Scripture: Acts 2:1-6
In a few moments we’ll have the opportunity to share in the confirmation of Amber Lyon. I’ll get to Amber in a moment. Let me start though with some comments about Pentecost, which today is.
Pentecost is a Jewish holiday, celebrated for centuries already by the time of Jesus and still celebrated today. Originally it was a harvest festival, a time to give thanks for the gifts of the earth. Later it came to have an additional meaning. It celebrated the gift of the Law, given through Moses to the Hebrew people at Mt. Sinai.
The Law may sound like sort of an unpleasant word to some people. Jesus contributes to that actually. In the gospels Jesus often finds himself in conflict with people who were intent on following the Law in great detail and with great rigidity, the Law meaning not only the Ten Commandments but all the secondary regulations that went along with them, and there were many. Jesus often had harsh words for people who were so committed to the Law that they couldn’t see anything else. For instance, when people suggested you shouldn’t help someone pull his animal out of a hole because it was the Sabbath and you aren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath. Sometimes Jesus was told he shouldn’t be healing people on the Sabbath for the same reason.
I think it is fair to say that this attitude enraged Jesus, and he made it crystal clear on more than one occasion that compassion is always more important than observing some religious rule. And because of those incidents reported in the gospels, the Law has come to represent, in the eyes of many Christians, an inferior approach to religion which Jesus replaced with the grace of God, love, and the Holy Spirit. I want to take another look at this though, just for a minute. It’s not just about history, and it will lead in to some of the other things I have on my mind this morning.
For the Jewish people the Law was not some heavy burden to be mindlessly and joylessly adhered to. It did not need to be replaced—by Jesus or anyone else. It was not negative in any way. For the Jewish people the Law was and is a great, an immeasurably great and wonderful, gift of God. Rightly understood, the Law gave people not a bunch of things to be obeyed but a way of life. Rightly understood, the Law was not all about threats and punishments but was precisely about compassion. Rightly understood the Law kept people from just wandering aimlessly through life. It gave people a sense of what they are here for, what God’s hopes for us are. It gave people a sense of being guided through the wilderness of this world with some sense of divine direction. It was their everyday connection to the great and mysterious God who otherwise humans could know so little of. For the Jewish people the Law was and is a great and holy gift.
What enraged Jesus, to the best of my understanding of it, was not that people were sincerely trying to let their lives be guided by the Law. It was not the Law he was angry at, and he didn’t want to do away with the Law. He says that at several points quite clearly. What enraged him was the way people misinterpreted, misused, and abused this precious gift they had been given. And when the disciples gathered in Jerusalem as described in the scripture reading from Acts, they were there, these people not yet known as Christians and not yet thinking of themselves as not Jewish, these people were gathering to celebrate the Jewish holy day of Pentecost, perhaps giving thanks for the gifts of the harvest, perhaps giving thanks for the gift of the Law, as essential to them in many ways as the food on their tables.
The moral of this story? Christians should give up the idea that they are superior to the Jews because Judaism is a religion of the law and Christianity is a religion of the spirit. That sort of thing is said often on occasions like Pentecost because for Christians Pentecost celebrates the gift of the spirit. It’s said often, too often on other occasions as well, that Judaism is a religion of the Law and Christianity is a religion of the spirit, and therefore a higher form of religion. But it’s not true. What is true is that some Jews understand the Law in a literal, legalistic way that can lead to an approach to religious faith that is rigid in the way it is practiced and unloving in its attitudes toward others. Do I need to say that some Christians understand their faith in the same way? Maintaining this idea that Judaism is a religion of rules whereas Christianity is a religion of the spirit and that therefore Christianity is more enlightened and somehow on a higher spiritual plane, this notion is unfair to Jewish people and unbecoming of Christian people. Both religions have their fundamentalists—fundamentalists in the worst sense of the word. Both also have millions of people who know in their hearts that what really matters is loving God and loving one’s neighbor, the two things Jesus identified as the most important parts of the Law.
Another moral along these lines. We should be careful to recognize that even as we reject fundamentalism of all kinds, we must not lose appreciation for the fact that for Muslims, Jews, and Christians the scriptures are a great gift. Fighting against fundamentalism of all stripes is not the same thing as saying that there is no value in the scriptures. I may not interpret the scriptures literally. I do not interpret the scriptures literally and I don’t grant them absolute authority over my life. There are especially some verses that do not have authority over my life, and I do feel free to argue with the scriptures and to dissent from what they sometimes seem to say. But they are to me a great gift. They can be used legalistically, as people have accused the Jewish people of doing with the Law that is contained in their scriptures. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all capable of misusing and abusing their scriptures, trying to do what scripture says but only in some legalistic sense and not in loving ways. But that is not in any way the same thing as honoring the scriptures. It is a dishonoring of scripture. It is important to appreciate that Muslims and Jews can hold their scriptures, their “law” if you will, in great reverence, but not be fundamentalists. It is important for Christians, especially those of us who style ourselves as progressive Christians, it is important to understand that for us too rejecting fundamentalism does not mean failing to see the scriptures as a gift from God.
Pentecost is about gifts. Gifts that come from the earth. Gifts that come from God. Gifts of the Law and gifts of the Spirit. In a few moments we will be having a ceremony of confirmation for Amber Lyon. We will receive her, by her own choice and decision, into membership in this church. We will receive her as a gift. I hope that doesn’t sound too corny. Whenever we receive people into membership at Sojourners, whenever people find their way to us and decide they want to be officially part of this community of faith, I think of it as a gift. Somehow someone who has not been here before appears among us as a gift. The fact that Amber has been among us for some time does not make her presence here this morning and her choice to confirm her membership at Sojourners and in the Christian church any less of a gift. It gives us all a chance to confirm the fact that she is a gift to this community and indeed to confirm the giftedness of each person. Just as we receive her as a gift to this community, I would also encourage Amber to look on everyone else here as a gift to her. That is part of what being involved in Christ’s church means. That we all see each other as gifts from God.
In a few moments Susan Scofield will introduce Amber, something we always do as people are joining the church, have someone say some words about the person that will introduce her or him just a little bit to those of us who don’t know the person. What is different about confirmation is that then Amber will present her own statement of faith. There is no template for this. What we affirm, and confirm today, at Sojourners is that there do not need to be any standardized questions or any standardized answers in matters of faith. In a certain sense we all speak a different language. We express our faith in different words. Or maybe we don’t have any words we’re comfortable with that express our faith. Maybe we think faith is best expressed without words. (However, if Amber thinks that, we ask her to come up with some words anyway for this occasion.) We all have different stories to tell about our church experiences and our God experiences. In many senses we may all speak different languages. And when we come together in a family of faith and begin to understand one another in spite of the different languages we speak, it is a great gift. We could even say it is a miracle. And you will recognize that it is the miracle described in the book of Acts in the story we heard this morning. The gift of understanding. The gift of understanding sometimes what we are trying to say to each other beneath the words we may be using.
There is one more gift I want to mention in connection with Pentecost, the last one I’ll talk about today. It is the gift of belief. A little bit like the Law, belief can be understood in a distinctly unhelpful, even hurtful, way. It can be misused and abused. Instead of being understood and received as a gift, it can be used as a tool to decide who is a good Christian and who isn’t. It can be used to threaten people. It can be understood as something that asks us to shut down our minds, as when it is said that Christians’ beliefs just must be accepted on faith, not allowing doubt or questioning or thinking into the picture. Some approaches to belief have the attitude that if you don’t believe you are not a good Christian, you are in willful opposition to God and the truth that has been revealed, and because of your refusal to believe, you are most certainly destined for the eternal torments of hell. Needless to say, that is not the kind of belief I am referring to when I suggest that belief is a gift from God.
Belief is a gift because it is not something we earn or anything we can make happen. It is not something we can talk ourselves into. It is not something we can will to have happen, not if we’re talking about beliefs of the heart and mind and soul. I’m talking now not about formal belief like you would find in an official creed—I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, born of the virgin Mary…Belief in the best sense of the word comes to us by the grace of God. And it has to do not with formulas of faith but with the dreams and visions that are referred to later on in the chapter from Acts where it says (asking us to hear God speaking in this way):
“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young shall see visions and your elderly shall dream dreams.”
In the spirit of these words, belief has to do with dreams and visions that give us something to hope for. It has to do in other words with what gives us reason to get up in the morning, with something inside us that calls us to give thanks for this new day. Belief has to do with what keeps us going through hard times, with what sustains us through whatever pain or weariness or discouragement we may encounter along the way. Belief has to do with what it is that can bring tears to eyes, whether tears of sadness, or tears of joy, or tears of relief, or tears of gratitude. And if God is involved in all those things, then we have beliefs about God that are maybe hard to express sometimes, but that are there. And if Jesus is involved in those things, then we have beliefs about Jesus, which may or may not be expressed in some conventional way. These are the beliefs of heart and mind and soul. We need such belief. And when we find such beliefs living in us, I believe they are there as gifts by the grace of God.
And because our beliefs are given to us by the grace of God, they need to be held gracefully and put into practice gracefully. They are not tests of orthodoxy or Christian goodness. They are not the tools of eternal reward or the threats of eternal punishment. Rightly understood, our beliefs, like I was saying about the place of the Law in Judaism, our beliefs give us not a bunch of statements to agree with but a way of life. Rightly understood, like the Law, our beliefs are not all about threats and punishments but are precisely about compassion. Rightly understood beliefs are what keep us from just wandering aimlessly through life. They give us a sense of what we are here for, what God’s hopes for us are. They give us a sense of being guided through the wilderness of this world with some sense of divine direction. Rightly understood, our beliefs are a great and holy gift from God. I pray for this gift for all of us. Blessings to Amber on this day of her confirmation. Blessings to all of us on this day of Pentecost. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 11, 2008