Happy Birthday, Church!—A Sermon on the Power of Pentecost

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Throughout Easter, we’ve been starting every service—and again every sermon—with “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed, hallelujah!”, right? And that’s true again today—because every morning is Easter morning—but today is also not just any Easter day. It’s the festival of Pentecost! There is, disappointingly, no Pentecost-specific call and response to kick off with. I think we should invent one. The one I have invented is that I say, “Happy Birthday, Church!” and then everyone replies, “Happy Birthday, Church” in a different language.

Feliz cumpleaños, iglesia!

Bon anniversaire, église!

(I also signed “happy birthday, church”)

Since we read the text from the Acts of the Apostles in a few languages, and the Holy Spirit empowered the disciples to go out and do the work in every place, I assume that you get it. This is, easily, in the top five nerdiest things I’ve ever suggested. Perhaps it will catch on? Perhaps we will never speak of it again.

This Pentecost day is a very important one in the history of Christianity, but it has not caught on in our popular culture the way that Christmas and Easter have. I’m not 100% sure why that is. Perhaps it’s because we get a little weirded out by the whole “tongues of fire” thing, or because that whole list of people—Parthians, Medes, Elamites, etc.—doesn’t mean much to us, or maybe because we agree with the person in the crowd who suggested that everyone was drunk.

I think, though, that being 2000 years removed from this spark of the Church, we’re just not amazed. 

We are the results of this day of Pentecost. We, the Belfry, and we the ELCA, and we the Episcopal Church, and we, Christians of any kind from any place are only assembled here today because those folks were assembled there that day. We have travelled to other cities or states and found church communities we recognize. We have heard, perhaps, about the Lutheran World Federation and the Anglican Communion and the World Council of Churches, so we are not surprised that the Gospel is proclaimed in every language in every nation. We are witnesses to 2000 years of preaching, teaching, travelling, and growing. We may be a ragtag bunch of bumbling disciples—we’re in good company—but we are not the only followers of the risen Christ. We are part of a huge community of believers and practicers that spans the continents and the centuries.

We are aware, too, of the dark side of this history. We know about colonialism and imperialism, how Christendom was and is violently forced upon people across continents—including ours. We know that Christianity can be used to limit people and to subjugate them. When we think about it that way, we know that there is a difference between Christian community and Christian empire. We know that we have power to wield, and we must wield it for the good of the world. 

The reading from 1 Corinthians reminds us that each of us is part of this Church’s history, its present, and its future. “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit,” the Apostle Paul writes. You are gifted with so many things—wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy—not to mention your more worldly gifts, like learning new languages, and math, and writing poetry, and interpreting the law, and dancing, and crafting, and telling jokes, and storytelling, and comforting your friends, and speaking truth to power, and playing soccer, and baking cupcakes. “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses” (1 Cor 12). 

The Church has been built by millions of people working together throughout history, and it will continue to be built by us. In this 500th anniversary year of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation, we are focused on what the next 500 years of change and protest will look like. The first Pentecost was the birthday of the Church; what is Pentecost 2017 the birth of?

It doesn’t have to be something quite so momentous as the start of the early church, or the Holy Roman Empire, or the Reformation, or the Great Awakening, or any other seismic shift in the life of the Church. In fact, I think we get into trouble when we expect things like that. The folks who were alive during those times probably didn’t sit around talking about how neat it was to be part of history—they may not have even really known just how world-altering those periods would turn out to be. They were faithful people, open to the movement of the Holy Spirit, going about their lives in a new way.

In what ways, on this Pentecost day, can we be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit?

How can we go about our lives in a new way?

Because of Easter, Pentecost is possible, and because of Pentecost, the rest is possible. Because Peter and the rest of the apostles before us were empowered by the Holy Spirit, we are empowered by the Holy Spirit. We are empowered to bring good news to the poor, liberation to the captive, wholeness to the broken, healing to the wounded, courage to the fearful, joy to the mourning, and hope to the hopeless.

After worship tonight, it’ll be time for our annual Pentecost balloon launch. Every year, we write our prayers for the church and the world on pieces of paper that we tie to—biodegradable, minimal turtle murder—balloons. We launch these prayers into the sky, in hopes that our words and our work will move far beyond these walls. 

This activity may feel silly; we live in a cynical world. Our cynical world routinely disparages or gives up on something before it has even begun, rather than risk being disappointed or rejected. In this environment, the bearers of good news are desperately necessary.  

To a world that says no, Pentecost empowers us to say yes.

To a world ruled by hate, Pentecost empowers us to say “God calls you beloved.”

To a world in fear, Pentecost empowers us to say, “Do not be afraid.”

To a world at war, Pentecost empowers us to say, “The peace of Christ is with you.”

To a world that says “Crucify him!” Pentecost empowers us to say, “Christ is risen, indeed!”

Hallelujah!

Happy Birthday, Church!

Living On a Prayer—A Sermon Wholly Void of Bon Jovi, Though

You may be wondering what you're doing here on a Sunday; don't I preach on Wednesdays? Surprise! I preached this sermon this morning to the good people of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, usually the home of my seminary classmate The Rev. Jeremy Serrano. 

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I bring you greetings from the Belfry, your Lutheran-Episcopal Campus Ministry to UC Davis and LEVN, the Lutheran-Episcopal Volunteer Network, part of Episcopal Service Corps. I spend my days, and many of my weeknights, with a handful of young folks who are living in Davis temporarily.

Some of them are UC Davis undergraduate students, here for a few jam-packed years studying and socializing, looking for a place to step out of the fray for a moment and meet people who “get” them.

Some of them are UC Davis graduate students, continuing their academic journeys in more specific ways, looking for a place that’s decidedly not buzzing with the near-death experience of cutthroat exams.

And some of them have graduated from colleges around the country, and are living in half of our little yellow duplex for 11 months, serving in local non-profit organizations and attempting to create intentional community together.

Sure, we’re the place you can definitely find a Lutheran pastor and an Episcopal priest, but we’re a place that invites more questions than it provides answers.

As a young adult myself—yep, I also fall into the under-30 demographic of the folks involved in our ministry—I feel right at home in this place of transitions and learning experiences and questions. We gather each week for worship and for dinner—nothing says “young adults” quite like free food—and we stay connected in the in-between via Facebook and emails and iMessage emoji. It is my duty and my joy to be among this particular genre of the communion of saints.

Since we gather on weeknights instead of on Sunday mornings, my colleagues know that I am a pretty safe bet for a Sunday morning supply gig. Pastor Jeremy and I were at PLTS at the same time, and so at a recent First Call Theological Education gathering in Arizona, he invited me to be here this morning. I always jump at the chance! It is such a delight to get out into the synod on Sundays like this one, to commune with the good people of congregations like yours. 

In campus and other young adult ministries, we are keenly aware of the wider network of congregations and ministries that we serve alongside, because our community members came to us fairly recently from somewhere else, and we do our best to successfully launch them to what’s coming next. We are so grateful for the home parishes of our students and LEVN volunteers—places like this—who raised them in the faith and sent them off to college and beyond. We know that you send them off in the hope that they will grow in faith and in love and in service to God and to one another.

As you have sent and continue to send your young-adult family members and members of your parish off to college or their next great adventure, we know that you are praying for them and wishing them well. We know that you have entrusted them to us, and with God’s help, we care for them and guide them through their time with us. Keep them coming, and we’ll keep them going.

In this season of Easter, all of us have been reading through the Acts of the Apostles, encountering the stories of Jesus’ friends who continued the work after his death, resurrection, and ascension. It’s our same cast of characters from the gospels, those pesky disciples with their impertinent questions and constant bickering and general misunderstanding of the whole point.

In this week’s story, they have come together one final time with the risen Christ, and—for old times’ sake—still aren’t totally sure what’s happening. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” they ask. Their risen Lord replies, as usual, as I imagine it, with a sigh: “it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”

But! “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:6-8). In other words, “no, but that doesn’t mean never, so continue what we’ve started.”

A weird part about the season of Easter is that we are sort of in a paradox of Jesus being risen and not-yet-risen, depending on which reading we’re talking about. In this reading from Acts, Jesus has already been killed, then raised, and now is ascending to heaven. But in our Gospel text for this morning, he is awaiting arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. In both scenes, he is with his friends, talking to them and to God about what has happened and what is going to happen.

We could go back and forth for a while, probably, about whether or not the apostles are adequately prepared to do what God needs them to do. We could go back and forth for an even longer while, probably, about whether or not we feel adequately prepared for what God needs us to do. Jesus sits in the garden and prays for his friends, and we follow in all of their footsteps. It is comforting to me and perhaps comforting to you to know that on his last night of life, Jesus prayed for us. And, certainly, the risen Christ remembers us, as well.

In this Gospel According to John, Jesus prays, “Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf” (John 17:7-9).

Jesus is praying on behalf of his friends and on all people whom God has given to him, all those whom God has created to be God’s people—Jesus’ 12 friends, and the women, and you and me. In his prayer, Jesus asks God to protect us, so that we all may be one, as Christ and the Creator are one. What a lovely sentiment, and a deep challenge. “If the emphasis on unity can be seen in Jesus’ prayer, then we can conclude that he was aware that keeping his beloved united” was not going to be easy. And that, “without cohesion, they would not survive.”  [1]

As Christians in the United States of America in 2017, we are being pulled in many directions by many powers and principalities. We are seeing play out on the local, national, and global stage, just how many choices we have. We are a nation of many. We are a nation of native peoples, and of immigrants, and of the descendants of immigrants, and of the descendants of enslaved people. We are many metaphors of community—a melting pot or a salad bowl or a dazzling bouquet of every kind of flower—none of these is one, stagnant, stationary thing. The unity in Christ that we proclaim does not insist on sameness.

Perhaps this prayer of Jesus gives us an opportunity to consider what that unity means. We know that as the trinity is three and is also one, we, too, are millions and are also one. I hear this prayer as a sincere petition for unity, but not for uniformity. For us to sing not in unison but in harmony. For us to be individuals-in-community. We, the body of Christ, are called to be a living and breathing and dying and rising organism—changing and growing and reforming from age to age.

We are interacting on a routine basis with one another here in this building and church buildings like it; we are engaging with our families, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and acquaintances in the good work of the Gospel and in all manner of things; we are encountering strangers on the road and in the grocery store and at the gas station and in the post office and any number of seemingly mundane scenarios where the truth of our community resides.

As we go about our days, are we living as the witnesses to the resurrection that Jesus has sent us out to be? 

Are we recognizable as the body of Christ?

In order to live deeply into our call as the body of Christ, we need to live out the example set for us by Jesus in this week’s Gospel text. We need to pray. We need to pray, and we need to get serious about it. As disciples in the present, we must “offer prayers on behalf of the universe in which we are privileged to live and our neighbors with whom we share it.” [2]

We know this, in theory. We have prayed several times together already since we arrived this morning, and we’re not done yet! There may be words of prayer we know by heart. There may be prayers we grew up saying, and maybe even still say! There may be times of the day or times of our lives we feel more inclined to pray. There may be whole seasons of our lives during which we cannot even fathom putting anything together that even remotely resembles a prayer. 

Often, when we are struggling, we reach out to friends or family members and ask them to pray for us—before a medical procedure, or when we’re waiting for news (good or bad), or when we’re trying to make a big decision, or when we’re just feeling kind of lost. It feels wonderful to hear you’re being prayed for, doesn’t it? And when someone dear to you is in need of prayer, it feels good to say, “I’m keeping you in my prayers”—whether in person or in a Facebook comment, right?  

Has there ever been a time when you’ve said you’d pray for someone and then, well, sort of just...didn’t? Or maybe you were going to, and then before you got a chance, you did the 4000 other things you had on your to-do list and then suddenly the friend told you the results of the thing you were supposed to be praying about—maybe even said, “thanks for your prayers!” and you just sort of...let it go? Let me tell you, we have all been there. And if you haven’t, you can be the first to teach us all how to cement our prayer lives into action.

I am not your regularly-scheduled preacher, and I do not have the capacity to follow up with you next week, or the week after that, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t set you a challenge before I sat back down. Our deep and abiding task is to, like the apostles before us, constantly devote ourselves to prayer.

Consider how you might embody that devotion. Consider how you might take very seriously the prayer requests you receive, and the prayers of intercession we offer later this morning, and the prayer that Jesus taught us that we’ll say—as we have said 1000 times—during the Eucharist.

Pray for one another. Pray for yourself. Pray for your pastor. Pray for the people that you see suffering in your community and around the world. Pray for the people you see experiencing great joys in your community and around the world. Constantly devote yourself to prayer.

Whatever that looks like. Whatever words you say, or don’t say; whatever actions you take or don’t take; whatever movement of your body feels like a prayer to you—or perhaps your body needs to try residing in a prayerful stillness. Laughter can serve as a prayer, and tears can serve as a prayer.

Perhaps, through this constant devotion, we will begin to recognize that our whole lives are prayers. And for that, thanks be to God.

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[1] Samuel Cruz, “Commentary on John 17:1-11” for Working Preacher.

[2] Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Prayers for the Coming Week

Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled—A Sermon Easier Said Than Done

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Hallelujah, Christ is risen! [Christ is risen, indeed! Hallelujah!]

As you’ll recall, every morning is Easter morning, from now on. And here we are in the fifth week of the season of Easter, about ⅔ of the way through our 50 days of celebrating that life wins and love wins, and that death does not. Our scripture for this week, though, maybe didn’t totally get the memo?

In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we witness the death of St. Stephen by stoning. Yikes. And in the Gospel According to John, we are back in the Farewell Discourse, the words Jesus leaves his disciples with at what would turn out to be the Last Supper. So Christ is risen and not-yet-risen, today. It’s...complicated. As Lutherans and Episcopalians, we like to live in that mystery, though. We’re all about those both/and paradoxes. So it shouldn’t really bother us that we’re in this limbo with Jesus. Because we’re in it with Jesus.

We often get all discombobulated about this text, because it has been used in a variety of ways in our Christian history. Our dear friend Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” and Jesus replies, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

These words have been such comfort to so many, as Jesus folds us into is community by ensuring us that we are on the road together. These words have also been used to exclude folks from the fold by emphasizing the sentence that follows—“no one comes to the Father except through me.” This can be a “proof text” argument against the validity of all non-Christian religions, and it has been used as one for centuries, “to damn a good two-thirds of the human population.” [1]

But my friend Matthew, an Episcopal priest in North Carolina, wants us to hear Jesus more tenderly. Jesus is talking to his disciples, who are grieving already, even though he is not yet dead. He has told them that he is going to leave them, and they are distraught. We’ve watched them fumble their way around the known world with Jesus, shouting out answers they haven’t thought through and getting in fights they shouldn’t and altogether struggling. And now, Jesus tells them that he’s going away and that they’ll know what to do to get there, too. Understandably, they are not convinced. Jesus smiles and sighs, I imagine. “‘Your heart knows the way to where I am going—I am the way, you have seen it embodied in my life. Just stay on the path, keep walking, and I promise you will not come to God without me.’ These words are meant to soothe an aching heart, not to be used as a weapon.” [1]

Like the disciples, we are followers of Jesus the Christ, and so it’s fairly reasonable to expect that we understand Jesus to be the way, the truth, and the life—or are on our way to understanding that. We have been baptized and perhaps confirmed into traditions that proclaim this boldly and clearly. We are part of the saving community of Christ, hallelujah, thanks be to God.

But last week, we played tic-tac-toe relay races and prayed for peace with the communities that make up the Interfaith Campus Council. By saying that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, are we denying the goodness and truth of our friends’ traditions? I don’t think so. I don’t think that that’s what these words from Jesus are about, at all. He didn’t say them to a crowd of people of many religions, in the midst of a speech meant to convert them all to his way, truth, and life. He said them, around a dinner table, to his terrified friends.

When Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” the disciples are so distressed trying to wrap their heads around the words, but Jesus is just trying to make it plain for them. He thinks he’s making it easier, but they think it’s an intellectual exercise. “Since you know me,” Jesus says, “you know the Father. Don’t worry about it.” This isn’t a test. You don’t have to prove anything. When Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he’s saying “what gets you there is who I am, not what you do.” [2]

And so we head back to the very first sentence Jesus spoke to us tonight: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” There is a lot to be troubled about. In the time between me deciding to write this sentence and the time I am saying it out loud, who knows what news will have come our way from the White House, alone. In addition to a volatile geopolitical scene, we all have intricate inner lives, full of turmoil and tough decisions and all the joys and challenges of relationship and self. Certainly, our hearts are troubled over and over about small things and about big things. But there is one thing about which you need not worry: you are beloved of God, and the risen Lord Jesus Christ has made space for you in the community of saints. He said so, right here! “‘In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?’ (John 14:2).”

Here and now, and there and then—wherever and whenever that time is—there is room for you in the family of God. There is room for you in this beloved community of sinners and saints. There is room for you, here.

There’s no guarantee that it will be simple or easy or great all the time. Jesus does not promise us anything close to an uneventful life. But Jesus promises us life. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Thanks be to God.

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[1] The Rev. Matthew Wright, "The Only Way to God," via soundcloud

[2] The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," via HFASS