May 11, 2008
(The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday)
I Have Seen the Lord
by
The Rev. Joe Behen, Clergy Assistant
Acts 2:1-21 • Psalm 104:25-35,
37 • 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
• John 20:19-23
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Today’s gospel lesson takes up immediately after Mary Magdalene’s experience of the risen Christ at the empty tomb. “Do not cling to me,” Jesus had told her, but “go” to the disciples. And she went. What she told them was simply this: “I have seen the Lord.” This is Mary’s last appearance in the gospel. She leaves us by passing on her faith to the disciples, whose journey of faith is now taken up once again this morning.
The disciples will rejoice two verses later when they see the Lord. As they sit in the house with “the doors locked for fear,” they have no control over the situation whatsoever. That is the source of their fear, the absence of any sense of control over what happens to them. But Jesus appears to them, and offers them peace in the midst of fear. And then, after receiving the Holy Spirit, they are sent. “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus tells them, “so I send you.” It seems that we cannot understand discipleship apart from a sense of being “sent” by God. And this being sent appears to be closely associated with the passing on of the faith. But how is this to be done? What does the writer of this gospel think that the passing on of the faith looks like? I think that these are the kinds of questions about our journey of faith that are being wrestled with in these passages.
This “being sent” element of Christianity seems to be understood quite differently among the various Christian traditions. In fact, you can sometimes identify a person’s tradition by how they understand the passing on of faith. A Catholic monk once told me about a brief conversation he had with a visitor to his monastery. Almost immediately after exchanging neighborly greetings, the visitor asked the monk, “Brother, have you been saved?” The monk said that he thought for a moment, identified the nature of the question, and then responded, “What need would I have of a Savior now, if I had already been saved?” Neither of them knowing where to go from there, they pleasantly but directly parted company. I had an Ethics professor at my seminary who said that she was once asked if she had made Jesus “her personal savior.” “No thanks,” she responded, “I’ll just take the Jesus that everyone else has.”
I was driving down Antioch Road last week and I saw two young men walking down the street wearing black suits and carrying small black bags. I wondered if they belonged to one of the traditions in which part of the journey of faith involves spending a year going door to door and sharing the faith. For me, this image of these two walking through the world, doing what they were doing simply because they had been sent, was more powerful than the memory of the conversations I’ve had when the doorbell rang. And this says something to me about my own understanding of discipleship, about what is communicated about faith, and how it comes to be communicated.
What does the life that we live say to others? Do they look beyond our words and see primarily a grasping for control and power within our community? Do they see a criticizing of those who would do things differently than we ourselves would do? Or do they perhaps see a long, drawn out attempt to convince ourselves and others that we are the model Christian that others should emulate? Or rather, does our life appear as something whose essence looks like that which gives us life itself, a vital faith that looks critically at the self before the other, but that looks to care for the other before it looks to comfort the self. I’m not suggesting here that the image that others have of us is what matters most. What I am suggesting is simply, as we already know from the basics of human psychology, that when words are not in line with lived lives, it is the words that ring false.
I suspect that the image I have of the two young men walking through Gladstone resonates with me in a way that a conversation with them might not, because they are, in a way, living their “sent-ness.” Their walking says more to me than their talking, but it makes me know, that whatever they might say had I stopped, they are at least sincere in their talking. One has to live the faith before it can really be imparted in any way to another.
So how, or what, are we to do with our “sent-ness?” How does the author of this gospel understand the faith journey, the passing on of faith? Very few specifics are given, because being sent has less to do with what, exactly, one is sent to do, than it does whose work one is going to do. For Mary as for many of us, it is about letting go as opposed to clinging to. For the disciples in today’s passage, the peace that Jesus gives allows them to make their lives proclaim their faith rather than their fears. They will live lives that in effect say, as Mary said, “I have seen the Lord.”
I found myself last weekend at the commencement service at William Jewell College. The speaker was Bill Snyder, the retired K-State football coach. He told the graduates that very few decisions they will make in their lives will have much effect on their future. Two, three, perhaps four or so of those decisions, however, will have enormous impact on them, perhaps changing the entire course of their lives, for better or for worse. We rarely know at the time, he told them, whether a particular decision that confronts us is life changing or not. But it is the habits that we create in making the small, insignificant decisions that we are bound to follow when the big decisions approach.
This says a lot about discipleship as well. It is the daily practices and decisions that we make when it seems that it hardly matters, that make us who we are. But if the habits we develop are those of discipleship and not of our own creation, then we are not alone in trying to develop such habits. “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit offers us the peace that makes our “going out” with rejoicing, the only possible response. But how is it that the Spirit’s presence changes things? We celebrate this day the giving by God of the Holy Spirit, and of the enduring presence of the Spirit, but what difference does the Spirit make in all this?
I find that a certain openness is a prerequisite for the spirit to work in me. When I know how something is to be done, or in what direction a particular conversation needs to go, the spirit behind what happens is simply my own, because it is me that is in control. But when the outcome of my actions and conversations is left open, room is created for God’s spirit to work through me.
All this suggests that faith is at least partly, about lightening our grip on the need for control, and taking up the cause of one that is greater than we are. The one thing that we know is that when we are in control, God is not. But to give up our control is bound to produce anxiety and fear. I know that, as N. T. Wright has described, opening myself to habits formed by God’s Spirit will involve “loving my enemies, taking up my cross, and losing my life in order to gain it.” [Borg, Marcus and Wright, N. T. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1999) p. 48] Knowing this does produce fear and anxiety. But if I am going to give up my own habits and make room for the daily decisions and habits of faith, then the journey of faith that the disciples take in today’s reading is also my own journey of faith. And it is precisely this journey that will produce the small, everyday practices and habits that create a life that says, “I have seen the Lord.”
Breath of Peace
by The Rev. Carol Sanford,
Priest Associate
I was reading an online debate a few days ago on whether or not the Church should in any way acknowledge Mother’s Day, especially this year when it falls on Pentecost Some said that Mother’s Day is commercially motivated and should not be jumbled up in our liturgical calendar. After all, Pentecost is a really big day for us in the church year. It is the culmination of the great fifty days of Easter, the day when the Holy Spirit comes upon Jesus’ followers; the day when we are sent forth bearing our gifts to go about God’s work in the world.
Mother’s Day, it seems, is about sweet greeting cards, dainty flowers and perhaps a lovely brunch.
Pentecost, on the other hand, is introduced by a rushing, violent wind and flames as of fire crashing in upon a group of unsuspecting women and men. The normal order of things is so disrupted that some outsiders conclude that Jesus’ disciples are drunk. This is the day when the apostle Peter stands before the crowd and quotes the prophecies of Joel, dire and awesome words of strange signs in the sky and visions of blood and fire and mist.
Pentecost is about a mighty and uncontainable Divine force, the very Breath of God that blew over the deep in Creation, cascading upon and into humankind with awesome blessing and power and responsibility, pushing and propelling and demanding our attention in no uncertain terms. Many of us take comfort, and rightfully so, in identifying as God as Father and as Son. These are human terms with which we can identify.
But then the Holy Spirit shows up and reminds us that God is always greater than our understanding. We learn from today’s lessons that the Spirit, like elements of nature, transcends all human barriers; divisions of language, gender and status dissolve in the breath of God. The Holy Spirit even transcends the barrier between humanity and divinity, entering into and filling humankind. When I really think about the Holy Spirit, the incomprehensible power of God, coming in our direction, I wonder if maybe we should all duck and run.
And yet, in a few moments, we will welcome Graham, all 12 or so pounds of him, into the family of God in the waters of baptism, presenting him quite deliberately and with joyful intent to the full blast of Divine power. How can such a fragile creature withstand the awesome force that has been described as tongues of flame? How can we sit here so calmly knowing that the storm of God’s mighty breath swirls within and among us one more time as the waters of baptism are blessed and poured upon Graham’s tiny head?
We sit here calmly because we know, in our hearts, that this same Spirit is our Comforter and Advocate. Somehow in the depths of our being, in a place past human reasoning, we understand, through this same Spirit, that God never leaves us and works always for the good of all Creation, including us.
The Holy Spirit is elsewhere described as like a dove, the symbol we use for Peace; the same Peace that Jesus breathed out upon his followers. It was the desire for Peace, by the way, that inspired the original Mother’s Day.
A priest is not a magician calling out strange forces of nature. We gather together and in the waters of baptism and in the bread and wine of the table, we are made Holy to God in Christ. Through the outward and visible signs of the inward, spiritual truth of God’s presence and love, we are renewed as the very body of Christ on earth.
We don’t duck and cover at the coming of the Spirit, because we know that the Holy Spirit is the activator and tender guardian of our best and brightest selves, the one who brings forth our gifts for the healing of our lives and our world. The Holy Spirit motivates and empowers our highest aspirations, rather like a very good mother.
The Holy Spirit is generative, creative power. The Holy Spirit is Christ with us now and always. The Holy Spirit is God, the same God who made Leviathan just for the fun of it, the God who delights in each and every one of us. You know the saying, “He or she has a face only a Mother could love”? God loves even our least attractive bits and pieces and desires our Peace and Joy. The Holy Spirit fills us with our own desire to bring Peace and Joy into the world and activates in each of us the gifts by which we may join God’s great enterprise.
We cannot isolate the events of Pentecost as described in Acts from the mighty saving deeds of God in the life of Israel that went before, and we cannot keep them safely at a distance from ourselves. Peter identified the prophecies of the Hebrew testaments tumbling into the lives of Jesus’ followers. We, in our time, acknowledge an unbroken flow of breath and fire and baptismal waters into the hearts and minds and actions of the followers of Jesus and the lovers of God sitting here, now, in this Cathedral.
Oh, it’s Pentecost all right, with all the glory and the challenge of being activated by the Spirit to do God’s work. Isn’t it interesting, that word ‘activated’ used in first Corinthians? We are all very energy conscious these days, and I think of wind farms and water wheels and solar panels, and the many ways by which air and water and fire power our lives. And so, the Holy Spirit, breath, water, flame, empowers us. As Christians, we are commissioned by Jesus and prodded by the Holy Spirit to be gatherers and carriers of the Light and breath and sweet water of God as it pours forth in the good news through our various gifts.
And we gather in Graham, our newest member of the body of Christ. His individual gifts are yet unknown to us. Is he a prophet? A teacher? A healer? An artist, perhaps, or a steadfast friend? With the urging of the Spirit and the support of the Christian community, with the love and nurture of his family and godparents, and through his own choice, his gifts, like ours, may unfold in God’s love and Graham, too, will flourish as a light of Christ in the world.
The face of the earth is renewed in loving service, whether that be changing a diaper for the comfort of both a wet baby and a hassled parent, or donating toward relief supplies for a storm-tossed nation. The face of the earth is renewed every time we ask for and accept God’s forgiveness, and each time we are willing to forgive. Each small act of kindness as well as every grand gesture of selfless courage opens the window of opportunity for the breath of God to move afresh over the face of the deep.
We are not all mighty prophets with visions and omens and dreams, but we, too, may carry the breath of God. The effect of our passing may be less like a violent wind and more like the stirring of leafy branches on a spring afternoon, offering delight and refreshment to the world around us, but never underestimate the power of God’s love at work through us in the world.
I find it splendid that Mother’s Day falls on Pentecost this year. The two observances coinciding may remind us that tender love and mighty power are joined in God and so, in Christ, through the Spirit, are joined in us. As we prepare to welcome baby Graham, now, into the flow of Christian life, and to renew our own Baptismal vows, let us pause for just a moment and feel the presence of God’s Spirit …blowing over the face of the deep in creation…over the gathered disciples on that Pentecost nearly two thousand years ago…and over us here, now.
Is it just me, or did you feel something stirring?
