pentecost – By Another Road

Wake Up: A Sermon for Pentecost

I preached this sermon on Pentecost, May 19, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH.

I actually don’t remember my dreams that often, but every so often I have a really strange or stressful one. You know, the sort where you are caught in some embarrassing situation and you can’t get out of it, or everything starts crumbling apart and you fall through an opening in the floor, or some scary monster is chasing you and you can’t quite get away. I once had a dream where I opened my mouth to speak and marbles kept pouring out of it. Hopefully not a subconscious commentary on my preaching prospects today.

But if you have ever had a stressful dream or a nightmare, then you also know that strangely pleasurable pang of relief when you wake up with a start and realize, blessedly, that everything is ok. You are safe. The walls are not falling down around you. The monster wasn’t real. You can speak the words you need to speak.

And so you catch your breath in the soft pre-dawn gloom, and it’s true, the world to which you’ve awakened may not be perfect, it may carry its own tangible shadows and fears, but it is solid and real, and the sun is rising, and it will somehow be ok. This is the relief of waking up.

And this is why, I think, that in many of the great spiritual traditions of the world, coming into the proximity of divine truth is also often described as “waking up.” We employ the metaphors of sleep and dreams and wakefulness in talking about our experiences of God because we know, instinctively, what it feels like to be jolted into an awareness of what is real, to find safety and purpose in the things that we can actually hold onto, the things that endure, versus those things that are confusing and illusory and which fade like dreams, like the moon at daybreak.

It might even be said that the entire spiritual journey of humanity is one made in the direction of “waking up” and comprehending, as much as our mortal minds can, what is True with a capital T and to cultivate within ourselves the place where that truth can take root and flourish and bear fruit and not be crowded out by nightmares and delusions. I think that this is the case no matter who you meet, no matter who you are, no matter how you understand God.

Notice that I am deliberately speaking in very broad strokes here about human spirituality, and not specifically about a Christian spirituality—not yet. That is intentional, even if it’s maybe a bit daring to do so on Pentecost, one of the major Christian feast days of the entire year.

But Pentecost is a very unusual feast day, and if we take it seriously, it demands more from us than a passive acknowledgment of one moment in the life of Jesus’ disciples recorded in the book of Acts. It would be easy to gather and to sing some hymns about the Holy Spirit and wonder what the tongues of fire looked like and then go on about our business til next year.

But what if we were meant to do more than that today? What if Pentecost was meant to wake us up to something entirely new, something very real and enduring and transformative about the God whom Jesus embodied?

Because here’s the thing about Pentecost: it is, perhaps more than any other feast day, a categorical statement that the gospel does not belong to us. Let me say that again: the gospel does not belong to us. At least, not only to us.

Because the true gospel of love that Jesus initiated cannot be contained or controlled or wielded by anyone, including the churches that bear his name. It is universal, for all people, not in an imperialistic sense where we will compel others to be like us, but simply because the movement of love, the movement of the Holy Spirit, is everywhere, in everything and everyone. This was the radical revelation and invitation of God in Christ, fulfilled at Pentecost: to wake up to the good news that God’s love is free to all people. And then to act like people who are awake.

Nontheless, we have spent over 2,000 years, in various places and times and cultures, fitting the message and the mission and the death and the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus into a sectarian or institutional framework. And of course we would. We’re only human. For all we know, the apostles were drafting an organizational chart in the days leading up to Pentecost.

But then something happened. Something so strange and wild and free and destabilizing that even the account of it in Acts doesn’t make a lot of sense. All we get are metaphors: a sound like a rush of violent wind. Divided tongues, as of fire. People speaking in languages they don’t even know. It honestly sounds more like a strange dream, except in this case it wasn’t. They were not asleep, and they were not drunk on new wine. They were awake. Maybe for the first time in their entire lives. And in the speaking and the praying and the blowing of the wind and the burning of the flame something became apparent that had not been before:

That whatever Jesus had been doing, whatever he had been trying to teach them and pass on to them and invite them into in his risen life, it did not belong to them, or to any one group. This gospel was not a secret teaching for the elect, it was not an exclusive invitation for the chosen, it was not a blueprint for the power of one nation above all others. It was the Spirit saying to all of creation:

Wake up! Wake up and see that I love all of you, that I love everything, that everything is nothing but love! Wake up, children of every nation and creed and language and color and class. Wake up and see that the good news is you were made for blessedness, you were made for communion with your Creator, you were made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth and to let these things rush through you like a fire, like a gale, like the light of the rising sun!

The Gospel of this love does not belong to you, and that is what makes it good news. It is for Israel, but not only for Israel. It is for the Gentiles, but not only for the Gentiles. It is for the rich, the poor, the healthy, the weak, the lost, the found, the mighty, the marginal, but it does not belong to any one of them alone. It is for the gay, the straight, the trans*, the young, the old, the urban, the rural, the liberal and the conservative, the partisan and the cynic, but not for any one of them alone. It is for the human, the beast, the soil, the stars, the rivers, the wood, the stone, the deep ocean and the immeasurable depths of the cosmos. It is for all of them, this gospel. It is for all of us.

And on this day, on this strange and beautiful day, we have a choice: we can either wake up all over again and rediscover our calling to a universal, boundless, borderless, indiscriminate care and concern and fellowship with everything and everyone. Or we can keep dreaming our restless dreams about a God who is more concerned with perpetuating cultural warfare and the histories of violence and loss to which we have become accustomed.

But I will tell you, I am weary of those terrible dreams. I am ready to wake up and see what is real, to speak clearly, to seek what is possible if we let the gospel be what it is, as dynamic and fluid and liberated as the Holy Spirit, belonging to no one and thus belonging to everyone, everywhere, always, revealing how we all belong, how are all beloved, how everything is possible if we dare to act like it is.

This morning we are baptizing baby Oliver and baby Thea into all of this. And as we witness their incorporation into this life, into this story, into this community, what I hope you will remember is that, on a fundamental level, what we are talking about in baptism, and what we are talking about on Pentecost, and really on every Sunday we gather, is not only being part of a church, but also about being part of everything.

It is about recognizing our kinship with every face we encounter, and with the night sky, and the vast earth, and the creatures that dwell therein. It is about giving something of ourselves over to everything else, just as Jesus did—something of our life, and labor, and heart—so that we might wake up, with a start, and yet with a strange pang of relief, to realize that life is neither a strange dream nor a private nightmare to endure, but something solid and real and interconnected and whole, and that the sun is rising, and that somehow, in the end, everything will be ok.

For there is a God who is bigger than everything, who burns with love for you; there is a Spirit who is closer than your own breath, and this Spirit has come, in wind and fire and gentleness to say one, necessary thing as you toss and turn in that gloom just before the dawn:

Wake up, dear one. Wake up.

The Language of Our Hearts: A Pentecost Sermon

I preached this sermon on Pentecost, June 5, 2022, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Acts 2:1-21, the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the Apostles.

A few weeks ago I traveled up to South Bend to attend a conference for all of the Episcopal Churches in Province V, which is a region that roughly encompasses the midwestern United States. It was a wonderful time, both for the workshops and other sessions offered, and also, just as importantly, for the chance to connect with new people and reconnect with some familiar ones—friends and colleagues that I hadn’t seen since well before the pandemic started. As we know from gathering together here at Trinity each Sunday, there is something heartening and healing about being together in person, seeing each other’s faces, hearing each other’s voices.

When we celebrated the Eucharist at the conference, we were invited to do something that perhaps you’ve experienced before if you’ve attended a large Episcopal gathering or convention, especially one with a diversity of attendees: at that moment in the liturgy when we all join together to say the Lord’s Prayer, we were asked to pray it in “the language of our heart.” The language of our heart. I love that phrase.

And so, after a brief pause, a cacophony of voices rose up in prayer—some praying in the traditional English language version that is so dear and familiar to us here; some in the more contemporary English translation; but also in Spanish, and in other languages—a seminary friend of mine who was there offered prayers in Lakota. The cumulative effect was messy, but beautiful—a collision of hearts and tongues naming God, praising God, asking God for protection and provision.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t heard the Lord’s Prayer offered that way in a little while, but it touched me deeply, it gave me a different sense of the vastness of that prayer, the billions of times it is offered up each day, in grand churches and in homeless shelters, on mountaintops and on commuter trains, by people we will never meet, people so different from us and yet so fundamentally connected to us, each crying out in the language of their deepest heart. Our Father, who art in heaven. Padre nuestro. Ate unyanpi. (That last one is in Lakota, if you’re curious).

One of the great tragedies of Christian history has been the idea that being one in Christ means being exactly the same as one another. The idea that being part of the universal Church is more about fitting in than it is about becoming the fullness of who God made each of us to be. That pressure to conform, to get in line, to deny the parts of yourself deemed different or unacceptable—that is a particular cultural force at work, not the Gospel itself. That urge to suppress diversity is the work of tyrants and empires, not the work of God’s Kingdom. Because the Spirit of God speaks in every language, shows up in every type of person and place and circumstance, the Spirit radiates out of every color of the rainbow.

And, to put it more bluntly for those of us here in the United States: God does not only speak in or understand English. God does not only work through people similar to us. And I thank God that we are part of a church that recognizes the joy and the strength of diversity of every type—social, economic, political, theological, racial, linguistic, and every other sort, too. We are messy, but we are beautiful, this collision of hearts and tongues that we call The Episcopal Church.

By not simply tolerating our differences but striving to cherish them and learn from them, we live into the reality of the Church that was born on that first Pentecost, when the Apostles were caught up in the whirlwind of the Spirit and were able to proclaim the gospel in the native tongues of the immigrants to whom they spoke.

There is a nuance here that is essential for us not to miss: the miraculous gift of the Spirit was not that these immigrants could suddenly understand the Apostles speaking in one universal language—which would likely have been Greek or Latin, the dominant languages of the Roman Empire. It was that the gospel was carried to their ears in the language of their hearts—the language of their blood, the language of their native soil, the language their parents sang to them in lullabies, the language by which they learned to count the stars and name the creatures of the earth.

On this day the gospel–the fiery incandescence of God’s love–was transformed on the lips of the Galilean preachers and rendered into the particular poetry of the hearers’ innermost self. This is the day God called out to each of them not in the language of empire, of conquest, of sameness, but in a voice that was as familiar as their own.

There is a crucial lesson in that, a fundamental Christian truth, especially as we grapple with our own challenges of living in a diverse society where some would still have us give up our God-given uniqueness, would have us mute our stories, our perspectives, our voices, in favor of a monolithic, lifeless consensus masquerading as peace.

That is not what we were made for. That is not what Jesus died for. That is not the type of peace he leaves with us. And that is not what the Spirit came for at Pentecost. The Spirit came to fill each of us with life abundant, to winnow away with fire all the lies we tell ourselves, leaving the clarity and the particularity of our divinely-made selfhood, and the Spirit came to catch us up into a bond of fellowship that honors our differences while uniting us in common practice, in common mission.

Authenticity and courage and truth, that is our peace. And that is not just who we can be or hope to be, that is who we are when we surrender our fear and our bitterness and our prejudice to the expansiveness of God’s Spirit. A people reborn, a people who are unafraid to speak in the languages of our hearts and yet somehow still understand one another in the wordlessness of grace, the ultimately unspeakable mystery of life and of love.

Let that Spirit of love be yours today. Let it shape all of your days. Let it shape the work that we do together in this community, in this nation, on this planet. None of the challenges that we collectively face can be met without this Spirit—a Spirit that honors difference, and yet demands from us the discipline of remaining together IN that difference. No retreating into corners; no demonizing one another; no insistence that God only speaks in ways that we alone understand.

For if the Spirit of God is like fire, like wind, then it is elemental, and limitless, and free—it is available to everyone, kindled in hearths unknown to us, blowing across landscapes we will never see, speaking in languages we will never understand. Today we honor that vast freedom of the Spirit, we put our hope in it, because it means that we, too, might yet be free. We, too, might yet be liberated from the language of empire and speak, instead, the living language of our hearts.

Come, Holy Spirit. Only speak the word, and we shall live. Speak the word, and we shall be healed.

School of the Spirit: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Pentecost, May 23, 2021 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 15:26-27

How do you usually feel when you come into church on a Sunday morning (or, in more recent times, when you happen to tune in from home?) How do you feel right now?

Excited? Encouraged? Or perhaps a bit tired? Burdened by the events of the week? Maybe on some especially challenging days you feel a little like those Israelites mentioned today in Ezekiel, the ones only recently brought back to life whose bones are dried up, gasping for the breath of life. (When my alarm clock goes off at 6, I usually feel exactly like that, but I never was an early morning person.)

What I find remarkable, and beautiful, and inspiring about you, however, is that you nonetheless come here each week, whenever you are able. You step through these doors and let your body and your heart and your mind get caught up in the words and the patterns of the liturgy. Despite all of the other things vying for your attention and your energy, you are here, in this place, doing this thing that nobody really requires you to do. Why is that? What is it that draws you here, to this particular church, whether for the first time or for so many times that you’ve lost count?

When asked that question some of us might say: the people; the beauty of our traditions; the music; the opportunity to rest and pray and reflect on our lives. At least some of those things are important for most of us here, but I would also offer that there is something even deeper at work, something we don’t tend to talk about very much in the Episcopal Church, but something that we ought to name and claim, especially today, on Pentecost:

You are here because of the Holy Spirit. We are participating in this liturgy, right this very moment, because the Holy Spirit has drawn us here. You are here because God’s Spirit is within you, and that Spirit is like a moth to flame, like a river returning to its source—this Spirit longs for communion with the Father and the Son, and has placed that same longing in you–a longing to know and be known, to hold and to be held.

‘Deep calls to deep,’ the Psalmist says, ‘at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.’

And we are here, deep under the waves of liturgy, treading among the shafts light in these baptismal waters because we somehow know, under the ebb and flow of the prayers and the silences, that there is TRUTH here, a truth that is deeper than our institutional stumbles, a truth deeper than our human failings. A pattern of living, revealed in the ancient pattern of the liturgy: a pattern that contains a truth you will not find anywhere else, nowhere else in the world except within the enactment of this living Word. In the liturgy, unbroken in its offering since the time of the apostles, are the tools that teach us how to live out our daily life as God meant it to be lived.

This is Spirit-driven, Spirit-led work.

“Jesus said to his disciples, “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.”

This promise is fulfilled in the Pentecost account recorded in the Book of Acts, when the disciples were transformed by wind and flame from somewhat hapless followers of a beloved teacher into the undaunted, fervent agents of Christ’s mission on earth. And it was not just the Son of God, but the ongoing work of the Spirit of God that drew them into the lives THEY were intended to live—it was the Spirit that animated their mortal bones and caused them to prophesy and to see visions and to dream dreams. It was the Spirit that sustained their dedication far beyond the typically fickle, faltering enthusiasm we tend to give even the most worthy causes of this world.

And that same Spirit of truth, that same Spirit that swept over the waters at creation, that same Spirit that descended at Jesus’ baptism and at your own, that same Spirit is still calling out to you, still guiding you, still animating THIS community and THIS liturgy, still saying YES: God desires for you to be close, God desires for you to take your proper place in creation, God desires you to live in fullness, God desires you.

You.

God desires you so much, in fact, that God has made a home within you; God has fed you with his own flesh; God’s holy breath is on your breath as you offer up these ancient and eternal prayers week after week.

In short, we are here, friends, not because liturgy is just a nice ritual to enact on a Sunday morning, but because liturgy at its must fundamental is the very pattern of the Holy Spirit’s movement through creation, and we are being carried aloft on the Spirit’s wings, learning, day by day, how to fly heavenward.

I share all of this with you because I sometimes observe that, if we talk about the Holy Spirit at all in our church, we don’t tend to talk about the Spirit in connection to our experience of liturgy. Maybe it’s because we are so often focused on the Father and the Son, or maybe it’s because we think that too much talk about the Spirit might open the door to a level of exuberance to which we Episcopalians are not generally accustomed.

But be assured that the Spirit IS here, in candlelight and in quiet gesture and in the swelling note of song, the Spirit is here in the silence of your prayers and in the outstretching of your hand towards Christ’s body, and we should be encouraged, emboldened even, to name God’s dynamic presence in our liturgy, and to say to the world, to our neighbors and our friends and those who have fallen away from faith: COME, see what is TRUE. COME, see what the shape of love is. COME, see how God teaches us to embody, in this liturgical gathering—in this school of the Holy Spirit—the essential vision of a sanctified life: gratitude, praise, confession, lamentation, reconciliation, offering, receiving, communion, contemplation, joy. COME, and see, and live.

We ought not be timid or bashful about this. Because one thing I know is that there are countless people—some of whom you probably know quite well—who are desperately longing for the type of life we seek and strive for here. A Spirit-driven, Christ-shaped, liturgically-enriched life. There is no greater gift that we can give than to invite others into the practice of their truest, most beautiful humanity.

So when you think about why you come here, week after week, and what it is about the liturgy that draws you in, what it is that inspires you to give your heart over to Jesus, day after day, remember, it is , in part, because you are doing something essential here, something more than engaging in a pastime, something more than exercising personal taste. We are seeking and claiming LIFE. True life. Eternal life. Love-infused life.

The tongue of flame, and the wind, and the dove, and the water, and the bread, and the blood, and the unbroken song, and the unbroken prayer and the unbreakable bond: in the liturgy these things are present, they are given.

In the liturgy, the Spirit guides us into all truth.

In the liturgy, these tired bones–yours and mine–can live.