As we sped
to this weekend and our resumption of public worship for the first time in
what, 10 or 11 weeks, I was excited to learn it going to be on the Feast of
Pentecost. It would have been nice to
have had a full blown Easter celebration when this all first began, but now we
have learned and unlearned and learned more about the disease. Medical experts tell us we should not really
gather, as the close confines and proximity to one another increases the
chances of the church becoming a hot spot for new infections. Politicians have used the gathering of the
Church as a bullet point in their re-election efforts. Some want us to obey the law of the land;
others want us to gather and pray to God to protect and deliver the
country. We cannot safely share the
Easter feast in the Parish Hall. The
Easter egg hunt would seem a bit out of place.
All those trappings we associate with Easter around here, I think, would
have led us to lament the new normal. So
I was happy that public worship was resuming on the Feast of Pentecost.
Notice, I
have been careful not to say we re-opened.
Some pastors have used that language.
We have merely been forbidden from public worship events and big
gatherings, but the work of the parish has continued. As a parish, we have fed maybe 4000 people
during the pandemic. We have helped keep
a number of families now facing unemployment and loss of all income alive for
nearly three full months. Those who have
helped unload and load and distribute the food stuffs, the depends, the
toothbrushes, the toilet paper, and everything else can testify just how
important our work was and is to those most hurting around us. Feeding in God’s name. That’s not a closed church.
I wish more
of you could have been around here or that church would have opened when the
trees and bushes and flowers were in full bloom. A few Adventers have made it over during the
pandemic, but most have missed the thank you’s from those who came here to walk
on level ground, who brought their children to play on the playground, who
brought their children to teach them to ride bicycles, or who just sat on the
courtyard bench seeking the peace that passes all understanding in the midst of
a pandemic and resulting economic upheaval that has left us all feeling anything
but calm. Again and again I was thanked
for giving folks a safe space for those activities, for planting beautiful
flowers and trees that help them see the promises of God in the hope of spring
growth. A few even contributed money to
help feed the hungry as they learned about that ministry or for things less
prosaic like mowing and trimming the grounds.
Tending to our garden patches in the wildernesses. That is not a closed church.
Of course,
some of you would like to hope that I have had a good rest these last
weeks. Unfortunately for me, someone has
had to be here when folks needed food, to arrange the various online services
during the week, to learn how to be a bit of a producer, to handle the visitor
after visitor who had been forced to face the questions of their own mortality
because of this pandemic, and to do the best I could, mostly over the phone,
for Adventers who had their own pastoral care needs, which ranged from fears of
isolation to “I’m going to kill those with whom I am locked down with” because
of the pandemic; who had fears about treating one illness or one injury for
fear of contracting a worse one; who worried about which doctor to believe or
whether our government was intentionally lying to us. No, Coronatide has proven exhausting for come
clergy, myself included. This Sunday
represented an opportunity to get back to normal, to resume public worship, and
to fellowship with one another, even if to a limited degree, to make sure we
were mostly ok.
Then the
events of Memorial Day happened. Then we
all watched in, what, dumbfounded horror(?), as an officer casually knelt on
the neck of a counterfeiter(?) and snuffed the life out of him. Most of my pastoral conversations the first
couple days were with non-Adventers. My
minority friends demanded to know where God was in the midst of THAT. My law enforcement friends were worried
they’d be painted with the same brush as has happened in every case of police
brutality, from their perspective. As
the protests and riots began, conversations got longer and more in depth, but
still few Adventers. Then the riots came
to Nashville. Then it was no longer
“their” problem but “our” problem. I
knew how bad it must be on Saturday when I came down to church to work and had
an officer wanting to speak to me for just a minute.
Part of
your ministry at Advent is making clergy available. Your support of me makes it possible for
folks in our community to find a clergy person who will talk with people about
God and life and whatever struggles they are having. Canon Fred and Captain H, I think, did their
best to get officers to trust me, but these things take time. I had met this officer, actually I met several
officers in the days and weeks that followed, after a suicide up at the bridge
by Wendy’s and the Hampton Inn. He’s a
normal guy like most of us; his job is just thanklessly demanding. His worry.
His worry in the immediate aftermath of all this was how to keep from
becoming like that officer. Day in and
day out he, and other metro officers, face the things in our community that we
don’t want to believe exist. In some
sense, we treat them like we treat soldiers, just without all the love and
support. When they pull us for speeding,
we bitch and threaten. When they are slow
to an accident, we gripe and complain.
Yet, here he was, worried he could become another video.
By the end
of our conversation, I knew my Pentecost message had to change. No longer was I going to be able to give you
time to lament the loss of the last 11 weeks.
No longer was I going to be able to give you hope, by sharing some of
the great work that happened at this parish thanks to your prayers, your
support, and, in some cases, your work and heavy lifting. Heck, in the sermon I knew I needed to give,
I was likely to suck the joy out of our renewed gathering. Such, though, is my calling. It is my responsibility to disciple you in
the faith, to encourage you to pattern your lives after our Lord’s, and to
remind you that long before we receive our glorious and eternal reward as first
born sons and daughters of the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, we have
so much work to do.
Our story
from Acts today is familiar. In some
sense, it is probably too familiar. The
apostles and disciples have been waiting as instructed in Jerusalem for the
coming of the Holy Spirit. On this day
in Acts, the Holy Spirit comes in power.
Flames appear over the heads of the disciples, and they begin speaking
in all the Mediterranean languages. The
crowd is stunned. Our translators say
“amazed,” “bewildered,” “astonished” and other such adjectives. The experience so stuns the audience that
they must grasp for a reason, a reason that makes no sense. These Galileans must be drunk, that’s how
this is happening.
Pick a
group that you mock constantly. Pick a
town or state that serves as the butt of your jokes about education, expertise,
good manners, dependable workers, whatever.
Imagine people from that town impressing you. That’s what’s happening in our scene. The people from the backwater part of the
backwater province are speaking like well educated individuals in the languages
of their hearers. Got it? Good.
I talked a
minute ago about the translators’ chosen adjectives and about our familiarity
with the story. When our translators use
words like “amazed” and “bewildered” and “astonished,” we tame them. By that we assign a positive motive or
experience to them. But those words in
Greek carry a sense of fear or discombobulation with them, a sense of “this is
not how this is supposed to happen.” We
treat the Pentecost experience as if it was a cool or expected experience of
those who were present. We rob it of some
of the visceral emotional impact that it had on both the hearers and the speakers.
Think of it
in terms of “the fear of the Lord.” How
often do folks tell us that it was not really fear that people talked or wrote
about, that it was more of a “healthy respect”?
Yet how does every single person in Scripture behave when confronted by
God or His messengers? They are
terrified! For humans to come into
contact with a holy, righteous, other God is a fearful experience. The root word in Greek is phobia. Phobia is not a reasonable or healthy
respect. Our phobias terrify us. And this terror is not condemned. What does God or His messengers say to His or
their audience? Do not be afraid. There’s no “you should not be afraid, you
need only a healthy respect.” No, it’s a
recognition that the human response includes that unsatisfied emotion we call
terror.
Each of
those words used to describe the emotional experience of the audience likewise
contains an element of or strong suggestion of what you and I would call an
unsatisfied or negative emotion, just like terror in “Fear of the Lord.”
For those
of us who are super Anglican in our way of thinking, CS Lewis captures this in
his description of Aslan. Aslan is a
good lion, but he’s not a tame lion.
Good I see the laughing nods.
Now, back
to our consideration of others from that town or state or background we tend to
ridicule. Were they to begin acting in a
matter that defied our stereotyped impression, how would we feel? If we constantly joked about and looked down
upon those from a rural Appalachia background, and then found them talking
nuclear physics to us, what would be our reaction and discomfort? If we thought of a neighborhood as being
undesirable, but then found ourselves befriended by someone from that
neighborhood, someone who extols the neighborhood, what would be our reaction
and discomfort? I could use far more
specific examples, but I am hoping we understand what is happening in this
passage. To us, it is a glorious
fulfillment of God’s promises to His people.
To those who witnessed the event, it was scary, pulling-the-rug-out-from-under-their-certainty,
and worrisome. What is happening?
As I have
shared in the last few weeks, our empowerment by the Holy Spirit is our proof
of the Resurrection of Jesus. Sometimes
we gripe that we would like to stick our fingers and hands in Jesus’ wounds or
see Him like the Apostles and disciples so that we could have their faith. Our empowerment by the Holy Spirit,
Pentecost, could not have occurred had Jesus stayed here. You and I learn that He was raised from the
dead by our ability to accomplish or say those things beyond us. Hopefully, each one of you present in person
and virtually have those moments in your life when, looking back on it, you
know, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God saw you through it. It may seem to pale by comparison to the
stories of others, but I hope you have moments in your life when you
experienced the power of the Holy Spirit.
If you did, you know He was raised from the dead! He had to Ascend to the Father to make it
possible for the Holy Spirit to come.
As a result
of His Ascension, it is left to us to herald God’s love, mercy, forgiveness,
justice, and whatever else He calls us to herald in the world around us. And make no mistake, our work is out
there. We gather here for training and
teaching and encouraging and fellowship and feeding, but all of this is so we
can be prepared to do the work He has given us to do in those places where we
live, work, and play out there, in the wilderness. And boy, has anyone noticed what is happening
in the wilderness this week? Has anyone
noticed that God’s voice is ever more necessary? Anyone else feel like our Diocesan Prayer,
composed at a time when the only worry was a continent was on fire, was
prophetic?
Sitting
here today, you may be worried that the world is unhinged, that the certainties
of your life are far more transient that you wanted to believe, that we are
streaming toward anarchy. More
importantly, you may be thinking you have nothing to offer as a solution to
this mess. If you find yourself agreeing
with that statement, you are listening to the wrong voice! By virtue of your baptism God has made a
covenant with you! He will be glorified
in your life, and you will be glorified in Him for eternity, if you trust
Him. It’s a wonderful promise. It’s an amazing opportunity. But it comes with responsibility.
You and I
each know the root cause of all that we are seeing and hearing and experiencing
in these riots and bullhorns screaming at each other. It is sin.
So long as those around us are steeped in their sin, so long as they are
led by the enemy of God to believe they can fix everything, including their own
hearts, these efforts at reform are doomed to fail. We know this!
We have experienced that truth ourselves! We are witnesses!
So, our
first job is to point people to Christ Jesus, to point them to the One through
Whom lasting transformation is possible.
Our first job is to teach others that they cannot save themselves, that
they cannot fix the world themselves, and that they cannot fix others. Sin is simply too powerful for humanity to
overcome. . . on its own!
But God
offers them and us a lasting eternal relationship. It is a relationship based on love and truth
and mercy. It is a relationship that
bears all things and hopes all things because our relationship, however poorly,
models the relationship of our Lord and the Father and means that we bear
crosses and trust in God’s redemptive power, even as Jesus did almost 2000
years ago!
We are
called to give up the fear, the pain, the judgment, the need for revenge and trust
that God will see those accounted by Christ’s offering on the Cross, and that,
with our brothers and sisters in Him, we can begin to scratch out more of His
kingdom on this, our island home.
All of
that, of course, brings us to our second responsibility: obedience. If God is calling us to do something, we need
only to obey. Our only obligation to Him
and to those around us is to trust Him.
But,
Brian, I can’t halt riots. I can’t fix
subtle systematic injustices. I can’t
fix all that is broken in the world.
No! You cannot! Only God can do those things. But, for whatever mysterious reasons, God has
chosen to work His redemptive power through frail, sinful human beings like
ourselves. He wants the world to
recognize that it cannot fix itself; that true power is found only in Him; and
that He gladly shares all He has with those whom He calls His own.
Pentecost
coming at this time in our life, both in terms of Coronatide and in terms of
the civil unrest, was perfectly timed.
You and I are reminded, both by Scripture and by our bishop’s teaching,
that nothing is the same after an encounter with the Holy Spirit. Perspective and life both change. Church will not function the way most of us
would like. Those forced to remain at
home would likely love to be among us. Those
who have the gift of hospitality likely miss feeding us and sharing in those
coffee hour conversations. Touchy feely
folks have had to give up hugs. Things will
be different. But as I reminded us in
pastoral letters and prior sermons, our business has remained the same, and we
have seen God’s redemptive power in our midst.
We who self-identified as a country club seven or eight years ago are
thought of by others as a church. People
in our neighborhood have asked, and followed through, if they could help in our
mission! Even in the midst of a
shutdown, they see God at work in our grounds, in our pantry, and our
faithfulness.
But, as
always, our job is not done. Until He
comes again it is our job to continue to show His mercy and love and redemptive
power to a world that does not wish to see or hear. In some sense, it is thankless. In some sense, it may seem pointless. But we serve a God Who promises that His Word
never goes forth without purpose, Who promises each one of us that we are His
beloved and that we will share in His glory.
And so we go.
Brothers
and sisters, the pain and the fear in the world is ever increasing. Individually, neither you nor I could tackle
the injustices perceived in the world.
But, precisely because of our work and because of our Lord, you and I
are empowered to bring His grace and wisdom to those fears and pains. This week alone, I have shared with some
minorities what I have learned counseling law enforcement over the years, I
have shared with law enforcement officers some of what I have learned from
minorities over the years—and don’t get me started about my conversations with
minority law enforcement officers. Will
lasting change come? I don’t know. Do I think those specific individuals would
treat the other as created in God’s image were they to encounter one another in
the wilderness? I hope so. I’ve no guarantee. But that’s all I was given to do with them this
week.
Some of you
are far more influential than you know.
Some of you have the ear of politicians in power. Because you have contributed early in
campaigns, politicians give ear to your voice.
Maybe God is calling you to call upon them to get serious about a
specific reform? Maybe you think schools
need to be fixed? Maybe you think prison
reform is required? Maybe you think police
training needs to be reformed? When I
look around at us I see amazingly talented and well-respected individuals. I see people who were excellent at running
companies, educating students, researching, running numbers, and who knows what
else. I see people who have been forced
to be courageous at times in the way they approach issues in their life. I see people who have glorious failure in their
background. Most of all, I see the
mystical Body of Christ when we gather.
I see the possibility that we can accomplish whatever He asks of us, as
long as we trust Him and His Word and Example.
I see a congregation that longs for it to be on earth even as it is in
heaven this day, that the world might know and turn to Him through Whom all
things are possible. I see a group of
people who know the fears and hurts and pains among those groping in the
wilderness and desire nothing more than to point them to His glorious light,
that all might turned and be saved, and know themselves created indelibly and
loved in ways we cannot fathom or understand.
I see a church that recognizes we are on a wilderness road not just for
our diocese, but for the world around us!
The world
around us, my friends, is crazy. A
pandemic is sweeping the earth. Economic
shutdown is affecting everyone. We have
seen too many people treated like animals rather than the human beings we know
them to be. In some cases we have been
stuck in close proximity with folks who drive us nuts; in other cases we have
had to stay away from those whom we love dearly to keep them safe. It is auspicious on this day that we remind
ourselves that our work, the work of the Church, continues. It is right that we remind ourselves that the
beginning of peace on earth and good will toward all men begins in the life and
work of Christ Jesus. And it is right
that we remind ourselves that we, just like those women and fishermen and tax collector
and countless others saints through time, are those whom God has chosen to be
His vessels of grace in the world around us!
Even better, is fitting that we are reminded that He will see us
through, not because of our expertise or gifts, but because He is always
working, redeeming, and sustaining the world.
In Christ’s Peace,
Brian†
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