To Lead is to Have Compassion

Text: Psalm 23
Other texts: 2 Sam 7:1-14a, Mark 6:30-34

There is a kind of restlessness in king David that makes him want to put God in a little house.

God objects. In all the years I’ve known you, God says to king David—and known the leaders who have come before you—have I ever asked you to build me a house? I have not lived in a house since the olden times in Egypt (and before that).

But David is uneasy, even when God reminds David of their mutual history. When David was a young boy in the fields, God chose him. God made him a great king over Israel. God vanquished Israel’s enemies by David’s hand, and created a place for Israel to be safe and to prosper. Yet David’s story has been one also of wandering, danger, and exile. God is with him now, but perhaps David is not sure whether God has always been so, and more to the point, whether God will always be. It may be that David is being generous to God in offering God a permanent temple. Or it may be that David just wants God securely and permanently nearby.

We share with David a legacy of Adam. Anxious restlessness and a sense of being beleaguered and urgent striving. We are creatures after the fall, knowing in the center of our beings that we are made for the better and wondering where sometimes—or often—where God is. We are missing something: peace of mind and peace among people, contentment, an ability to love without misgiving, knowing we are cared for and cared about.

Jesus looks at the crowds that increasingly surround him. Crowds of people, you get the impression from Mark’s reading, who are harassing him. He and his disciples need rest and food and some quiet time. But Jesus cannot turn away. The people come for healing, of course, and to see miracles. But it is not their illnesses that move Jesus in this passage. He has compassion on them, Mark says, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

It is this that draws the crowds to Jesus. It is more than healing, though I’m sure that was important. But healers then were a dime a dozen. It is the restlessness of David in them that responds to Jesus. The people see in Jesus someone whom they can trust to guide them as sheep trust their shepherd.

The twenty-third psalm is a treatise on our deepest needs and desires. It promises food for our bodies, and a break from our weariness. It promises water for our thirst, and peace in our busy-ness. It promises restoration of our souls and psyches.

Though it seems to celebrate God’s abundance, it more exactly celebrates God’s sufficiency. It promises not that all our hungers will be satisfied, but that we would be free from hunger. I shall not want, it says. The verb has no object. It does not say “I shall not want this or that.” It says, as it does here around the altar: I shall not lack. It says that wanting will no longer be a cause for worry. In that way, this is a psalm of grace. The promise frees us.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. The two phrases are joined without a conjunction because they each mean the same thing. Trust in the shepherd, and lacking nothing, describe one another. The sheep who trusts the shepherd does not worry. The sheep who does not worry can only so when trusting the shepherd. The guidance of the shepherd along the right paths is what makes the shepherd the good shepherd, the one to be trusted. It is the guidance we long for in our restlessness; the rest—the abundant life—follows.

The psalm is not a utopian vision. Grief and shadows of death are and will remain a part of our lives. The psalm does not promise to take us away from all that. It cannot, in this world. But it can weaken their power. I fear no evil, a word whose meaning here is more secular than cosmic. It is the evil and sorrow and suffering of the day to day whose presence remains but whose strength is obliterated.

It is God’s presence that makes this work. You are with me, the psalm says. These words are in the exact center of the psalm. With them the song changes from a description of the shepherd (he makes me, he leads me, he guides me) to an address to God (you set the table, you anoint, your goodness). It goes from a statement about God to one to God. From knowing about God to knowing God. From talking about a shepherd to having one.

The crowd of people in Mark long to be with Jesus because they are deprived somehow of the promise of the psalm. They have no shepherd. Jesus sees this. And because of this, Jesus has compassion on them. This is the other reason they are drawn in such great numbers to Jesus. They see he can be their shepherd. And they see he has compassion for them. This is not some mystical sensitivity; people are not easily fooled about others’ compassion for them. They know when it is bogus, an empty show.

Compassion means to suffer with, or to feel with. Like empathy. But more than that, because it is not something that can be done at a distance. It is not the same as pity. It is not intellectual or sentimental. The word that Mark uses means gut-wrenching. To be compassionate for someone means to hurt inside in body and soul. Jesus is compassionate because, just as God is in the psalm, Jesus is with the people. Compassion is like solidarity. One cannot be compassionate from a distance any more than one can be a shepherd from a distance.

Compassion is the heart of Mark’s Gospel and the heart of Jesus’ life. It is the “for us” that we say when we talk about the crucifixion plus the “with us” that we say when we talk about Emmanuel, the incarnation. It is a synonym and an implementation of the unconditional love that Jesus talks about. It is the center of the teachings of Jesus, the one whom we follow.

We seem to have lost our shepherd’s guidance. We seem to have been roped into becoming parties to an unfortunate agreement that the good life can come about through the means of violence and greed. That these evil forces can invisibly and magically yield good fruit, and if they have not yet, then they someday will. Compassion is an afterthought, a nice possible side-effect. But these are forces that, unlike compassion, operate most effectively at a distance. When near, they turn our stomach. We cannot easily endure in our bodies or our ethics the close-up suffering of others.

Our restlessness in the world can lead us to acquiesce to this deal. But it does not have to. We are made for better.

When we are baptized, as Miles just was, and when later we become part of a community of people who confess to following Jesus, we say we are born to a new life. One consequence of that life is that we become sheep of a sort, no longer deprived of the promise of the psalm. And as much as we are able, entrusting our fortunes to God, the Lord, our shepherd.

Going without Honor

Text: Mark 6:1-13
Other texts: Ezekiel 2:1-5

We are advised to set clear, measurable, and attainable goals. How else, we are asked, are we going to know whether we have accomplished what we set out to do? How do you know whether you have arrived if you do not know your destination? How can you plot the best path to get there? It is important to be effective and efficient, essential elements of productivity. If we set good goals, we say, we can mark and judge our actions, know when to cut our losses if necessary, quit while ahead, or optimize assets. This is good process for getting some kinds of things done.

But sometimes the goal is not the point. Sometimes the destination is not known to us. Sometimes we are called not to accomplish something but to be some way, or to be some place where we are needed for reasons mysterious to us and sometimes, but not always, eventually revealed to us.

Jesus returns to his hometown after assembling his team. He has been wildly successful. He has healed people, and cast out demons. Crowds have pressed around him, seeking his power. He has brought to life a child thought to be dead.

The people in his old neighborhood are astounded, Mark says. But not in a good way. Astounded as in “I don’t believe it!” They cannot believe that someone as ordinary and as without prospects as Jesus was could have done what he has. This is the Jesus the carpenter they know, one of Mary’s boys. They judge Jesus, taking offense our Bible says, but it really says they are scandalized.

Jesus seems puzzled, amazed by their disbelief, Mark says. But Jesus is not angry at the people. He is not judging them. Nor is he making excuses about his inability to do any deed of power (or just a few deeds, it turns out). He has not been thwarted in some project. His job is not to make people admire or trust him. Some people will, and some people will not.

Like a prophet, Jesus speaks for God. Whether people hear him is another thing altogether. He is not responsible for the hearing, just the speaking.

Jesus is not, as someone called him, a big ball of divine power walking around able to accomplish whatever he wants. In the Gospel of Mark, more so than in the other Gospels, Jesus is revealed over time, and there is a sense of Jesus gradually coming into his own. Jesus develops. We teach that Jesus is fully human as well as fully divine. As the lives of humans unfold, so does the ministry of Jesus.

This episode with his hometown neighbors is a lesson to his disciples, whom Jesus immediately sends out in mission. He warns them, through this example, and then through words, that some will welcome them and some will not. It’s fine. Minister to those who receive you, Jesus tells them. Do not worry about those who do not. Your job is to be the person who offers healing and transformation.

In the past few weeks two young pastors have been called to build, more or less from scratch, two new churches in this area. One (who is actually a pastor in training) is Tiffany Chaney , who is working in Dorchester at the site of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. Her fledgling congregation is called The Intersection, a name that fits the geography of the site and also fits the intent of its mission. The intersection, as she says, of faith and life.

The other pastor is Ryan Lun, who was just ordained last month and is working with Good Shepherd Lutheran church in North Quincy. His congregation-to-be is called Good Neighbor Church, which fits his mission of serving the growing population of Chinese neighbors in Quincy.

Both of these pastors seem to me to be people of great courage. They have been sent out (two by two as it happens) called to act without the benefit of the kind of goals that we are taught to admire. They have a thankless job. I do not mean that people will not thank them or that they themselves are not grateful for these calls. But their job is to do stuff that may or may not lead to some outcome that they may or may not have imagined. They are being called as prophets are called, sent as disciples are sent. Not knowing the destination.

Prophecy is the intersection of life and faith, of humanity and the spirit. It is embodied in humans like Ezekiel. O mortal, the voice says to Ezekiel, meaning “son of Adam,” a phrase which appears over and over in this book. A son of Adam into whom a spirit has entered.

Prophets have no goals, or rather their goals are not theirs and not known. Prophets carry the divine word even though they themselves are merely human. Prophets are called not to enact or implement the future, but to state clearly the present, to envision what could come from what is now, and to speak for God.

Stand up! God tells Ezekiel. You shall speak for me It is not a sought-after job. Prophets are rarely called to successful ministry. They always work in rocky soil. The people of Israel were, our Bible says, impudent and stubborn. It says more exactly that they had hard faces and hard hearts. They are rebels who have rebelled against me, says God. God is not angry with them, any more than Jesus is angry at his neighbors. The Israelites are rebels now. God has told Ezekiel that it will be tough going. God sends Ezekiel anyway. What happens next is not the responsibility of Ezekiel.

We are called—pastor-to-be Tiffany and Pastor Ryan and you and me—we who follow Jesus are called to speak. To speak clearly and courageously as Jesus has taught us, about forgiveness and justice and overriding compassion.

We are sent as disciples to reveal God through our actions, conforming our lives to our faith. We do not have to measure our accomplishments. We do not have to find or follow the best path. This is not a time to judge whether what we are doing is effective or efficient. It is a time to stand up when called, to go out when sent.

Binding and Loosing

Text: 2 Corinthians 8:7-15

Once upon a time there was a governor of Massachusetts who was enjoying a photo op at the Ashmont MBTA station. I’m not sure what the occasion was. Perhaps the opening of the renovated T station there.

There were two notable things about this event. The first was that the governor had no idea where he was. He did not know where Ashmont was (which is in Dorchester) because he had never been in that part of town before. And the second thing was that he had no idea how much it cost to ride the T.

The reason the governor did not know these things is that the governor had many other places he no doubt preferred and many fancier ways to get there. He did not have to go to Dorchester. None of his friends lived in Dorchester. People from Dorchester who wanted to talk to the governor had to go to the State House, where the powers that be worked. And the governor didn’t have to ride the T. In fact, that particular governor had never ridden the T, even before he was governor. There was a gap—and I do not mean in miles—between the governor who visited Ashmont on a photo op and the people who used Ashmont T to get around the city in which they lived.

The governor enjoyed being at the top of a kind of pyramid of privilege. At the top, the governor in his limousine. Then people who had cars, then people who rode the train, then the bus, then people who could not afford even the bus and had to walk, if they could. The pyramid corresponded, very imperfectly, with a parallel wealth pyramid. Imperfectly because many people preferred the T or walked out of convenience or pleasure. Nonetheless, the governor of the Commonwealth was ignorant about the lives of most of the people for whom he was making decisions.

That there are inequalities of wealth and privilege is nothing new. In the time in which Paul wrote his letters to the church in Corinth, the wealth pyramid was shaped less like a pyramid and more like a thumbtack with the dangerous end up. At the flat bottom was almost everyone. Most people by far had next to nothing. This is where Jesus lived, poorer even than a subsistence farmer, for he had no land, and he lived as a craftsperson, by his own hand. At the pointy top were the very few who had wealth and power.

Paul writes in today’s passage to the Corinthians encouraging them to support financially the emerging organization in Jerusalem of the followers of Jesus, who had sent out an appeal for help. This is not the first time Paul has had to remind the Corinthians to think of people who are less well off than they are. Reading between the lines, we can see that though they have eagerly given lip service to helping Jerusalem, they have not followed through. “now finish doing it,” he writes, “so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means.”

This is for sure a request for money. But for Paul money is a specific case of a general principle. He is writing about grace—a word that means gift, and thanks, and generosity—about God’s grace given to us, and about our grace in turn given to others. The word is mentioned five times in the first few verses of the chapter we just heard. Paul is writing about not only the necessity of generosity and but even more, about its power.

As always, Paul is concerned less about (or not at all) about the moral goodness of individuals and more about how their actions strengthen or weaken the unity of the community of the followers of Jesus, the body of Christ. Paul argues with intensity, but not because he likes the people in Jerusalem (in fact, he does not like them very much), but because they are part of that body. The actions of the church at Corinth threaten the whole community because the Corinthians have abundance while Jerusalem has little. There is a gap between part of the community—Corinth—and another part—Jerusalem.

“It is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need,” Paul writes. This should not strike us as weird. Paul could be writing about traditional American values. Generosity, interdependence, and neighborliness. This is not about liking someone or supporting their beliefs or admiring what they do. Calvin, Luther’s contemporary, summarized this passage: “no one starves, no one hordes one’s abundance at another’s expense.” Would you let a neighbor starve while you have a surplus?

For the sake of all, there needs to be a fair balance, as Paul says, between the wealthy and the needy. The word is sometimes translated “equality,” but that is not quite right. He is not trying to shuffle the pyramid here (impoverishing the Corinthians to enrich the Jerusalemites), but to help the Corinthians see things differently. The gift from Corinth will be measured against the need of the church in Jerusalem to determine whether it is sufficient for Jerusalem. But the gift will be measured against the abundance of the church in Corinth to determine whether it is gracious for the Corinthians and generous.

The Corinthians are blessed with many gifts. Yet all such gifts have the power to fragment communities or to bind them together. If we take any of God’s gifts as a way to differentiate some people from others, or to protect some against others, then the whole of us fragments and suffers. But if we see God’s gifts as grace which we might share, then we are tied together into one body. Who shall the Corinthians be, Paul asks them. Who shall we be?

In the verses just preceding these, Paul describes the Macedonians, who have already sent much to Jerusalem, even though they, the Macedonians, are dirt poor. Some think he does this to embarrass the wealthy Corinthian church. But Paul is not commanding them, he says. What makes the Macedonians special is that they were begging Paul to let them participate in the grace and the fellowship of helping the people of Jerusalem. “Begging us earnestly,” Paul says, “for the privilege of sharing in this ministry to the saints.” They see this helping as the gift it is.

They realize that we are called to be generous not because we should, though it is true we should. And not because we are grateful for God’s gifts, though we are. But we are called to be generous because God is generous. God was generous in Jesus, Paul reminds us. We are made in the image of God. It is in that image that we itch to be generous. It is a gracious gift to humans that we are allowed to be generous to others.

Paul is a missionary. His job is to create and nourish and tend communities of people. His call to the Corinthians to help the saints of Jerusalem is urgent. Not because of the need of Jerusalem. But because of the need of the Corinthians to be generous, rather than privileged. And the need of the broken world to be stitched together by generosity. And the prospect that if we do not eagerly enact our longing to share God’s grace, our spirits will starve.

Knowing God, part 2

Text: Mark 4:25-34

In Mark’s gospel the disciples just don’t get it. They desire to know Jesus. They want to understand his teachings. But they are a little thick. You can detect the frustration in Jesus as he says a little earlier in the chapter we just heard, “Don’t you understand this parable? How will you understand [any of] the parables?” And though he explains it then, and though Mark says in the passage for today that he explained everything all over again in private, it never quite sinks in. Perhaps we are to conclude from this that the disciples are dummies. Or perhaps instead that they are just trying to comprehend something that is really hard.

Jesus speaks to his disciples and to others in parables. A parable is a way of coming upon a truth obliquely. The word means “on the side.” Parables are sideways truths. They serve when more direct words fail to convey the idea. They are not allegories (though they are often interpreted that way, even in Mark). They are not metaphors. We cannot conclude from these parables that we are like the farmer, or like the seed, or the plant, or the birds in the bush. We cannot conclude from these parables that God’s kingdom starts small and becomes great, or that it unfolds slowly. These things may be so, but the parables do not teach them.

Parables are like koans, little mind tricks that purposely derail our usual train of thought. In that regard, they are like jokes. They should (and would have when Jesus told them) startle those who hear them. They should make us uncomfortable and thoughtful.

These parables we heard today are two of three agricultural parables in this chapter of Mark, all of which are about seeds. These parables make us think about growth and fruitfulness, about the force of life causing great abundance. About one-hundred-fold yields and giant mustard bushes.

But they also make us think about things that are hidden and about how God reveals God’s self to us. The plant exists in the seed, planted underground, invisible. Then visible. Then blossoming. Then ripe. There is an unveiling here, a disclosure. How does this all work? The farmer does not know. “He does not know how,” Jesus tells us.

We long to know God. We do not know how. Jesus tries to explain things to us. In this passage, he casts about for a way to do that. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God?” Is he speaking to us or is he wondering himself how to explain it? The language here in Mark is strange. What parable shall I use? he asks himself. In one version of the passage, he says “In what parable shall we stand?” In another, older version, he says “with what parable should we parable-ize this?” It is as if Jesus acknowledges that a straight-on explanation of the kingdom of God would not reveal God. “With many such parables he spoke the word to them,” Mark says, “as they were able to hear it.” Each might hear differently.

We desire God. We desire God as essentially as one desires a lover. That desire is as built into us as the hunger for food is or the need to breathe. We wish to court God, to have God near us. We do not know how. God seems partly hidden. Declarations about God (sentences that start out “God is …” followed by some title or characteristic) are unhelpful. So are metaphors regarding God (“God is like …” something; a father, the wind, light).

This kind of language does help us to think about God. And in that way it does help us talk to one another about God. But it is not the language of a suitor, not the language of desire, of longing. The description of God is not the same as God. The word is not the thing.

What happens in the parables is not that the farmer seeks to know the plant, the harvest. The farmer longs for it. He cannot live, cannot survive, without it. Do the disciples want to know about God or do they long for God? Our imperfect ability to know about God has nothing to do with our need to know God, any more than the imperfect knowledge of the farmer has anything to do with the farmer’s longing for the sprout, the fruit, the harvest.

The language of worship is the language of desire. Prayer, and praise, and song are words of desire for God. That is why there is no right way to worship. Martin Luther called most of what we do in worship “adiaphora,” which means “it does not matter” or more literally “indifferent things.” Things which are fine but not essential. There is a lot of room in worship.

At the Synod Assembly last weekend there were a whole bunch of different ways of worshiping. And by a “whole bunch” I mean compared to the limited traditional palette; but really, a smallish bunch compared to the total variety of Christian worship. There were unfamiliar (to many of us) songs in unfamiliar languages, strange and wonderful music, odd ways of praying, visual extravagance and quiet meditation. Some people thought all this craziness was great. And some thought it was untoward, inappropriate, and they were a little crabby about it. They did not like this way of approaching God. It was not their way.

Nonetheless, all the people there, as far as I could tell, desired God. Even though we worshiped in common, in a gathering as we do here, each person was courting God in his or her language (as they were able to speak it, Mark might have said), borrowing words and sentiment as they could from the common pool of the liturgy. I’m sure that no one got it exactly right. Whoever speaks the exactly right thing to one’s object of desire? Perhaps we all got almost all of it wrong. It does not matter. Being too worried about where one sows the seeds is not God’s requirement, if you recall the parable of the sower.

We do not know whether we have our theology right. We do not know whether our image of God conforms to what God really is. We do not know whether we have heard God correctly. We do not know whether our sacred rites are effective. We do not know whether our meditations are pure.

We know anything only imperfectly. We are as much dummies as the disciples were. It does not matter. Like lovers, we speak from our hearts as best we can, in ways that are as true as we can be, to the God whom we desire.

Knowing God, part 1

Text: Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
Trinity Sunday

Over the past few months people from Faith have been meeting with people from Temple Beth Shalom to talk about worship, theology, scripture, and prayer. The interns at Faith and at the synagogue organized these great discussions. At the last meeting, the topic was personal prayer: when do you pray, what do you pray for, how do you pray, have there been for you any special moments of prayer? In the course of these meetings, people have learned to trust one another, to ask questions openly and without embarrassment and to reveal their own vulnerabilities. So at this, the sixth session, people talked not about how Jews and Christians differ in faith, but about their own personal prayer life.

What we found out was that people pray for all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. This should not have been a surprise, but it was, sort of. Occasionally our relationship with God gets into a rut, put there sometimes by our own laziness or unwillingness to take the energy to experiment.

But more often its put there by our fears. Fear that we are doing it wrong, or that God is judging the quality of our prayers. Or fear that we are asking for the wrong thing (either something too trivial or too big). Or often fear that there is some official teaching about prayer that we do not know, that we would benefit from going to a class on prayer, or reading Prayer for Dummies. This is not a new fear; when Jesus first recites the Lord’s prayer, it is because the disciples have asked him: “Lord, teach us to pray.”

If we were each individually in ruts, we were not as a group. People prayed for all sorts of things. People prayed for world peace. People prayed for peace of mind. They prayed that the airplane they were flying in would not crash. They prayed for a good meal. They prayed that they would lose weight. They prayed for a good night’s sleep. For comfort, safety, help for others, healing.

People prayed at all sorts of times. At bed at night, or first thing in the morning. While they were driving or on the T. At Sabbath worship and at meals. Walking down the street. They used prayer books, no books, prayer beads and rosaries. According to a schedule or when they felt like talking to God.

And they prayed in all sorts of ways. They asked God to do things or to keep things from happening—petitions, in the jargon of prayer. But they also told God things that were happening with them, in their lives or in their hearts and thoughts, their worries and their hopes—declarations. They thanked God for good things or life itself—thanksgivings.

They also just sat and listened for God. For God to talk to them, or show them something. Or to detect God’s presence around them in the physical things: sights and sounds and smells of the world.And they chastised God, complained about things that happened to them, their friends, the world. Or about what seemed unmet promises, or being abandoned.

Our prayer and the identity of God for us are intertwined. In Faith 101, which meets after coffee hour, we’ve been talking about theology. Lutheran theologian Richard Jenson (whom we will be talking about in today’s session) says that the primary religious question is “which is God?” Meaning of all the images of God, which has the most claim on us? Another way of asking that question, he says, is to ask “to whom may I—do I—pray?” It is a clue that the huge variety of prayers and prayer life among us means that the identity of God is complex and variegated.

You may find the readings today seem a more or less random assortment. There is a story of the calling of the prophet Isaiah; there is a wonderful psalm about God’s power; something from Paul about being adopted children of God; and a story of Nicodemus coming under the cover of darkness to speak to Jesus.

The readings are as varied as our prayers, which is perhaps the point. There is no clear unity in them of the characteristics of God. In the psalm, God is mighty, powerful, and splendid, stronger than all the elements, cosmic even. Yet at the end, God blesses individual humans with peace.

In Isaiah, God is heavenly and huge—the hem of his garment barely fits in the Temple and his presence fills the universe. Seraphim fly all about him, mysterious and strange. God is kingly. Yet at the end, God wonders aloud whom to call. And Isaiah has the courage to say “Me! Send me!”

In Romans, God is familiar enough to call God “Daddy!” or “Papa!” God has adopted us as children. When before we were like slaves—who in Paul’s time had no claim to their own children nor claims on their parents—now we are children, deserving as much—and the same—consideration as Jesus. God is our parent.

And in the Gospel, God is a teacher in the flesh of Jesus. And a gift to the world.

What we have here is a basketful of contrasts, contradictions, and paradoxes. God is timeless, yet comes in particular times (the year that King Uzziah died, for example). God is elemental yet is called in the psalm by name. God is almighty yet asks for help from people. God is secret yet known. God is singular yet plural. God is huge yet people-sized (or smaller). God is ethereal, spiritual, and earthy all at once. God is father and child at the same time.

Last Sunday on Pentecost we heard the story of many people, moved by the Spirit of God, who began to speak all at once. And the people around them were amazed, because though the speakers were all from Galilee, the visitors were from all over the world. How is it, they asked, that we each of us hear the words in our own language? Though this seems at first glance to be a miracle of speaking, it is instead of miracle of hearing. They each heard differently. It adds nothing to know what the folks were “really” saying. It is a miracle not of tongues but of ears.

God’s identity—the character of God—is like that. It is not so much that God has lots of different modes or guises, but that we have lots of ways of seeing and hearing God. This does not mean that anything goes, or that God is so vague that God could be anything. That we see God in many ways and forms tells us little about whether God is unified or fragmented. It tells us a lot about our relationship with God, which changes as we and the world do. And it tells us how strongly we need that relationship, our demands, expectations, and hopes for God, and how much we are fed by God’s presence.

Theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel begins his theology with the notion that God is ineffable. That does not mean that we cannot approach or understand God. God is awesome, he says, and “Awe is a way of understanding.”

We have been given means to know God. Scripture and scholarship and friends and the living experience of our lives. And knowing God in itself changes us. We begin to see God through God-colored glasses, so to speak. We hear God through God-enhancing headphones. But they are still our eyes, still our ears. We see and hear many things in the one God to whom we pray.

Groaning With

Text: Romans 8:22-27, Acts 2:1-21

This is the season of graduation and commencement. Degrees are conferred, marking the completion of years of intense work and focussed energy. It is the end of something, and congratulations all around. But by calling it commencement, we acknowledge that it is a milestone, or a portal, not a destination. We stop for a moment, we enter new territory, but we are not done traveling.

It is a good day to contemplate the feast of Pentecost.

We live in a realm of the incomplete. Plans made but not yet carried out, expectations not yet met, constructions not yet complete, relationships not yet jelled. Someday, we think, but not yet, I will get my desk in order; I have not yet traveled to Africa; I have not yet made amends to the friend I betrayed; I have not yet worked against injustice. I have not yet accomplished, repaired, or enjoyed all that I wish I had.

This is the nature of things for us creatures. Physics, biology, and theology conspire against closure, against wrapping things up. There is not enough time in the day or days in our lives. Though we feel the moments—great and small—come and go, time continues to push us forward at its own pace, not ours. Creation is ongoing and unresolved.

We are not perfect. The world is not perfected. There is inevitably a gap between what is and what might be. Our ills and those of the world reveal this. War, starvation, greed, sickness, sorrow. A misalignment between God’s intent and actual existence. We suffer. People suffer, and the world suffers.

We dream of a different way.

The events of Pentecost are a commencement. The ministry of Jesus was not complete. What his followers had hoped would happen had not. The Gospel stories are ended. But the book of Acts, from which this story comes, is the second book of a series of two written by Luke. After only a short period of surprise, fear, and grief, the followers carry on. New plans, new hopeful plans. Dreams that conform to the dreams of Jesus. Peter reminds everyone of Joel, who speaks of dreams and visions of another time, a glorious day. I will pour out my spirit, says God, upon all men and women.

Pentecost was a feast day that comes fifty days after Passover. Originally a harvest festival, it commemorates the giving of the law, Torah, on Mount Sinai. It is a commencement. Having been redeemed from slavery in Egypt (the story of the Passover), now the Israelites are given the law to guide and nurture them. A plan for the future and a way of being in the life of God. The people in the story in Acts are in Jerusalem centuries later celebrating this gift.

In a house, in one place, the story says, the followers of Jesus gather. We are not told about their state of mind. Mixed up probably, and disappointed, facing an uncertain future. Suddenly something like wind filled the house and something like fire came to each one, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. It was the baptism of sorts—of fire and the Holy Spirit—predicted earlier in Luke by both John the Baptist and Jesus.

Like the ancient event it echoes, it creates a new community. It creates a project of new dreams. The community is heartened, and its dreams fed, by the coming of the Holy Spirit.

This is, we imagine, the same Spirit that moved over the waters in Genesis at the creation of the world, and the same Spirit that Jesus promises in the gospel of John to send to his disciples. It is the same Spirit whose gift we just prayed would be stirred up in Kim. It is, we teach, the same Spirit as the third person of the Trinity of God.

The Spirit is God’s presence among us. Though not physical, the Spirit seems palpable. Noisy and powerful like a wind. Hot like a fire. Near us. Touching us. The Spirit is our companion. I will send you a helper, Jesus says. What all the portrayals of the Spirit have in common is its single-minded connection with creation and especially with the affairs of people. It seems like the Spirit has an assignment and its assignment is us. Humans, earth, things of the earth. The Spirit has been with us from the beginning of the world.

The Spirit is especially bound up in human suffering. Paul tells us this in Romans. Living in suffering and uncompleted aspirations for the world, all of creation is groaning together. And we ourselves groan—it is the same word—groan inwardly. And the Spirit, Paul writes, groans—the same word again, which implies grief and complaint, matching ours—the Spirit groans deeply with us and for us, beyond words.

The Spirit intercedes for us, Paul writes, a sometimes uncomfortable concept for Lutherans. But the Spirit that Jesus sends he calls a helper or an advocate (like a health care advocate—speaking up for us when we cannot; when we are suffering). The Spirit knows us through millennia of keeping company with us. God searches the heart, Paul says, finds what God seeks in the mind of the Spirit. The Spirit is not other-wordly but especially-worldly. The Spirit speaks for each of us because it knows all of us so well. It speaks not only when we do not know how to pray as we ought, as our version translates it, but when we do not know even what to pray, which is a translation just as accurate and, to my mind, more helpful.

The word for Spirit is “wind” or “breath.” We can think of the Spirit as God’s breath, which is a synonym in the Bible for life. All living things look to God for sustenance, says today’s Psalm 104—all look to God. You send forth your Spirit, it says, and they—we—are created, and thus you renew the face of the earth.

The future is not some predetermined mapped-out route upon which we must walk. But we are not bushwhacking alone through the wilderness, either. The future is not only the narrative we create by living through it. We are not helpless, because we have help. We are not directionless, because we have a guide.

It is a gift, not a defect, that life is incomplete, open-ended. Creation continues; God’s breath continues to renew the ever-changing face of the earth. There is still time. We only hope for what we do not see, Paul says. If all the loose ends are tied up and all the tasks accomplished, then what happens to hope? Hope that is seen is not hope, Paul says.

There is nothing, Paul writes a few verses later, that can separate us from the love of God. We are not alone. The Spirit, our helper, advocate, comforter, is here. And accompanied by that Spirit, unsatisfied, incomplete, off we go.

Trump

Text: Acts 8:26-40
Other texts: 1 John 4:7—21

Some Christians like to tell other Christians that the other Christians are not Christian. I have first-hand knowledge of such things. One of my friends, for example, prayed that another friend would become a Christian. Even though the other friend was already a pastor. One of my colleagues at seminary told me that since his fellow-students had not had a born-again experience, they were not Christians, even though they claimed to follow Jesus. In both examples, the ones who were doing the judging felt they not only had a right but had a duty to speak out in judgment. They saw themselves as right—or righteous—defenders of the faith against a weakening of God’s church by pretenders and dangerous loosely-committed hangers-on.

In the best light, you could say they were concerned and zealous. In a different light, you could say they enjoyed the power to say who gets in to see God and who does not. They were certainly unwilling to let God determine who is faithful and who is not. They saw themselves as God’s bouncers, protecting God at the gates.

Though there have been many such folk in the history of the church and now, I doubt that God needed or needs such protection.

The writer of Acts, thought to be Luke, tells a story of a eunuch who is met by Philip, a Jewish follower of Christ who is sometimes called Philip the Evangelist. We learn in the story a lot about the eunuch, but we do not learn his name. Which makes us think that Luke is talking about a type of person, not just this particular person. There is a message here meant for all followers of Jesus.

The eunuch has much against him and much going for him. On the one hand, he was officially outcast. He was a foreigner in those parts, and because he was castrated he would have been unable to worship at the Temple. On the other hand, he held a position of authority (he worked for the queen of Ethiopia), was probably wealthy, was well-educated (he could read), devout, and humble. And also hospitable. He invites Philip to join him in the chariot and to chat about scripture.

The eunuch has three questions for Philip. First, he asks Philip to help him make sense of the Bible passage he is reading. The passage he quotes from is the suffering servant song, verses which have given comfort to people who are outcast and who, like Jesus—and Christians, like Philip, do see Jesus in this passage—people who suffer at the hand of those in authority. The passage promises freedom from those like the eunuch who live at the margins.

Second, the eunuch asks Philip whether the hope present in these verses are claimed only by the prophet or whether they give hope to him also. Is this passage about one person or is it a promise to all who suffer? In particular, could it apply to someone like him? Could it apply to him?

And finally, coming upon some water, the eunuch asks “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

The church—organized religion—mixes law and grace uncomfortably and with difficulty. Claiming God’s grace and unconditional love, the church nonetheless has been hesitant to wholeheartedly be an instrument of that grace. The church is an institution and has the usual concerns of institutions: perpetuation, keeping on message through doctrinal rigor, maintaining infrastructure so work can be done, appointing task forces and firing people. We preach forgiveness, but ask practically whether is it we who must forgive and—scriptural guides notwithstanding—if so, how much. The church, like other institutions, does see its job partly as a gatekeeper; it thinks that part of its job, amazingly, is to keep some people out. Christians denying other Christians, or those who wish to worship and serve as Christians. The church’s answer to the eunuch’s question is that there is, perhaps, much to prevent it.

But that is not Philip’s answer. By asking the question, by stepping forward to seek baptism, the eunuch has qualified himself. Philip does not question whether the eunuch is prepared. He does not ask him to confess or proclaim one thing or another. He does not look things up in the rule book. The eunuch commanded the chariot to stop, it says, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. Done deal.

We are not flabbergasted at this because we know that Philip was not acting on his own. This whole story is thick with the presence of the Holy Spirit. There are three people in the story: Philip, the eunuch, and the Spirit. The Spirit brings Philip to the eunuch and the Spirit sends him running after the chariot and the Spirit whisks him away. In between, we can guess that the Spirit no doubt helps Philip interpret Isaiah and is present at the baptism of the eunuch. Right order is not Philip’s concern. He is grounded in a tradition that lets him recognize God’s leading, however strange. Philip listens to the Spirit, and lets himself be led by it, wherever it may go.

In the first letter of John, from which we heard in the second reading today, the writer defines the nature of God. There are presumably lots of ways to characterize God. God, you might say, is power. God is goodness, God is righteousness. But we hear none of those things today. John writes in this lyrical passage that God is love. Love prompted by simple existence alone, not by accomplishment or affection.

Let us love one another, John starts out. That’s the first thing he says. Made possible because God loves us. Loving one another is a sign, a mark of Christians. Grace and forgiveness start there. It is inseparable from following Christ. You cannot claim to love Christ and at the same time hate a brother or sister. John is not polite about this. He says: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.”

This love is not ethereal. It is not unearthly and therefore impossible or vague. It is embodied, John says, in the person of Jesus, who was human. It is not therefore impossible for humans.

It is, however, difficult. It is a new thing (we must be born anew, Jesus elsewhere tells Nicodemus, or from above: we must take it from the top). We live on the earth. We make rules to keep focused, to think clearly, to keep safe from hurt or harm or indifference. We wish to keep order. That makes sense.

To love one another, therefore, is an act of courage. An intentional tough decision. To act lovingly, even if it is hard to do. Even if it seems crazy. Even if it means we love imperfectly, as we always do. Love casts out fear, John writes, but that does not mean loving one another is not scary. We are not called to be perfect first and then to love others. It works the other way around: if we love one another, John writes, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

The command to love our sisters and brothers is a call to trust in God and to trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But always, prevails. When we are driven to maintain order first, when we are tempted to man the gates and lock the doors, to keep out the pretenders and the dubious—that is when we most need to remember this command, and to remind ourselves that, in all cases, love trumps order.