Bold Worship: May 28, 2023

 Year A, Pentecost                                           Acts 2:1-21                                                                           

            It started as a simple chapel service at Asbury University on Feb 8^th, where the assistant soccer coach preached a sermon on Romans 12.  After he left the worship service he texted his wife and told her that the sermon was a “total stinker.”  He left, but about 20 students stayed to pray.  Some left, but more joined.  This turned into an 11 day non-stop worship service.    Asbury University is a Christian school in the town of Wilmore Kentucky, which has a population of 6,000. This 11 day worship service attracted tens of thousands of people.  At one time, there was a line ½ mile long to get into the university’s chapel.

            One of the things that enabled word to spread about this 11 day worship service was social medial platforms like Tiktok.  People came from across the country to witness what was happening.  It was on virtually every news outlet in print, online and on TV.  Many who learned about it were thrilled.  Given the constant news that we read and hear which tells us that young people, especially Generation Z, is moving away from faith and religion, it was inspiring and heart warming to see so many young people in one place lost in worship.  And if you look at the pictures of where they were worshipping, it’s a traditional church.  There weren’t big screens or flashy effects.  They had a band, but it wasn’t anything outrageous.  All in in all, it was traditional worship with singing, praying, preaching and testimonies.  

            Yet as you can imagine, there was also a fair share of naysayers, people who were skeptical.  This was not just coming from people who were not religious. It was coming from Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians…those of us who are a little more skeptical of worship that seems unstructured and spontaneous.  Many people decided that anything that reeks of a revival must be contrived.  People said it was emotional and spiritual manipulation. 

However, there was no money being made, no flashy celebrity preachers.  Once the administration of the school got organized, they decided not to let big name pastors and musicians come in and take over. They explicitly said, “There are no celebrities here, no superstars, except Jesus.”  Still the criticism came from all sides.  There were countless articles and blogs on how we could determine whether this was a real experience of God.  Could we only know based on what the outcome was---OR---is it about how it transformed the hearts and minds of those who attended?

            This all happened in February of this year.  I read a bit about it when it was happening, but hadn’t really thought about it much since.  However, as I was reading this lesson from Acts, I found some interesting similarities.   First of all, both of these outpourings of the spirit started because people were already gathered in a place, ready and willing to worship God.  The students were at a chapel service.   The disciples were gathered in prayer.  There was also a large group who had collected in Jerusalem, apparently right around where the disciples were.  These people were Jews from many different nations, who had come together for their own holy feast, the Jewish feast of Pentecost (we took their name.) In the Jewish faith, Pentecost marks the end of the spring harvest.  It was when people came together to present the first fruits of the harvest.  It was a time to praise God and show gratitude for all God had given. 

            The other similarity is the reaction that this spontaneous worship received.  In the Acts story of Pentecost, onlookers accused the disciples of being drunk on wine.  Peter had to start his speech by saying, “Indeed, these are not drunk as you suppose, for it’s only 9am in the morning.”   What a way to start a sermon.  No one accused the students at Asbury and those who eventually joined of being drunk.  But they were accused of spiritual and emotional manipulation.  People assumed their worship couldn’t possibly be genuine…that we would only know if it was a real revival if lives and communities were transformed.  I would love to know who gets to make that determination.

            Comparing these two events, 2,000 years apart, it makes me realize that it  doesn’t matter how you worship, someone is going to accuse you of not being genuine.  When Episcopalians go visit a church with screens and bands, they often will call it a performance.  When those who are not accustomed to traditional liturgy observe our worship, they see the liturgy as performative.  They observe us reading words out of our Book of Common Prayer or our service leaflet and conclude that we cannot possibly mean what we are saying because we are reading instead of praying from the heart.

It doesn’t matter what way we worship, someone somewhere will judge us.  It’s been happening for millennia and it will continue to happen.  Sometimes I think that awareness inhibits us from talking to others about our faith.  God forbid someone calls us a hypocrite.  God forbid someone thinks that we don’t know exactly what we are talking about.  Here’s how I think that we can know the Spirit was present at Asbury University 4 months ago and in Jerusalem 2000 years ago— they didn’t let the critics stop them.  They let the spirit dictate how they were worshiping, how long they were worshipping and in the case of Acts, what they sounded like when they worshipped.

We have been hearing about the Holy Spirit for a few weeks in our readings and I spoke about it in a two sermons.  In one I said that I wasn’t sure how I felt about the images that we use on Pentecost—images like fire and wind.  Because when Jesus described the Holy Spirit, it was by saying that it abided with us, it stayed with us, the people of God.  And wind and fire…they don’t usually stick around. 

However, I think there is a place for a Holy Spirit that presents itself with wind and fire. Why? Because, it’s public.  It’s in your face.  It’s unavoidable.  We love our subtle evangelism in the Episcopal Church.  We love to say that we don’t have to talk about faith because we let our actions show how and what we believe.  Actions are important.  But the thing about Pentecost Sunday is that it was all about a very public display of faith that came in words that all who attended could understand.  That is how the Holy Spirit showed up---with wind, fire, words, comprehension and then a sermon that summed it all up. 

Where will that wind and fire take you? I hope that it will give us all some boldness, not only in action, but in speech, that we need not be ashamed of who we worship, or how we worship—that we need not  be ashamed of how Christian we are or are not—that instead we can hold on to that Holy Spirit that abides with us and gives us strength…but that we can also  let the flames and winds of Pentecost embolden us as they did the first disciples and converts—that the wind might propel us out into our neighborhoods and workplaces so that we can be the Christians (in word and action) that God has called us to be.  Where will the wind and fire take you?  I don’t know?  I hope it takes you somewhere that needs God’s love and passion and then brings you back to be fed by the Holy Spirit once more.

Hot, hot, hot: June 4, 2017

Year A, Pentecost                                                         
Acts 2:1-21                                                                            

            Typically, I write my main sermon, and then I consider how I can take something from it and make it accessible to children.  For this Pentecost Sunday, I came up with the children’s sermon first and that informed my main sermon.  The reason I was thinking so much about my children’s sermon was because I was worrying about how people would handle singing Hot, Hot, Hot.  If you loved it, it was my idea.  If you hated it, it was still my idea.  I realize that some people might find it a little weird for church.  Pentecost is one of the three major feasts of the church year.  It’s bigger than Christmas in terms of theological significance.  Because it is such a sacred day, we should take worship seriously.  We should be solemn and stoic like good Episcopalians. But then I kept coming back to this reading from Acts.  I kept thinking about what a ridiculous and wild scene this must have been.

 The disciples were all in one place---they heard and saw the same thing.  They were somewhat prepared for this event. Jesus had told them that after he left, the Holy Spirit would come to them.   However, the huge crowd gathered outside of the disciple’s small enclave were not prepared in the same way.  They were prepared to some extent as they were there for their own holy feast, the Jewish feast of Pentecost. In the Jewish faith, Pentecost marks the end of the spring harvest.  It was when people gathered together to present their first fruits of the harvest.  It was a time to praise God and show gratitude for all God had given.  They were there for a spiritual experience, but the same one they had every year, not something they did not recognize. 

However, something got their attention.  They heard a loud noise and felt the strong wind. They heard the disciples speaking in their own language, even though there were people from many places with many different languages. Thus all the people in the crowd knew something was happening.  But they all discerned what was happening in different ways.

 Some people asked, “What does this mean?”  They were astonished and amazed. They wanted to understand.  They wanted to believe.  Others heard the same thing, but they sneered and accused the disciples of being drunk.  Different people had different experiences with the Holy Spirit. Those who were open to the newness of it all ended up being baptized that day.  3,000 people were baptized--which is remarkable.  But not everyone was.  Some left thinking that these people were idiots or charlatans.  They were faking this holy experience to get attention or power.

Peter knew what they were thinking. He took this opportunity to preach a sermon.  He started by saying that they were not drunk as it was 9am (apparently had it been 5pm, it would have been a different story---yet it was 9am). He then quoted the prophet Joel.  It’s an odd choice for a happy and spirit filled moment. Joel was a prophet who had lived about 500 years before and spent a lot of time telling the people of Israel to repent as the Day of the Lord was near and the Day of the Lord was full of destruction and judgment.  It was not a day to look forward to. For Joel, it was almost as if the presence of the Holy Spirit was a bad thing. 

Peter was taking this text and reframing it.  Peter was telling people that the Holy Spirit was not just providing salvation from something bad, but new life through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.  Jesus had brought something new to the earth.  Instead of taking it back with him when he ascended to heaven, he left the Holy Spirit with the people of God. It was up to the people of God to decide how they were going to respond to the Spirit and this new life, this changed life. Would they scoff because it was different and incomprehensible? Or would they open themselves to this new experience of God’s wonder?

Please do not misunderstand me.  I am not comparing Hot, Hot, Hot, with the flames of Pentecost.  I am not saying that if you did not feel the presence of the Spirit, you were clearly not open to it.  What I am saying, is that we all experience the Spirit in different ways.  We even experience this Spirit in different ways as we age and go through the phases of our lives.   Sometimes it is in moments of utter misery—a small light of hope in the darkness.  Sometimes it is a moment of silliness and joy.  Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere.  When I was working on this sermon, I wrote down my spiritual experiences. It is hard to describe what I mean when I say spiritual experience. For me, it is a moment when I can feel the presence of God in a very tangible way. 

It is an interesting exercise and I commend it to you all.  In about 10 minutes, I came up with 16 experiences. Some of these moments were sad and even embarrassing.  Others were light and joyful. Most I could not really put my finger on what the emotion was, it was just a moment of fullness. It was like a small light inside me burst through.  Yet there was one theme that kept popping up. Of all those moments, only two happened when I was alone.  Some were with small groups of 2 or 3.  The majority were with crowds, crowds of people worshipping God.

We often associate the Holy Spirit with mystical and contemplative times. Some people might even think that they have not experienced the Spirit because they are not a mystical or contemplative type of person.  That is what is so amazing about the Holy Spirit--it comes to all people, at all different times, in all different places.   While this unpredictability can be lovely, it can also be frustrating as sometimes we crave that experience and we don’t know how to find it.  In looking for the mountain top experience of transcendence and nearness to God, we think that we have to literally climb a mountain.  If you can, then absolutely, go for it.   But perhaps… you can also have that mountain top experience here at sea level worshipping God with other people who are sharing that joy or that sorrow…or just the pew.  You might be thinking, well this is the 3^rd time I have been this year and I have not felt it once.  You have to give the Holy Spirit more opportunities to work in you and around you.  The Holy Spirit does not appear on command.

When we had our youth pilgrimage in Ireland, we hiked to the top of a small mountain in the middle of the sea.  The view was breathtaking. If you were to have a mountain top experience, it would have been there. We had communion at the top where monks had worshipped and lived for centuries. I knew it would be this amazing experience.   Yet there were seagulls trying to get the bread, bugs in the wine, and tourists walking in and out of our sacred moment.  Plus, I was pretty sure we were not supposed to be having communion there. It did not feel holy or Spirit filled. When we were walking down, I said to one of our leaders, “That was not really the sacred moment I expected.”  He replied, “I bet the Last Supper was kind of like that, people interrupting Jesus, a bunch of people not really paying attention.  It probably did not seem so holy at the time.” That resonated with me.   The Holy Spirit (the presence of God) rarely looks the way we expect it to look.   I am sure that the scene we heard about in Acts was absolute chaos.  Many people walked away thinking, “Those people are fools.  God could not possibly be present in such foolishness.”  Perhaps even the disciples, upon whom the spirit had descended thought, “This can’t be what Jesus was telling us about.  We need something more real, more permanent.”   When we are stuck in our own expectations, we miss the fresh expressions of the Spirit.  We miss opportunities for transformation.  I was not there on that spirit filled Pentecost 2000 years ago.  I think if I was, I would have been pretty annoyed.  I like order and predictability.  But I hope that I would have at least tried to be open to the crazy beauty that surrounded me.    I hope that you will all strive for that openness as well.  I love our liturgy and music in the Episcopal Church.  But the Holy Spirit is far too big and unwieldly to be confined by our expectations.   Thank God for that.

June 8th, 2014: Acts 2:1-21

                                               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?