and her parents were not even there. They went elsewhere to celebrate.*

But what if you threw a party and nobody showed up? What if the food was on the table, the drinks iced, the music on, the streamers up, and nobody showed? Something tells me that might be even worse.

Peter and I have been talking about the Holy Spirit for several weeks now and of course today, on Pentecost Sunday, we have to talk about the Holy Spirit. We have talked about how the Spirit inspires us to witness, how the Spirit gives us power to work in the world, how the Holy Spirit continues the work of Christ. But maybe we haven't emphasized the most important thing about the Holy Spirit - the Spirit is what gets us to the party!

You might wonder what this Holy Spirit business is all about. After all, do we really need the Spirit when we've got Jesus? It's Jesus who came to liberate us from "slavery to sin and death." It's Jesus who took on the cross. It's Jesus who faced down the devil. It's Jesus who died on that cross and offered us forgiveness for sins. It's Jesus who rose again to show us the way to eternal life. What more is the Spirit going to add to that story?

The Spirit is going to put us into that story. To receive the Holy Spirit is to know that that thing that happened on Calvary? It happened to you. That reconciliation God offers to the world? It was for you. That love that runs the universe? It's here and it's yours and it is not meant to be sitting around unaccessed, unused, unappreciated, unknown. It is meant to be shouted from the rooftops and proclaimed throughout the world.

That's the point of this whole crazy Pentecost experience. You remember where we left the disciples last week. They were watching as Jesus ascended into heaven after promising them that the Holy Spirit would come upon them. Two angels show up and ask them why they are looking up in the skies when there was work to be done in the world.

So the disciples get to work and these early disciples were Methodists. Do you know how I know? They have a committee meeting to nominate a replacement for Judas and then they have gather together in one place for the Festival of Pentecost.

And the Spirit breaks out on them and there is the sound of violent, rushing wind, and there are tongues of fire and the whole place is an uproar. The disciples start speaking in other languages. People from all over the world are there and they hear the disciples praising God in their own languages. There were people there from Cappadocia and they hear the disciples speaking in Cappadocian. There were people from Egypt and they hear them speaking Egyptian. The Elamites say, "Hey, they're speaking Elamite." The Phrygians say, "Man, they are talking Phrygian!" The Romans heard Latin. The folks from Mesopotamia heard Mesopotamian. The people from Tangier heard someone say, "God will provide." It was craziness. But it was the Spirit.

It was not meant to be a private possession of the disciples. If all the Spirit was was a golden ticket for a select few to get into the kingdom, then it was not the Spirit at all. The Spirit was to be poured out onto all flesh. The Spirit was unleashed to sweep the whole of creation into the drama. The Spirit was let go to let us in on the great love affair going on in the life of the Trinity. The love of God poured out on Jesus and in Jesus didn't have to include us. God doesn't need humanity to be God. God didn't need to create us. God didn't need to reconcile us to God. God didn't need to send Jesus, but God wanted us. God wanted the glory of a creation that could learn to sing God's praise. God wanted you and God wanted you so much that God, the great "I am," went to the cross and stretched out his arms and said, "I am for you." And the Spirit...well, the Spirit...and I bet you have never heard this analogy before...the Spirit is like the invite button on Thessa from Hamburg's Facebook. The Spirit will not let this good news be a private party. What God did in Jesus Christ is meant to be a very public event.

The great 20th century theologian Karl Barth, who wrote in German back in the days when Germans did heavy theology instead of going to birthday parties uninvited...Karl Barth said that "the Son of God is the prototype of the sonship of believers." Jesus shows us the way and gives us the model of what it means to be children of God. "This Christ," Barth says, "the children of God have 'put on.' This child...can meet this Father, the holy God, as a child its father, nowhere else than at the place where the only-begotten Son of God bore and bore away his sins." In other words - it is at the cross where we meet God. From God's side of the equation, Jesus on the cross is the invitation being made to the whole world of forgiveness of sins and new life in the world. But if it stopped there - if the invitation were made and no one knew - if no one responded - how sad would that be? What we need from our side is a response. What need from our side is the opportunity to participate in what God is doing. "That," says Karl Barth, "is having the Holy Spirit. Having the Holy Spirit is being set together with Christ in that turn from death to life."**

So life in the Spirit doesn't just mean ecstatic experiences and speaking in tongues. Life in the Spirit means that the cross is not just a story about Jesus; it's a story about me. And it's not just a story that took place centuries ago in a long-lost culture. It's a story that takes place now in this culture.

And it is a story that is renewed in every new generation. When we put water on Tate's head this morning...and Dale's and Morgan's...when we did that we were saying that their lives are claimed. We are saying that the love of God that we saw in the cross of Jesus was meant for them. And when the confirmands answered those questions they were placing themselves in a story that may have begun a long time ago but that is never more alive than it is in this room right now. The Holy Spirit didn't swoop down for a visit one Pentecost and then leave the building. The Holy Spirit came to stay so that every new Christian can know that they have a place, a role, a connection to God. Not because he deserves it. Not because she has earned it. But because God, who has no need of us, has made a way for us and has loved us beyond measure.

One of my colleagues in ministry, Steve Rhodes, once told the story about his daughter's birthday party. When she was a young girl, probably 4 or 5, she had invited her friends over and she could hardly wait until the guests arrived. She stood at the window and put her face to the glass, expectant. When the first guest arrived she started jumping up and down. She ran out to the car and when here friend got out the two of them started jumping up and down together. They went back into the house and looked out the window. When the next guest arrived they ran outside and the three of them now started jumping up and down. And so it went until all the guests arrived.

Steve says, this must be what the kingdom of heaven is like. A place where we are expected with joy. A place where we are invited. A place where we are ushered in the door. And a place where all are welcomed in love.

This morning, in this place, we are tasting a little bit of heaven. So praise the Lord, who sends the Spirit to make us one. Thanks be to God.

*Marilisa Kinney Sachteleben, "Facebook Sweet 16 Party Goes Viral; 1500 guests show up", Yahoo News, 5 Jun 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110605/us_ac/8591449_facebook_sweet_16_party_invitation_goes_viral_1500_guests_show_up
**Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 [T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1936], p. 524.

Life in the Spirit: Now What?

It was just about 150 years ago. Fort Sumter had fallen in Charleston Harbor. Virginia had just voted to secede from the United States. Everywhere there were signs of war – the American Civil War.

On May 23, 1861 – the very day that Virginia left the Union to join the Confederate States of America – three men got in a boat at Sewell’s Point in Norfolk and rowed across the James River to Hampton. Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend had been working on an artillery placement to bombard Fort Monroe, one of the last places in the South still under federal control.

Fort Monroe is still there today, looking a lot like it did 150 years ago. Big stone walls encircling 63 acres inside. And inside it on May 23 were brand new military units from the New England states under the command of Benjamin Butler – a Massachusetts politician and lawyer with nothing to distinguish himself as a military leader.[i]

The three men had been working to build up the Confederate defenses. As they rowed across the James, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend could probably hear the celebrations in Hampton. People out celebrating secession. But these men were not heading to the party. They were headed to the fort. They wanted to get into the only spot of land still under the control of the US government. Because Baker, Mallory, & Townsend were slaves and they hoped that whatever war was coming would be a war to free the slaves.

That’s not what northerners thought they were doing. There were some abolitionists, particularly in the northeast who thought there was no greater moral cause than getting rid of the institution of slavery. But they were in the minority. Even Abraham Lincoln, who eventually would produce the Emancipation Proclamation, didn’t think that what he was doing was trying to free slaves. He was trying to limit the expansion of slavery into the west. He didn’t like what slavery was doing to the country, but he wasn’t about to stir up the great majority of the populace by declaring war on slavery.

But everybody knew, if only deep down, that the slavery question was tying the country in knots – that it was now splitting it apart. The seeds of the dilemma had been there in the founding documents. A free nation had written slavery into the constitution. And for decades the nation struggled to reconcile its ideals with its reality. Everyone knew, if only deep down, that something had to give. Baker, Mallory, & Townsend were risking being caught or sent back for whippings or worse because they believed that if something had to give, it ought to be now.

When the three slaves showed up at the fort they were let into the gates and the next day they were brought before that Massachusetts general who had just come to Fort Monroe one day before. He questioned them about where they had come from and what they had been doing. They gave him some very useful information about what the battery across the river looked like and where the Confederates were encamped.

The policy of the US government officially was to send fugitive slaves back to their owners, even if the states had seceded from the union. The South might not be recognizing US law, but the US government was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave act of 1850. And Butler was no radical abolitionist. At his previous post in Annapolis he had volunteered to put down any slave insurrections there.

Butler recognized, however, that something new was happening here. He was surrounded by hostile territory. These three men who had shown up at the door were giving him useful information. And the landscape was changing rapidly. He was still trying to get straight in his head what he ought to do when word came that a southern officer was on the causeway demanding the return of the three slaves. What was the general going to do? More on that in a minute.

The disciples were trying to choose a successor for Judas, the one who had betrayed Jesus. As they deliberated they had one criterion for who should be considered for the position in the circle of 12. Whoever it was had to be someone who was with Jesus from the time of his baptism by John until the day of his ascension [Acts 1:22]. Those two events were the marker events of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Which tells us that the ascension was a big deal, even though we don’t tend to emphasize it much.

I know the Ascension was important, though, and you know how? Once, when I was a youth, I went to a conference youth event called YACS – Youth Active in Christian Service – and we had it at a place known as Holy Land, USA. Holy Land, USA is closed now, but it’s hard for me to know how to describe it. It was created as a kind of low-budget theme park by a deeply committed Christian farmer in Bedford who decided to convert a hundred acres of his land into a scale model of the Holy Land so that people who couldn’t afford to go to the real Holy Land could go here. It also had a retreat house on it.

It was a very interesting place. They had the Dead Sea, which was a kind of muddy pool where cows bathed. You could see the Negev desert, which, unfortunately, was covered with trees. And you could see the Mount of Transfiguration, where high-voltage power lines crossed the summit, which gave the transfiguration a whole new meaning.

The Ascension, though, was very important at Holy Land, USA. You know how I know? Because every morning I woke up and looked out the window to see the Mount of Ascension. I knew it was the Mount of Ascension because it said so in letters that were 6 feet high made of stone blocks spread out all over the hillside. There was a sign, too, but it really didn’t need it. You couldn’t miss the Mount of Ascension because it was a big deal.

It is in the Bible, too. You might wonder why that is. What more does Jesus’ ascension into heaven add to the meaning of his resurrection? Well, I think there are two things that interest me here. One is that it’s an interesting kind of kingship that Jesus assumes by taking his seat at God’s right hand. You would expect the power to be there – in heaven – but Jesus emphasizes to the disciples, in the last words he ever says to them, that they will receive power with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has been with them for his earthly ministry and has done deeds of power. He has been with them for forty days following his resurrection. Now the power is going to come to them through the Holy Spirit.

The second thing that strikes me is that in this story Jesus calls his disciples to an open ministry – a ministry that is open to the world – beginning in Jerusalem, but expanding in ever-wider circles to the ends of the earth. The disciples are called to look beyond themselves to those outside – to create a new community from the diversity of all the people of the world, not just among their own group. This will be hard for them to understand. They will resist it. They won’t get why this important. But the Holy Spirit is going to bust up some walls.

The Holy Spirit is going to move like a wrecking ball and a lightning bolt through this community of disciples. What does that power look like? Pentecostals will tell you that the power of the Spirit includes speaking in tongues. There are some snake-handling churches out in Appalachia will tell you that that is the Holy Ghost power. But the thing that stands out here is that those who have the Holy Spirit become witnesses to Christ in the world. Read verse 8 of chapter one in Acts again. Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses.”

And that power is going to be open to the world. The disciples were called to be witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Only two verses earlier they disciples were asking about when Jesus would restore the Kingdom of Israel, but Jesus is more interested in the Kingdom of God. He calls the disciples to remove the blinders which prevented them from seeing anyone beyond their own nationality and creed. For them it was a call to take the risk of moving out to discover a world that was made up of Jews and Gentiles, male and female, slave and free, Greeks and Romans, baysiders and seasiders, migrants and locals, born-heres and come-heres, Hokies and Cavaliers – look out! And it rocked their world.

Let me take you back to Benjamin Butler. Here he is riding out to meet a Southern officer who is demanding the return of the three escaped slaves who were being held in his fort. Butler didn’t have explicit instructions on what to do. The few instructions he did have were orders to send back fugitive slaves. He didn’t have any great love for abolition either. He thought abolitionists were disturbers of the general order. But old Benjamin Butler – who was a cranky, disagreeable man with more than a few character flaws – sensed that something had changed.

He met Major John Baytop Cary on the causeway and they rode their horses together through the farmland leading back to Hampton. Cary knew Butler from before the war and he said, “What do you mean to do with those [men]?”

“I intend to hold them.”

“What about your constitutional obligation to return them?”

“Virginia is now a foreign country,” was Butler’s reply. “I am under no constitutional obligation to a foreign country.”

Cary protested that the US had claimed Virginia could not legally secede from the union so if he was to be consistent he would have to return the slaves.”

“But you say you have seceded, so you cannot consistently claim them.” And then Butler, maybe on the spot, made a decision that changed the whole character of the war that was to come. There was a principle in war that property could be taken from an enemy if it could be used to help them in their fight. Such property was contraband. And since the South had claimed that slaves were property under the law, he would use that claim against them. Benjamin Butler said to Major Cary, “I shall hold these [men] as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”[ii]

Just like that, Butler had begun a new policy that meant the war was going to be about freedom for the slaves. The next day 8 more slaves showed up at Fort Monroe. The next day there were 47. Two days later they were arriving every hour. Over the next four years thousands upon thousands of people would get their first taste of freedom as contraband. And Butler, who was not a saint and who did not go to war to free the slaves, did just that.

What does the story of Baker, Mallory, & Townsend have to do with the Holy Spirit? I was reading this story in a book by Adam Goodheart called 1861 and it struck me that here was a man who grew up in a nation that was torn apart by an evil that no one could even talk about with a civil tongue. Just to mention the name of the institution of slavery was to invite such strong passions that no one dared do it in mixed company.

But by 1861, slavery was an evil that was ready to be unraveled. It was demanding to be unraveled. And no one, besides the abolitionists, was ready to pull on the thread. There was too much fear. Too many people believed that they didn’t have the power to do anything about it. And many, many more people were afraid of what it would mean to recognize the freedom, much less the equality, of black people in the United States. The power turned out to be right there in the decision of three men to seek freedom and in the spontaneous creativity of a man on a causeway to get it for them.

So is it that you are looking at and saying, “I can’t”? “I don’t have the power. I don’t trust the world beyond. I’ve got to hold on to what I’ve got. I can’t take a risk. Maybe Jesus has the power. But I don’t. I’ll pray for Jesus to take care of that problem. I’ll pray for Jesus to do something.”

The best scene in the Ascension story is when two men in white robes show up. They show up while the disciples are still watching Jesus ascend up into the skies. I think it was the Holy Spirit talking when they prodded those future apostles with a question. “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up to heaven?” Surely it would have been the Spirit, the one who enlivens and enables us…us…to continue the work of Jesus and to preach the good news of life…surely it would have been the Spirit who would remind these disciples that if they were looking for Jesus they were looking in the wrong place. The next great adventure was in the age of the Church, the body of Christ – on earth. The power was given to them to be witnesses of unity and communion in a broken and divided world. The power was given to us. Thanks be to God.

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[i] All of the material related to the story of the escaped slaves at Fort Monroe is taken from 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart, [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011], chapter 9.

[ii] Quotations from Goodheart.

Life in the Spirit: Untroubled Witness

Her name was Emily. Well, actually her name wasn’t really Emily. The program I was listening to changed her name and her voice so that she wouldn’t be recognized. Emily, you see, is a witness.

Not like a courtroom witness. She wasn’t in the witness protection program or anything like that. She is a paid witness. A marketer paid to give testimonies on behalf of products like video games. But in order to give witness in a way that people will listen to her, she has to pretend to be somebody else.

Emily’s company pays her to create fake user profiles on social networking sites like Facebook. If you are in the Facebook world you know that the face you present you present to the world is on your profile page. If you want to you can post your birthday, your relationship status, your favorite quotes, favorite hobbies, favorite TV shows. And you can post a picture of yourself. And there you are.

Only when Emily posts for her work, she isn’t there. She is creating somebody who doesn’t exist. She uses a fake picture. She researches an area so that she can sound like she’s really from there. She tries to choose associations so that, if you live in the place she’s researching you might think, “Hey, I think I might have gone to school with that girl and she wants to be my friend and she lives in my area…sure, I’ll let her be one of my online friends.” Emily even makes sure to include a few typos in her profile just so you won’t think she’s not real. Which she isn’t. Because she’s really just an imposter posing as your friend so she can slip in references to how cool Call of Duty 15 is.

Only she is real. Emily herself is a real person. And she feels badly about how she’s making a living. She cannot show her true self even though she sometimes gets involved in the lives of the people she befriends. Once she got invited to a Thanksgiving dinner. “In a way that was sad,” she said, “because that was such a nice gesture to make to someone who they really didn’t know. They just wanted to know we had somewhere to spend Thanksgiving.”[i]

This is where we are today in our crazy world. Online marketers are hiring real people to be fake people online so that they can hype real products to real people who want their fake friends to be real friends. And these marketers are doing this because they know that people will trust people that they think they know over advertisements on TV or radio. They know that we are hungry for real witnesses in the world.

So what does that mean for the people of God who are struggling to be real witnesses? At this point you may think you’ve got the whole sermon figured out. You may be saying, “I know where Alex is going with this. I know what he’s going to do here. He’s going to take this example from the real world and say, ‘Look how terrible this is that poor Emily has to be a fake Facebook friend.’ And then he’s going to contrast that with being a witness for Jesus, which means that we have to be authentic and be our selves. Emily’s world – bad. Being yourself for Jesus – good.” You might be thinking that, but you’d be wrong. What I want to say is that, if you’re going to be a witness you’ve got to be somebody else.

Not that I think you’re not qualified for the job. You are. We are all God has to work with in this world. And not that I think you should go create a fake profile to start telling your friends about Jesus. That is bad. But the scripture lesson from Acts for today tells me that when you become a witness for Jesus, you’ve got to be somebody else.

We’ve been talking about the Holy Spirit for these last few weeks and we have looked at how the Spirit inspires new communities and transforms relationships – how the Spirit makes Jesus present in the midst of us. Today, though, I want to look at how the Spirit empowers us to be witnesses and to be somebody else.

The witness in the story from Acts is a man named Stephen. Stephen was a deacon in the church and evidently one of those early Gentile converts to Christianity. That’s important because to this point the Christians had been identified as a subset of the Jewish community. Christianity was branching out, though, and lots of new people were coming into the new church. The Spirit was doing this.

Stephen was just trying to be faithful to what Jesus and the Holy Spirit had done to them, but it got them in trouble. The leaders couldn’t stand it. Partly because Stephen was accusing them of not enforcing the law they were supposed to be upholding and partly because Stephen was claiming that he was standing in the long line of God’s prophets and they were standing in the long line of those who rejected the prophets. They were furious at Stephen and the Bible says they were grinding their teeth.

That’s where the lectionary reading for today picks up. Stephen is facing this angry mob of religious leaders and suddenly he has a vision. For the whole chapter before this he has been telling the story of Israel’s history and how God has continued to speak to the people in each new generation and called them to something new, from Abraham leaving his home to travel to a new land, to Joseph going to Egypt and saving his family, to Moses leading the people out of slavery, to David and Solomon. That’s where Israel had been, but now Stephen has a vision of where God’s people were going. He looks up into the heavens and he sees the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Now this language is so familiar to people who have grown up in the Church that we just gloss right over this. It’s like Stephen starts quoting the Apostle’s Creed. “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, who is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and who shall come again to judge the quick and the dead.” But we forget what this image meant to the early Church and what it ought to mean to us.

It’s not just abstract language and a formulaic way of saying things. This was the vision that kept the persecuted Church alive in the midst of its darkest days. Not a therapeutic Christianity that talked about how Jesus is my best friend. Not a militant Christianity that talked about destruction. The image that the early Christians took with them was of God in glory and Jesus standing or seated at God’s right hand.

This goes beyond reason. It goes beyond history. The comfort that Stephen got when he faced the mob was a vision of God and Jesus. And this is what makes him so serene as they set out to kill him. He knows that it’s not about him anymore. He is a witness and he sees what the universe hangs on. It’s the love of the Trinity. That’s it. And having seen that love, his story suddenly becomes absorbed into Jesus’ story. It’s almost as if he’s becoming Jesus.

Listen to the story of his death and see if doesn’t sound like Jesus’ experience at the cross. When Stephen tells them about his vision, the crowd members stop their ears so that they don’t have to hear it. They cry out in a loud voice and they run at Stephen and grab him and drag him out of the city. They take up stones and they start to pelt Stephen with the stones, but even while he’s being beaten to death by these stones, Stephen kneels. It doesn’t seem to be the stones that make him kneel, he just kneels. He prays that God will not hold the sin of his murderers against them. Even as he dies, he wants them to know the beauty that he sees. Even as they give in to the evil that consumes them, he knows what they can be in God’s eyes.

When Stephen becomes a witness, he becomes somebody else. He becomes the one he’s proclaiming. And he doesn’t have to be deceitful about who he is. He doesn’t have to have anxiety about who he is or how he’ll be perceived. He’s an untroubled witness because his life is so transparent to Jesus that he becomes Jesus.

There’s one other character in this small story, though. He’s standing there as the crowd drags Stephen out for his execution. He’s watching with approval as they do the deed. They throw their cloaks at his feet – he’s the coat clerk for the first Christian martyrdom. It’s a young man who stands in for us. His name is Saul and later his name will be changed to Paul, the great apostle who will take the message of Jesus to the whole world.

He’s the one who gives me hope in this story. The crowds are too cruel and too possessed by their hatred for me to relate to. Stephen is too pious – I pray that I could respond as well to such a thing, but how many of us could? But Saul – there I see myself. Witnessing the worst that the world can do to assault truth and beauty and heaven itself, but still harboring the possibility of change.

Saul becomes the Apostle Paul by developing a relationship with the Jesus he had persecuted. Paul will spend days, months, years in prayer and seeking out Jesus. Paul will do the dirty, troublesome work of keeping Christian communities focused on who they are and why they exist. Paul will become a faint image, growing ever brighter, of the Jesus he proclaims.

That’s what Jesus asks of each one of us. Here’s the thing about Emily. She feels badly about what she’s doing because however realistic she makes her fake profile, she can never be authentic with the people she is trying to talk to. She can only be a deceiver. She may be able to have interactions with others that they value, but at the end of the day, she’s just engaged with them for one reason – to get them to buy a video game.

Witnesses for Jesus are not asked to be unreal. They are just asked to stay close to Jesus – to develop practices of prayer and Bible Study and small group accountability so that they can meet other people with the love of Jesus – as if they were Jesus. At first it will feel unnatural. That’s why Paul uses the image of putting on Christ – like a jacket that may not fit when we put it on. But eventually we grow into it. We start to think less from our anxieties and worries and more from our confidence that God can use even us. We stop letting sin distort our vision of who we are and we start to embody the love of the Trinity – the power of the Holy Spirit.

And one day we become somebody else – somebody made perfect by God’s love in Jesus Christ. It’s the work of sanctification – that grace-filled work that God does in us once we give our lives over to God’s love. And somehow people can see – even in us…even in us the Jesus we proclaim.

We may never have to suffer like Stephen. But we do face the choice of Saul. Are we going to stand by the coats and watch what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world? Or are we going to let it fill us? Who’ll be a witness for my Lord? Thanks be to God.

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[i] Spark 148: CBC Radio, 15 May 2011.

Life in the Spirit: Promises, Promises

Back in the days before my sister got married, she had some boyfriends who seemed to have no sense of direction. That's not a metaphor. I'm not saying they had no goals for their life. They just had a hard time getting from point A to point B. To be PC - they were GC - geographically challenged. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Most of us are at some point in our lives. I once went on a mission trip to Philadelphia with some college students and the biggest challenge for most of the work teams was getting back to our home base without going through New Jersey. It's a common problem.

These boyfriends, though, were exceptional. Once one of them left our home in Orange, in the central Virginia, headed to Maine. We had talked about how he should take Interstate 81 and he left with a lot of confidence. About four hours later we got a phone call from him saying, "I got on 81, but now I just passed a sign saying 'Welcome to Tennessee.' Should I be going to Tennessee?"

On another occasion, we were gathering in Pennsylvania at my aunt and uncle's house for Thanksgiving and this same boyfriend was due to meet us there. He ended up driving around and around within three miles of their house out in the country, never finding us. He was there, but he didn't know it. I hope that boy has got a GPS now.

I sometimes wonder if Jesus didn't know that we do some very similar things in our faith life. One of the most powerful parables he told was one that used a geographic metaphor. In the story of the prodigal son, the son takes his half of the inheritance and where does he head off for? A far country where where he blows the inheritance on loose living. Several months later, as he's out slopping pigs to keep body and soul together, he decides to go back to his father begging, but the father sees him, when? While he's still a long way off and runs to meet him. The story seems to say that there's a great distance to be overcome between God and us and that we've headed in the wrong direction. Like going to Tennessee when you're supposed to be going to Maine.

When I stop and think about it, though, the stories Jesus told and the story we read from Acts today all seem to be more like that boyfriend's second experience than the first. Because the point of Jesus' coming to live and breathe and walk and teach and die among us was to say that, even though we might feel like we're a long way from God, God is right here beside us and we didn't even know it. We're driving around and around and around and the driveway to Thanksgiving dinner is right there!

I've been reading a great new book on the theology of Julian of Norwich, a woman who lived in the 14th century but whose Christian writing is still popular today. It's the kind of book that you only pick up if you once were in a doctoral program in philosophical theology. But, hey, I was, and it's a great book.

Julian has a very interesting notion of sin and the distance between us and God. For her we would make a mistake if we focused on the prodigal son's loose living as the cause of his sin. That's what he believes. He thinks that he has lost any right to his father's love because of what he's done with his father's money. He still has the notion that his father will only love him if he lives up to a certain standard. In the vision of the son, all that love that has surrounded him from birth is hanging by a thread and as soon as he does something to show that he doesn't deserve his father's love, it will all be taken away. So he comes back to beg forgiveness and for a new relationship based not on love but on an economic bargain. I'll work for you, Dad, and you pay me like a servant.

The prodigal son gives himself way too much credit for being able to sever that relationship with the father. In Julian's eyes, the sinful tragedy is in the son's separation from the father. The separation is what causes him to forget who he is and to waste his wealth. The far country to which he goes might not be that far at all. But in the father's eyes, the son is still close to his heart. He only desires that the son turn around. He never stops loving that child. And the reunion at the end of the story - the party with the fatted calf - only shows how wrong the son's vision of his father was. That love didn't dangle from a thread. It was held fast from all eternity by the strongest rope. God's love is not offered to us on a thread.

Of course, the feeling of being far away is no worse whether you are two feet or three thousand miles from where you're supposed to be. Some of you will remember that lonesome old song that was popular some years back: "Lord, I'm one, Lord, I'm two, Lord, I'm three, Lord, I'm four. Lord, I'm five hundred miles away from home." It didn't matter how far it really was, it felt like a long way. Sometimes with God the distance can seem unbridgeable. The task of a good preacher, though, (and I'm not claiming to be one - just pointing out the job to be done), is to help us see that the gap has been bridged. Christ has bridged the gap through the cross and God is, in fact, closer to us than we are to ourselves. Like Dorothy discovering at the end of The Wizard of Oz that she had the power to go home all along and she didn't even know it.

There aren't any ruby slippers in the book of Acts, but I hear a few echoes of this same theme in Peter's sermon. You remember Peter. He's got a great back story. Peter's name means 'rock' but he turned out to be pretty unstable as Jesus headed to the cross. He walked on water, literally. Got right out of the boat and walked across the Sea of Galilee towards Jesus. He was doing great, too, until he realized how foolish it was to get out of a perfectly good boat and he took his eyes off Jesus and...splash. Peter was the first disciple to say to Jesus, "You are the Messiah!" and also the first to tell Jesus that he'd gotten it all wrong when Jesus told the disciples about the crucifixion. Peter said, "Lord, even if everyone else should fall away, I will never desert you." But he didn't even make it till the cock crow the next morning before denying Jesus three times. Yeah, THAT Peter.

Well, it seems that Jesus knew more about him than he knew about himself. Following the resurrection, the community recognized Peter as a leader and the sermon we got a piece of this morning was Peter's first. It came to the crowd gathered at Pentecost.

The disciples had all been gathered together in one place. Jerusalem was full of Jews who had gathered there for this important festival. Then all heaven broke loose and there were tongues of fire and speaking in tongues and wagging tongues wondering if the disciples were drunk - all kinds of tongues because the Holy Spirit had come into the place where they were staying. Remember the Holy Spirit? Somebody was doing a series on the Holy Spirit.

Peter is the one who gets up to explain that they are not drunk. "It's too early in the morning for that," he says. "No, let me tell you what this is really about. It's really about Jesus." Here's our first clue about this Holy Spirit. When it comes, it's not a new revelation. It's really about Jesus.

Peter goes on to preach an incredibly powerful sermon. It went something like this:
Do you remember Jesus of Nazareth, friends? (He calls them friends - brothers actually.) Do you remember how he walked among us and did great wonders and signs? Do you remember how powerfully God used him while he was alive? Do you remember how you killed him...how you handed him over to the Romans for crucifixion? Do you remember how he died?

Here's the place where you might expect a little fireworks from the crowd. You might not expect the crowd to react favorably to being told that they had killed the man Peter was calling God's Son - the Messiah. But Peter had called them brothers. He was not pushing them away. He was reminding them that they were still connected. The promise God had made with Israel from the beginning was still holding them and reminding them of who God was. God's love was not gone.

The crowd listening to Peter was stunned. They hadn't known what to make of these crazy Spirit-filled disciples. But now, they call the disciples brothers (and sisters, presumably). Not only do they call them brothers, but they ask them for guidance. "Brothers, what should we do?"

Peter answers, in effect, "Repent. Turn around. Be baptized in Jesus' name. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." And the Holy Spirit will let them know that this crooked, messed-up world has distorted their minds about who they were and what they desire. The Holy Spirit will point them back to Jesus who has defeated sin and death.

Peter goes on: "And know that this promise is for your, and for your children, and for everybody who is far away from God." For everybody who is far away from God? This is not geography that Peter is talking about here. These were mostly Jesus listening in. They were in Jerusalem. They were at the supreme home base for God's people. The distance they had to travel was not the problem. They were far away because they didn't know who they were or whose they were. And that was the day that three thousand of them found out and they were baptized on the spot.

Ever felt far away from God? Ever felt like there was something you'd done that was going to keep you in the far country forever? Ever felt like you'd never feel like God's child again? Ever wonder what in the world it is that you're supposed to do? Yeah, me too.

Ever been on a long trip and think that you're never going to get there and then realize that you're already there? Now that's the stuff to live for.

The good news of Easter is not that the gap between us and God has gotten smaller because Christ rose from the dead. The good news of Easter is that we suddenly realize that the gap was never really there. We were far away, but God saw us in the distance and ran to meet us. God sees us in the distance, but how are we going to see God unless you repent, a word which means 'turn around,' and unless you believe the promise of your baptism. Repent, people. And believe the good news. Thanks be to God.