May 15, 2016, Pentecost
Gen 11:1-9
Romans 8:14-17
Movement
Movement. In the
desert. A flurry of activity from a
cookie-cutter civilization. Movement
toward a common goal. Build a
tower. Build a grand tower brick by
brick to scrape the sky. To stand so high you watch clouds float by. Movement. Upward mobility, the type of which
would bring a great name for a people unto itself.
Movement. In the desert.
The Lord came down. Always down, to meet the people of God’s
creation. The humanity which he brought
with the breath of life. The humanity he had named. They dared to make a name for themselves.
Only God names. Movement. The Lord scatters the people. God divided
their tongues. No longer one language,
no longer one culture, no longer one people.
Movement. Scattered like dry leaves from a strong wind.
Movement. Generation
after generation the people scattered upon the earth. Divide, then multiply.
Then divide again. All strive to make a
name. All strive to hold their own
power. All strive to be like God. All
strive to be favored by God. And all
fail. Until….
Movement. The Lord
came down. Always down, to meet the people of God’s creation. The humanity in which he had breathed life,
the humanity God named--Emmanuel. God with us.
Only God names. Movement. Jesus walked among us, gathering the scattered;
healing the lame, feeding the hungry, speaking the Word. All strive to give him names. Son of Man, Son of God, Messiah, Rabbi. All strive to give him power. Make him
King. All strive to be like God. All strive to be favored by God.
Movement. A walk to
death, a place on the cross. A final breath. A burial. A stone rolled
away. A stranger on the road, a stranger
on the beach. A savior, who once was dead and now is alive. Raised to the God
who always comes down, to be seated with God at the throne of grace.
Movement. Shifting
eyes and sweaty hands. Feet shuffling on the dusty floor of a cramped room. Disciples of a Rabbi who had gone ahead of
them. The students must become the leaders. When the day of Pentecost had come
they were gathered in one place. But that was as far as they’d come. As far as they could go. They no longer knew movement. They were stagnant. Weighed down by the crush
of fear.
Movement. A strong
wind. God’s breath, the very Spirit of God tore through windows, whipping the
robes and sashes of the people. People gathered yet scattered. It filled the
house. Divided tongues of fire rested on
each head. Movement. Once frozen in fear, now thawed. Filled with the Holy Spirit they knew the
words to speak. They spoke in other
languages. And they began to comprehend. Amazed. Astonished. Movement. God’s people scattered. God’s people
gathered. Children of God. Heirs of God.
United with Christ-- brothers and sisters.
Go out. Go out. Go out.
Movement.
In his book, “WorldChanging 101,” David LaMotte talks about
the difference between a hero narrative and a movement. Is the arc of history through which we weave
the account of Jesus’ ministry a hero narrative or a movement? A hero
is extraordinary. A great person, an extraordinary human encounters a crisis
and does something dramatic.[1] Doesn’t sound unlike Christ does it? He was extra-ordinary: fully human but also
fully divine. Jesus entered humanity and
encountered a crisis of faith and sought to dramatically reclaim and reform the
ways in which God’s people understand God’s divine love. So, Jesus is a hero, what do we do now? We
are not heroes, we cannot do the extraordinary.
Let us just wait for Christ to return.
It can’t be long now, he’ll be back.
Surely, when we see the world in crisis: war, poverty, illness,
violence: surely the hero will come save us soon. Let’s just huddle together, here in our safe
sanctuary. And wait.
Except that we can’t.
The triune God did not send the Paraclete, the Advocate, The Holy Spirit
to us so that we could sit on our hands and wait! You see, Jesus’ story is not a hero narrative
at all. It’s a movement. A movement that
began when Jesus walked along the shoreline and gathered the twelve. It
continued with the tongues of fire dancing over the heads of the first gathered
Christians that continues in us today! I
am arguing, as LaMotte does in his book, “that the function of heroes is to
inspire others. And when a lot of people
move a little bit, the problems begin to be addressed.”
If we turn back to our Genesis reading today, the story of
the tower at Babel, we find that there wasn’t really anything wrong with the
people in the story. They were
multiplying at a great rate. They were
decent folks, nothing indicates otherwise.
But they were also scared. They
didn’t want to become divided, they wanted to be bound together by a common
mission, and they wanted to build a fortress of protection, a great city that
would give them notoriety. God saw that
if they were forever one people with one language and one culture they would
never grow, they would never learn anything new as a homogenous people. They
would grow stagnant. And so, as God
willed, God added diversity into the mix.
And ever since we have found humanity in a struggle to understand one
another.[2]
Babel has come to represent for people, our individualism
and the right to better ourselves. According
to Douglas M. Donley, our own Babel today is “Our First-Worldness, our
materialism, our economic and military domination. Our Babel component is everything that built
up the Berlin Wall, The U.S./Mexico wall, the disputes between Pakistan and
India,[ the horrors of Isis], the plethora of denominations that seek unity
only by throwing others out! Our Babel component is the fact that most
Americans can only speak one language and we expect others to learn ours. We grew addicted to Babel. We grew up believing that Babel is the God of
true spirituality. Rugged individualism
is the stuff of Babel. Individual
thought is the stuff of Babel.”[3]
Donley goes on to express that Babel isn’t all bad. It is where we gain our cultural diversity,
as I believe God desired it. For if there are no words great enough to
encompass our God into a neat and tidy box, why should the humanity created in
God’s image be any different? Due to
Babel, we get to push outside of our own understandings, if we have an openness
to learn. But Babel can also be that
which makes injustices thrive. Once we
became a humanity divided our sinful nature caused us to feel driven to make
distinctions between the haves and the have nots. It made us feel like we could condemn “the
other”. It’s how wars begin. We tend to look to ourselves rather than
God. And what we end up with is
confusion.
If Babel is a representation of humanities brokenness; of
the infinite trials that humans have created in an unwillingness to accept our
diversity in God’s image…. Then Pentecost is a snapshot of the opposite. “The Spirit at Pentecost moved among them and
they no longer saw each other as people to be suspicious of, but as fellow
children of God. They had a new freedom,
and a chance to be a different kind of community.”[4]
Pentecost is the ideal hope that we cling to and should strive to achieve as
Christians. Note: it doesn’t say the Spirit moved among them and made them all
think and feel the same way. But they saw each other and heard each other. The gift of the Holy Spirit is what binds us
together, what breathes new life into us, and emboldens us to go forth from the
safety of our polished pews into the world.
Pentecost is that which gives us the individual flames of our faith that
together can become a raging fire.
As Bob Fiedler would so often say, “Here’s what I’m thinkin’.” I believe that the Holy Spirit was given to
dwell in us so that the Bible would not simply be a book of myths and legends
from long ago with no impact on our lives today. I believe that often times we long for the
Hero Narrative of Jesus. The one where
we imagine he will come back and clean up this mess we have made because we
didn’t want to accept that all of humanity is in God’s image. I believe that even though the Spirit of God
dwells in us, we keep it as a low-burning ember, locked deep inside our souls
because we love the power-- the Babel Tower--more than we love one
another. That is the brokenness of
humanity that the Bible reveals to us time and time again. Maybe that’s why we
don’t long to drink of the word deeply.
Maybe that’s why we don’t find lifelong learning to be a necessary
component of our faith journey. Maybe this is why the word Evangelism terrifies us. The thought of sharing the story of our
own faith with another person would require accepting that Jesus is not the
only one called to enact change. We have to have a story too. Because it’s tough to accept that the Bible is
not a Hero Narrative but rather the cornerstone of a movement.
As David LaMotte so eloquently writes, “If we cling to the
myth that large scale change is effected by dramatic heroic actions, we risk missing
opportunities for real impact. As it
turns out, movements are more effective than heroes. And movements don’t need a lot of leaders;
they need lots of participants. In the
end, the real power lies with us: normal people making small decisions to
engage.”[5]
On this Pentecost Sunday I am asking you how you will
engage? This is the part of the sermon
where I usually pat you on the back and tell you all the good things you are
doing. But I’m not going there this
time. Because the Holy Spirit wasn’t a
gentle breeze blowing through a comfortable sanctuary scented with flowers and
the warm glow of candles. The Holy
Spirit was like a tornado, a mighty, rushing, wind. It blew the people back. It stirred the air around them. It caused the hair to raise on the back of
their necks. It made them edgy and
uncomfortable. The Holy Spirit didn’t
make the mission of the people gathered easier.
It made it harder. Where is your
conviction? What kind of movement is God
demanding of YOU as a proclaimed follower of Christ? I can’t tell you exactly what it is. But I
can tell you what it’s not.
It is not okay to
let our world be overrun by hatred. And
it is not okay to throw a blanket over all people of Islam (or any religion)
because it’s too difficult to try to
understand the true meaning of their religion. It’s not okay to dismiss other
cultures because it runs contrary to your own. It’s not okay to fight violence
with violence. It’s not okay to say my
voice doesn’t matter so I will say nothing instead. It’s not okay to close doors
in the faces of others because we cannot agree on a definition of love. We need dialogue, not denunciation. It’s not
okay to allow citizens to be hungry and homeless. It’s not okay to turn a blind
eye because it’s not in our zip code. It’s not okay to let innocent children
experience violence in their homes or empty plates at their tables. And it’s not okay to assume that the only
reason that happens in our society today is because their parents are drug
addicts or deadbeats who cannot hold a job and self-righteously proclaim
they’ve done it to themselves. Just like
it’s not okay to be brushed off as an upper-middle class congregation who focus
only on their own busy lives, folded into ourselves. We would hate that description of our
families, of Covenant. But, to be
outside of something, looking in, it is easy to judge. Do you
see the dangers of choosing not to learn, not to understand those things which
make us different from one another? Every time we allow ourselves to be
overcome by indifference or ignorance we demonstrate to our children and
grandchildren that the faith we hold in Jesus Christ who commanded us to
LOVE—is null and void. Our God whose
character cannot be described fully in any language because She is too deep and
too wide created us in Her own image.
Thus we are not made to be identical.
God believed in God’s creation enough to allow us different languages,
different cultures, with inquiring minds, so that we might, by valuing the
varieties in our humanity, learn to see God in one another and experience God
more deeply than we would otherwise.
The truth is that we are both Babel people and Pentecost
people. To be inheritors of God’s grace,
to be children of God, means that we are called to the mission of God just as
Christ was. A people called. Called to
spread the good news of grace. Called to
attend to the people of every nation, every situation. Go out. Go out. Go
out. Movement.
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