Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

Like the Ascension last week, Pentecost is more an event to be experienced rather than a theological concept to figure out. I think it was W. H. Auden who once wrote "A poem should not mean but be," and that is very much Pentecost as well.

And how cool that Pentecost falls on Mother's Day this year, because often in the early church the third part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is depicted as female (both the Greek and Hebrew words for the Spirit are in feminine gender). Like the best mothers, the Spirit is depicted in the story for this Sunday as moving through chaos, helping people move past differences to communicate and build relationships.

A couple of interesting things

• We were told back in chapter one that the folk gathered waiting for the Spirit were not just the 11 (now 12 again), but also some women who had followed Jesus, Jesus' mother and his brothers. So these original prophet/preachers were a diverse bunch.
• If you check out the nationalities of all those who heard the Spirited-speakers that day, you discover that Asia, Africa and Europe are all represented. Not an accident, I think, but rather a foreshadowing of where the gospel would spread first.
• The use of the Joel scripture indicates even greater diversity. The Spirit now will not only move in select prophets and leaders, but in everyone from the greatest to the least in society, of all ages and social conditions and genders.
  
• Fire, wind and water are all part of this tale as well: flames above the heads of the believers, the "violent" wind heralding the Spirit's presence and getting people's attention, and then, following the entirety of Peter's sermon (not in today's text), we get waters of baptism for 3000! The imagery of the Joel passage Peter quotes includes cosmic elements in the coming of the Spirit.
  

The marks of the Spirit then included holy, life-giving chaos, breaking down barriers of communication between people and people, and people and God, and the creation of new community among folk who would not ordinarily be in community with one another. Altogether amazing, and still the ways we can see the Spirit at work today.

Ascension

Acts 1:6-14
If you ask people to list the highlights of the Christian Year, my guess is that most Protestants, anyway, would not have Ascension high on the list, or even on the list at all. In fact, in 26 years of preaching, I think I've only preached one or two sermons on the topic.

It all seems so airy-fairy, like bad religious art with a white-robed Jesus floating up barefoot through the clouds into glory. Is it just Luke's way of trying to explain the very valid question that goes something like this: If Jesus rose from the dead in the flesh, then why is he not around today?!

It is a conundrum. If the Resurrection is so important, why didn't Jesus stick around. At the risk of inciting folk to label me a heretic (a la Carly Smithson who apparently got voted off American Idol for choosing to sing the title song from Jesus Christ Superstar and so vexed the conservative Christian Idol voters in one of the most bizarre popular culture events I've seen in a while), I would ask with Judas in Superstar why Jesus didn't really make a big splash post-Resurrection in order to completely convince people he was divine and therefore get a whole lot more convinced folk to follow God's way?

The text in Acts that tells Luke's second version of this (see the end of Luke's gospel for the first version) does make fairly clear Jesus' reasoning on this one. The enfleshed Jesus has limitations: he can only be in one place at one time. If he goes and the new earthly form of the presence of God is in Spirit, a Spirit that will move in and through people in many places and across time, then the word and work of God has legs, so to speak. The legs of the disciples, and our legs now.

But there is more to it than that. The issue of what the power of the Spirit, the continuing power and divine authority of Jesus, now dwelling in what would become the church, the issue of what that power is to be used for is also addressed here. The disciples asked Jesus if now was the time that the great political revolution would start, the one that would restore Israel to its historic greatness. Even after all this time with Jesus, the disciples are still looking back for their vision and not ahead. Jesus actually ignores the question because he has all along been talking about power not limited to kings and queens and empires. Will they get it post-Pentecost?

Will we?

Paul at the Areopagus

Acts 17:22-31

A sermon from Paul; maybe not a piece that would get people real excited, but this one is different from all the others in Acts in some ways. He is preaching not to a mixed crowd of the eager and the skeptical and the apathetic, but to a crowd of intellectuals and philosophers at one of the teaching places in Athens.

Now I pastor a church in New Haven, Connecticut, just down the hill from some of Yale's buildings, so I find connections with this passage that are different from when I was pastor of a small church in rural Michigan, when I connected more closely with other of Paul's writings.

So what does Paul say to the smart people? He does not chastise them or denigrate their religious impulses. He praises them for their seeking after God! I really don't think he is being facetious here. I think he honestly is reaching out to them at the place where he and they have something in common: a history of "groping" for truth, for understanding, for God.

He then tells them that in his seeking, he has found, through Christ, one God. He connects with this God; he knows this God as the one who has been living and moving in his life for many years. It's as though he recognizes someone he knows but has never seen before.

What's odd is that our reading for today leaves out the part of the response to this sermon. A couple of people responded to Paul and came to learn more about Jesus. Most did not. Most walked away, disappointed perhaps that Paul did not have a better argument, a more erudite philosophy perhaps?

This is a real tension place for me, as I expect it was for Paul. I am very highly educated at some of the best schools, and I serve a congregation with many highly educated and accomplished members. So do I preach to them with complex theological arguments, doing all manner of apologia? Or do I call them to search within all they know and all they are for the one in whom they live and have their being? Or both? How does the church and its preachers reach out to those who are among the wise and great thinkers of our world with Jesus? The Dawkins and other atheists are reaching out with complex (and often misleading) scientific, philosophical and literary arguments. Paul doesn't really respond to that kind of thing in Athens.

What is the gospel for Yale?

Emmaus Rd.

No, I have not abandoned the blog! Just got caught up in other things!

This week we continue the resurrection appearances of Jesus in our gospel readings. Luke 24:13-35. Some interesting pieces to lift up about this story follow.

• This is the only gospel in which this story appears. The man named "Cleopas" and his unnamed companion (some speculate it was his wife) also appears nowhere else in the scriptures. Obviously Cleopas was in the circle of those who followed Jesus, though not one of the 12. I love it that Jesus appears to those not in the inner circle: Mary and the other women, Cleopas. We need to remember that the early Christian Community consisted of far more than those 11 disciples!
• Cleopas and wife come to know Jesus in two important ways: first, through the scriptures. He reminds them of what they already know about him and how God has kept trying to make clear who God is!
• Second, they know him through the breaking of the bread. Obviously, this has Eucharistic implications (that last supper, by the way, Da Vinci notwithstanding, had to have included more than just the 12. If it was a Seder, then women had to be present at the very least!). Jesus took, blessed, broke and gave which are all basic movements of Holy Communion. More than once these post-Resurrection appearances involve eating! He had an actual human body and was not a ghost
• So excited were Cleopas and friend that they ran, in the dark!!!! back to Jerusalem to tell the others. Their hearts burned. They were inflamed!
  

Psalms 2 and 23

What an odd pairing of Psalms, 2 and 23! We are looking at these this week because our choir is singing Leonard Bernstein's amazing "Chichester Psalms," second movement, in which the men sing a vigorous Psalm 2 (in Hebrew) and the women sing a gentle Psalm 23. I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of these two Psalms and how they speak to each other.

Psalm 2 is a coronation Psalm, full of bluster and bravado as befits the crowning of a new king. God here is the tough guy, sticking up for little Israel and making it powerful beyond all reality and able to defeat any enemy.

Psalm 23 is the shepherd Psalm, full of comfort and trust.

Wow, what an emotional contrast, which Bernstein's music exploits wonderfully.

More and more I am seeing Psalm 2 as how we want God and the world to be and Psalm 23 as how God actually moves in the world. We really want a God who will come in and beat up our enemies with a rod, rather than a God who walks beside us with a very different kind of rod. We want a God who starves our enemies, rather than one who sets up a table for us in the presence of our enemies (does this mean the enemies eat with us?).

Here's my quote for the week on Psalm 23. It comes from James Mays' commentary on the book of Psalms in the Interpretation series (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994), p. 118.

"The trust expressed [in Psalm 23] is not just a matter of mood. Strength must be found, a way must be walked, harm and evil threatened. Enemies persist. That is the environment of trust. Trust is not a rosy, romantic, optimistic view of things. Its foundations are prayer and thanksgiving and the story of salvation. 'There is a great difference between this sleep of stupidity and the repose which faith produces.' (Calvin)"

Psalm 130

Psalm 130 falls into all kinds of categories. It is one of the Psalms of Ascent (meaning it was used in pilgrimage, as a way to prepare to attend religious festivals in Jerusalem). It is a lament psalm, but of a specific kind, a penitential lament. In other words, the lament here is not for what outside forces are doing to someone, but for how their life is not whole due to their own errors. It is also a psalm of hope.

A couple of fascinating things about this Psalm. First, although at the beginning it seems to be a prayer of confession by one person, it morphs into a prayer about the nation in the final two verses. This is in keeping with the sensibility of Hebrew prayer that there is little separation between an individual and the collective "people" or "nation." This is particularly hard for individual-oriented Americans to understand. When we sin as individuals, the sin impacts many people. When many people sin together (as when a nation makes mistakes), that sin impacts individuals.

The opening lines of this Psalm, in Latin, "De Profundis," pick up the strongest emotion possible. The "depths" are shorthand for the depths of the sea, the sense of the waters rising so high that we are covered and see no way back to the surface and the breath of life. Walter Brueggemann comments in his book The Message of the Psalms that "the gospel affirms that the cries from the depths are the voices to which Yahweh is peculiarly attuned." (p. 104).

That hope, that God is indeed attuned to hear the most agonizing cry of a human being, sits at the heart of the Psalm. The words "wait" and "hope" are synonyms in Hebrew. Together they are repeated five times in the Psalm. Elie Wiesel has said that a "passion for hope" is what makes a Jew a Jew. This is a hope rooted in God, beyond human capacity for understanding or action. It is not a hope rooted in what seems humanly possible or logical or realistic. And it is not a hope that can always be satisfied quickly.

I am coming to this Psalm this week keenly aware of the power of the individual penitential lament, but also keenly aware of the need for the church as well as our nation to engage in this activity. We need to be in touch with the honesty of lament and the possibility of hope (no, this is not an endorsement of Obama, though it is interesting how he has tapped into the basic human need and capacity for hope). Maybe most of all we need to learn how to wait in ambiguity.

Into the Hills

This week on our journey through the Psalms, we get to 121, "I lift up my eyes to the hills," etc. This one is a favorite of many, and partly because it is a very emotionally accessible song. For many, in the end, it doesn't matter what it may "mean," because it brings comfort and hope.

Nothing wrong with that!

But a few words about this Psalm are in order that, I hope, will increase appreciation and not just be needless explication.

First, those hills. This Psalm is one of 15 designated as "Psalms of Ascent," or Psalms that were sung as pilgrims traveled to Jerusalem for one festival or another. Jerusalem is at one of the higher point above sea level of all the land of Israel, so that journey was uphill all the way for many. One scholar (Erik Routley) thinks these Psalms (120-134) were like folk songs that people would sing while traveling. They are all short and to the point.

The hills. Three ideas. The hills were places of potential danger. Wild animals, tough climbs, robbers and assorted bad guys, uncertain weather. The traveler looked at the forbidding hills and wondered, "How am I going to make it through there?"

Or, the hills were places where other religions had shrines to idols, the "high places." These idols offered help of all kinds for everything that ailed or bothered you. Are these idols the place to get help?

Or, the hills mean the hills of Jerusalem itself, and particularly Mt. Zion, the hill on which the Temple stood. The hills are places of hope where the presence of God is felt. Where will my help come? From God on Mt. Zion at the Temple. The God who made all the hills, and all the creatures in them. Us, too.

The other interesting thing to me about this Psalm is the repetition of the Hebrew word "samar." I have found it translated in various Bibles as "keep," "watch over" (it's the same word used to designate the watchers at the city gates elsewhere in scripture), "guard," "take care of," "protect." God the watcher is attentive to the least detail (those rocks on which your feet might stumble, for example) as well as the big picture (sun and moon). God is present, deeply present in this Psalm. God doesn't do away with evil, but is present and caring for us through it. Much like Psalm 23 with which this Psalm is often paired.