Are You Listening? (5/15/16)
Altarpiece, Church of the Holy Spirit, Singapore
Some Bible stories are so familiar that we fail to hear them with an appropriate sense of wonder. And some stories seem very quaint; they don't fit with our modern, scientific mindset. This is certainly the case with the story of Pentecost. The tongues of fire are strange and hard to believe, but this is a really important story. It's worth taking a closer look.
Are You Listening?
(5/15/16)
Sermon
Good morning!
Every time I hear this morning’s lesson from Acts, I’m reminded of my freshman
year of college. In particular, verses 13-15, in which some people say, “they
are filled with new wine,” and Peter disputes this by saying, “these people are
not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” Filled
with new wine . . . at nine o’clock in the morning. At this point, you might be
wondering why this reminds me of college. Or worse, maybe you’re not wondering
at all!
Actually,
this story starts at about 10:30, on the morning of August 28th, or
maybe August 30th, 1989. And yes, I had to look those dates up. I
was a freshman in college; it was my first day of classes, my second class, to
be precise. It was Political Science 109, Intro to American Government. The
professor was late. That seemed really strange for the first day of class. Five
minutes went by. No professor. Ten minutes passed, still no professor. The
students were anxious. Some people talked about leaving, but most of us were
freshmen and we weren’t sure how long you had to wait before it was safe to
leave.
Somewhere
between 10:40 and 10:45, the professor stumbled into class. He was drunk at
10:30 in the morning! Or so it seemed. For a couple minutes, he tried to slur
his way through the beginnings of a lecture. Then one student finally had the
nerve to call him out. This led to a discussion of what the professor’s duties
to the class were, how the law dealt with someone who had a disability or a
disease, how those laws have changed over time, and that sort of thing. When I
left that classroom, I realized that I knew a lot less about law and government
than I thought I did. I also got some laughs out of the professor’s drunk act.
The fancy,
academic term for what had happened is social dislocation. I went into that
classroom with a set of expectations. I assumed that the professor would offer
an engaging lecture that introduced some of the key topics for the semester and
that everything would proceed in an orderly fashion. I was shaken loose from my
previous expectations and my mind was opened for deeper learning. Of course,
some students weren’t amused by this. A lot of my classmates were studying to
be engineers or doctors or accountants. They were taking the class to fulfill a
humanities requirement. They had to be there and they were hoping that
Political Science 109 would be easier than advanced calculus or circuits or
organic chemistry. They weren’t there for the professor’s amateur
theatrics—they just wanted to come to class, find out what they were going to
learn, and get on with it. They expected something neat and tidy, a nice,
orderly class. What they got was a professor who challenged their expectations.
Some of us embraced this approach, while others grumbled that this wasn’t what
they had signed up for.
This is the
reality of the story of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit blew into town and
overturned everyone’s expectations. Now I have to tell you, this is a difficult
text to preach on for two reasons. First, it’s a very familiar story and it’s
been tamed by our culture. In fact, the whole gospel has been tamed by our
culture: we celebrate a baby in a manger; instead of the crucifixion and
resurrection, we celebrate a bunny who brings hard-boiled eggs and
chocolate—don’t get me wrong, chocolate can be worthy of some celebration, but
it’s not the same as the hope that we have in the resurrection.[1]
What’s more,
the tongues of flame seem like a quaint story about a magic trick. The story
doesn’t fit with our modern, scientific mindset. It becomes easier to let our
culture tame this story and move on to something that’s easier to explain,
maybe with historical details about the Greco-Roman world in the first century.
That’s certainly my typical approach. It’s easy to blame the culture and it’s
even easier to blame the culture if we ignore that we, too, are part of this
culture.
How do we
fall into this trap? How is it that we let the culture tame the gospel? I think
we tend to pick the parts of our culture that we like, and then ignore or write
off the rest. We want to see ourselves as righteous and we only listen to those
people or those parts of the culture who sound like us. This is dangerous. In
seminary I learned that it’s really important to listen to as many voices as
possible. I read a really interesting article in Presbyterian Outlook the other day and I think it offers a good
illustration of this.
The article
was written by a young missionary named Kate Taber. She is appointed to
Israel-Palestine and she works on peacemaking and reconciliation. She points
out that there are a great many Christians who still live in the Holy
Land—Palestinian Arab Christians. Taber writes:
There is a common anecdote among
Palestinian Christians I’ve met. They tell me that people often ask them when
they converted to Christianity, assuming that they are converts from Islam.
“Pentecost!” my friends respond. Their humorous response is also the truth. The
Palestinian Christian church that exists today is the oldest in the world. They
are the descendents of the church that was born in this very land; indigenous
Christians have been here ever since.[2]
Let me tell you, I have also been to Palestine and I have
heard these same stories. What we see on the news is portrayed as a conflict
between Arabs and Jews; the Palestinian Christian perspective is left out of
the narrative.
I knew very
little about this perspective before I visited the Holy Land. I was used to the
narrative of the U.S. media: Israel is our ally and the Palestinians are
terrorists, out to destroy Israel. I have seen many reports on the news of
rocket attacks that originate in Gaza—rockets fired into Israel that often destroy
property and occasionally kill Israeli civilians. But that is just one story. I
found a much more complicated picture on the ground.
While we were
in Palestine we visited the Dheisheh refugee camp. We heard some harrowing
stories. One young woman that we met was a young child during one of the
uprisings in Palestine. She was eight years old. One day she was playing in the
house when a group of Israeli soldiers pounded on the door. They wanted to use
her family’s home as a barracks or something. The whole family—11 people in
all—were to be confined to a single bedroom, with no sink, no stove, and no
toilet. They were to stay there until the Israeli soldiers were ordered to
leave. At the last minute, the soldiers relented and allowed them all to move
to their grandmother’s house. They were locked in the two-room house, but the
Red Cross delivered supplies, which could be raised to an upper balcony by a
hoist. It was unpleasant, but they survived. As the young woman told us:
The soldiers then left and we thought
the nightmare was over. But we thought wrong.
. . . the nightmare began again—the nonstop shooting, anxiety and fear
began again. The worst thing is that this time they didn’t only endanger our
lives, and violate our rights, but they offended our religion. The soldiers
that came the second time were stricter than the ones before. They were of the
“religious” kind. They took all the crosses that were in the house and
destroyed them. They broke them, stuffed them between shoes and even peed on
them.[3]
This was a very difficult story to hear. The young woman was
a Christian, like me. Yet some of the Israeli soldiers treated her and her
family like common criminals.
I was very
angry, but our trip leader, a professor named Steve Tuell, reminded us that we
cannot let this story stand alone as a single story, as if it is the only story
of the occupation, the Israeli military, or the entire nation of Israel.[4]
One story is not enough. As Christians, we are called to listen to many
stories, including the uncomfortable stories. But we live in a culture that
seeks to eliminate the uncomfortable stories. Heck, we like it when we
eliminate the uncomfortable stories. If we give in to the culture then we can
eliminate those voices that distract us from our own desires. We seek to
eliminate the discomfort at all costs—even when that cost is to ignore the
message of the gospel.
That’s what
we miss when we gloss over this story of Pentecost. The story of the gospel
doesn’t end with the crucifixion of Jesus. It doesn’t even end with the
resurrection. The New Testament offers a lot of stories about discipleship—how
we are called to be disciples of Christ. These stories are meant to prepare us
for the time when the human Jesus won’t be walking beside the disciples. Then
we hear the story of the resurrection. It reminds us of our ultimate hope in
the risen Christ! And even there, the story is not over!
The Book of
Acts shows us how the first Apostles were called to continue Christ’s mission
here on earth. This story shows how God, through the power of the Holy Spirit,
equipped the Apostles for that mission. Simply put, the Spirit gave them the
ability to hear one another. That’s it. The Spirit equipped all of the
believers to truly listen to one another—nobody learned to speak a new
language, but they were all empowered to listen!
So who are
you listening to?
We spend a
lot of time worrying about the fate of the church in the United States. We can
see our numbers declining and we get anxious. We hope that our troubles will go
away if we hire a new, young pastor, because he—or she!—will attract young
families to our church. Or maybe if we offered some new and innovative
programs—a good youth ministry, perhaps—that would bring new people in. Or how
about two services? Maybe if we offered more different times to worship, we’d
get more people in church. Or maybe not.
My friends,
these are the solutions that come from our culture: better advertizing, better
products. A church, a worshiping community is NOT a product. The hope of the resurrection
is not a product or a service. It isn’t something that you see on TV or that
you can buy at South Hills Village! It is the culture that tells us we must go
out and buy something to have satisfaction, to have fulfillment.
The gospel
tells us that we have hope! Let me repeat that. We have hope! We have the hope
of a new life in the risen Christ. The gospel also tells us that we have work
to do in this world. And the gospel tells us these things through stories.
Sometimes the stories are uncomfortable. Sometimes they seem strange or quaint.
Sometimes these stories don’t fit with our modern sensibilities. And sometimes
we just don’t want to work hard enough to live into the responsibilities that
these stories describe.
Here’s the
problem: If the only place where we’re listening for God’s voice is here, in a
church, on a Sunday morning, then we’re not doing our job! God isn’t done with
us or with the institutional church, but God isn’t going to wait for us to get
our acts together. God will send the Holy Spirit wherever God needs to send it.
Period! We can fall in with the movement of the Spirit, we can ignore it, we
can even try to stand in its way, but at the end of the day—or perhaps I should
say, at the end of the age—God’s work will be done, whether we like it or not!
The only question is: are we willing to do the work?
Now I’ll
admit; that’s a heavy burden. But guess what? When we turn ourselves over to
God, when we offer our hands and our hearts and our minds to do God’s work here
on Earth, God gives us the tools that we need to do that work. The Holy Spirit
equips us for God’s purposes! That is what this story from Acts shows us. Think
about it. God doesn’t magically make everyone speak the same language. Rather,
through the power of the Holy Spirit, everyone is able to understand one
another. So go out there and listen! Thanks be to God. Amen!
Benediction
Now, beloved,
as you depart from this place, remember that we are an Easter people. We are
called to be Christ’s church in the world. We are called to love one another as
Jesus loved us. So go forth and be instruments of God’s peace and
reconciliation. Do not return evil for evil to any person, but know that we are
all loved by God, and that we are called to reflect that love to everyone we
meet. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, let all God’s children say, Amen!
[1]
Frank L. Crouch, “Commentary on Acts 2:1-21,” retrieved from http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2457
[2]
Kate Taber, “”Global Perspectives on Pentecost: Spirit of Steadfastness,” Presbyterian Outlook, retrieved from: http://pres-outlook.org/2015/05/global-perspectives-on-pentecost-spirit-of-steadfastness/
[3]
Steven Tuell, “The Danger of a Single Story.” retrieved from http://www.steventuell.net/?p=1381
[4]
Ibid.
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