Back in the Camp

On Pentecost Sunday, we expect to gather in the church to await the coming of the Spirit. After all, where else would the Spirit fill us but in church? This year, though, we're not in church -- at least, most of us aren't. What happens now? This sermon might reassure you that the Spirit can (and does) work in all kinds of places!

The story of Pentecost from the book of Acts is powerful, isn’t it? (Acts 2:1-4) It’s easy to imagine ourselves as some of the apostles who gathered together early on that morning. Without warning, a gust of wind sweeps down from heaven and into the room where we are gathered: a wind as strong as a category 5 hurricane; the kind of wind that uproots entire trees, sweeping through a room where we are sitting. As we are hanging on to our chairs for dear life, wondering what in the world is going on, trying to stay put in the middle of all the uproar, fire follows the wind – a fire that settles on the tops of our heads, burning brightly but without destroying anything. In fact, we can’t even feel any heat. But all of a sudden, we find ourselves speaking foreign languages! You find yourself speaking in Mandarin Chinese, your best friend sitting next to you is speaking in Russian, while the woman in the chair across the room is speaking in Portuguese! According to the book of Acts, that describes the coming of the Holy Spirit. It was sudden; it was unexpected; and it led to amazing results! I didn’t read farther in the story this morning, because that story is a long one; but to sum up the story, after hearing Peter deliver an impassioned sermon, over three thousand people ended up believing that Jesus was the Christ; and all before Bob Evans opened for breakfast! That is a good morning’s work if ever I saw one!

But this story can lead to a big misunderstanding in how, where, and when the Holy Spirit comes upon us. When we read this story – how the Holy Spirit swept into an early-morning gathering with great power and lots of fanfare – I’m afraid that many people expect the Holy Spirit to work this way all the time. People gather in churches expecting the Spirit to arrive in their sanctuaries with the same kind of flourish – especially today, on Pentecost Sunday. I’m told that sometimes the Spirit does just that. Our Pentecostal sisters and brothers witness that they have seen the Spirit arrive in their church sanctuaries with power that has people dancing in the aisles and speaking in tongues. I don’t doubt them; but their experience isn’t mine. I have yet to lead a worship service on Pentecost in which tongues of fire settled on the heads of everyone in the congregation! I suppose that might happen; but it sure hasn't happened to me.

So, I understand this story from the book of Acts as being descriptive instead of prescriptive. There is a big difference between the two types of stories. A descriptive story describes something that happened without assuming that it will ever happen again. God spoke to Moses through a burning bush; but I hope that none of us feel the need to leave the house and seek out a fiery shrub every time that we want to communicate with God. That story is descriptive. God spoke that way once, but it God may not ever speak that way again. A prescriptive story, on the other hand, tells us not only what did happen, but what should happen. The Sermon on the Mount is a great example of a prescriptive text. In those chapters of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus gives us all kinds of directions concerning how to live as his followers. Descriptive stories tell us what did happen, while prescriptive stories tell us what should happen.

It’s easy to read the story of Pentecost as prescriptive – telling us what should happen – instead of as reading it as descriptive – telling us what did happen. When we read this story as what should happen, we limit the power of the Holy Spirit! Although the Spirit arrived on that first Pentecost early in the morning when Jesus’ followers were gathered, the Spirit doesn’t always follow that pattern. If we expect the Holy Spirit to arrive only when we Christians are gathered together for worship on Sunday mornings, we have pretty well ruled out the Spirit’s activity right now, as well as for the foreseeable future; because we aren’t going to be gathering that way for a little while yet.

The reality is, though, that throughout the Bible, God’s Spirit falls when, where, and on whom it likes. The little story of Moses and the elders from the book of Numbers (Numbers 11:24-26) is witness to that. I’ll bet that you had never heard that story before. Moses took seventy of the tribal elders of the Israelites to the Tent of Meeting where Moses routinely talked with God. God had promised to give those elders a share of the Spirit so that they could be of assistance to Moses. It’s kind of like our gathering for worship in our sanctuary, isn’t it, and expecting to meet with God there? And sure enough, God showed up and filled them with the Spirit. But God also showed up back in the camp, and gave the Spirit to two fellows who never set foot in the Tent of Meeting! The Spirit shows up at times, in places, and to people that we never expect, whether we are gathered or alone, in church or in our home, regardless of the time of day.

On this day of Pentecost, we’d like to be gathered together in our own Tent of Meeting, wearing our best red outfits, listening to the choir singing, looking at the beautiful stained glass picture of Jesus in our chancel, and expecting the Holy Spirit to show up and fill us once again. But we aren’t there, are we? Instead, we’re back in the camp. We probably aren’t expecting the Spirit to show up this morning, because we aren’t where we expect to meet that Spirit. But the good news is, friends, that the Spirit isn’t limited by time or by place. The Spirit blows where it will. In Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, he said, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you can’t tell where it comes from or where it’s going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) Just like the wind, the Spirit goes where it wants, when it wants, and to whom it wants. On this day of Pentecost, don’t be distressed that we aren’t gathered in our Tent of Meeting. We may be back in the camp, but the Spirit knows where to find us. The good news is that it will find us; and it will fill us once again! Thanks be to God!

The Fiery Ordeal

In his first New Testament letter, Peter encourages the members of his churches to hold fast in the midst of "the fiery ordeal." He could be talking to our military men and women who are in combat zones, and whose sacrifices we remembered this weekend. My sermon on this Memorial Day weekend remembers their ordeals, and our own.

We aren’t sure exactly when Peter wrote this letter to a group of early Christian churches, but we are sure about one thing: something was testing the members of those church to their limits. Peter encouraged his readers to stand “firm in the faith” as they “participate in the sufferings of Christ.” Were they enduring one of the many persecutions that the early Christians experienced from the Roman empire? It’s possible. But regardless of the particular situation in which Peter’s churches found themselves, I’m sure that they questioned where in the world God was in the middle of it. You can hear Peter’s encourage them that God was right there with them, no matter what their experiences seem to indicate. “Stand firm in the faith!” he told them. “The God of all grace will himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast!”

We need to hear that encouragement, too, when we go through our own fiery ordeals. Oh, we may not be persecuted because we are Christians; but our faith is certainly tested over and over again. This weekend is the time that we set aside each year for remembering our military men and women who were killed while defending our country. My guess is that they, too, questioned whether God was with them as they faced their own fiery ordeal. Soldiers, sailors, and pilots wrestle with that question all the time; and they keep military chaplains very busy, indeed. Now, it is very easy for those of us who are sitting safely on a picnic bench enjoying a grilled burger and homemade potato salad in beautiful late May weather to glibly answer, “Oh, I’m sure that God’s right there with you!” But that’s not always obvious to men and women who have seen their comrades die right in front of them. Where is God in this fiery ordeal, anyway?

Let’s take a step back for just a minute and examine that question. God has always been connected with war in one way or another. The Old Testament is full of stories about God fighting on behalf of God’s people. These stories are rooted in the ancient belief that every tribe had its own god; and that one of the jobs of that god was to go to battle on behalf of the people who worshipped him. Victory in battle proved that your god was the biggest, baddest god around! Israel was no different. They believed that Yahweh led them into war and fought on their behalf. Where is God? Why, God is the one leading the attack, just like Teddy Roosevelt led his Rough Riders in their charge up San Juan Hill!

Lots of people believe this. We’ve all heard about radical Muslims who pray to Allah as they exterminate people they consider to be heathens. The terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11 did just that. Even some Christians buy into this kind of thinking. Because we believe that God loves us {which God does) and because we see ourselves as faithful Christians (which, in most cases, we are), we fall into the trap of believing that God is always on our side in war. But maybe we need to rethink that. The book of Joshua contains a little story about an angel who meets Joshua on the evening of a crucial battle. Now, if anyone had the right to expect God to fight for him, it was Joshua! He had been commissioned by Moses himself to take command of the Israelites after Moses’ death. Under Joshua’s leadership, God’s people have crossed the Jordan River; and Joshua intends to led them in battle against the Canaanites. On the eve of the battle of Jericho – a battle that, by the way, he was fighting on God’s orders – Joshua had a very puzzling encounter. This is how the book of Joshua tells it. “Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’ ‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord I have come.’” (Joshua 5:13-14) Neither for them nor against them? Why, then, is that angel there at all? Maybe it was to remind Joshua that God is far above our political concerns. God is above “taking sides.” Taking sides is for third-graders on the playground who are caught up in the middle of petty squabbles. We expect third-graders to choose up sides, and to side with their friends. But God? God doesn’t take sides. On the contrary, we are the ones who are called by God to take a side! In the midst of our fiery ordeals, the real question to ask is “are we for God… or are we against God?”

Abraham Lincoln struggled with difficult decisions when he was President in the midst of the Civil War. The story is told that he had invited a group of leaders to the White House one day to help him in making some of those decisions. At the end of the meeting one of those leaders asked, “Mr. President, can we pray that God stays on our side?” Abraham Lincoln’s wise response was, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My greatest concern is whether we are on God's side.” God doesn’t take sides. After all, both North and South were convinced that God was on their side! No, we are the ones who are called to take sides. We are called to be on God’s side. Are we on God’s side? In particular, are we on God’s side when we must go to war? Surely every soldier is on God’s side when he or she is willing to lay down his life for the good of her country, regardless of the political cause for which they are fighting! In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this, that they are willing to lay down their life for their friends.” Sacrifice for a greater good is surely taking the side of a God who has sacrificed himself for our welfare!

And that brings us back to our original question. If we can’t say that God is on our side politically when we are in the midst of a fiery ordeal; then is God there at all? The story of Joshua meeting the angel gives us a clue to the answer. Although God may not be leading us in battle, fighting for us or against us, God presence will surely be at the side of every single military man and woman who is prepared to die for their country and for their comrades. God most certainly is at their side in their fiery ordeal. Wherever our soldiers are called to fight; whatever they are called to do in battle; and whether they live or die, God has promised never to leave them alone.

God has been at the side of our soldiers down throughout our history.

God was at Lexington when the Minutemen took their first shots at the British, and God shivered with Washington’s army in the bitter cold of Valley Forge.

God was at Fort McHenry as the British rained bombs on it; and God stood next to Francis Scott Key on a ship in the harbor as he wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.”

God was at the Alamo when its little band of warriors was exterminated by a Mexican army.

God took cover in the Bloody Lane at Antietam, and charged bravely forward with General Pickett’s men at Gettysburg.

God endured the trenches of World War I, and walked among the poppies in Flanders Fields.

God flew with the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, and waded ashore with our GIs on Omaha Beach.

God sweltered in the steaming jungle rivers of Vietnam, and endured years of captivity in the Hanoi Hilton.

Even today, God stands guard duty in the burning heat of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wherever there are soldiers, sailors, or pilots who are willing to lay down their lives for those of us at home, God is there, too – with them in battle, in life and in death – because God loves us more than anything. As God’s presence will never leave us, God will never leave them, either! Thanks be to God for God’s eternal loving presence; thanks be to Jesus Christ for showing us what that love looks like; and thanks be to the Spirit who gives us the courage to show that love ourselves!

Things Change. God Doesn't.

This morning's sermon was written by Marilyn Kendrix of the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ. The Council of Conference Ministers of the UCC wrote this morning's worship service in its entirety -- including this sermon -- to give us local church pastors a break from worship design after we have not only been going full steam for two months, but also have skipped our post-Easter vacations. I hope that you find it life-giving; and I sincerely thank them for supplying this morning's worship materials!

God has indeed reordered our world. The way we were before seems so long ago, and we find ourselves living in a new reality. We have discontinued practices that we thought were unchangeable. It turns out that “the God who made the world and everything in it does not live in temples made by human hands.”

I can remember a Sunday practice from my childhood. Many Sundays after church, my mom and dad would load us kids up in the family car and we would go for a Sunday ride. No destination in mind, Daddy would just drive. Invariably he would get lost somewhere on Long Island. In my younger years, I would cry because I was afraid that we were lost. But my dad would say, “You aren’t lost. As long as you are with Mommy and me, you can’t get lost.” As I grew, I came to understand that; and to find comfort that, no matter where I was, if I was with my parents, I could never get lost.

In these long weeks, when we’ve been cloistered in our houses, even though we’ve been right at home, many of us have been feeling lost. We went into this time of “Stay Safe, Stay Home” fearing deep in our hearts that being physically separated from our faith communities would cause us to be separated from God; fearing that if we were not in our familiar pews, we would not be able to find God. We thought we needed our church buildings, our beautiful sanctuaries to feel God’s warmth enveloping us in love. But it turns out that “the God who made the world and everything in it does not live in temples made by human hands.”

Friends, it’s not only the separation from our buildings that has us feeling off kilter. We’ve all been living through a nightmare, an international nightmare. Some of us have lost loved ones. Some of us live in fear of losing loved ones. Some of us are suffering from the virus. Some of us are suffering from lost income because of the virus. Some of us are bored from too many days looking at the same walls. Some of us are forced to work at home. Some of us wish that we could stay home and not work, endangering ourselves and our loved ones to keep essential businesses open for the rest of us. Some of us, the heroes among us, are working in hospitals and nursing homes, working as EMTs and police officers and fireman and orderlies, many of whom are overwhelmed and over-worked trying hard to keep people alive. Some of us don’t know if we can continue to watch as more and more people get sick and die. This is indeed a long, national nightmare.

Those people whom Paul encountered in Athens had some inkling that there was a God whom they did not know. Paul had observed as he walked around the city that they had objects of worship in their temples, and that among them was an altar to an “unknown god.” He understood that these were people hungering for an experience of the holy. And so he told them about the one true God. He let them in on the secret that the one true God could not be confined to their temples. He shared with them that the one true God was not far from each of them, not far from each one of us. He let them know that “in God, we live and move and have our being.” And Paul told them about Jesus – how he’d lived and how he’d died. But most of all, he told them about how he’d been resurrected. He shared with them the saving balm of the Good News that we are a resurrection people. He told them, and he is telling us still, that death does not have the final word.

We are living in a time when we need to remember every day that we are a resurrection people. These are indeed hard times that we are going through. These are times when it seems as if we have been abandoned by God. But Paul is right here, speaking to us from 2,000 years ago, reminding us that no matter how bleak the time, God is still Emmanuel, God with us. He is reminding us that we are God’s people, and that no amount of sheltering-in-place can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. No tiny microbe can take away from us the truth that we are a resurrection people.

When I grew up and had children of my own, we would sometimes take those Sunday rides after church. And we would purposely turn down streets that we’d never been on. We would jump off of the interstate at an exit that we’d never taken before. This was before GPS, and we would always lose our way. We grown-ups had to look to the sun for direction and keep turning until we found a familiar street or a business that let us know what town we were in. But in the back seat, out children just looked out the windows, not worried about a thing because they knew that they could never get lost while they were with their parents.

We are in a difficult time right now. We feel lost and afraid that nothing will ever be the same. Nothing will ever be like it was before. But we’ve also learned so many things in this time. The most important thing we’ve learned is that “the God who made the world and everything in it does not live in temples made by human hands.” We’ve learned that no matter what, “in God, we live and move and have our being.” Things change, God doesn’t. We can never get lost. We have Jesus as our Guide and God as the foundation of our lives. We have the Holy Spirit filling us with such love that it just has to spill over onto others.

Things change. God doesn’t.

Things change. God doesn’t.

Thanks be to God!