Day of Pentecost
Year A, RCL
May 11, 2008
All Saints’, Bentonville
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."
Last week a violent cyclone hit the country of Myanmar creating a 12-foot wall of water that swept away entire villages, leaving the coastal plain submerged, and thousands dead, missing or homeless. There are estimates that as many as 100,000 people may have lost their lives. You may recall that nine months earlier, government security forces in this country formerly known as Burma, fired into crowds, killing dozens of people, in order to disperse the pro-democracy demonstrations led by Buddhist monks. In the months since, the government has carried out a brutal campaign of arrest and intimidation.
It is rare for the country of Myanmar to appear in the news in the West, so with the violent repression of the colorful monks of Burma followed so closely by the devastation of a violent cyclone, we are drawn as human beings to look for connections. When events occur in close succession, the human tendency is to look for a causal relationship. A fundamentalist Christian perspective, would have us look for the hand of God as the causal agent, especially when it comes to natural disasters, - movements so terrible and cataclysmic that they seem beyond anything except the awesome power of God. Even our insurance policies have absorbed the language, referring to hailstorms and floods, as “acts of God”.
So it was in this context that I received from a new parishioner, the following thoughtful and compassionate response to the cyclone in Myanmar.
I am sure that I am not the only one whose lack of faith in a loving God is solidified by moments like these. How do we explain situations like these? Every time I'm tempted to believe in some kind of a God, something comes along that causes my brain to scream out; OF COURSE NOT!
I can understand nature, this is not my problem, but what I cannot do is explain the role of a loving God in the context of such tragedy.
Let me assure you that our God of love does not reign down destruction on innocent people. Cyclone Nargis occurred because of a confluence of just the right natural elements. Large areas of the ocean became heated, and the air pressure over that area dropped. A wind pattern near the ocean’s surface started to spiral the air inward – and a cyclone developed. The cyclone drove a tidal surge inland from the sea and the human devastation occurred.
God didn’t cause the cyclone in Burma, anymore than God caused Hurricane Katrina or any of the thousands of other disasters that have been recorded in human history. Storms are the result of scientifically explainable forces, not the hand of God.
So if God isn’t in the business of creating human misery, just how does God work in the world? How is God’s power made evident?
Through us. As we heard in the Epistle this morning, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
God’s love connects us with the suffering of the Burmese people. God love is made evident in our response to horrific crises like the cyclone, and our response to the less sudden but equally devastating misery that daily encompasses most of the world’s poor, and defines the tenuous existence of the oppressed that live among us.
On the Day of Pentecost, one year ago, All Saints’ Episcopal Church was meeting a mile or two east of here at Washington Junior High. We had just started meeting on Sundays and we were still scrambling around on Sunday mornings, setting up the altar furniture on the stage of the musty school auditorium. In those days, visitors, as soon as they walked in the door, often found themselves recruited to read the lessons or lead the prayers or sing in the choir as we assembled church – on the spot. More than one 12 year old boy or girl learned what an acolyte was, and had his first experience carrying the processional cross, all on the same day. They were heady times, often chaotic, and providing fertile ground for the Holy Spirit to scatter her seeds.
And now when you look around we not only have people prepared to serve as readers and acolytes, but also as teachers and singers and preparers of food and worship and community organizers, and friends of the poor and evangelists and Eucharistic visitors and those who want to start community gardens and Friday night coffee houses, and those who want to build clinics, and parishioners eager to respond to the needs of troubled youth, the immigrant, the imprisoned, and the friendless. People who have identified needs in the community and are passionate about bringing their gifts of the spirit to bear.
It is been my great joy these past few weeks to talk with new members of our parish and learn about the gifts and talents they bring with them – continuing a legacy that, while still in it’s infancy, has become central to who we are as a people. A people intent on resurrection - on discovering their passion and living into it with all their being.
The early church was launched on its mission as a spirit filled community as a result of its Easter experience. This gift of the Holy Spirit, isn’t a gift that merely provides us with some vague sense of religious feeling. It’s meant to empower us to do the work of the church. The spirit is the vehicle through which Christ continues to live and work in the world. We worship a living Christ. The Holy Spirit isn’t a substitute for a Christ who walked on the face of the planet, but the means through which the mission of Christ continues. It isn’t something we can keep to ourselves, it is equipment for mission.
So the newly resurrected Christ, stood among his fearful disciples and said, “Peace be with you.” The disciples were transformed from eleven fearful men, hiding behind locked doors, to men who were sent forth to carry the gospel message to the world. These frightened, troubled, ordinary people were changed into extraordinary human beings.
Walter Wink once said, “Something did happen to Jesus: he infiltrated the Godhead. The very image of God was altered by the sheer force of Jesus' being. God was, in Jesus, taking on a human face. God would never be the same. Jesus indelibly imprinted the divine; God everlastingly entered the human. In Jesus, one might say, God took on humanity…” And the disciples saw that Jesus' spirit could work its works in and through them.
What I imagine for all of us who arrive at All Saints’ is that we can have the same realization. That the person who crosses the parking lot, timidly enters the doorway, tentatively accepts a bulletin from a greeter in the narthex, and joins with us here in a pew, is transformed. My prayer for all who pass through these doors is that we are imbued with the Holy Spirit just as surely as the disciples were.
Breathe in the peace of the Holy Spirit. Allow it to strengthen you for the work, the fulfillment of the gifts of the Spirit.