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"Too Much for the Spirit"
Text: Acts 2 It is, first of all, Pentecost. The fiftieth day after Easter and the end of Eastertide or the season of Easter. The color changes (to red) in order to mark that change. Pentecost is one of those days of the Church year the purpose of which is not always clear even to the regular church attendees. We try to simplify its significance by telling our Sunday School children that it is the birthday of the Church. The church was born by the power of the Spirit, a mighty wind, Tongues of fire, Tongues of speech. "All in their own language" it says.
The suggestion here is that the word of God is simple enough to
understand. Love one another as I have loved you. A greater gift can
no one give than to lay down his life for another. That much God has
loved you. That much you shall love one another. And they all understood, each in their own language. Each in their
own culture. Each in their own ethnic group. Each in their own color
of skin and dress. No longer shall I call you servants for a servant
doesn't know what a master is doing. But I call you friends, for you
know in your heart what I am doing. I love you. It's just about as
simple as that. Just about as simple as it gets. And you shall love
one another. But then comes another aspect to this day: the ordering of the
church by the election of its leadership, amending of its constitution,
considering of its budget. And yet the work of the Holy Spirit must
find a concrete expression in a church in a specific time and place.
So here we are at an annual meeting for a church with an annual
budget of about $150,000, $24,000 of which we give away. We give time,
talent and treasure to a variety of things going on in our city in
ways that cannot be measured. St. Ben's feeding program. Food to pantries
at 21st and Mineral, a part of our city with the highest
rate of drive-by shootings. Capitol West Neighborhood Association,
a three-year-old church-based neighborhood association that in its
short life has made its mark on this part of the city, fighting a
never-ending battle to stabilize a part of our urban life through
a hundred short and long term projects. A mark of our Capitol West presence was shown to me recently when
a staff member of our newest County Supervisor called asking how her
boss can join this organization. We have established a wonderful partnership with a Goodwill program
which serves severely mentally handicapped senior citizens. We together manage a staff of 11 full and part time folks and
our staff meetings are filled, not only with the negotiation of space,
but also many jokes, stories about things going on in all our lives
and mutual sharing of each others' burdens and joys. The work of the
Holy Spirit takes on a concrete expression in the goings and comings
of this organization of God's people. And this day, we elect our volunteer leadership. A leadership
which lovingly gives many hours to manage a complex small business
trying to witness to a simple message that we should love one another
as we have been loved. Thus the irony of this day: The celebration of the presence in
the Church of the Holy Spirit, while pausing to read annual reports
that try to tell in a decidedly unspiritual way the story of how,
exactly, we go about the loving of one another in a concrete world
with a building that makes decidedly unspiritual demands on us, like
leaking roofs and aging boilers and cracking sidewalks and burned
out lights. The Holy Spirit founded and continues to sustain the Church. But
it doesn't change the light bulbs and it doesn't make sure the payroll
taxes get paid in a way that the Internal Revenue Service would appreciate.
The work of the wild and woolly Holy Spirit always must take a
concrete form, making annual meetings and budget considerations always
a necessity. I'm not the first to wonder why we just cannot get on
with the work of the Holy Spirit, get on with loving one another,
without having to have church buildings or budgets or paid clergy
or elected leaders or committees. But after the day of Pentecost, the work of the Spirit had to
be ordered in some way. Monasteries are deeply spiritual places, but
they are ordered by rules. The Rule of St. Benedict is the best of
them all. It is a rule that, for all of its orderliness, is really
one of the finest pieces of spiritual literature in the Western World.
It is spiritual while at the same time, it attends to the specifics
of community life. Someone has observed that so many utopian communities
have come and gone, and mostly they disintegrate in arguments about
who will take out the garbage. The rule of St. Benedict makes sure
that everyone shares in the work of taking out the garbage because
that is a concrete way in which we express our love for one another.
Churches are founded and sustained by the Holy Spirit, but every
church must find specific and concrete ways in which to work out the
details of its life, or it will die. And still the chaotic reign of the Holy Spirit comes through,
often in unexpected ways. The cry of a child during worship, the exclamation
of someone who is deeply moved. It often comes through in our expressions
of joys and concerns that happen in the midst of our worship. The
power of that moment in worship was brought home to me by Kathleen
Norris, who writes about her little Presbyterian church in North Dakota.
Norris is a poet who lived for many years in New York City. When she
inherited her grand-mother's plot of land in North Dakota, she and
her husband decided to live there for a time just to see what life
is like on that land. Her first book was called "Dakota" and is now a classic
piece of spiritual literature. Her second book is called "Cloister Walk" and it is
a book about her life as an oblate in a Benedictine monastery and
her continued life on the Dakota prairie. Here is a segment from her
book about her little church. You'll recognize this church in her
writing: At the worship services of Hope and Spencer there's a time
after the sermon, and before the Lord's Prayer, in which people are
asked to speak of any particular joys they wish to share with the
congregation, or concerns they want us to address in our communal
prayer on that Sunday, and also to pray over during the coming week.
It's an invaluable part of our worship, a chance to discover things
you didn't know: that the young woman sitting in the pew in front
of you is desperately worried about her gravely ill brother in Oregon,
that the widower in his eighties sitting across the aisle is overjoyed
at the birth of his first great-grandchild. All of this pleases the gossip; I've been told that on Sunday
afternoons the phone lines in town are hot with news that's been picked
up in church. For the most part, it's a good kind of gossip, its main
effect being to widen the prayer circle. It's useful news as well;
I'm one of many who make notes on my church bulletin; so and so's
in the hospital; send a card, plan a visit. Our worship sometimes
goes into a kind of suspended animation, as people speak in great
detail about the medical condition of their friends or relatives.
We wince; we squirm; we sigh; and it's good for us. Moments like this
are when the congregation is reminded of something that all pastors
know; that listening is often the major part of ministry, that people
in a crisis need to tell their story, from beginning to end, and the
best thing -- often the only thing -- that you can do is to sit there
and take it in. And we do that pretty well. I sometimes feel that these moments
are the heart of our worship. What I think of as the vertical dimension
of Presbyterian worship -- the hymns in exalted language that bolster
our faith, the Bible readings, the sermon that may help us through
the coming week -- finds a strong (and necessary) complement in the
localized, horizontal dimension of these simple statements of "joys
and concerns."(1) Well, nobody these days puts things as well as Norris, who has
discovered the real source of her poetry in a specific land inhabited
by specific people with specific joys and concerns. And that is the way the Holy Spirit works. The Spirit intercedes for us with "sighs too deep for words"
when we do not know how to pray as we ought (Romans 8:26 ). The Spirit challenges us and moves us in directions we never would
have planned. The Spirit brings us here for a couple of hours each week so that
we can reorder our lives according to a Holy and wholly mysterious
spiritual presence. Thus the tension between the orderliness of a congregation and
the white hot experiences of the Holy Spirit felt and experienced
by the early church is our mood today. We are born of the Holy Spirit. We are born of a pentecostal fire.
And yet we know that to truly love one another, we've got to make
sure that we share in taking out the garbage. The work of the Holy Spirit must take some concrete expression,
and it might as well be here It might as well be now It might as well be you and I Amen. +++ |