Little Girl, Get Up

SJF • Proper 8b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means Little girl, get up.+

Death is unavoidable. Each of us knows, even as we try to avoid thinking about it, that a day will come that will be our last. In a hospital bed after a long illness, in the sudden shock of an automobile accident, surrounded and supported by a loving family, or alone in a cold room — each of us will die one day. But before that day comes, each of us will very likely be touched by death in another way. Almost everyone first knows someone else’s death before our own day comes. Who hasn’t lost a loving grandparent, perhaps a distant relation you perhaps saw only rarely, or a father or mother, a beloved friend, a husband or wife — most of us will be acquainted with death before we experience it personally. And acquaintanceship with death, though it makes it no less painful, can blunt the edge of sorrow with familiarity.

Some deaths, however, will still find us unprepared. And of all such un-looked-for passings, the most keenly felt is the loss of a child. For while to an old man or woman rich in years death may come as a gentle and familiar friend, bringing easy transition to the next world, to a child death is a stranger, and to the parents a traitor and thief who has snuck in before his time.

This was true even in days long gone by, when the death of children was far more common than it is now. The blessings of technology and medicine have greatly reduced infant and child mortality. The Psalms, written some three thousand year ago, assure us that, “The span of our life is seventy years, perhaps in strength even eighty” — about the same as today. But in those ancient times the death of children was so common, that they weren’t even counted in the average — to get to that seventy or eighty figure, which only applied to those who made it to adulthood.

And most of us need not look back that far to the past, to the times of the Psalms. Take a look through the front pages of an old family Bible. You will probably find as recently as two or three generations back the names of great-aunts and uncles whom you never knew, who died at seven or eight, or ten, all in childhood.

Still, however common such childhood tragedies might be, in biblical times or in the days of our grandparents, to the parents of a sick or dying child it would have all been as if nothing else had happened; it was something new, a hard sharp pain striking them then and there as keenly as anyone would feel it today. The knowledge that pain is common or widespread doesn’t really make it any easier to bear; and though misery loves company, it is no less miserable.

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So we can be sure that the ruler of the synagogue, Jairus by name, was fearful and in pain for the life of his little daughter. Though he may have had a dozen other children, that would not lessen the grief of this particular loss. For this was his little daughter, twelve years old, and at the point of death. When the others came with the news, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” it was easy for them to keep a “stiff upper lip.” “He has other children, a good wife and many years ahead of him,” they might have thought. “Why trouble the Teacher any further?” But for Jairus, this was his little girl, just twelve years old, his little gazelle, his own dear little child. Would those sweet brown eyes never smile at him again, never twinkle with mischief, never glow with delight at the little gift of a beaded necklace from Sidon? “Why trouble the Teacher any further?”

Did Jairus shrug, nod, and turn away? Did he look at Jesus with hope, or with despair? We do not know. Because whatever Jairus did, Jesus did something as well. “Ignoring what they said, Jesus said... ‘Do not fear, only believe.’” A moment before the bottom had fallen out of Jairus’ hopes. He had heard of the wonders performed by this Teacher from Nazareth, the healings performed in Capernaum. His hopes had been high as he fell at Jesus’ feet, imploring his help, so that he might lay his hands on his little daughter and restore her to health. Then the word had come, the word he had dreaded hearing all along. “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” But then, into the midst of that empty, cold loss came a voice that said, “Do not fear, only believe.” And his hopes revived.

When they came to the house, they saw the crowd weeping and wailing, the cries of the professional mourners, still common in many cultures to this day. This was not the deep, sorrowful silence of heartbroken parents. The professionals and the neighbors were doing their part, weeping and wailing loudly, tumultuously grieving in the ritual style that is as ageless as human civilization, as the community expresses the grief that the family itself is too numb, and too drained to express. But such ritual mourning is rarely from the heart. And it does little to fill the empty void left by the loss of the loved one.

We see how conventional this formal mourning was by how quickly it turned into sarcastic laughter. When Jesus gave the great good news that the little girl was not dead, but only sleeping, the crowd laughed in his face.

But the father and mother, standing by in the silence of grief, too numb to put on the show of conventional mourning — did they suddenly look up, look into the eyes of this man from Nazareth, this wonder-worker? Was the silence of their grief broken by a sudden gasp of hope? “Not dead, but sleeping!” So Jesus took this father and mother, and his disciples, into the house where the child lay, dismissing everyone else.

Imagine how quiet it must have gotten. The laughter has died down; perhaps a few whispers are going through the crowd outside; perhaps one of the flute players is keeping up a somber tune. But in the house, there is an intense silence. The parents have their eyes fixed on Jesus; the disciples wonder what is going to happen next — they have seen so much these last few weeks.

Into that silence a voice speaks. It is a voice filled with power, a voice filled with command. It is the voice that called all of creation into being, the Word through whom all things were made, “God’s all-animating voice” who calls from above, as our hymn put it. But that voice, a voice from beyond all time and space, here is a voice speaking gently to a little girl. “’Talitha cum... Little girl, get up.’ And immediately the little girl got up and began to walk... and he told them to give her something to eat.”

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That voice still speaks to us today. We have all fallen asleep in the death of sin, and that same voice calls out to us to awaken, to get up. We are not dead... we are only sleeping, lulled by the siren song of the world, the flesh and the devil. And Jesus says to each of us, Wake up, Get up!

This startling command stills the weeping and wailing of merely conventional repentance, the excessive display of grief and breast-beating.

This startling command silences the cruel laughter of those who would rather keep us dead, just so they could be proved right, those of the sour looks, and the judgment of others.

This startling command shakes people out of that deep despair at the sense of their own sin, lost in the false belief they are beyond forgiveness.

This startling command brings us back from the edge of death, from the shadow of death and the valley of tears: Jesus assures us we are not dead but asleep.

And he tells us to get up. Just as he called that little girl from the sleep of death, he calls us from the death of sin. “Get up, little girl; young man, arise; woman, I say to you rise up; come, Mother, take my hand; stand up, Grandfather.”

He quiets the mourners with a blessed assurance. He touches us with forgiveness, and fills the depth of our empty grief out of the abundance of his love. He lifts us from the sleep of death, stands us on our feet that we may walk and follow him, and feeds us with the spiritual food of his own body and blood.

Touched by that love, awakened by that voice, healed by this forgiveness, fed with this food, we can face anything — even bodily death itself — in the sure and certain knowledge that nothing in the universe can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.+

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The Fatherhood of God

SJF • Proper 7b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And he said to them, “why are you afraid?”+

Happy Father’s Day! This being Father’s Day, I thought it would be good for us to reflect for a moment on what we mean when we call God our Father — as we do every time we say the prayer that Jesus himself taught us, literally almost every time we gather for prayer, either formally or informally.

First of all, it is most important to admit to our own experience of earthly fathers, as this will have some impact on us when we try to think of God our heavenly father. It doesn’t take too much earthly experience to recognize that not all earthly fathers are good fathers. I hope and pray that most of us here were fortunate enough to have good and loving fathers; but even if we have not experienced a bad father ourselves, we have no doubt heard about them or read about them, or perhaps had friends whose fathers were not as good as they ought to have been.

It is perfectly understandable for someone who had the misfortune to be brought up by either a neglectful or a cruel father to say, “I don’t want to think of God as a father, because my father was so terrible.” And it may take such people a long time to come to understand that the problem is not with God but with the bad experience they had of their own fathers.

The point is that God is not simply like any and all fathers, good or bad; but rather that God our Father in heaven is a good and loving father. All earthly fathers are called to be like him, even though many of them fail to be so — some simply because of the natural imperfections that all human beings share, others to a greater extent because they are truly bad fathers.

But that, thank God, is not God’s fault. God is the perfect father: and all of earthly fathers, even as we seek to emulate God’s fatherhood, will fall short in one way or another.

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Our Scripture readings today give us a glimpse into the nature of God’s fatherhood — into what kind of a father God is. We have before us, as it were, three pictures of God our Father in heaven, three photographs from the church’s family album, and they can give us some insight into who God our Father is, and what kind of a father God is.

On Trinity Sunday I cautioned about the error of contrasting the God of the Old Testament as harsh and judgmental, with the God of the New Testament as sweet and loving. There is only one God, who, as I said a couple of weeks ago is sometimes stern with us because of our failings but is always loving to us because we are his children.

I mention this because the reading from towards the end of the book of Job presents God in one of those sterner moments. You will recall that the book of Job consists almost entirely of a conversation between Job and his friends about the nature of God. They’ve been arguing back and forth about whether Job deserved the suffering that he has received, and whether God was fair in dishing it out.

And finally God speaks up, out of the whirlwind. And we have to admit it’s pretty stern stuff! However, even with the whirlwind and storm and tempest and the stern language, I invite you for a moment to hear this speech in a different light. Imagine a group of children, sisters and brothers, maybe one or two of them adopted into the family, perhaps at a slumber party, not having turned the lights out, and still talking among themselves as the shadows fall. And they’ve been arguing about is which of them loves their father best, and which of them the father loves best. And imagine them saying the kinds of things that children will say about their parents when they are off on their own. “I know Dad is tough but I can always get to him through Mom.” “If Dad really loved you best you would get a bigger allowance.” “Dad likes the best because I gave him the best Father’s Day present last year.” And on it goes into the night. And then imagine that the father is standing outside the door hearing every word.

Don’t you think that when the father opens the door he might say something very much like what God said to Job and his friends? Here is a picture of God who is angry, not because he hates his children, but because they have reduced him to a mere force to be reckoned with, and manipulated if possible. And so God lays it out: “Do you think you can work me this way? Tell me, if you know.”

And even here the language that God uses to Job reflects God’s care and nurture — notice how much the language about the creation of the sea makes God sound like a caring parent: when the sea is born, bursting forth from the womb, God makes a blanket out of the clouds, and puts a safety gate on the doorway at the top of the stairs, with a stern warning, to go thus far, and no farther.

So that’s our first snapshot of God: stern, yes; but only because he loves and cares so much.

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The second picture shows us God as the source of reconciliation and forgiveness. What could be more loving than that? Here is a father like the one in that other beautiful snapshot — the father of the prodigal son — who not only doesn’t store up wrongs and trespasses to hold against us, but gives us a fresh start: a new creation in which everything old has passed away and everything has become new. As Paul says, this is all from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ. And not only does God forgive us, and welcome us back, and let us start afresh — but even gives us a promotion, to serve with Paul as ambassadors for Christ, to spread the good news of reconciliation to all of our brothers and sisters, about what a wonderful father we have, a wonderful father who loves us, forgives us, and reconciles us. This portrait shows us God as generous and forgiving, the source of refreshment and grace and creativity — and a whole new start.

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The final snapshot really does look familiar. How many of us, especially as young children, haven’t had moments when a thunderstorm or windstorm or some other frightening event hasn’t sent us running to our parents looking for reassurance that everything is going to be all right?

I remember from my childhood — I was about six years old — a terrible hailstorm that swept through Baltimore. The hailstones were literally the size of golf-balls, and heavy enough to cause the roof of the house across the street to collapse under the weight. My younger brother and I were terrified, but I admit a little excited to see such a display — the hailstones were breaking car windshields up and down the street.

I remember my dad, though, standing at the screen door, and then suddenly bursting it open and rushing out onto the front walk, to gather up a few handfuls of the huge hailstones — with my mother screaming and shouting out to stop him. Those hailstones went into a mug of Coca-Cola after Dad came back into the house, and we all enjoyed a sip and enjoyed the clattering as it continued, no longer afraid now, as those hailstones continued to fall, and my father laughed, and Mom just shook her head at my dad’s impetuousness.

In our gospel passage today, don’t you hear the familiar voices of children crying out in the disciples’ complaint, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” Do you not also hear the familiar voice of a father having been awakened from his nap on the sofa to deal with a spider in the bathtub, “Why are you afraid.” God will manage those acts of bravado, calming the storm, and our fears, and even killing that spider in the bathtub, with one hand tied behind his back. God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.

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These three family snapshots give us some sense of who God is — and taken together with all of the rest of the pictures in that family album we call the Bible, we can be assured of certain truths about God. We can be assured that God our Father can and will be stern with us — but only because he cares so much about us and loves us so much that he seeks to protect us from danger — both from a dangerous world and the dangers we get ourselves into when we turn away from him and treat him as something other than who he is.

We can be sure that however badly we stray God can and will forgive us and reconcile us to him, and give us a fresh start and a new life — and even a promotion!

And we can be sure that God will protect us when we are afraid, and shelter us from the storm and the night — calming the winds of fear, and assuring us that even when our faith is small, his power to save is great.

So let us give thanks to God our Father, the Father Almighty, our creator, our reconciler, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.+

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What have we got to show for it?

SJF • Proper 6b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
All of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.+

It is said that once in ancient times there was a great king who posed a challenge to the wisest people of his court. He challenged them to create a ring that he might wear on his hand, with an inscription on it. This inscription was to have an almost magical property: if you looked at it when you were happy, it would make you sad; and if you looked at it when you were sad, it would make you happy. The king promised a great reward and the wise ones headed out to see what they could find.

Six months later one of them returned and presented the king with a golden ring with an inscription. At the moment the king was quite amused, and in good spirits because he expected this ring would not pass the test, and he would not have to give the promised reward. But as he looked at the ring, the smile faded from his face. For on it was inscribed the short phrase, “This too shall pass.”

Some believe that the king in this story was Solomon — and that would certainly explain why the richest man in the world in his day, who delighted in wine, women and song, who built the kingdom of Israel to the furthest expanse it would ever encompass, would towards the end of his life write the bitter and regretful reflection of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” And, indeed, Solomon’s great kingdom did fall apart shortly after his death, and never regained its position on the world stage.

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This too shall pass — this is a reminder that everything changes, that nothing lasts forever; and that can be bad news when you are enjoying yourself, or good news when you are suffering. Some five hundred years after Solomon, a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, also known as a bit of a gloomy Gus, put it this way: “Everything flows.” Whether you want to go with the flow or resist it, the flow will win out in the end. However big and powerful you may think you are now, one day you will be a memory — and perhaps not even that, as time “like an ever-flowing stream, bears all its sons away.”

At about the same time as this gloomy Greek philosopher was meditating on the transient nature of all things, a similar idea came to the mind of the prophet Ezekiel. We heard him in today’s reading with his advice and warning to Egypt based on the example of Assyria, which the prophet compares to a cedar of Lebanon — a great tree with its branches reaching up into the clouds, which nonetheless ends up being chopped down. Empires, be they never so mighty, come to an end. The line of dominoes tumbles along: Assyria was felled by Babylon, Babylon by Persia, Persia by the Greeks (who also took down Egypt while they were at it.) But then the Greek empire built by Alexander the Great was divided at his death, and eventually fell to the power of Rome. Rome too divided, and was battled by barbarians at one end, and after it became Christianized, by the rise of Islam at the other end. And Christianity itself? Well, that brings us up to the present day — and more importantly — us!

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Because ultimately the question isn’t, “Will the church survive?” but rather, “In what form will it survive?” I think it will survive — we have God’s promise on that; but I don’t think it will do so by being a great empire. Great empires don’t seem to be too successful in maintaining themselves, perhaps due to the sin of pride that causes them to lose sight of the words on that ring: “This too shall pass.” It seems the more empires try to resist change, the sooner they fall — intolerance and clamping down on people brings about even greater resistance, division, and internal weakness. Empires may be big, but they are brittle. The great tyrannies of the last century, and those that have survived into this one, do not seem long for this world: the higher they seek to rise, the bigger they strive to get, the more viciously they suppress those who dissent, the sooner their fall seems secure.

Just as the little mammals were somehow able to survive while the giant dinosaurs were collapsing all around them, so too the church managed to survive, the church managed to make it through the collapses of Greek and Roman and European civilizations, not by being big and powerful, but by slipping through the cracks of history — squirreled away in the catacombs underground, or out in the monasteries or out in the deserts. And when the medieval church tried to seize secular power, and insist on central control of all of Christendom, it only served to hasten the Reformation. So it seems to me likely that the church will survive in this our time, and as time passes, not because it is big and powerful, or centrally controlled, but because it remains true to its faith in Christ; by placing its hope not in an everlasting earthly empire, but an eternal heavenly dwelling. It will, in the meantime, do its best work here and now in its own small way, not as a giant agribusiness, but more as a cooperative of small family farms — as the church in each place is a family.

For it isn’t about how big the tree is, or how expansive the fields — but about the fruit and the grain that comes at gathering and harvest-time. When the bough breaks and the tree falls, when the crop is harvested with a sickle, what do we have to show for it?

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It is to this distinction that the Apostle Paul turns. In his case, it’s not about trees or empires, but about bodies — physical and spiritual — though Paul speaks metaphorically in terms of earthly tents and heavenly houses. The earthly tent — this earthly tend — is going to be taken down and folded up — and Paul uses the rather uncomfortable analogy of someone being caught naked when their tent is removed! “This too shall pass” — our mortal flesh as fragile as grass, as passing as the flower of the field, will cease to be: ashes to ashes, dust to dust; as we are reminded every Ash Wednesday: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The promise is that a more durable dwelling is prepared for us, an eternal dwelling in the heavens. It is something for which we long and hope, groaning for that fulfillment, even while we are reluctant to let go of the tent which is our temporary shelter. We would rather, as Paul suggests, bring our tent with us and set it up within the new house prepared for us. But Paul assures us that we cannot properly be at home with the Lord while we are fully at home in the body — yet whether at home or away, the important thing is not the transient and passing, but the relationship we have with God, in our constant aim to please God, whatever our condition.

This too shall pass — our youth, our successes, our possessions. But this too shall pass — our weaknesses, our failures, and our fears. All that is mortal and transient will be swallowed up by life: and we will stand before our Lord and God, before the judgment seat of Christ, with all that is past laid out before us and before God.

And that is when we will face the final question, “What have we got to show for it.” Has our life been filled with an effort to accumulate those transient goods of wealth and fame and fortune; or have we stocked our tent with a supply of faith and hope and love? It is not how tall the tree grows or how lush the greenery of the fields appears — but how much fruit and how much grain they bring forth.

Let us strive always, my sisters and brothers in Christ, amidst the changes and chances of this temporal life, to hold on to what is eternal and lasting, and come before our Lord bearing a rich harvest of a life lived in hope of God’s guidance, by faith in God’s mercy, and for love of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.+

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Three Things About God

SJF • Trinity Sunday 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus said to Nicodemus, Are you a teacher of Israel yet you do not understand these things?+

Today is Trinity Sunday, our annual opportunity, on an almost-summer morning, to talk a bit about the nature of God — our Father and our Creator, but also Christ our Brother, and the Holy Spirit our advocate and guide. Today, in honor of the Trinity, I want to say three things about God, three things about the nature of God, about who God is, and what that means for us.

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The first thing I want to say is that God is One. This truth echoes forth from the first of the Ten Commandments, on through the most important Jewish prayer — the prayer that gives rise to all other prayer: Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai ehad — Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is One Lord. And what was true for Israel is also true for us. Among the earliest errors to plague the church was the mistaken belief that the God of the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, wasn’t the same God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. You will still sometimes hear people talk about “the angry judgmental God of the Old Testament” and the “loving God of the Gospel” as if there were two Gods. Well, I’m sorry, but we don’t believe in two Gods. We believe in One God — who is sometimes angry because we don’t do all that we should, but who is always loving because we are — even when we misbehave — his children, through the Holy Spirit.

Later, another misguided effort was made to parcel out history to the Trinity as if the Trinity were divided into three gods. A monk named Joachim of Fiore thought it made sense to give God the Father authority over the Old Testament times, Jesus the Son rulership for the few years he was on earth, and up until the time when things would be turned over to God the Holy Spirit in a new age of universal peace and love, which Joachim predicted would start about the year 1260. An interesting idea — but boy, was he ever wrong!

These errors, and others like them, forget that God is One at the same time that God is Trinity. The Trinity is not three Gods, but three Persons in One God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the same God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and the same God who fills the church in the Holy Spirit. God is One. That is the first thing to remember about God.

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Now, in case you haven’t noticed, we are doing theology! How about that! We are all theologians, quite consciously at least one day a year, when Trinity Sunday invites us to look for a moment at the nature of God. For that’s what theology is, looking at God not so much for what God does but as who God is.

Theology was long ago described as “faith seeking understanding.” Note the order. Theology isn’t about understanding seeking faith — if you try to understand God before you trust and believe in God you will never get there. We are too young to understand God, but if we love God and trust God, loving and trusting as only a young child can, our faith and love seeking to understand, God will then pour the Holy Spirit into our hearts. And God will do this not to give us all truth — nobody has the corner on the truth market — but to lead us into all truth, as a loving parent leads a child to learn. God graciously leads us into the beginnings of the glimmers of understanding. as our hearts and minds are turned towards God. Even though we cannot comprehend God, we can at least turn towards God and allow our hearts to be warmed by the glow of his love.

This is what Moses did when he turned aside to see why the burning bush was not consumed. He did not know beforehand that he was turning towards the Holy One of Israel. All he knew was that he saw something marvelous, and like a curious child, he wanted to know more about it. The bush burned, and yet it was not consumed.

And this burning yet unburnt bush provides me with the second thing I want to say about God: God touches his creation, and makes himself known to us through that creation, but God is infinitely more than the creation. God is not just the Creator of Everything that Is, but the Source of Everything that can Possibly Be. God utterly infuses and saturates the whole of creation, and yet God was God before creation began, and God will still be God after this creation ceases to be, and the new creation is begun.

The word for this marvelous quality of God is holiness. God is Holy: intimately connected to the universe, the source of its existence, and yet completely distinct from it. Perhaps it might help to think of how water permeates and fills a sponge, and yet is completely distinct from it. The water is still water, filling the sponge, saturating every pore — and without the water the sponge is just a hard, dry thing of no use to anyone!

So it is that God infuses the universe, filling it and making it useful and meaningful and fruitful. God is holy, deeply present while remaining completely distinct: the bush burns but is not consumed, and Moses, though called by God to approach, is warned to “come no closer” than is absolutely necessary.

God fills the universe and makes it work, but when at the end of time the universe is squeezed out like a used up sponge, God will still be God. God is Holy: that is the second truth about God to reflect on today.

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The third thing about God that our Scriptures teach us is that God, in addition to being One and being Holy, is also Loving. God loves us; indeed God loves us so much that he has given us his only Son, to the end that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but have everlasting life. Saint Paul tells us that God’s own Spirit speaks in our hearts and calls out “Abba! Father.” The Spirit speaking in our hearts lets us know that we are children of a loving God, who is the source of our being.

The problem is we don’t always appreciate how much God loves us. So Jesus tells the old sage Nicodemus that the only way to know God’s love is to be reborn, to be born from above, not through the flesh, but through water and the Spirit, God’s own gift to us. God loves us, and has shown us how to love him back. But again, it is not about understanding God first, but about loving God first, about being reborn, being a new creation, about becoming once again a child who can wonder and love and trust.

Our own lives as children and later as adults show us that love comes before understanding. Most of us have gone through that human transition, from loving our parents when we were little, and then as we grew into our teen years and began to try to understand the world, finding it very hard sometimes to understand our parents! And then, as we and they grew older, as the turmoils of adolescence cooled down and we became adults ourselves, we became aware once more of the love that was there all along.

The great American humorist Mark Twain noted this phenomenon when he said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

That is part of what Jesus meant when he said that it is as a child that we come to God, that it is as one reborn that we come to know who it is that is the source of our life, that God is Love.

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Remember these three things our Scriptures teach us today: God is One, dwelling in light inaccessible from before time and forever. God is Holy, untouchable, beyond our reach, burning and yet not consuming, pervading but distinct from creation. And God is also Loving, generous, giving us a new birth through water and the spirit and making us children of God, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. May we ever thus be blessed by the God who is One, Holy and Loving, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.+

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The Spirit’s Doing

SJF Pentecost • B 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.+

On Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead, and in fulfillment of the promise he had made, the apostles saw and felt the Spirit descend upon them in tongues of fire, and began to proclaim God’s saving deeds in many languages. But given the amount of woodwork in this church, if we were to see tongues of fire distributed and alighting anywhere we would likely sound a fire alarm! Clearly, when the Spirit comes to us — and I have no doubt of the Spirit’s presence, as I shall explain in a moment — when the Spirit comes to us it is in a less inflammatory fashion. We don’t see flames alighting on the tops of each other’s heads, we don’t find ourselves speaking languages we never learned to speak. How, then, do we know when the Spirit visits us?

We might begin by noting that even with such marvels as tongues of fire and the miraculous gift of languages there were still some folks who failed to see the Spirit at work on Pentecost in Jerusalem on that day so long ago. They attributed the disciples’ inspiration to hitting the bottle rather early in the morning, accusing them of being drunk and disorderly. Some, it seems, can not recognize the Spirit even when the Spirit is most obvious. So how, then, do we recognize the Spirit?

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The first sign of the Spirit’s presence with us is community, for the Spirit calls and summons us, drawing us together, or rather back together: re-membering us as members of the church so that we can remember God together.

There have been great souls who have been able to go it alone, great saints whose solitary encounter with God is the stuff of legend and sacred history. These are the spiritual athletes who encountered God flying solo, out in the wilderness, like Moses and Elijah, or the monks who dwelt in the Egyptian desert, some of them going so far as to live solitary lives on the tops of pillars, as far away from human society as they could get. But unlike such rare souls as the desert hermits, most of us will not find God in solitude on top of a pillar, but in community. If we are spiritual athletes, it is only as team players.

Moreover, the Holy Spirit appears to favor the public assembly over the private audience. “The disciples were all together in one place” when the Spirit came upon them. They were not pursuing their own personal holiness, but praying together — for and with each other — when the Spirit blew through the windows and set their souls on fire. It is in community — from the most intimate community of a loving couple, to the wide community of the church — that the Spirit comes to us, revealing Christ in our midst. Community, then, is the first sign of the Spirit.

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And the Spirit reveals Christ gathered with us too, revealed in our midst, revealed foremost as one who serves, who before his death washes the feet of his friends, and afterwards responds to their betrayal and lack of belief with words of peace, who offers them forgiveness so that they might be able to forgive in turn. This service and forgiveness find their natural home in community. For just as it takes two to tango, so it takes at least two to serve, two to forgive. Service and forgiveness flow from community as naturally as dance flows from the music, when you simply have got to move your feet to the persuasive beat.

So the ministry of hospitality, which combines service and mercy, and grows from community, is the second sign of the Spirit’s presence: as I have said many times before, “see how they love one another” is Christ’s identity badge for the church, a sure sign of the Spirit’s presence.

Hospitality takes many forms, in a parish coffee hour or visit to the shut-in; in an act as simple as an outstretched hand to help someone up these steps to the altar, or as formal as baptism. We offer a hospitable welcome to each newly baptized person, welcoming them “into the household of God” — a dwelling for the Spirit whose building-stones are ourselves — our selves, souls and bodies — as the church’s members.

Remember the children’s game: here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors, and see all the little people. The outside of a church looks like a building, but when the doors are opened the living, human construction is revealed — as a community. So hospitality is the natural response of the gathered community we call the church, the second sign of the Spirit’s presence.

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And what the disciples did upon the Spirit’s arrival was to proclaim the story of salvation to each other in many languages, so that those outside the house were attracted by the sound, and were astonished to recognize their native tongues.

This proclamation is the third sign of the Spirit’s powerful presence. The children of Israel knew this, and they were always telling their story to each other. Their story sustained them through exile and captivity in Babylon; and through and beyond the destruction of the Second Temple, and even up to this day — as we are reminded of the bombing attempt at two synagogues right here in the Riverdale section of the Bronx — through and beyond the most terrible and single-minded efforts to exterminate them. The Jewish people have told and retold their story to each other, in synagogue and schul, down through the years, and the Christian church’s story is added to theirs; and each of us has a story, too, like footnotes and annotations expanding the history of salvation — so that the whole world could not contain the books that might be written.

As if the world even cared! “The world” that confronts us today, is a world where community is shattered, a world that doesn’t know how to serve, a world that has forgotten its own story. The world will not stop talking — or Twittering, or blogging — long enough to hear the gracious possibility offered to it.

Well, the world needs a wake up call. And the responsibility to give that call falls on us, the members of the church, the Body of Christ: to tell the story of salvation to the world. If we at Saint James Church faithfully proclaim that story, the world may stop its chatter for a moment and overhear: that’s how it worked on Pentecost, and it can again. People who have forgotten that they are God’s children, in the midst of this great but terrible city, might suddenly hear a voice speaking a language they haven’t heard for a long, long time, but which they recognize at once: a language from home, reminding them who, and whose, they are.

If we at Saint James Church then open our doors and our hearts and welcome them in, we will be magnified, and together we will offer glory to God such as never yet has rung from this corner of the Bronx.

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The Spirit reveals Jesus’ presence in the gathering of the community, in the hospitality they shared, and in the telling of the greatest story ever told. But the Spirit also reveals Jesus to us through a last sign unlike any other: in broken bread and a cup of wine. In the fourth sign of the Spirit’s presence, in the eucharistic feast, the one serving at the table reveals himself as the bridegroom, and the story takes a classic turn: like Richard the Lionheart casting off his pilgrim’s cloak, revealing the king’s bright red cross on his chest to an astonished Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men. And suddenly, everyone drops to their knees.

Suddenly, though the doors be locked, we realize who has been among us all this time, and we can hear his breathing. Suddenly the Holy Spirit descends upon us and upon these gifts and we remember and are re-membered into the Body of Christ.

Once one special Pentecost, that ancient Jewish harvest festival, the Spirit gathered the apostles together like a harvest of grain once scattered on the hillside. And together they welcomed, served, proclaimed, and feasted: in fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in prayer. We, their successors, can do no less. The Spirit has gathered us together. It is the Spirit’s doing, not our own. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, and the Holy Spirit our Pentecost has come to us. So come, let us welcome; come, let us serve; come, let us proclaim; and come, let us celebrate the feast. +

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