Pentecost Sunday, Yr. B,
May 27, 2012
Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm
104:25-35, 37; Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
Sermon preached at St.
Stephen’s Episcopal Church
Yesterday,
we had Family Time at the Saints Community Garden. Several of us got there a little early and turned the beds
over and got most of the weeds out, so that when the families came, they could
concentrate on planting seedlings with the kids. When families began to arrive, I was working on cleaning out
the front flower garden that sits in front of our banner at the corner of the
garden. A tall man approached me
and asked if he could help us. I
said, “Of course!” So he took my
shovel and began digging holes I needed to transplant some day lilies that we
had heeled in for the winter. He
helped take all the yard waste to the compost pile and then we began watering
and mixing in some compost in that bed.
As
we worked he talked. “I want to
get to know Jesus”, he said. I
stood up and we looked at each other.
I was in my shorts and T-shirt.
No way could he have known I was a priest. I took some comfort in that. I said, “How do you do that? How do you get to know Jesus?”
I was sure he was going to say something like … reading the
Bible. But he stopped and thought
for a moment. “By confessing to God, and then going on. Only I’m not too good at that. I’m having some trouble with a few
things in my life right now.” Part
of me wanted to know what kind of trouble … but then I realized that it didn’t
matter.
I
started to think about how I had come to know Jesus. How would I have answered my own question? Well, I did learn a lot about Jesus
from the Bible. The parables tell
us a lot about what Jesus believed about God and the world. We also have some first person accounts
in the gospels that tell us how Jesus acted, what he said, and what he
taught. There are descriptions of
some of the miracles and healings that he performed. I’ve read quite a bit of theology too and I have refined my
own ideas about Jesus. I’ve
thought a lot about Jesus, but is that getting to know Jesus, or is that getting to know about Jesus. There’s a difference.
I
bent down to pull up a few weeds.
“I want to get to know Jesus.
If I can just confess everything, God will take care of the rest.” “I’m not so sure about that part”, I
said. “I think God will be with us
… but that doesn’t mean everything will just magically work out.” He said, “We have to help too.” “I know Jesus”, I told him. “I can tell you about my experience of
him … if you want.” We
worked a little while longer. He
said, “I’m a Christian. I think
God brought me here today. I asked
if I could help and I think God did that.” Maybe God did.
There was definitely a connection that happened between that man and me. He worked with us in the hot
sun for about an hour. I took a
picture of him by the garden he helped to clean out. I asked if I could put it on our Facebook page, and he said
“yes, and you can put my name in too!” His name was Elijah.
That
encounter was the work of the Holy Spirit. It was God at work in human relationships. It was God at work in that visitor and
me and everyone else who encountered him.
The Holy Spirit is God’s gift given through Jesus to all of us.
James
Allison, a Roman Catholic theologian describes the Holy Spirit like this. … when we’re talking about
the Spirit, we’re not talking about something vague – we’re talking about
something that was given under quite specific historical circumstances: Jesus
going to his death, in order to make it possible for us to inhabit being human
deathlessly. … It is made available for us by Jesus going to his death – in all
the Gospel accounts it’s the same. He breathes out the Spirit on the cross,
hands the Spirit back to the Father on the cross. It’s only after he has gone
to his death that Holy Spirit comes upon us. For instance in John’s Gospel,
where everything is done with very gentle allusion, on the day after the
Resurrection he appears in the upper room with the disciples who are
frightened, and then it says he breathes upon them – usually translated as
breathes upon us, but the word is enephusésen: he ‘breathes into them’, he
‘insufflates’; and it’s exactly the same verb in the Septuagint with which God
breathes into Adam’s nostrils, thus bringing him into life. We’re talking about
‘the new Adam’, having become a living spirit, in Paul’s terms; making it
possible for the ‘new Adam’, who does not know death, to come alive.[1]
The
Holy Spirit is all about making human beings come alive, just as the dry bones
in the passage from Ezekiel did.
How did they come alive?
They came to life when Ezekiel prophesied to them, when God’s word was
spoken … and God breathed life into them.
Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter
you, and you shall live. The breath of God moved over the waters in the
creation story and brought life to a formless void. God spoke the world into existence. That same breath enlivened dry old
bones. That’s what the Spirit does
for each of us.
Allison
talks about it this way.
The second element of story that I want to bring
out concerning the Spirit, is the way … the word Spirit is compared, I think
deliberately, with other spirits. In one sense it’s the obvious comparison. I
think this is why we hear the word the Holy Spirit – it’s just to remind people
that there are plenty of spirits, but only one is the Spirit of the Creator;
and that there is a real difference between being possessed by a spirit, and
being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and the difference is essentially that other
spirits … displace people when they move them. If you’re possessed, you become
less who you are: you are ‘taken out of yourself’, you are no longer rational,
free, etc. You find yourself acting out of the strange part as if under the
control of someone else. Whereas the point of the Holy Spirit is that unlike
other spirits, it moves without displacing, so that it is ‘more you’ who is
doing something, if you are doing something ‘in the Spirit’. It’s actually more
rational, more logical, more emotionally healthy, and you are ‘more than who
you thought you were’, because you are being created, and the Creator is not in
rivalry with you.[2]
When
we are doing things in the Spirit, we are working in cooperation with God. We are being created. Something new is happening within
us. When tongues of fire descended
on the disciples they were infused with the Holy Spirit. They began doing things that they were
not capable of without it. Their
capacity for understanding increased.
Their ability to communicate with others across barriers of language and
culture was enhanced. That group
of early Christians went around spreading the good news of God in Christ so
effectively that it has survived the last two thousand years. God’s breath was alive in them, and
made them even more alive, more whole.
The church was born.
That
same Spirit is alive and well in us today. God is present in us as Spirit because Jesus gave his life
in love … and sent God’s breath into the world for the benefit of us all. Something of that Spirit is at work in
the world and in the Church today.
Something is being re-created in us and in the Church. Mainline churches have been
declining for the last fifty years, and many people have called this the end of
organized religion, but Diana Butler Bass calls it the newest awakening, an
opportunity for imagination, a time of re-creating the Church. Some people are fearful and despondent
about the drop in attendance, forgetting that the Christian church started out
as a minority religion. It started
as a collection of house churches in Jerusalem. It was the church of those on the fringes of society, a
church of the poor, the outcast and the oppressed. It offered hope to the hopeless. It proclaimed life out of death, and offered flesh to dry
bones.
Yesterday
a man told me, “I want to get to know Jesus”. That name offered him hope of a better life. We are Christians through our baptism. We have received the Holy Spirit and we
are marked as one of Christ’s own forever. We have the privilege of already knowing Jesus. We can offer hope to others by offering
to share that experience with those who are looking for life and hope. I said, “I know Jesus, and I would be
happy to share my experience of him with you … if you want.” Perhaps I should have added, “in the meantime, thank you for joining
me in service in Christ. Together we will
get to know Jesus better through one another.” Because that’s exactly what ended up happening.
Amen.
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