Sermon

To You All Hearts Are Open

Published on by Tina Shippey

Pentecost 2
June 23rd, 2019

Today’s Readings are:

Isaiah 65:1-9
Psalm 22:18-27
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39

Click here to access these readings

        The other day, Gwendolyn and I watched a scene from a 90s children’s cartoon called the Prince of Egypt.  The movie follows the story of Moses, so it’s sort of a children’s version of the Ten Commandments.  I’ve never seen the whole thing, myself, but a friend once showed me the scene where Moses encounters the Burning Bush.  It’s a really beautiful scene, and I wanted to show it to Gwendolyn.

        Now, you all know the story of the Burning Bush: God reveals himself to Moses in the form of a bush that is on fire but not being consumed.  Then God issues a call to Moses to save the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  It’s a powerful scene in the Bible, and this cartoon rendition is a pretty powerful one as well.  Now, in the scene, Moses is standing all amazed at this strange sight before him.  He hears a voice, and he asks, “Who are you?”  And God gives him his name, which is one of the center-points of God’s revelation to us: I am that I am.  God is pure being, pure love, pure life; that is who he is.  And this name reveals that God is not just any other god, like Zeus or Thor or someone, but the God at the center of all existence.  That’s quite a name.

But in the scene, God also asks Moses who he is.  Or, rather, he tells Moses who he is, but Moses doesn’t believe him.  First, he calls out to Moses using his name: Moses!  Moses!  But Moses barely answers.  Then God says that he will send Moses to Pharaoh and set the Israelites free from their slavery in Egypt.  Moses comes up with all these excuses of why he shouldn’t be the one, but God just says, no, it is you who are to go.  In short, God says: Moses, this is who you are; Moses responds by saying, that can’t be. 

Now, this film isn’t the Bible, but I think it does a great job of picking up a really important theme in our Scriptures: who are you?  Time and time again in the Bible, God asks a person, “Who are you?” or, perhaps more appropriately, “Is this who you really are?”  It happens often when God calls someone to a specific task.  When the Jeremiah is called to be a prophet, he says, “You can’t mean me; I’m just a boy!”  Jonah does it better: when he’s called, he doesn’t just say “no” but turns tail and runs the other way.  But it’s not just when people are called to some great task that God asks them, “Who are you?”  God asks this to King David when he commits first murder, then adultery: “Is this who you really are?”  And Jesus asks it to St. Paul when he first appears to him: “Why are you persecuting my people?  Is that who you really are?  Or are you someone more?”  And Jesus asks it all throughout the Gospels as well: to the woman at the well; to a bunch of fisherman who then become his disciples; to St. Peter in that beautiful story at the end of John’s Gospel, though here Jesus doesn’t have to ask the question directly.  Instead, he asks to Peter (three times to balance his three denials of Jesus): Peter, do you love me?  And when Peter responds “yes”, each time Jesus tells him: “Feed my sheep.”  In other words, he’s saying: if you love me, Peter, if you are one of my disciples, then here is who you are: feed my sheep.

Now, we’re asked “Who are you?” pretty much all through the day.  When we go to the doctor’s office, especially if we’re a new patient, we have to fill out these long forms that ask us our name, our address, our closest-kin, our medical history, and on and on.  When we sign into our email, we’re asked for our user name and password.  Some larger churches have name-tags so that everyone knows that this is Joe and this is Frank.  And I don’t know about you, but I get tired of all this.  And all I want is to go to a place like in that old show “Cheers”, where everyone knows your name, where people know who you are deep down to your core.  That’s one of the beauties of a family: they know us, through and through; or one of the deep graces of your home church: when you walk in the door, or when you see one another out in town, you know them, you know their pains and their joys.  You know what they’re going through and what they’ve gone through.  You know them.

And how much moreso with Jesus.  There’s a great prayer at the beginning of our Sunday liturgy; it begins: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.”  Now, I’m not required to say this prayer each week.  It’s one of those optional prayers, but even so, I always make sure to begin the liturgy with this prayer.  And I do so because I think it’s important to remember just how close God is to us, just how deeply and thoroughly God knows us, and that he still loves us and is dedicated to that love.  Because the presence of God, the mere presence of him, be it in the Bible or the history of the Church or in our own lives, God’s presence strips away all that we think we are, all that we write on those forms in doctor’s offices, all the user names and passwords, all the titles we put before our names or the letters after them, and gets down to the nitty gritty of each of us.  And who are we before God?  When God has seen through all of our smoke-screens, all of our mind-games, what does he see?  Nothing more, and nothing less, than his own beloved children.

That’s a lot.  I could stop right there, and we could all sit for a while to drink that in, because that’s huge.  The Creator of Heaven and of Earth, of all that we see and know, and all the angels in the heavens, the ruler and life of all that is: loves us.  Thinking about this, you can maybe understand why some people become monks and nuns, so that they can sit and ponder and work within this great reality all the days of their lives.  But what can we do with this awesomeness, this great grace that the Lord God Almighty loves such creatures as us, and loves us so much that he would take the form of a human and die on a cross?

Well, one of the things we can do is to ponder this reality, to pray within this reality of love and goodness.  But Jesus gives us something more as well.  At the end of our gospel reading this morning, look at what happens: the man, once enslaved by a legion of demons, is now whole and healed, and he wants to go with Jesus.  But Jesus sends him back, and what does he say?  “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.”  Tell people about God.  Tell people about your life with God, and your life lived in God’s love.  Tell people about where you meet that love: in your garden, with your family, volunteering at the food bank, here at church.  Proclaim God’s love in the world.  You don’t have to stand on the street corners and yell at people that God loves them (actually, I’m pretty sure Jesus told us to be cautious of doing this), but we are called to not just keep God’s love to ourselves but to share it, to open our arms wide and share our story of our walk with God.

We are Spirit-spreaders, we Christians.  So cast those nets wide, sing your songs loud and with a full voice, and love your God with all that you are.  For God loves you for all that you are, and more.

The Trinity

Published on by Tina Shippey

Trinity Sunday
16 June 2019

The readings for this day are:

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

Click here to access these readings.

       Let’s start this morning with a field trip in the BCP.  Could you grab your red Book of Common Prayer and turn to page 307, please.  It’s right at the bottom of the page, marked with a nice big heading “The Baptism.”  Now, this section is right smack dab in the middle of the liturgy for Baptism.  This is where the actual baptism happens.  The part in italics (called the rubrics) tell us that each candidate is presented by name, then each person is immersed or has water poured over them.  And while they are in the water, these words are spoken: [person’s name], I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 

       Now, why do we do this?  Why do we, when we bring people into the Church through the Sacrament of Baptism, do so in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit?  Why not just “in the name of God”?  Why use God’s name at all?  Well, the easy answer is that Jesus told us to do this.  In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  But as we do this, and do it faithfully and joyfully, we may also ask: why?  Why do we baptize in the name of the Trinity and not in some other way?

       We Christians believe that the true nature of God is found in the idea of the Trinity.  God is One, but God is also Three.  And God’s how we might be when we’re in different groups, so, even though there’s just one of us, we act differently with our families, our friends, and out in public.  And it’s not as if God is a set of three identical triplets, each that looks very much alike but, at the end of the day, are really just different people.  No, God is One and God is Three.

And if this makes your brain hurt trying to imagine how God can be both One and Three at the same time, don’t worry.  The Trinity is a very complicated, often confusing part of our faith, and many good, intelligent people have spent their whole careers trying to find different ways to explain something so beautiful.  That said, the Trinity isn’t something big and complicated like, say, the motions of the planets or the tectonic plates, that if we think about them for a long time, we’ll be able to fully understand them.  But when we look at our lives, and when we look at what is revealed to us in Scripture, when we listen with our hearts and minds and souls, we begin not just to understand that Trinity but to live it, breathe it, and walk in it.

Our readings this morning are part of this revelation.  Now, historically, the concept of the Trinity – the idea of it – was not thought up until the fourth century.  Christians in the fourth century were very much concerned with the exact nature of the relationship between Jesus and God the Father.  And one of the things produced from fourth century discussions is the Nicene Creed, which can be very technical at times with its language about “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.”  But all of these discussions weren’t just vague philosophizing and people making up theories off the top of their heads.  No, these early Christians were drawing the understanding of the Trinity from how God had revealed himself in Scriptures – in what we call the Old and New Testaments – and in the life of Jesus Christ.

We see some of this revelation in our readings today.  We see it in our reading from Proverbs, where the Wisdom of God stands like a master worker at the founding of the world.  And this Wisdom isn’t just being wise but seems to be a person, a being, for God delights in him, and Wisdom rejoices in God and the world that was created, and humanity with it.  And in Romans, St. Paul describes God’s life as being love poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, bringing to us a peace – even in suffering – through Jesus Christ.  St. Paul doesn’t tease it all out for us, or separate all the components of God like a little kid at school lunch who takes apart each piece of his sandwich; but instead he says that the life of the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are intricately intertwined.  For the language lovers of you, God is not just about nouns but about prepositions for St. Paul.  God’s about ‘through’ and ‘in’ and ‘with’ and ‘inside’, about poured into and living with and given through, so that God is revealed to be not just some bearded guy on a throne with people at his feet but a being of living, breathed life and who pulls us into that life so that we may be healed and sanctified into that relationship.

And there is, of course, Jesus himself: his words and his deeds and his very being.  Time and time again Jesus speaks, acts, or directly identifies himself with God the Father, and the Spirit together with them.  Jesus, and God, and the Holy Spirit are, in some way, revealed to be in an intricate relationship with one another.  And it was this relationship that the fourth century councils, through reading and contemplation and prayer, came together to write the creeds.

But we don’t believe only because the Bible and the Creeds tell us to do so.  The Bible and the Creeds are an authority in our lives as Christians, surely, but they themselves live and breathe in the context of our faith here in the present.  For we see, even in our own individual lives, that the God of the Bible and the God of the Creeds is still alive today, grounding us, healing us, and breathing new life into us.  We experience God the Son, God in Jesus Christ, in those times when we find healing and goodness in the most turbulent of times.  When we turn from our own darkness, when we turn from hatred or disdain or sorrow, when we are caught in that darkness and hatred and disdain and feel a steady hand turning our hearts towards light and life and goodness; that it is the life of Jesus Christ born within us doing this work. 

And in this healing, in this turning from despair and darkness, we are not only led back to a sort of status quo but are lifted higher into light.  This is the work of the Holy Spirit, who won’t let us remain in complacency, but will show us a deeper life, a fuller life, a more hopeful and giving life that is ever the promise of God.  And this life is founded on something strong, something sure, something that will never move, something that is not a “thing” but is the Creator and Guider of all Creation, a being of truth that will never stop loving us; and this being we call God the Father.  And all this work of God, the work of Jesus and of the Spirit and of the Father, all of this is to bring Creation into a fullness where there is no grief or despair, no hatred or resentment, but goodness and love for all eternity.  

We as Christians have dedicated our lives to this Trinity.  In Baptism, whether we were baptized as a child or led into the faith by others, in Baptism, we were all brought into the Church; in the Eucharist we meet Jesus and are healed with his hands of love; in the Sacraments we are nurtured into the Life that was born and is growing within us; and in our mission, our good work as the Church, we bring that Life out into the world that is so deep in hurt and sorrow.  For that Life that we have seen in Scripture, and that the Church has proclaimed for the past two thousand years, is here now in this present day, in this very room, in your very hearts, speaking to the Life that is in the hearts of those sitting around you as well.  For the life of the Church is a Trinitarian life that seeks to heal, to love, and to ground things in the source of all goodness and love, which is God, our creator, our savior, and our light in this world.

The Language of Our Salvation

Published on by Tina Shippey

Pentecost

The readings for today are:
Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-27

Click here to access these readings.

        If you’ve ever spent time in a foreign country, you know that something funny happens with your language.  It happened to me while I was in Japan.  And it was this: suddenly, with any warning (it seemed), I was utterly and completely illiterate.  Signs – they meant nothing to me.  Menus at restaurants, safety information that comes in furniture, my receipts, even my teaching contract; I couldn’t read a thing.  Nor could I understand anything that was said, either.  I sat in teacher’s meetings and only understood a few names.  Every week I bought food at the grocery store and only understood a “please” or “thank you.”  My students, who had about as much skill with English as I had with Japanese, tried in vain to tell me about their studies, or baseball, or themselves, or to ask about the U.S.  And I could understand, or say, a little bit.  Here I was, in a country that I had studied and loved for many years, and I couldn’t interact with it beyond, “Isn’t it sunny today.”

        Now, I always knew that I’d be basically illiterate in Japan.  I knew that my language skills (especially in speaking and listening) were pretty poor.  I know that I’d have a hard time.  But I didn’t expect it to be so frustrating.  I’m a reader by nature.  I like talking to people.  I wanted to talk to people.  I met people my own age, older folks who had lived through WWII, Buddhist monks who had such different beliefs than my own, and even fellow Christians who were about as excited to speak to me as I was to speak to them – and yet, there was that barrier between us.  There was that barrier of language – a barrier that so often connects people together but here it was like the Tower of Babel, and language kept us apart.

        And in all this frustration, there were little havens of calm and grace.  One of these times I was up in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan.  I was on vacation with a bunch of friends, and they went off skiing.  And since I’m horrible at skiing, I wandered around on my own for a bit.  Then, on the train back to Sapporo, this young Japanese guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, are you American?  Do you speak English?”  You see, this guy loved English, just about as much probably as I loved Japanese.  And he had just gotten back from studying in Australia, where he spoke this language he loved day in and day out.  And, really, he was kinda lonely for it.  He wanted to hear it again from a native, and to speak it himself. 

        We were immediately friends.  We told each other about our families, where we grew up, our dreams and excitements and hopes, everything.  In the seat in front of us was another guy, a young man from Korea who was travelling alone, and when he heard us talking and laughing, he turned around and joined in.  His English wasn’t as good as the other guy’s, but he kept on with the story-telling as best as he could.  It was great.  And, for a while, I was home.  Yeah, sure, I was fourteen time zones, 6,237 miles (I checked this) from where I was born.  I was on a train, in a country where I was completely illiterate, talking to people who I had only met just that day, but I was home.  In my language, I was home.

        Pentecost is about being home.  Well, Pentecost is about a lot of things, but one of the big things it’s about is being home.  But it’s not just about being home but about hearing home.  Because on the day of Pentecost, we remember a miracle.  And it’s not just the miracle of the tongues of fire above everyone’s head, as I have pictured on the front of your bulletins.  It’s the miracle that, suddenly, the disciples were preaching the Gospel, they were speaking of the devotion and love and hope of God, not just in one language, but in every language.  But not as if the Holy Spirit were some sort of spiritual Google Translate, where you put in the Gospel and it churns out some wacky translation that makes little sense to a native speaker.  No, the miracle here is that the lonely Parthian over there, far from home that he can taste it in his dreams, suddenly hears the tongue he grew up with; or the Egyptian hears the exact accent of Egyptian of his beloved wet-nurse.  These people hear the Gospel, the Gospel of salvation and love and hope, not in a foreign language that they barely know, or a second language they’re struggling to make sense of; but their own language, their mother tongue, the language they were raised in and in which they were taught who they were, the language they thought in, dreamed in, argued in, and hoped in.  It was in this language, so close to their hearts, that they heard the Gospel.

        And this is a miracle, I think, that we often miss: that God saw fit to say, not “Come over here, I’ve got something to tell you” but “I will come to you.”  Now, there are many things in Christianity to which we need to align ourselves.  We are to die to sin and be risen (not “raise ourselves” but “be risen”) by God into new life.  We are to remake our lives, by the Holy Spirit, according to the Scriptures and the teachings of the Church.  We are to practice the virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, faith, hope, and charity.  And all of these things are not in ourselves but in God.  Just as we say in the Baptismal Covenant, we must turn, each and every day, from the powers of evil and to the goodness of the Lord.

        So are we called to live a life to Christ, but the language of this call, and it’s voice, speaks to our heart of hearts.  In the story here in Acts, on the day of Pentecost, this took the form of an actual language, but it’s much bigger than that.  God created each of us not as carbon copies of one another but as distinct individuals.  And God, in raising us up to be his own daughters and sons in the image of Jesus Christ, God does not erase who we are.  We aren’t like those old floppy disks full of corrupt information that God needs to reformat and start again.  We aren’t even like a weedy garden that God has to spend time with in the dirt, yanking out the bad and sticking in new, prettier plants.  We are God’s children, his beloved, and those good things that we love, those things we hope for and yearn for, all those things that we go to in love, these are the things through which God calls us and hopes for us as well.  There’s quite a bit of death before the resurrection, surely, and that death can sometimes feel like being nailed up on a cross, but at the end of the day what God is aiming for is not the death, not the pain and sorrow of loss, but the resurrection, the golden light of the new dawn on all of our Easter day.  And God gave us these things that we love – be they our gardens or our children and grand-children, works of great literature or whatever college football team you root for – God gave us these gifts in love to pull us up towards himself.  Just as the people on Pentecost heard the Gospel in their own tongues, erasing the destruction of Babel, so too do we hear the Gospel in the love language of our own soul, which God made.

        Today is Pentecost, and it’s the start of the season of Pentecost.  We call it Ordinary time, but it’s anything but ordinary.  For the past half-year, ever since Christmas, we’ve been hearing about and thinking about Jesus’ life, his death, and his resurrection, and about the life that he brought to us in Salvation.  But now, now in Ordinary time, we listen to God’s call to us on Pentecost to help bring that light out into the world.  And what does that look like?  Well, we’ve got six months of Ordinary time to talk about it and discuss it.  But at its core, it’s the same work of Pentecost: for just as God met us where we are, and called us through our joys and sorrows and hopes, so are we called to be present in the lives of others, to speak to them the Good News of Jesus Christ in a language they understand.  In our world, putting ourselves – our own needs and our own path – aside to sit and listen to another, then to preaching a Gospel of mercy, forgiveness, and love; that’s a rare thing in our world.  But it’s the work of the Spirit.  It’s the life of Jesus Christ that we’ve just heard about and walked through ourselves these past six months.  And it is a call from God, our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier, to love, to love, and to never stop loving.

 

Seeing Clearly

Published on by Tina Shippey

Seventh Day of Easter

Today’s readings are:
Acts 16:16-43
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17:20-26

Click here to access these readings.

We humans are so often pessimists.  We look at situation – be they in our lives, or in the culture around us – and we say, ahh, this isn’t going to end well.  We do our best to hope and to keep an open mind, but often there’s that little voice in the back of the head that whispers that everything is going to go south.  We do this a lot with the weather – I think a lot of us spent all week last week prophesying rain on Friday and Saturday for the fair – about traffic and delays and how horrible a dinner will turn out.  And we know this about ourselves, so much that movie makers take advantage of it with suspense.  The other night, Helene and I were watching a sci-fi show, and the main characters were investigating an abandoned ship. They were wandering through the dark hallways, looking this way and looking that, searching for what happened.  And it was all so suspenseful, which means that Helene and I both knew that something bad was going to happen: something would go wrong with the ship or some monster was going to pop out and scare everyone.  And at one point Helene just said out loud, “Get off the ship!  Just get off that ship already!”  And in the end, nothing happened, but we felt justified in thinking this anyway.  We humans are pessimists.

And it’s not just us in our culture, either.  In our first reading this morning, from the Book of Acts, we hear about a pessimistic set of magistrates and a pessimistic judge.  Here are Paul and Silas dragged before the authorities in the marketplace.  They’re accused of disturbing the city and just being generally un-Roman-like.  And what do the magistrates do?  They say, “Yeah, sure they’re probably up to no good,” and they have Paul and Silas beaten and then throw them in jail.  There’s no trial, no questioning of witnesses, and it doesn’t seem like Paul and Silas get to speak for themselves.  The magistrates, it seems, already know the outcome.  They’re pessimists.  They see these two raga-muffin characters, and, without hearing what they’re saying or seeing what they’re doing, they assume the worst, and throw them into jail.  And they probably think they’re justified in doing so.

And then there’s the jailer, who is, really, our hero in this short story.  He’s not a hero yet, but he will be.  Here’s a man who is, quite simply doing his job.  The magistrates tell him to keep Paul and Silas securely, and so he casts them into the innermost cell and fastens their feet with shackles.  He’s not taking any chances.  He wants to do his job and to do it well.  He doesn’t care what Paul and Silas are in for; he got an order, and he’s going to follow it out.

Then there’s the earthquake.  Then the ground shakes so violently that all the doors of the prison are thrown open and all the chains are broken.  And the jailer wakes up and sees everything that he has been tasked to protect split open and destroyed.  And, yeah, I’m coming down hard on pessimists this morning, but your heart really goes out to this man, doesn’t it?  Put yourself in his shoes for a moment: your one job in life is to make sure that these doors stay locked.  It’s your job to make sure that the doors that hold all these people – all these people that the culture has deemed so dangerous that you’ve got to lock them up – that these doors are now split open and torn from their frames.  Imagine working in a bank, and coming in to find all the doors (and to your terror) even the door of the vault thrown open.  Or that you come home from vacation and you find your front door wide open.  These doors, this vault, these chains, they’re here for a reason, and that is so that things stay inside and definitely not outside.  And when the jailer sees all this, he assumes the worst: everyone’s fled away.  And then he assumes the worst again: the only proper response is to fall on his sword and kill himself.

Now, when I take this man to task for being a pessimist, I think that he’d do better in being an optimist.  We should still criticize this man if, after waking up from the earthquake and seeing the doors thrown open, he just kinda shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m sure everything’ll be fine.”  The cure for pessimism isn’t just a good dose of optimism.  This story isn’t here to encourage us to just look on the bright side of life and make the best of what we have.  And, to look a bit outside the story, the point of the Christian life isn’t just to move from pessimism to optimism, to just be happy and go-lucky, to look for the silver lining because Jesus has our back and nothing bad can happen to us.  No, one of the main points of the Christian life, and one of the main points of this story, is to see clearly, to call for a light, to rush into the darkness, and to see what is actually there.

This is what the jailer does, and what he finds are Paul and Silas, sitting and waiting for him.  But that’s not all.  He also sees their wounds, fresh from their beating and certainly in need of some medical attention.  He sees them for the situation they’re in: that they’re cold, tired, probably hungry, and most likely bleeding.  He sees them and, within an hour, has them home, and is cleaning their wounds.  And Paul and Silas, in that light, see the jailer, too, and they see what he needs: they speak the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in the house, and they baptize them.  And the night ends, not in a dark jail cell, but in the full light of a household with everyone rejoicing in God.

Now, it’s easy to be pessimistic.  It’s easy to assume the worst.  Or, well, it seems easy.  It seems easy because getting your hopes up is hard sometimes, especially when disappointment is so often waiting just around the corner.  Once hurt, shame on you; twice hurt, shame on me, as the saying goes.  But in being pessimistic, and, really, in being too optimistic as well, we miss what is right in front of us.  We miss seeing the problem for what it actually is, and we miss seeing the people in the problem.  And, perhaps most of all, we miss seeing the grace of God.

Now this seeing, this act of looking not on the bright side or the dark side, but of seeing, this is something that Jesus Christ was (and is) really good at.  Time and time again in the gospels, Jesus encountered people up on life and down on life.  He encountered prostitutes and rich young men, he met tax collectors with pockets full of other people’s money, and he met those who struggled every day to glorify God.  Jesus met sinners and those who had been blessed.  But Jesus looked beyond all this and saw the person, the person himself or herself, whoever they were in the eyes of God.  And perhaps most of all, he met them where they were thirsty, where they yearned for something more or better or more holy.  He met them at their core, and it was from here, from seeing who they were at their depths, that he sought to heal them and to make them whole.

And, if I can speak for you all, I think we’ve known this sight of God, too.  God has looked at us and seen us.  He’s looked past the bad and the good, beyond everything who think we are to who we are inside.  And God looks with eyes of love – not love that ignores the bad and puffs up the good too much, but eyes of true love, that see us for who we are, which is beloved children of his own making.  God lights a candle in the darkness of our own soul, and he picks us up and brings us to his home.  And there he tends to our wounds, so many of them self-inflicted, so many of them at the hands of others, but without blame, without hatred, without anger, God washes those wounds with the hands of Jesus Christ and the cool waters of baptism.  And then he feeds us with food fit for the soul, that grows Daughters and Sons in the image of his own Son.  This is what we experience in the sacraments, in the community that we call the Church, and in our prayers.  This is the life lived with Jesus Christ growing inside of us.

And so we, too, are asked to see.  Not to hold ourselves back in pessimism or to shrug our shoulders in optimism, but to open our eyes and see the light of Jesus Christ.  And in that light, we see those who are hurt, we hear the call from God to go to them, we see the hope of God in his Creation, and we see and experience the healing hands of Jesus Christ, his Son, our savior.

 

The Holy Spirit and the Church

Published on by Tina Shippey

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

This Sunday’s Readings are:
Acts 16:9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 14: 23-29

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This morning we hear about the Advocate; or, in other translations, the Encourager or Comforter.  These translations lead to the joke that those who don’t go to church on Sunday morning and sleep in are “attending the church of the Holy Comforter.”  But all these words – the advocate, the encourager, the comforter, even the friend – all of these are translations of the single Greek word paraklete, or paraklaytos.  Jesus will soon ascend to sit at the right hand of God the Father and no longer be among humans.  And another, someone who the Father will send in Christ’s name, will come to teach, to lead, to remind the disciples of what Jesus said; to encourage, to comfort, to advocate; to paraklete. 

        Now, in John’s gospel, Jesus pretty clearly identifies this paraklete as the Holy Spirit.  But following the crucifixion, there were a number of people who stood up and said, “Oh, that paraklete guy, yeah that’s me.  I’m the one who can interpret what Jesus said.  I’m the one who will continue his teaching.  I’m the one who understood Jesus, not that other guy over there.  Listen to me, not to him.”  And we see a bit of this infighting in Acts and the epistles, and especially in 1 Corinthians, where some say they’re with Paul, and others to Apollos.  This is something that was happening rather often in the first century, and it’s something that’s happened ever since.

        Now, we always have to be cautious of someone who says that they speak directly for God.  We can interpret God’s word for us, sure.  We can discern what God may mean by his presence in our lives, yes.  But we come to some pretty shaky ground when we think that God gave me these specific words to tell you. 

        And, sure, we can enter into this way of thinking pretty naturally and innocently.  God really is present in our lives, talking to us, guiding us, and loving us into the fullness of Being.  God is concerned with us – that’s all of us as a group and as a people – and with us, each and everyone, individually.  I believe that God called me, Timothy Robert Hannon, born in New Jersey husband to Helene and father of Gwendolyn and Fiona, to be a priest in his church.  Through thoughtful prayer and discernment, through looking at God’s voice to me in my life and through talking to others about it, I actually think that God led me to be a priest and to stand up here each and every week to tell you all that God’s word to you is LOVE.  I do believe that.

        But the question isn’t whether or not God is present in our lives but in how God is present in our lives.  Again and again, we hear in the Bible about how God is present to people – but how is God present?  Most often, when God reveals himself, it is to a group of people: the Israelites in Exodus as they fled from Egypt, or to two men on the road to Emmaus, or to all the disciples when they were mourning the loss of their beloved teacher and friend.

        And when God reveals himself to just one person, it is always at the service of the community.  Why does God reveal himself to Moses in the burning bush?  Not to make Moses feel important or good about himself, or because he really just likes Moses and doesn’t want to talk to the rest of the rabble.  No, it’s to equip and inform Moses so that he can go into Egypt and lead an entire people from slavery.  And Jesus comes to Peter after the Resurrection not just to guilt him and make him feel bad, but why?  What does Jesus tell him, three times, to do?  Feed my sheep.  Peter, get out there and feel my sheep. 

        Now, an introvert, this aspect of the Bible and the Christian life used to make me feel uncomfortable.  I like being alone.  I like sitting down with a good book on a stormy, rainy day.  I like sitting out at the shore and just quietly watching the ocean.  And I like these things, because I’m filled by them.  I meet God in them.  God is present in the quiet, and I believe that God heals me and nurtures me in the quiet.  And, in many ways, I think that my relationship with God was built during the beautiful, quiet moments, alone, just me and my God.

        But when we seek to understand what God is trying to say, when we seek to know God’s will in our lives and in the world, when we hope for and in the kingdom, we do this in community as the Church.  That’s the real reason we in the Episcopal Church have so many committees and delegations and conventions.  Often we get lost in them, thinking that the BAC or the vestry or the convention is really important because we get together and not that we get together because together we can more fully and completely hear God speaking to us.  We gather together each Sunday and on days throughout the week not just to do our own personal, individual prayers alone, but this time just with someone sitting next to us doing her own personal, individual prayers.  No, we come together so that we may bring each of our needs, our hopes, our yearnings, our loves, and our joys together, together before God.  And after we pray together, hear the Bible together, and join together in the Eucharist, then we go out, separate but together, to bring the love of God into a needy and despairing world.

        And this work of the Church is the work of the Spirit.  For there’s a reason that, in the Creeds, the parts that deal with the Holy Spirit all have to do with the community that is the Church.  Think about it.  The Creeds begin with God the Father and creation.  Then they move to God the Son, which is all about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and what that life, death, and resurrection did to bring salvation to us all.  And the next part, that third part, is about the Spirit, and it’s about the Church.  It’s about the good, everyday, sun-up and sun-down work of today, which is the life of the Church.  And this work is life.  It is the worship and glory of living a life to God, of the encouragement of the prophets, of Baptism and the forgiveness of sins, and of the Resurrection of the dead in the world to come.  In all, the Holy Spirit is the giving of life to our community and, through this community, through the Church, to the world.  The Holy Spirit is life.

        Soon it will be Pentecost.  Just two weeks and it will be green season again.  And we call this long season “the season of Pentecost” because it is the season of the Church, of the movement of the Spirit not just in our hearts but in all our hearts, individually and collectively.  It is the season when we all listen to the word of God and live a life not just dedicated to good works or good programs, but a life dedicated to the burning center of all existence: God the Almighty, God the Encourager, the Advocate, the Friend, the Comforter.  God the giver of life, love, and hope.