Pitt Street Uniting Church, 24 May 2015 A Contemporary Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Pentecost B: Rekindling the church and ourselves Ezekiel 37: 1-14; Acts 2: 1-21; John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15 Let us pray: Open our eyes to see. Open our ears to hear. Open our hearts to love. Amen. Today is Pentecost Sunday. We dress the church in the colours red and yellow and orange to symbolise the flames of fire that were a metaphor for incredible energy among the early Christians. The conference I attended in Denver Colorado, the Festival of Homiletics (which is the study of preaching), was titled Preaching from the Mountain: Heralds of Good Tidings" The title was drawn from Isaiah 40: 9 Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, Here is your God! The preachers and teachers who presented at the festival both addressed the mountain top experiences and they reminded us that we do not always dwell on the mountain. We return to the valley. We live our lives on the plains. The festival was well named, for the city of Denver is called Mile High City. It s exactly one mile, 5280 feet or 1,609 metres, above sea level. And now that marijuana is legal in Denver, the emphasis is as much on high as much as it is on mile. But after the festival, instead of going down from the mountain, my travelling companion Nicole Fleming and I went higher still (not in the marijuana sense). We went to the high desert of New Mexico, elevation 2133 meters or 1.3 miles above sea level, for a time of retreat and restoration. Ghost Ranch, where we stayed is stunningly beautiful land. It has been inhabited for at least 7,000 years by Native American peoples. It is a mystical place, where heaven touches earth and the soul is restored. It is one of those places on earth, where I most powerfully feel a sense of spirit and connection. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 1 of 5
But we cannot remain in such mountain top places or moments. We live in the city. After a journey of 33 hours from Santa Fe to Sydney, which ended early yesterday morning, I am back at sea level. I want desperately to hold on the experience of spirit that gripped me in the American South West. But I know that it will be different here. The search for spirit at sea level is more challenging but equally important. And we have, in the story of Pentecost, a spirit story not located in the grandeur of creation, but in the midst of conflicted, chaotic urban geography. The encounter with spirit in the high desert reminds me to pay attention to spirit in the city, to spirit among the people, to the spirit of God s people within and among us here. ----- Each year on this day, we hear Luke s story of what happened in the city of Jerusalem 50 days after Easter. It's a story of symbolism and drama. The writer of Luke and Acts, scripts a scene that belongs in an adventure movie, wind and fire, symbols of the presence of God. Such symbols are not a complete way of addressing the power of God, but I think that metaphorical images - wind and fire - are more adequate than trying to use abstract philosophical words. The holy is felt as rushing wind and the productive and destructive power of fire. It s mystery not history. Pentecost is one of the three major celebrations of the Christian year along with Easter and Christmas. But there is no public holiday. No special food is planned. No excessively large meal to be shared with family. It s just the church, recalling its beginnings, and reflecting on who we are and where we are going today, more than two thousand years after the first Pentecost. To understand Pentecost, we need to know something of the historical and cultural background. Pentecost s roots are in Judaism. Pentecost was, and still is, a Jewish festival. Shav-u-ot. Occurring 50 days after Passover it links Israel's much older agricultural cycle to its religious history. It celebrates both the completion of the harvest and the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt Sinai. For the followers of Jesus, grappling with their Jewish roots, their new experience of God made known in Jesus, and struggling to survive in a sometimes hostile religious climate, where new could mean death, these images would have been powerfully evocative. Theologian William Loader suggests: Luke is saying that the coming of the Spirit is as epoch making as the giving of the Law, the scripture on Sinai and more. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 2 of 5
So this reimagined story would have given them a sense of legitimacy and purpose and empowerment. The spirit of God was at work creating the new community of the church, resulting in the beginning of the post-easter mission of the early Christian movement. And they were engaged with, filled with, that Spirit. It worked in and through them and their transformation. It was a time both grounded in hope and history, and of freedom open to a new future. It was a wild time which words could not describe, but which could only be evoked by images of fire and wind, and of people who were so caught up in this Spirit that they seemed drunk, or high! When the Holy Spirit blows like a wind into our lives and through our moment in history, things are not left tidy and calm. In awe, we wonder where that wind comes from and where it goes. Yet if we go with it, we find a deeper understanding, and hear one another beyond our contrasting languages and understandings. We might then appear odd enough to the dominant culture that someone will have to announce to the city of Sydney the people of Pitt Street Uniting Church are not drunk, as you suppose. If we are to follow the example of the enthusiasm of the early Christians, we are to be a bit crazy, a bit uninhibited enough, that people might think that we are drunk or high. This windy journey is inviting us to go wild. Wind as breath of God, and fire as the energy of the holy, have captured the human imagination for millennia. Humans have sensed the presence of something more something hopeful something new and have sought metaphors to point to that which cannot be pinned down in words. Perhaps there is a part of us that longs for a way of seeing the world that is profoundly hopeful in the midst of gloom, a way of knowing that understands the world as held in an energy that is primarily good and beautiful. We hope to be reminded of this other way of seeing, to feel that it still exists within all of us, when it is so easy to be cynical and disconnected. Humans have quested for this beauty, and for the hope of new beginnings out of old and broken ways, for millennia. In the text from Acts, Peter quotes a passage from Joel about this new way of being. God declares: I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. Joel prophesied in the period after the exile of the people to Babylon when all seemed broken and forsaken by God. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 3 of 5
From the exile, to the experience of new life in the infant church, to the community of Pitt Street Uniting Church in 2015, we are Spirit people, questing, seeking vision, hoping for a breath of fresh air that will lift our eyes and bring us to life, kindling a fire that will warm and energise us. That is how history is made: by envisioning of new alternative possibilities and acting on them as if they were inevitable. I imagine that s how the people of the Irish Marriage Equality movement felt when they woke up to the tremendous good news yesterday morning that Roman Catholic Ireland has voted overwhelmingly in favour of including gay and lesbian people in society s understanding of marriage. The Fair Trade Movement, campaigns for a living wage, ongoing actions to treat asylum seekers and refugees with dignity, movements to give dignity to people with disabilities and mental illness, simple acts of care and compassion from person to person. This is how despair is overcome: by the declaration of unlikelihood welling up from the centre of reality, by prophesying a course of action that Sacred Energy, which we may name God, is conspiring to bring to pass. Joel s unprecedented egalitarian dream had to wait 400 years before it began to be fulfilled at Pentecost, fifty days after the bewilderment of Easter. Then, as in the Exile, a group of people had lost their grounding, were uncertain of the way forward, lacking in all models and patterns and sure of only one thing: resurrection had happened in their midst. Once again God-energy was enabling the impossible. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit was power and promise for their journey into the unknown. Can we believe that sacred energy is at work in our community today? It seems inevitable that the old ways of being church will continue to decline. It may be that the new forms of the church's faithfulness are already present among us, unrecognized. It may be that they are still waiting to be birthed. This is one of the most turbulent and innovative periods in the church's history. In much of our culture there is a lack of meaning, or a lack of spirituality, that can contribute to a sense of life not being worth living in an intentional and reflective way. So much of our world is running on empty repressing spiritual impulses that can provide the language we need to express hopes and dreams. You see that in the dominance of the pseudo-religion of neo-liberal economics, embodied in a budget that puts economic doctrine ahead of people and the earth. In his book, The Future of Faith, former Harvard Professor, Harvey Cox claims that we are living in, or waiting for, the Age of Spirit. He sees Christian history as evolving from the Age of Faith, to the Age of Belief, to the Age of Spirit. The Age of Faith was active in the first three centuries after Jesus death, the time when the church actively embraced and enacted the teachings of Jesus. The Age of Belief spanned from the 4th century until approximately fifty years ago, when the church, aligned with the state, was more concerned with beliefs about Jesus than the faith of Jesus. This was an era of ecclesiastical control and domination. In A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 4 of 5
the last fifty years, claims Cox, we have entered the Age of Spirit, the so-called spiritual but not religious movement, which now has made its way into the institutional church. In every age, including our own, when the structures become stifling, the belief systems become bloated, and religiosity loses sight of humanity, there is a longing for Spirit to come and breathe fresh air. Whether these ages of salvation resonate with you or not, we go through something like these stages in our own spiritual evolution. There is a time of conventional religious belief, followed by a time of questioning and doubting, followed by a renewal of Spirit, a mystic knowing that radically alters our life. The presence of Spirit is always iconoclastic, personally and institutionally. We are being called, it seems to me, to be profoundly aware of the spiritual dimension of our lives: and this is not an altogether serious business. This is a process of encountering joy and laughter, of letting go and taking risks to be something new and alive. And wind, the breath of God, prophesying a wildly utopian dream of peace and justice, inclusion and understanding, inspiring the early church: also moves within us and among us, as we breathe God in, as we are warmed and rekindled by sacred fire, and as we are swept up in the swirling of the sacred dance around us. On this Pentecost Day, let us celebrate life, and our connection to the source of life, that catches us up, blows us about, disturbs us, and best of all, invites us to dance in wild ways! May the wild wind and the sparking fire of the Spirit move among us here, and new life be felt in our lives and in our community. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 5 of 5