The Making of the Church

Acts 1-2: Ascension & Pentecost

Some of us here heard a guest speaker last week at a presbytery meeting, tell all about how we need to grow our churches—the right kind of churches with the right kind of beliefs, that is. He was articulate and persuasive about it, but if I were boiling down his message into a super simple summary sentence, I’d say it was, “Hey, we PCUSA Presbyterians have a really special product here, a great religious perspective for today’s problems, and we need to sell that product well.”  

He was careful to say he wasn’t talking about growth for growth’s sake, and I believe him. I really think he believes we have a better religious product than most other ones out there.  One that can do good in the world and help people, that includes people who feel excluded by other religious products. We should be trying to impact more lives.

Then, as proof that this was our job, he used the Pentecost scripture, the beginning of the church, saying that on the day of Pentecost, they grew the church, in faith and in numbers, and that is what we are called to do. (Notably, our paraphrase today didn’t seem to think the numbers part was important to include, but the original says their 120 people grew to 3000 that day).

I am not faulting this individual. What he was saying is what any good leader of an organization should be saying in our competitive, capitalist world. It only makes sense. If you have something good for the world you should promote it well and get it to as many people as possible.
If the world were only what we can see and touch, and our lives were entirely about what we make of them, then I might agree with him. And I’m a person who needs outside structure and appreciates community, so I would find a good enough religion to commit to so that I could do some good with my life. Because in the whole sum of things, some kind of ethical system and higher power thinking is both good for my personal self-improvement project, and good for helping the world be better.

In fact, I am going to have to talk to some high schoolers about Christianity in a couple of weeks for their world religions class. I’m on the Abrahamic religions day, after Judaism and before Islam. It would be really easy on that day to slip into this role: defender of the faith, peddler of the goods, recruiter for my team. What make your religion good (subtext: better than others)? What beliefs is it shaped around? What ideals direct you?  I would possibly even fall into arguing how my kind of Christianity is better than other kinds, (even though we are all, technically, the Church, I would have to break it down into ‘churches’ so I could parse out which ones are better), and one way we’re better is that we are more welcoming of other religions than those other Christians are, so that’s why my version of my religion better than other versions andother religions. It’s complicated. And exhausting. Frankly, the whole thing is exhausting, and if I am really honest, it’s boring. 

And when I really let my mind go there, as if this is how it all is, as if this is all there is, life becomes flat and tedious. Then, just behind that, the pain of this world begins to feel scary, terrifying, even overwhelming, because the things that are supposed to be strong and hold us together, like our government, and our leaders, and our laws, and our freedoms, and our morals, feel weak and paper thin, and I am not sure where to put my feet or my heart. 

And if God is just this great idea or good thing I can get my hands around to pass off to people, then God is not bigger than the evil that threatens to undo us, or even more powerful than the ordinary human selfishness and stupidity that, like a snowball down a mountain, has picked up so much destructive momentum and force it will inevitably wipe us all out.

And by this point in the mind game, I am so very far from Jesus, and the stories of resurrection we’ve been hearing from one another. I am unmoored from the deep gratitude that’s been washing over me lately watching you all love one another, and care for your neighbors, and listen to deep stories of lives wrapped up in lives through love. And I can no longer find the joy I had just yesterday, digging in the dirt in my yard marveling that by the grace and wisdom of a God I can’t understand, microscopic things I can’t see, in this enormous earth I can’t direct, under this vast sky with sun and rain, will make these tiny plants grow and all I did to join into this miracle of new life was dig a hole. 

Life is miraculous, and the things that are the most real, the deepest, truest things, are not things we can control, we can only receive and participate in them. This is how God most often moves: in the small, the ordinary, the unnoticed; the possibly of God's act exists in everything, anything even, especially in nothing.

But this all depends on a real God, who so far beyond us, that all we can say truthfully is ‘God is God.’ (Barth)
Which brings us back to Pentecost and the “beginning of the church.”

Except, this is not actually the beginning of the church.  Where it starts is where we started our reading today: Jesus telling the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to lead them into what is next and then disappearing. 

In fact, this moment we call the ascension is so powerful and central to the making of the church, that it shifts the nouns used for the humans. Luke actually tells it twice: it’s the finale to the book of Luke—his narration of God coming embodied into the world in Jesus—where the humans are called disciples, which means ‘followers.’ Jesus is the subject and the disciples are oriented to him. 
But when the same moment again opens of the book of Acts, which is Luke’s narration of Jesus embodied in and through the Church, making us the Body of Christ, now they are called apostles, or ‘sent ones.’  This does not mean, however, that they become the subjects. The subject remains Christ; the power and story is still in the hands of the one doing the sending. 

This is the moment the Church begins, when two things happen. First Jesus tells sent ones what they’re sent to do: they are to wait and watch for what God is about to do next. And second, the flesh and blood Jesus vanishes from their sight. This is so jarring and confusing that they stay rooted to the ground, staring up into the sky for so long that God has to send in some follow-up messengers to prod them on, and tell them to get to it: go back where you were and wait for God to act. 

Now, they had some trouble just waiting, and I get it. They felt like without Jesus right there verbally giving the orders, surely they should do something.  It’s on them now to lead this thing! So, they hold a committee meeting, and pray, and ask God to choose for them, and draw straws to replace Judas in the 12 disciples with a new leader, Matthias. Which is sweet and honorable, and shows just how wide their imagination could reach and no further. Matthias is never mentioned again in the Bible. Immediately after he gets the gig, the Holy Spirit descends and all holy mayhem breaks loose, and the 12 disciples wasn’t even a thing any more after all; they have already become 120 sent ones, about to be 3000 and counting, because God is creating the Church God’s way.  

And God’s way, on that day, was to give the faithfully waiting ones words to speak right into people’s lives the good news of God’s redeeming love and the new life Jesus’ resurrection brings to us all. God chose a day when the city was filled with people from all over, and then gave those new apostles  words to say that they couldn’t even understand. (Maybe that made them a little braver right out of the gate). When they obeyed the Spirit’s promptings and spoke those words, even though they made no sense to their own ears, passers-by, strangers and foreigners heard through the open windows and the mouths of these country bumpkin Galileans truth that set them free. And God grew God’s Church. 

For the first 40 days after his resurrection, before Jesus disappeared again, only these 120 people knew the whole world had changed – they knew it not by their own great wisdom but because they kept running into the risen Lord in all these ordinary places of their ordinary lives. Here he is again! until they began to trust that indeed this is Jesus, and indeed we are in a new thing. But their imaginations are not completely ready for this new thing.  (Do you notice, just when he’s about to leave, those dear ones bring up their old misunderstanding of him! “Wait, when, again, Jesus, are you going to restore Israel? Just so we can know when to expect the salvation we assumed you were about. Even though you told us it was different. And then showed us. For the past 40 days). When Jesus gave them a new identity as sent ones, and then sent them to wait for what God would do next, and then left, it was made clear: the resurrection did not just bring back a private, embodied, singular Jesus just for them to follow and obey. Jesus now lives in the Body of Christ sent into the whole world. 

God is not a product we rate highly and recommend widely.  God is God. Our very imaginations are not capable of accessing God. And so certainly, our words and ideas, our efforts and goals, our church-making and religion-building can’t begin to capture or even hope to say anything substantive about God. This is the God who holds us.
 
Only God can reveal Godself. And God reveals Godself to us in Jesus. Jesus is still the subject. Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.  This has been the Church’s shorthand for the whole sum of the gospel for thousands of years. Christ has died: There is no death, loss, evil or suffering into which God does not go with us and for us; death does not get the final word. Christ has risen: bringing life out of nothingness, hope from despair, newness from impossibility is what God does, is doing, will keep on doing. And Christ will come again: the story is ongoing, the end to which this is all heading is the love that came from God’s being, brought all life into being, and will return all things in love to the very heart of God, and nothing can derail the trajectory of things.
 
The Church begun Jesus told them to wait for the Spirit is happening right now still, in every place in the entire world among the people who have surrendered their life into the Life of Christ lived in and through us.  God is forging a new community whose imaginations keep expanding, and whose lives take on the shape of the love that makes up God’s own being and bears witness to the resurrection life of Christ moving in the world even now, right in the places of brokenness, fragility and death.

And if the terribly uncontrollable feeling of surrender doesn’t suit us, and the waiting is so uncomfortable that we fill it with tasks and build our idea of what the church is and should be, at least we are in good company. The apostles do it in the first minutes of being Church, and the whole book of Acts and Paul’s coming letters to the Church will be filled with this back and forth between imagination-busting astonishment at what God is doing through them by the Holy Spirit, and falling back into misunderstanding, self-sufficiency and well-laid plans. Then being reminded (sometimes by a quite grumpy Paul) and redirected again to what this whole apostle and being Church is really about, then, when God does something through them that defies the limits of their imaginations, they’re astonished anew, humbled and awed, and so it goes. 

So, Church, while we keep running into the risen Lord in all these ordinary places of our ordinary lives, and telling our resurrection stories Here he is again!, first and foremost, we will wait together for the Holy Spirit to draw us into the most real, deepest, and truest things in ways that rewrite our imaginations for what God can do, and teach us to trust in what God is up to in the world, and make us ready to join in, ready for what God will do next. 

Amen.

The Story of Humanity

Acts 2:1-21, 38-47

One year ago we awoke Pentecost morning from a night with a curfew and closed freeways, to the smoldering remains of shops along Lake Street, and a palpable tension in the air along with the helicopters, smoke and ash, as the nation was reeling from watching the breath forced from George Floyd’s body in front of our eyes. One year ago this week our city, the nation, the world, ignited with pain. 
 
The end of our passage today calls the people who heard the word of God and joined in the work of God those who are “being saved.” Being saved looks like letting love’s fire cleanse us and burn away what is killing us, and fan to life what wants to live in us.  It looks like repentance of sins and honest acknowledgement of the ways we hurt each other, degrade each other’s humanity, or ignore the needs of our neighbors or their cries for help or justice. Being saved looks like forgiveness of ourselves and each other, the green shoots of new life budding between us. Being saved looks like courage (which is always vulnerability), and willingness to be changed. And it looks like showing up for each other with abundant generosity and our true selves, in whatever ways we can amidst life’s losses and upheavals. This being saved from fear and division for love and connection is the work of the Holy Spirit. 
 
The words for Holy Spirit in Hebrew and in Greek are: breath, wind, life force. The Spirit is the outflowing of the dynamic connection between Father and Son  - the verb of the Trinity’s relationship, love in action, the energy of life that binds us to God and each other. Where there is love, connection, comfort, healing, hope, there is the Holy Spirit.
 
The Spirit of God hovered over the great void of emptiness at creation, stirring up life out of nothing, bringing connection from chaos. So the Spirit doesn’t need some pre-existing material to work with.  Nothingness and loss is where God begins. This is the same Spirit that filled the lungs of the adam, the first creature of the earth (adamah), and initiated the first tiny human community with one man and one woman, now made in God’s own image.  This is the Spirit who inspired of the Psalms of David, quickened the womb of Mary, and descended like a dove to claim Jesus as Beloved in the river of John’s baptism.  
 
And this is the same Spirit who hovers over us now, in the strangeness of this life – the time that we are slowly leaving of upheaval and staying still, undergirding fear and excruciating languishing, and the Spirit is hovering over the season of transition and baby steps toward ‘normal’ we are just stepping into.  Into our exhaustion and worry, the unknown we are facing, the pain we are carrying and joy we are tasting, the Spirit of God speaks to our hearts the persistent invitation to life alongside each other.
 
In our Apostles’ Creed book, (the part about the Holy Spirit we haven’t gotten to yet) Ben Myers talks how in the bible – between the first tiny human family in Genesis and the final vast harmony of all tongues and tribes in the presence of God that awaits us in Revelation, sin breaks into the human story and disorders human relationships, making “each human being a fragment torn loose from the whole.” This culminates in the story of the Tower of Babel, where the in the distortion of their connection the people cooperated to undermine and mock God.  So God divided their language and suddenly they were no longer able to work together, to shape a shared life or mutual society. Splintered apart, they drifted off in separate groups to different places, and the whole is broken. 
 
But on Pentecost, when the Spirit comes on the fearful and languishing disciples grieving their loss and just stepping into own their season of transition, they suddenly speak all these different languages, and the human family that has been scattered and divided comes back together.  Myers says, “That is what happens when the Spirit is present. The Spirit fulfills the Creator’s original plan by bringing forth a universal community whose boundaries are as wide as the world.  The Spirit broods over the chaos of human nature, lovingly piecing the fragments back together so that together we form an image of the Creator.” 
 
We are in the middle of that story. We are made for belonging and being shaped for this human family, and we are distorted by sin and fragmented by division. But in every moment thee Holy Spirit is drawing us back into our belonging to God and each other, and is shaping us for a future of everlasting belonging and joy.  The power of the Holy Spirit, the energy of God’s love, comes into our places of death and detachment, bringing new life and healing.
 
One year ago, in the middle of a global pandemic that kept us separated, in the middle of a national outpouring of anguish and anger, the Holy Spirit was moving.  People who hadn’t been listening before started hearing the message of God’s love and connection in their own language, speaking to their own hearts, calling forth repentance and awareness. And in new ways, through different voices, our shared humanity was lifted up before our eyes.  
Communities came together to care for one another, artists and activists teamed up with grandparents and children, strangers gathered food, had conversations, shared tears, and made music, and art and good trouble.  A garden sprang up on George Floyd square, and rallies and marches sprang up all across our nation and the world, and people who had been isolated and divided began hearing and seeing each other.  People who had been settled became unsettled. People who had been ignored and marginalized, threatened and harmed were empowered to tell their stories, to speak truth to the world. Make no mistake, this is the Holy Spirit in action. 

In the past year we’ve been alongside each other in all sorts of ways, with laughter and tears and computers and masks and food delivered and prayers shared, and losses weathered and joys celebrated. And in our empty building hope is alive as walls have gone up, framing out a space of welcome for a community of children and teachers to share life with us. And the Holy Spirit continues to move.
 
We are one human family.  The children separated from parents at our border and the children hovering in fear of falling bombs are our children. The isolated and lonely who weathered the pandemic behind locked doors, seeing loved ones through closed windows, are our grandparents.  We all belong to God. We all belong to each other. 
 
God is forging a new community that reflects God’s own being. We are being saved into that love, for that love, to find our being in that love and live out that love in the world God loves.
 
But a reminder again: the work the Spirit does not come from us, and is not up to us. We don’t join in from our own competence or confidence; we join in from the connection that God has already made. The Spirit doesn’t need terrific pre-existing material to work with, nothingness and loss is where God begins. Remember, God’s Sprit hovers over emptiness, creates life out of a void and connection from chaos, and isn’t put off by a challenge. We are being saved.  The Spirit will give what we need when we need it.
 
All around us are stories of conflict, stories of human beings fragmented – torn apart in ways that seem impossible to mend.  But the true story of humanity is the story of Pentecost, scared people joining in and letting their voices be used by God.  Divided people from divergent backgrounds, experiences and places each hearing the voice of God in their own language, embraced in the fullness of their own person, and joined back into the unbroken whole human family by the Holy Spirit with the call to spread that hope to the world. Now we know in part, we get little tastes and small glimpses, but one day, in the very presence of God, we will experience fully and completely our belonging to God and each other without end.
 
Amen.
 
 

The Church has left the building

Daily Devotion - May 31

I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays) 

while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

Acts 2:1-21, 38-47

We made it through the night. God is here with us now. In the darkest moments of night this week, when the voices of rage and sorrow have been drown out by the violence of evil and destruction, God was here.  In the brightest moments of the day, where collective mourning took the shape of people showing up to help each other, to protest together, to clean up neighborhoods and deliver food, to weep and serve and love and raise voices and repair what is broken, God is with us.  In all things, God is with us. We are not alone.

When something awful happens, or awful things that have been happening for a long time come to light, once again, in all their ugliness, and claim our attention, the whole world momentarily takes on a micro focus on that crisis.  

We care and we rally, and then we're whiplash shifted onto the next crisis. A dangerous, global virus fell off the radar at the horrible killing of George Floyd.  And the spotlight on the vital cries of outrage at the deep and abiding injustice and racism that needs to be rooted out of our nation, our city, ourselves, shifted to our protests being infiltrated by violent outsiders, the summoning of the national guard and institution of a curfew, and last night’s surreal preparation for street warfare.  And in the midst of all this our daily lives, with our own struggles and joys and are still unfolding.

We human beings can’t hold all these things at once.  We shift our attention to the next one thing, and our despair and exhaustion build, and so does the pressure to focus hard on the specific thing in front of us. 

But the gospel speaks to ALL OF IT - and the message doesn’t change.  

At Pentecost, the Church is born. It’s the beginning of the people whose whole identity and purpose is to remember that the world is loved by God, that we all belong to God and each other.  That is the enduring message through everything else. 

It’s a wide, wide lens that takes in all of it - tyrants rise and fall, crises come and go, continents divide, there is mass destruction and amazing rebuilding, corruption and righteousness, death and rebirth - this being human is a terrible, glorious thing. 

And throughout every moment of it, our God is so relentlessly for us, and made us to be so relentlessly for each other, that into the deepest divides, and the most horrific brokenness, the most impossible situations where no hope can be seen, God came. 

God comes.  

Jesus comes into death to bring life for all. Death does not prevail. The final word is life.  

The world belongs to God.  The world is loved by God and is being redeemed by God. That is our hope, that is our future, that is our calling, that is the gospel, that is our message.  That is the church’s message. 

Always, and now, and always especially now.

We trust this. We live this. 

Pentecost is the celebration of the Holy Spirit moving in us to cleanse and heal and renew and empower us to embody God’s love and redemption. Pentecost is the day the Church left the building, and was born into the world. 

I woke up to a post from Holy Trinity Church this Pentecost morning, that said, in part:

We had plans for another video worship service this week, but as the days unfolded it became clear that everyone's energy was needed in the community and our worship became the daily work of the congregation. 

We typically have 200-250 people worship with us on a Sunday morning, but this past week it's been somewhere closer to 10,000. Our communion became our ordinary round tables, spread out on the lawn where thousands of neighbors brought their offerings of food, water, diapers, and tools, and thousands more came to take what they needed. Our hymns became the shouts of the protestors, our healing stations became those providing medical relief, our sharing of peace became listening to the needs anyone who found their way to our sanctuary. It's not the worship we had planned, but the church's witness and work became the worship that we needed.

And here's a holy choir:
Mennonites singing at Minneapolis protest

____________

Here is a list of clean-up events, food drives, and places to donate.  See how you can help. 
This Facebook group: Southside for mutual aid is keeping current.

Here is a S. Mpls. coordinated list of needs that also keeps changing and remaining current.  
 

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CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

Is it possible that since the moment the breath was violently forced from George Floyd’s body, we have not taken a deep breath?

Grief and horror have been followed by sorrow, anxiety, anger, fatigue, worry, tension, shame, fear, and ongoing pervasive sadness, and maybe all week we’ve been clenched tight, waiting for whatever is coming next?

I want to invite you to a moment of silence.  After each line, let whatever thoughts or feelings want to arise in you come and go. And then breathe deeply, all the way in, and all the way out, before reading the next line and sitting with that.

This is part of the story.  BREATHE.
This is not the whole story.  BREATHE.
The world belongs to God.  BREATHE.

Maybe you need to do this a few times.
Let this be your prayer.
Let God meet you here.

Being Saved

Acts 2:1-21, 38-47

Just like all those gathered there on the day of Pentecost, we all hear the gospel in our own language. 

For those of us who are charismatic Pentecostals, the day of Pentecost is the promise of seeing signs and wonders, of prophesying and dreaming the reality of God. 

For those of us who are social justice Christians it is about caring for the poor so nobody is in need, and for Christian socialists it is about having all things in common, sharing what you have with each other and building a new kind of community.  

For evangelists it is about numbers being added and the good news being spread to all nations.  For the preachers it’s about Peter’s epic sermon – some of which we did not read today - introducing Jesus in such a compelling way that it draws thousands to the good news of God.  For those waiting for the fulfillment of Old Testament promises, it presents Jesus as the culmination of their hopes.  

For some of us it’s all about repentance and the forgiveness of sins that leads to new life. 

For others the baptism of the Holy Spirit that gives us the power to do supernatural things.  

Sometimes it feels like instead of the Holy Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost allowing the singular message of the gospel, given in all the languages for everyone to hear the same thing, this story just opens the door to lots of different messages, the gospel fragmented and parsed out, for everyone to hear what they most want to hear.

But this passage is really about one thing: This is about being saved.  They are being saved. 

When I say this text is about being saved, I am aware that I am opening a can of worms.  A surefire way to light up the divisions between Christians is to talk about the concept of being saved.  Because we hear that through the filters of all our differing strategies, goals and the meaning we assign to the saving, who needs it, who does it, how it happens and what it’s for.  Some people cringe and hear it as condemnation toward those who are not saved.  Others hear the message of eternal security in heaven and being protected from an eternal punishment in hell when we die as the core of the gospel, and find it to be a deep and abiding hope.  And for others, faith and following Jesus is about obedience and action in this lifetime and they don’t even know what to do with the word “saved” so it makes them wiggly in their pew hearing it said aloud today.

But here it is – they were being saved.  Paul talks like this all the time, (and we will get into that this summer, and throughout this upcoming year).  That is what happens at Pentecost – they were being saved.  And it is why we are sitting here today, celebrating the day of Pentecost – we too are being saved.

We’ve been in the season of Easter, telling stories of resurrection, (aka, stories of being saved), leading up last week to the Ascension – the moment when Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain 40 days after his resurrection, gives them some words and vanishes into the clouds, is Luke’s dividing point in the story he is telling.  He gives us that scene twice- at the end of the book of Luke and just before this in the beginning of Acts.  He uses it to end the first of his letters- the one about Jesus being here with us in bodily form.  And then he uses it again to transition us to his second letter, the book of Acts, which is all about usbeing Jesus’ body.  When Jesus’ in body leaves, the Holy Spirit comes and we become the Body of Christ.  Luke has moved us out of the story of Christ in the flesh, to the story of Christ enfleshed in community, from God alongside, with and for, to God in and through and between.  

Pentecost is the very beginning of what we now call the Church.   

And Pentecost is the story of us being saved. 

Being saved from the way of fear for the way of God. 

Being saved for nothing less than full participation in the very life of God.

This also means being saved from thinking the story is about us, about what we do or believe or don’t do or don't believe. The verb, the action, in this story is not human action, it is the action of God – the Holy Spirit is the verb of the love of the Trinity. It is the very energy between the Father and the Son poured out on us and drawing us into that union of love. 

God is saving the world.  The rest are details.

You and I, every one of us, we are made for intimate connection with God – made for this.  We are children of God, which means not only do we belong to God as our very core purpose and source and the relationship that defines us and makes us who we are, but we also belong to each other; we are sisters and brothers in the human family – all of us. 

We are made by love to love God and love each other.  

Bishop Curry talked about this at yesterday’s Royal wedding- (did you really think you’d come to church – any church – today and not hear a reference made to Bishop Curry’s Royal Wedding Sermon?). He asked the crowd to imagine our pained weary world if love were the way of things. And then he painted a picture: nobody would go hungry, nobody would be poor, war and violence would not exist, and the earth would be stewarded with care.  Love is so powerful, he said, that living with its power would transform us so much it would be like discovering fire for the second time.

We are being saved for this, into this.  

God is forging a new community that reflects God’s own being – a community that bears witness to and takes on the shape of the love that makes up God’s own being. 

We are saved into that love, for that love, to find our being in that love and live out that love in the world God loves.

This is the birthing of a new humanity.  And it means the death of the old one.  

It means, as Franciscan priest, Father Richard Rohr puts it, “life is no longer about you, now you are about Life.”  

This is a losing of ourselves completely.  Belonging fully to God and to others, means that propping up ourselves and pursuing our own causes over against others ceases to matter entirely. 

This is also, therefore, paradoxically, a finding of ourselves utterly.  As we belong to others we find we are most fully alive; as we love and receive love we discover our unique humanity, fully participating in all its uniqueness, not losing its distinctiveness but gaining it.  

We find ourselves more fully belonging to ourselves, even as we more fully belong to God. 

Every person standing there that day, in every language, heard the gospel that set them free, whatever it was they needed to hear that allowed them to claim deeply that they were being saved for belonging to God and others, for conscious and joyful participation in this new reality defined entirely by love.

Being saved looks like letting love’s fire cleanse us and burn away what is killing us, and fan to life what wants to live in us.  It looks like repentance of sins and the ways we hurt each other, and forgiveness and new life between us.  And it looks like supernatural power that comes out in courage (which is always hand in hand with vulnerability), and abundant generosity, and inexplicable miracles as the Holy Spirit moves through us.  

We are the community of those whose lives have been lost that they might be found, those who understand themselves as “being saved”- every day saved from our own hatred and selfishness, freed from our own judgment against others and ourselves, saved from patterns of thought and behavior that dehumanize ourselves or others, freed from an existence emptied by apathy, or filled on gluttonous rage and irritation. Saved from the compulsive fear and avoidance of death that ultimately serves death.

We are being saved for Life – as Life truly is, as it is meant to be, that is, intimate connection with God and life-giving connection with others, in the honest and humble acknowledgment of our true selves, so that even while we are dying we know we are being saved, and even as we are being saved, we know we are dying.  

And here’s the power of it all – when we are living in this new reality, when the Holy Spirit meets us the way it did the disciples that day and all the people who heard the message spoken right to them, when we have an encounter with love that sets us free to love more, when something we thought we were dies and what we are becoming is being born in us - 

the result is that some will see signs and wonders and some will prophesy and some will dream dreams of God’s future reality breaking in.  Some will give up all they have and share in common. The poor will be claimed alongside us as our own and together we will work for a reality where nobody is in need. The promises of old find their fulfillment, not only in the embodied Christ who walked the earth, lived, died and was resurrected, but also in the Christ now embodied in, through and between us.  

This “being saved” is timeless and eternal, it is not stopped by death, nor does it begin at death. It begins right now with obedience to Jesus and concrete action, joining in the activity of God here and now, caring for the poor and building true community, and it continues, drawing us into eternity with God in deep, abiding hope.  The good news of this reality spreads from us and to us, from and to all nations. And, it turns out, epic sermons are occasionally preached to millions that draw people to the good news of who Jesus really is.

There are no divisions among us, there is only Jesus Christ.  
We are one in Christ, beloved and bearers of love.  
We are being saved for full participation in the life of God each and every day.  
May we welcome the power of the Spirit, however it comes to us today.  

Amen.

Our Pentecost Practice Run

Acts 2:1-21, 38-47

Pentecost has been called the birthday of the Church, because it is when the church first formed, but first and foremost, this is the Holy Spirit’s day.

The Holy Spirit is ruah in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek: breath, wind, life force. The Spirit is the outflowing of the dynamic connection between Father and Son  - the verb of the Trinity’s relationship, love in action, the energy of life that binds us to God and each other. The Spirit comforts, leads, inspires, and animates. 

The Spirit of God is has always been here, behind the scenes, under the surface – hovering over the waters at creation, filling the lungs of the Adam, the first earth creature, inspiring of the Psalms of David, quickening the womb of Mary, descending like a dove to claim Jesus as Beloved in the river of  John’s baptism. 

But on Pentecost the Spirit comes out from behind the scenes; the stage manager takes center stage.

Jesus told the disciples to wait, that the Spirit was coming – and they waited, unsure what was coming, wondering how they would become the so-called Witnesses Jesus had told them they were. 

They waited in that liminal space between the end of their following and the beginning of their sent-ness, in the place where their witness-hood began to take shape. 

Jesus had embodied in himself complete unity with God and humanity, he was the person in whom divine and human came together and spilled out as love verbed in the world, and they had followed in his shadow and soaked in its rays.  Then he died, and rose, breaking the barrier between heaven and earth, life and death.  And when the Spirit came at Pentecost, the power of that verbed love was released onto the disciples, and they were suddenly drawn into the dynamic relationship Jesus had with the Father, and into the life and mission of God.  The energy of the Trinity now draws us into God, and fuels us out with the breath, life force, creativity and activity of God. 

These disciples now become the very Body of Christ in the world. They are no longer followers of Jesus on earth, as students to a teacher. Now they embody the relationship and mission of God in their own bodies:  Their words, their own quirks and accents, their struggles and delights, their very hands and feet and voice!

And God’s Spirit that moves through them is also in that space between them – that is, this body they become when they come together with all their different needs and gifts and fears and hopes, and they trust together that God is God and the world is claimed in God’s love.  They’ve become Church.  

But they don’t know yet what they are.

They’re just experiencing things and sharing about them. They are witnessing.

And notice that when the crowd gathers as they speak, all who listen hear in their own language – no matter how distant their homeland is from that place or how few of them are in that crowd – each one hears exactly what they need to hear from God, through the words and actions of these surprised disciples, caught up in God’s love. The Spirit reaches out and draws each of these listeners into the inner dynamic of God’s love, where life originates and abounds forever, where Jesus brought death to die.

Today is the Holy Spirit’s day. 

Today is the day the Church was born.

Remember, last time I said the disciples and the early church throughout the book of Acts were bouncing back and forth between beautiful encounters of supernatural healing and transcendent hope, and the ordinary struggles about housekeeping and money, how to share, and how to listen to each other without fighting?  And they sought to do all of it as Christ’s Body – the place on earth where divine and human come together and spill out as love verbed in the world.

That meant not separating out the holy from the mundane, but recognizing all of it as God’s ministry, and learning to see themselves as stewards of the mysteries of God, as sharers in the life of God for the world. 

They were figuring it out as they went along – listening to the Spirit, seeking direction, using their intellect and their cooperation, and watching God work through all of it.  They were figuring out how to be the people who are with and for each other just as Christ is with and for us, because that is where the Spirit of God is found.  This is what Church means.

This little congregation gathered here today all these centuries later is part of that, a legacy of that group, an embodiment of that same continuing mission.  

And I love this community for the fervent and truthful way we try to be with and for each other and the world.  For the way we try to recognize God’s presence in both the obviously holy and the so-called mundane.  

I love how we believe we meet Jesus when we share each other’s suffering and bear each other’s joy.   And how we seek to honor each person as a minister, tiny or full-grown, with their needs, gifts, fears and hopes, and how our ministry changes with each new person who comes to share in this life together with all their quirks and accents, struggles and delights. 

And I love we learn from our mistakes, and we take risks, and we seek the Spirit’s guidance in the midst of each new hurdle and opportunity that comes our way. And through it all, we try to trust together that God is God and the world is claimed in God’s love.

One of the ways we live out this trust every month is that we give 10% of our income to other expressions of God’s love in the world - other organizations or congregations or ministries where we see people sharing life together, breaking down walls between people, reaching out in hope.  The list of those we’ve given to in the last two years is inspiring:

This congregation has shared with folks who offer people Sabbath rest and retreat, those who resettle refugees, and those who empower conversations and build community across barriers. We’ve shared with people who help communities heal after violence, those who help neighborhoods rebuild after tragedy, those who provide support and care for people who can no longer care for themselves as they used to, and those who provide housing and food for people without.  I’ve hung a complete list on the back wall, and put a few copies in the Gathering Room, so that you can see the amazing things we’ve been part of these past two years. The ministry God does in us spreads far beyond us; we are connected to God’s work in the world in lots of ways.

But as session reflected on Pentecost, and this moment when the mission went from centralized in the person of Jesus, to embodied by all these people who make up the Body of Christ, we decided to do something different with the tithe money for a month. 

What must it have been like to suddenly have the mission in your hands?

To pray to the Spirit for guidance and trust the Spirit to use you to bless someone else?

To learn to let God work through you?

We talk all the time here about noticing God, seeking to join in what God is doing, and coming alongside others in suffering and joy, and that is what we are called to do. To give and receive the ministry of God.  But that can feel abstract. We wanted to make it concrete.

So May’s tithe is right here – 17 envelopes with $100 each inside them. 

This month the tithe is not to be given to an organization, but is meant for personal connections with people.

We trust that in Jesus Christ, we all belong to God and we all belong to each other.  This is a chance to live that out in a creative way. Seventeen of us today will leave here with an envelope in our pocket and the job of praying and asking the Holy Spirit to show us who it might be meant for.

Here is how this will work: First, we will pray over this money – setting it aside, like we do the bread and the cup at communion, asking God to make it something holy, something that God will use to bless people, a tool of the Holy Spirit in the hands of witnesses and ministers, (that’s you). 

And then, we will draw names.  Adults and kids, members and visitors, 17 of you will be representing this whole community, the gifts we’ve all contributed, and blessed, and sent out, will be in your hands in the world.

If your name is drawn, your assignment is: Watch for God. See what God is doing. Join in.  Ministry is sharing each other’s suffering, and holding each other’s joy. How might God be calling you to use this money to do that with someone? This might mean finding someone to whom you’d like to give an unexpected blessing, or someone you’d like to say, “I see you. I am here,” or someone you want to express gratitude to for the blessing they are to you or others.  It could be someone you know well, or someone you’ve never met.

Step 1: Pray about it.  Ask God who to give it to, and how.

Maybe you have someone in mind right away. Maybe you need to sit on it for a while and ask God for direction.  Trust God to show you. (This is God's money. You are God's too. So is whoever will receive it).

Step 2: Give it to that person. 

It might be uncomfortable. That’s ok. Notice the discomfort; God is in that too.

Are there words you’d like to say? Gratitude, Empathy, Love you’d like to express? Pray about that too. Maybe there is something God would like to tell that person through you.  Maybe no words are needed.  Listen with your heart; speak from your heart. 

Step 3: Share about it

Remember, we are witnesses: We encounter Christ and we share about it. Come back and tell us what it was like. Was it awkward? Uncomfortable? Thrilling? Joyful?  How did you choose who to give it to?  What happened afterwards? How did you encounter Christ through this experience? 

We will share about this in worship on Sunday, June 18. 

Those who are comfortable sharing aloud can do so, and those who would rather write a note and have Lisa or me read it, can share that way. Between now and then, the rest of us will be holding you in prayer, that God will arrange the circumstances and the Spirit will guide you.

Kids- your grown up will help you however you need as you pray about it and ask God who to give this money to. Babies, your parents will decide for you and tell you all about it when you’re older. (And Pastor Lisa wanted me to remind you not to eat it).

A word to anyone who feels absolutely paralyzed with terror, or even just extremely uncomfortable about this. If your name gets drawn, and you feel you cannot do this alone- bring in another person. Ask someone else here (or even at home or work) to do it with you, to think, and pray, and reach out to give it away, along with you. You are not in this alone. This whole practice is meant to remind us that we all belong to God and we all belong to each other. 

Finally, this is the practice run, you guys. 

With that money in your pocket you have a specific assignment, something concrete to do.  It’s the training wheels.  The harder thing is to watch and respond in the world with the gifts God has already entrusted to us that we can’t see or don’t recognize as gifts.  Our hands and voice, our words and touch. Our presence, our own needs, hopes, fears, doubts, weaknesses, and joys. God wants to use it all to draw us and others into God’s love.  And through us, the Holy Spirit can speak to each person just what they need to hear, meet them just how they need to be met.

This is our Pentecost jump-start, a reminder that we are Church –the people who watch for Jesus and join him where he is – in the midst of it all, sharing joy and suffering alongside others.  Learning to watch for God’s ministry and join in is a lifelong endeavor that we do together.

So we witness to how hard it is and we celebrate how life-giving it is. We encourage each other to seek God’s presence and share God’s ministry every day in ordinary and extraordinary ways.  And today, specifically, we welcome and celebrate the life-force of God that binds us to Christ’s love and sends us out in that love. 

Today is the Holy Spirit’s Day!  

What marvelous things will the Spirit do with us, I wonder? 

Happy Pentecost, Church!