Dancing with Fire
Pentecost, Year
A
One of the benefits of being a
clergy person is the expectation that you will put thought and prayer into the
big questions of our faith and our church.
Like…how much red is too much red on Pentecost Sunday? Obviously, it’s a day for red shoes…but what
about red nail polish? But
seriously…there are many questions that I mull over that are a little more
serious than what to wear on Sunday. One
of the things I have been pondering is hope.
Is hope dangerous? Sounds odd, so
let me give you an example: Let’s say
you are a senior in high school and you have applied to one college that you
have always dreamed of attending.
However, only a small percentage of people get in. You have to wait several
months until you know whether you are accepted.
You could spend those months hoping and dreaming of getting in, or you
could consider the statistics and worry the whole time about what happens if
you don’t get in. Then, let’s say you do
not get accepted. Will it be harder if
you had spent those months hoping or will it be harder if you never hoped at
all?
This
is just one example. I am sure you can
all think of some point in your life where you have dealt with something like
this. I remember talking to a friend
once about a hope I had. She was worried
it would not work out and my hopes would be crushed. She recommended that instead I be cautiously
optimistic. It seemed wise at the time,
but since then I have wondered why people never encourage others to be
cautiously hopeful. Perhaps because it
is not really possible to be cautious when it comes to hope and faith.
Yet in today’s church, we try so
very hard to master the art of cautious or defensive faith. We have enough faith to get us through, but
not enough to get us hurt. That is what
makes Pentecost so out there, so wildly uncomfortable for most of us. In Biblical times, there were three things
that were considered to be the major source of power: Human, animal and wind. Out of all three of those, wind is probably
the most uncontrollable. Luke, the
author of Acts wrote, “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the
rush of violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”
That must have been a pretty intense sound…almost deafening. I imagine it
sounded a bit like when a jet goes overhead…except in this story there was no
accounting for the source of the sound.
Then, as if that was not enough, tongues of fire appeared out of nowhere
and rested on each one of the apostles.
Just imagine for a moment how terrifying that would be. We have lighters and matches and all kinds of
things that control fire. But at this
time, fire was not really a controllable substance. It was hard to create and hard to contain. If a fire was out of control, there was no
stopping it.
Luke then tells the reader that each
apostle was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in different
languages. While I have always wanted to
speak fluently in a foreign language, I am not sure I would want for it to
happen that way. It is hard to imagine
that this Holy Spirit is the same spirit that Jesus gave them when he appeared
to them after his resurrection. In the
Gospel reading that we heard today, Jesus gave the apostles the Holy Spirit by
breathing on them and saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” That sounds like a much more dignified way of
receiving the Holy Spirit. That would
probably go over better in most of our churches. How many of you would ask for the Holy Spirit
if it meant dancing fire on your head?
Most Episcopalians won’t even consider dancing in church, let alone
dancing flames of fire.
Yet we have all kinds of prayers
that we proclaim and we sing where we ask the Holy Spirit to descend on
us. We say those prayers every
Sunday. Today, at the later service, we
even have extra Holy Spirit prayers because we have 2 baptisms. Imagine that if instead of asking the baptismal
candidates if they would turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as their Savior,
we asked them if they were ready to dance with fire. How do you think that would go over? We could
not ask that of children, but I think we could with adults.
In Acts, after the fire descended
and the roar of the wind died down, Peter got up to preach a sermon. In it he quoted the prophet Joel. God declared “that I will pour out my Spirit
upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young
men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…” What a vision! When Joel said it in the Old
Testament, he was talking about the end of the world. It was a bit of a doomsday vision. But Peter reframed it. It was not about the end, but a new
beginning.
I love the line “and your old men shall dream
dreams…” I am not sure why Joel
specified dreaming for old men. Perhaps the
point was that it is never too late to have dreams, have hope even when we have
every reason to believe that all hope is lost. I think that kind of dreaming is
needed for all of us regardless of our gender or age.
I have conducted some hope
experiments over the last several years.
I have had hope, just to see the hope shattered. And I have practiced cautious and skeptical
optimism only to end up with the same devastating ending. The only difference was what came before the
fall. In one situation I went through my
days with a fire that burned strong. In
another, I barricaded the fire and provided only enough fuel to keep the coals
burning. While the end was the same, at
least when the fire burned strong the waiting was more holy, less lonely.
Hope,
even dangerous and precarious hope is always better than cautious optimism…but
only when that hope is rooted in God, in the Holy Spirit. Because while it will always be a slightly
dangerous hope, it will be holy and sacred.
It will be a hope that is a beacon in the night…a hope that gives us the
courage to dance with the fire when we would rather just dwell in the ash.
This sermon is not about the end
goal. It’s about how we get there. It’s about the hopes and the dreams that
inspire us toward the unexpected. I fear
that organized religion does not always give us the freedom to be dreamers…to
dance with the flame. In some ways, we have domesticated faith and that is why
Pentecost is so important. We celebrate
Pentecost not to remember the dreams of the past, but to remind us that we need
to keep dreaming, keep hoping. We proclaim our baptismal covenant not to remind
ourselves of what we promised or our parents promised on our behalf, but to
rekindle the flame. Actually, we should
do more than just rekindle it--we should let the flame go a little out of
control. We wear red on Pentecost to remind us of the
fire, but it’s time that we do more than just remind ourselves of fire. We have to dance with the fire, feel the heat
of it and let it inspire us. So the real
question for all of us is: are you ready to dance with fire?
No comments:
Post a Comment