St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran Church
3800 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47401
(812) 332-5252
Sermon for The Day of Pentecost (June 4, 2006)
Liturgical Color: Red
Reverend Dr. Lyle E. McKee
"A Blossoming Faith"
Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today, if you haven't noticed by now—with all the red and references to the Holy Spirit, is the Day of Pentecost. It is the fiftieth, the final, day of Easter.
I'd like to focus on this occasion as a celebration of a blossoming faith, for on this day we commemorate the gift of the Holy Spirit that provided a new seed in the world for a faith that blossomed immediately with many believers who could speak eloquently of the faith that burned within them. That same seed continues to blossom today.
With the coming of the Spirit, things change. In the passage from Romans, we read of the Spirit's prayer for us: "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with signs too deep for words."
We groan in anxiety for adoption, for redemption, for hope. And the Spirit is interceding for us, urging new fruit to bloom, with sighs too deep for words. The Spirit, like Jesus in last week's gospel, is praying for us with a depth that cannot be expressed. Words will not suffice; the desire of the Spirit is so profound. All the Spirit can do is sigh with the power of its yearning on our behalf.
So, what's new? What's blossoming?
The Spirit brings resurrection power into our lives through this deep prayer:
- bringing fire where there was cold resignation,
- bringing friendship where there was alienation and loneliness
- bringing praise where there was emptiness
- bringing joy where there was sorrow
First, the Spirit brings fire where there was cold resignation.
We hear about that fire today. The disciples are gathered together in one place. There isn't any suggestion in the text about their mood during those days following the Ascension, when their Lord left them yet again; but I would guess that this was not an enthusiastic group. The scene that followed the crucifixion is more likely; they were probably huddled in fear and uncertainty, wondering whether the resurrection appearances were some form of temporary insanity or mass hallucination. They were most likely anxious about whether there would be a new form of assurance that Christ would be present with them again.
Then, suddenly, tongues of fire rested upon them, and the fire of the Spirit enlivened them again.
Transformed by the Spirit, our cold resignation blossoms into a warming fire.
The Spirit also brings friendship where there was alienation and loneliness.
Jesus had already told the disciples that he called them friends, but the abandonment of his second departure from them must have given them cause to wonder. And yet, his friendship, through this fulfilled promise to send the Comforter, remained true.
Here's a story from a Christian Century article that is relevant ("Psychology 101 Revised," 5/31/03, 7). "Remember the fight-or-flight syndrome? When under attack or severe threat, the typical human response is either to go on the attack or to run away. But UCLA's Shelley Taylor thinks that bipolarity overlooks another human response to threat: reaching out to protect loved ones, thereby putting one's self in harm's way.
"This is perhaps more typical of women, especially mothers, whose instinct it is to protect their offspring. And there may even be a biochemical explanation for it. Researchers have long known that release of the peptide oxytocin takes place in the brain during times of emotional attachment such as childbirth and breast feeding... Now it is known that this chemical is also released during periods of stress. However, estrogen in women enhances the effect of the peptide, while testosterone in men lessens the effect.
"Anyway, there is now a third option in responding to traumatic threat: not just fight or flight, but tend and befriend (Discover, May)."
Cute, isn't it. That this seems a revelation? This isn't news! And the Church didn't need advanced science to reveal this truth about the possibilities open to human beings in times of trouble. The Christian community, by the new blossoming brought by the power of the Holy Spirit, has a long and moving history of how the sacrificial love of Christ is reflected in the lives of Christian people every day.
"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." (John 15:13)
Transformed by the Spirit, our alienation and loneliness blossom into friendship.
The Spirit brings praise where there was emptiness.
The function of worship is to offer praise and prayer to God. Liturgical traditions like ours have been shaped by two millennia. We know that even when we enter empty and unable to pray, our hearts may be moved to blossom into praise.
That happens in many ways, but as we recognize the contributions of our musicians today, let me use that as an example. Marva Dawn calls worship a royal "waste of time." Now she is not implying that worship has no purpose or meaning, or that we ought to give it up as useless. She is merely looking at worship from God's point of view, and affirming what we know well as God's grace. From that vantage, nothing we can do in worship will change one iota how God feels about us. Regardless of how we worship, God will remain the steadfast and immovable lover of our souls.
But that's the point, isn't it? It is because God loves us with such wild abandon that we worship God. Dawn writes: "We respond to the enormity of [God's] grace with praise and skill, with lives of service, with the best music we can make. And that is the most wonderful waste of time possible. It is a lavishing of our lives that fills us with fire. We sing our greatest music, play the new songs of heaven to surprise others and ourselves with the overwhelmingly wonder-full, stunningly awe-filled grace of God. Focusing on such a subject, how can we help but be passionate?...
"We engage in music that will not only enfold the congregation in the grace of the God who chose us, but that will also instill in them an understanding of what it is to worship that God. Our music will instruct, educate, nurture, cultivate, rebuke, exhort, discipline, warm, delight, enlighten, edify, develop. We waste our time so that others in the Christian community can be more profoundly immersed in the Word, can become more deeply formed, can more thoroughly join us in praise...
[Giving our talents in gratitude] "prohibits us from performing, from glorying merely in the holiness of the beauty we produce, rather than the beauty of God's holiness. The former is mere aestheticism for its own sake; the latter is beauty in order to display the splendor of God...
"Worship is a royal waste of time that spirals into passion for living as Christians and back into more passionate worship." (Royal Waste, 14-17)
Transformed by the Spirit, our emptiness blossoms into praise.
The Spirit also brings joy where there was sorrow.
In today's world, especially in our anxious Western culture, we seem driven to find happiness and look for any shortcut that can get us there. Generally we seek a happiness that is a far cry from what went on that day of Pentecost. The 16th chapter of John's Gospel clarifies the difference. In Jesus' long, beautiful farewell to his disciples, he tells them that he must go away and leave them and that they will be sorrowful. Then he adds: "but your sorrow will turn into joy." (16:20)
Joy is something that sorrow turns into. No sorrow, no joy! That is precisely the joy that turned the world upside-down on the day of Pentecost. The definition adds a new dimension to the familiar lines, "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee," as it implies a people willingly and compassionately entering into the suffering and sorrow of an unjust and unmerciful world.
Jim Callahan tells this story: "There has been one event in my life in which I came close to apprehending the wonder of Pentecost.... For over a year I had been the custodian of the ashes of a child in my parish who had died of SIDS. The father was a Frenchman who wished to have his son's ashes interred in his family cemetery in eastern France, near Dijon... The family was predominantly Roman Catholic, and few of them spoke English. Leaden gray clouds hovered over the ancient burial ground. A light mist of rain made us bring out umbrellas. A great slab of stone was rolled back to allow me to enter the underground vault.
I stammered my way through the liturgy,... The grandmother of the child stunned me when she thanked me for "the mess" I had made. Her daughters-in-law quickly explained that this was the French for mass.
It was a time of great healing for the parents and their devoted family and friends. Afterward, we went to a 400-year-old inn and had lunch, which turned into a French wake, with joy and camaraderie and love flowing as freely as the wine. I didn't understand a word they were saying, but I understood what was being said.
The name of what was going on is the name of what was going on the day of Pentecost. It is always a miracle of sorts, whether recognized or not. It always comes form God, whether we know it or not, and bears God's most beautiful of names: love. Unleashed from an empty tomb, God's outlandish love found its way into empty hearts, and the world has never been the same since. ("Windblown," Christian Century, 5/24-31/2000)
Transformed by the Spirit, our sorrow blossoms into joy.
These are only a few of the ways that faith blossoms today, but they are worth our remembering and our living. May you live more fully as the Spirit blossoms in you in the days to come-with fire, friendship, praise, and joy. Amen.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts
and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord, unto eternal
life. Amen.
