Scriptures: Acts 2:1-4, 14-21, Romans 8:26-27
Reader: The festival of Pentecost celebrates the birth of the Christian church. The Holy Spirit came upon the faithful disciples of Jesus to inspire and energize them. They told the story of Jesus and shared the good news with everyone.
Reader: Two American soldiers were killed in action Monday in Anbar province west of Baghdad. The troops were assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary force, but the military refused to release other details, citing security concerns.
Reader: Exuberant Spirit of God, sweeping us out of the dusty corners of our apathy…we praise you. Exuberant Spirit of God, speaking words that leap over barriers of mistrust to convey messages of light and new understanding, we praise you.
Reader Scores of lawmakers yesterday viewed unreleased photos and videos of Iraqi detainees being sexually humiliated and physically tortured. Sen. Richard Durbin said, “There were some awful scenes. It felt like you were descending into one of the rings of hell, and sadly it was our own creation.”
Reader: O holy spirit, making life alive, moving in all things, root of all created being, cleansing the cosmos of every impurity, effacing guilt, anointing wounds, You are lustrous and praiseworthy life, you waken and re-awaken everything that is.
Reader:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Reader: We remember that your church was born in wind and fire, not to sweep us heavenward like a presumptuous tower, but to guide us down the dusty roads of this world so that we may lift up the downcast, heal the broken, reconcile what is lost, and bring peace amidst unrest. For it is written: The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted…to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound…
Reader: Israeli troops use armored bulldozers, tanks and helicopter gunships to seize control of Palestinian neighborhoods in southern Gaza Strip; at least 19 people are reported killed during house-to-house searches.
Reader: “Likewise the spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”
I thought I would begin with words from other places, words that are not my own but that have been bumping around inside me recently as I have been thinking about worship this morning. I feel a little like one of those places in amusement parks that have those little electric cars that people drive around in completely chaotically just looking for someone to bump into. That’s how I have felt—all these words moving chaotically around inside me, bumping, crashing into each other, sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently.
Some of these words were words I wanted to find, words I knew existed and I went and looked for them. Some of them were words I didn’t ask for, words I just came across, or that just came across me. They come from the Bible, from an eight-hundred-year-old mystic named Hildegard, from modern day poets, from the very non-poetic Washington Post and the even more non-poetic Daily Progress. Some of them are upbeat and optimistic and religious in nature, some are sobering to say the least, and very unspiritual. They do not necessarily fit well together, and definitely do not contribute to logical thinking and a clear and uncomplicated message. That could be because our lives these days do not yield logical, clear, uncomplicated messages. Mine doesn’t anyway.
In the life of the church, today is Pentecost. I know that may not be a biggie for a lot of you. Depending on your church background, you may not have even taken note of Pentecost too much as an important day on the church calendar. I’ve usually paid some attention though. It’s a story that I’ve always found to be worth thinking about, the one from Acts where a bunch of grieving disciples, all huddled together and not knowing quite what to do, receive a mysterious but powerful gift of the holy spirit, that brings them back to life, fills them with passion and energy and commitment and courage and gifts they didn’t know they had.
All other things being equal I would normally spend some time reflecting on that Bible story from one angle or another and maybe just reflect some on the idea of spirit, holy spirit, what it might mean for a person or a church to be filled with the spirit, what it might mean for us to be fully alive, things like that. All other things being equal Pentecost/spirit would probably be the theme of our worship today. And all those things are partly on my mind.
In the life of our culture, this is Memorial Day weekend. It doesn’t always happen this way but this year it happens that Pentecost and Memorial Day come at the same time. We would normally find some way to acknowledge Memorial Day in church too, though when it falls on Pentecost, it doesn’t just naturally fit in with the mood and themes of the day. Still, all other things being equal, Memorial Day would also be either a theme of worship or at least included in some way.
Then there’s the fact that there’s a war going on. Memorial Day has a more urgent meaning because of that this year. And of course as I thought about worship this weekend I couldn’t help but think about the war. I think about it a lot. I’m sure we all do. And even when we’re not thinking about it in a direct way, it is there, taking up lots of space in our psyches, creating worry and uncertainty about the future, fears that we may not even be fully aware of and that we try to put aside in some corner of our consciousness where they won’t bother us too much, disturbing the peace of our inner worlds too, making us wonder what we’re supposed to think or feel or do. We have acknowledged the war in our worship. Evelyn has been faithful about keeping our prayers for Daniel and Andre fresh. (Let me assure you that you have been well-prayed for in this place and wherever else and however we Sojourners say our prayers.) Occasionally there have been other prayer concerns and thoughts shared in the context of prayer, such as Jim Gibson’s last Sunday. It’s not that we have ignored the fact that there’s a war going on. Not at all. But I did have just a bit of a sense that we have said too little, considering the proverbial elephant on the table. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t said much recently, in sermons, haven’t made it a focus of my thinking in planning worship. And so I came to the conclusion that it needed to be there today, taking up lots of space in my head and being part of my preaching, though I confess I have been struggling a bit with how I’m going to do that or what I’m going to say.
To say that I am troubled about this war would be an understatement. But I don’t have another word to use for now. I am troubled…by the very existence of this war, troubled by the loss of life—military, civilian, American, coalition, Iraqi, men, women, children, troubled by the casualties of war, the wounded, so often just a footnote in the daily reports, nameless people whose pain cannot be given more than a few seconds of attention before we go on to the weather and sports, troubled by other kinds of casualties of war, civil liberties, programs that go unfunded to teach children, repair roads, reduce poverty, provide health care, cure disease, troubled by the abuse of prisoners, troubled by the threat of terror that soldiers and civilians live with in Iraq, troubled by what implications the war may have for the future so far as the threat of terror we all may live with, troubled always for the safety of family members and friends.
Not only does “troubled” not begin to do justice to the feelings that are involved in all of this; there are so many different layers of feeling involved: for many of us opposition to the war in the first place, debates, maybe even debates within ourselves, about the best thing to do now that we are there, respect for the decisions soldiers have made that led them to be there and for the situations they live in, prayers for their safe return, hopes that something good will come out of this after all, fears that it will not.
As you can see, my own mind, my own spirit, is a jumble of things My own spirit is a mixed bag of anger, despair, wishes, prayers, uncertainties, and…I hope…compassion for my country men and women, some of whom are soldiers risking their lives, and compassion for the men and women of other countries. These are some of the things my spirit consists of these days. It doesn’t have a lot do, on the surface of it, with Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, or the birthday of the church. And so of course that makes my mind even more of a jumble, because as I said before, I do have those Pentecost thoughts in there too, and they are asking for a place in my spirit too, and they don’t fit in very well with a lot of those other thoughts, and very often I don’t know what to make of it all.
Here we are on a Sunday morning, sitting in comfortable chairs in a climate-controlled environment, with a view of the garden singing songs about a sweet, sweet spirit and a spirit of gentleness. It strikes me that we are speaking a language here that would be foreign to most people around the world, and not because it is English. Not because it is Christian either, but because it is so far removed in spirit from the reality that so many people live with in a world that is so beset by violence. Ours are words spoken and sung from places of comfort and relative safety. The same words spoken from a different place might be a different language. The words spoken at the beginning of the service were all in English but were, in the sense I am speaking, in different languages. We are besieged by news where so often the best thing we can say about it is that we don’t know what to make of it. Surely the language we read in the newspaper and understand, sort of, sometimes, is a different language than the one we speak here in church, though sometimes we may not know what to make of that language either.
And so I’ve been reflecting on the different languages we speak, which means the different realities we inhabit. And that of course is a Pentecost thought, because that is what the Biblical story is about. It’s about people speaking different languages all of a sudden through a miracle being given the gift of being able to understand one another anyway. It would be a miracle I think to be able to understand people who speak the language of soldiers in Fallujah, an Iraqi grocer in Baghdad, a Palestinian whose community has just been destroyed by a wall or a bulldozer, or even of some other residents of Charlottesville. It would be a miracle if somehow we could understand each other, all of us, not just some of us, but all of us, understand one another’s languages, one another’s realities. It would be a miracle, but it’s a miracle worth praying for, and for me, frankly that is what Pentecost is about, not the birthday of the church, which I think all things considered is a fairly minor celebration.
But I do think of the language of the church and how it so often seems so distant from and irrelevant to the world we live in. And yet it is a language that needs to be spoken, if we can learn to speak it correctly. Ours is a language of peace. We have no other language we can speak. We have no language of war. The language we speak does not contribute much to strategic or policy decision making, though that doesn’t stop us from having opinions. But what we have to contribute is not so much a political platform as an alternative reality. A vision of a different kind of world. Jesus called it the realm of God. And that reminds us that there are greater things to dream of than national security. In other languages people may debate whether invading Iraq will end up being in the national interest of the United States or not. But in addition to that someone has to be speaking the language of peace.
And that doesn’t mean all sweetness and gentleness either, though those are not bad things. Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, is also about the words of Isaiah and Jesus: the spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good tidings to the afflicted…to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound…” In an unjust and warring world, we are called to speak, in the best way we know how, the language of justice and of peace.
And in the meantime, if there is any spirit in us, we will not shut out the reality that is all around us. On Memorial Day and every other day we will do our best to remember the dead and to pay attention to the costs of war, the human costs of war, refusing to abide by the wishes of those who do not want the names read or the pictures shown. The language of faith needs not to be oblivious to those costs of war. It needs to confess that there is no joy these days to be had that is pure, that there is no inner peace available to us that is untroubled by the reports of war, that there is no beauty our world has to give that is unmarred by the wounds and scars of a violent world that simply will not quit its violence.
But the language we speak needs also to say that there is no worry, no sadness, no anger, no grief that is so deep that it cannot be penetrated by the gifts of God, by the laughter of children, by the touch of reunited lovers, by the miraculous beauty of the created world, by a prayer whispered in the night, by the heart of a grieving, hoping, loving God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 30, 2004