|
||||||||||||
 |
|
|||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||
|
Readings (click here for full text of the readings): The higher Christian churches … come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like [construction workers] along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom. [1] In those eloquent and frightening words, Annie Dillard wrote what I’ve been thinking this past week – we Episcopalians just don’t do Pentecost very well. There are some things we do extremely well: like Ash Wednesday, when we feel the coarse, dry ashes upon our foreheads; and the silence and solemnity of Good Friday. Those services are controlled, well planned out, and reverent: everything that Pentecost cannot and must not be. After all, there’s a reason we’re called God’s Frozen People, and changing the linens from white to red isn’t exactly the stuff of fire and daring. Pentecost, on the other hand, is out of control, spontaneous, irreverent. Today’s reading from Acts overflows with descriptions like: “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind”, “divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them”, and “all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” The scene was so remarkable that if we had read on a few more verses, we would have heard Peter’s speech which begins like this: “Rest assured, these people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it’s only nine o’clock in the morning” (1 Corinthians 14:2). But they were drunk in a way, intoxicated by the Holy Spirit, as in the famous exhortation of St. Ambrose: “Let us joyfully drink of the sober drunkenness of the spirit.” And this intoxication led them to speak in tongues, though not in the way that we usually think of it. This is not the speaking in tongues that Paul subtly criticizes in 1 Corinthians, where he says, “Those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them.” Whereas those tongues are individual and potentially divide the community, the Pentecost tongues of fire unite the people. Each person not only understands what everyone else is saying, he or she understands it in their native language. The words are familiar, and personal. And the power of the Spirit, which is usually so foreign and other-worldly, so terrifying and fearsome, is instead welcoming. I wonder how we might react, if people who claimed to be fellow believers in the risen Lord joined us for the celebration of Pentecost, and they began speaking in all manner of languages, with tongues of fire, to the accompaniment of violent winds from heaven. That actually happened to me, more or less, when I was in college in rural Illinois, which now seems like many worlds away. Some friends invited me to something called a FourSquare Gospel Church, and for most of the very long service the parishioners turned and knelt, using their pews as prayer altars, alternating speaking in English and their own prayer language; nearly everyone eventually came forward to be anointed for some reason or another; the pastor made us sing each praise chorus at least six or seven times, not moving on to the next one until we had sung the last with sufficient feeling and verve. It was very unsettling. The people seemed out of control, acting like fools. It was jarring and irrational. Just as Pentecost ought to be. Because as one theologian put it, “you cannot pray in tongues unless you are prepared to make a fool of yourself, and let something happen to you over which your mind has none of its usual control.” [2] In pretty much every belief system there’s a sacred role of “the holy fool.”
And in the Christian tradition, we have many fools: St. Paul, who bragged that he and the other apostles were “fools for the sake of Christ” (1 Corinthians 4:10), St. Francis of Assisi and his many crazy habits, and, perhaps, the greatest among them, St. Simeon the Holy Fool, one of the Desert Fathers. After living alone in a cave and eating only lentils for 29 years, he decided to highlight the follies of the world by playing the fool, and ultimately hiding his own saintliness. During church services he threw nuts at the priests and blew out the candles when they weren’t looking. He danced with random people in the streets. And on Good Friday, when everyone else was fasting, he would feast, “consuming,” according to one biography, “vast amounts of beans – with predictable and hilarious results.” Yet, all the while, he was performing miraculous acts on the sly. Granted, these were sort of quirky miraculous acts. On one occasion, he saved a man from debtor’s prison by rolling a double six in a dice game. And another time he punched a man out in order to prevent him from having an affair with a married woman. Now we must be clear – these fools for Christ knew exactly what they were doing. We’re not dealing with the good-hearted obliviousness of Forrest Gump or the Peter Sellers character in Being There. These fools were wiser than anyone else precisely because they saw the world for what it was – artificial, warped, distorted – and they only appeared foolish because they were working on a different set of rules, a heavenly set of rules. Even the dictionary recognizes their role, because one of the definitions of “fool,” nestled in between “one who is deficient in judgment” and “a dessert made of stewed or puréed fruit”, is this: “One who subverts convention … and varies from social conformity in order to reveal spiritual or moral truth.” From this definition it’s clear that a fool is of value only in a community, where there are conventions to subvert. And the same goes for the Holy Spirit which burst forth in flames on Pentecost. For Pentecost was a Jewish communal feast long before it was a Christian holiday. In the middle of the first month of their calendar God delivered the Jews from Egypt, and in the middle of the third month – about 50 days later – the Israelites arrived at Sinai, where God gave them the covenant in a cloud of smoke and thunder, and they became God’s people. From then on the Jews celebrated Passover and Pentecost. So Pentecost is about becoming God’s people, and from Acts it’s clear that God’s people are a motley bunch drawn from every country from the east to the west. No one is left out, and everyone is welcome. Instead of speaking one language, they speak many languages, keeping their native tongue, but understanding everybody else. So while Acts can certainly be read as a call to ecumenism, it’s not a call to conformity. As the old saying goes, “Pray as you can, and not as you can’t,” and the very fact that we all have found our way to the Episcopal Church suggests that this is the way we can pray, and the FourSquare Gospel style is the way we can’t, or at least don’t prefer to. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from another way of prayer. Today’s epistle reminds us that speaking in tongues is just as much a gift of the Holy Spirit as the utterance of wisdom and knowledge. And on Pentecost we have a golden, fiery opportunity to forsake control, to be taken up in a cloud of thunder, to let the Spirit pulsate within us, and all the while to be fools for Christ. It’s been said that every preacher is basically preaching to himself, with the congregation a secondary consideration. What that means is that the person who needs to hear the sermon the most is the person preaching it. If that’s generally true of most sermons, it’s surely true of this one, coming from a person for whom control has often been almost a god. Who has spent much of his life, in the words of a song by the Indigo Girls, Feeding the cancer of my intellect Ultimately, then, perhaps the role reversal of this sermon communicates its central message better than the words themselves. For in admitting how difficult acting the fool and losing control is for the person preaching, and how much he has to learn from the people supposedly listening, he, I, play the fool. The fool offers salvation to others not through wisdom or eloquence, but through perspective and uncertainty. Through calling into question things that are taken for granted, like the belief that the congregation learns from the preacher and not vice versa, or, for that matter, that we have much of a clue about what we’re doing when we enter this sacred space. For here we tread upon holy ground, in a land of fire and thunder and great power, and it is a perilous path we walk. Perhaps what we need to learn from our brothers and sisters who speak a different language is not their language, but the uncontrollable power of God that is beyond all of our understanding. Perhaps we need to view the words of our liturgy not as articulate expressions of our faith but rather simply as words that don’t get us killed when we say them to God. Perhaps we should view the children of our parish not just as great blessings to us, which they surely are, but also as messengers of God, untainted truth coming from the mouths of babes. As often as we pray for wisdom, perhaps we should also pray for “foolhardiness,” literally to be brave fools, fools for Christ, fools who can see the workings of the Spirit and are wise enough to quake in their boots when they do. And when we do that, all the clutter will melt away, and we, too, will be taken up in the power of the Holy Spirit, in the flames of Pentecost, and in the love of God from which it all flows. And, ultimately, in the great words of Teilhard de Chardin, The day will come when after harnessing the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, [humanity] will have discovered fire.
[1] Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper & Row, 1977): 59 [2] Simon Tugwell, Did You Receive the Spirit? (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1972): 63.. |
|
|
|
[Home] [Worship] [Sermons] [Youth] [Mulch] [Projects] [Info] |