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Poured out to overflowing

The end of the Romans lesson for Trinity Sunday, Year C really got me this morning.  At the end of that big, long, tempting sentence that I begged you not to preach this week, is an image that is too good not to pay attention to.  ”…  hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

My mind was immediately taken to the end of Psalm 23, in which the Psalmist declares, “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”  It all got me thinking again about the abundance of God.  God pours out his blessings upon our heads so that it runs down our faces, covers our bodies, and even the tips of our toes (an action that was recreated in ancient baptismal rites, but because of prudence, we no longer strip candidates naked and slather them with oil).  God’s love, unfulfilled (this isn’t the right word, but I can’t think of what I want to say) as it was even within the perfect love of the Trinity, overflowed into creation.   God takes that love and pours it into our hearts, but even that can’t contain it.  Ideally, the love of God overflows even our hearts and is poured out into the world through acts of service and compassion, through charity and justice seeking, and through disciples just being present: shutting up and listening to the needs and hurts of another.

God pours out his love into our hearts, but if we bottle it up, we’ve missed the true blessing of sharing that gift with a world desperate for deep relationship.

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A Pentecost Blessing

I’m about as loosey-goosey as one who has twice taken a vow of loyalty to the “doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this Church has received them” can be, but the reality of my low-church, liberal reading of the rubrics, is that here at Saint Paul’s, our worship has a strong Episcopal/Anglican identity even if we do wear cassock-albs and there is nary a chasuble in sight.  For example, rather than offering any blessing that might come to mind in the closing minutes of Sunday worship, we tend to use the blessings suggested in The Book of Occasional Services (2003) instead.

As I read the Gospel lesson for Trinity Sunday, it brought to mind the powerful words of the single blessing option for The Day of Pentecost (which, I would argue is appropriate straight through ordinary time), and while there is a blessing provided for Trinity Sunday, because of the lectionary’s prescribed texts for Year C, I would instead recommend using this blessing at the end of services this weekend.

In John 16, Jesus tells his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”

The Pentecost blessing reads, “May the Spirit of truth lead you into all truth, giving you grace to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, and to proclaim the wonderful works of God; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you, and remain with you always. Amen.“

While our cultural context is ever evolving (or devolving, as the case may be), it is the Spirit whose job it is to guide us into all truth.  Sometimes, this means making tough decisions toward new theologies.  Sometimes, this means being the conservative voice in a culture that seems to have lost its way.  Sometimes, perhaps more often than not, it means living into the mantra of Kairos Prison Ministry: listen, listen.  Love, love.

As I prepare to be the celebrant at three services for Trinity Sunday, I do so fully prepared to ask for myself and on behalf of my congregation, that the Spirit of truth might lead us into all truth, and that we might we made willing enough to go there.

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Lead me not into temptation

Natural disasters seem to bring out the best and worst in our humanity.  We watch with awe as first responders rush in, risking life and limb, to save the inured and trapped.  We offer spiritual and tangible support through our thoughts and prayers and by making donations to the Red Cross or Episcopal Relief and Development.  We often ask tough questions about God and Creation.  Without fail, some moron spouts off his lame-brained theology and either blames the victims or the wider culture for events that we know are random occurrences and natural pressure relief valves.

Most of the time, better theology prevails, and the vast majority of Christians will gather on Sunday to hear words of comfort and love rather than hate and stupidity, but there is a temptation lurking in the combination of Trinity Sunday and Romans 5 that I want to use my blog today to caution preacher against.

It is a well known fact that preachers dislike preaching Trinity Sunday.  We clergy think we hide that fact, but our congregations notice that the seminarian, last curate on the totem pole, or graduating high school senior always preaches the First Sunday after Pentecost.  Many preachers: rectors, curates, and graduating seniors alike, are looking for a way to avoid heresy and preach anything other than the Doctrine of the Trinity, so with the best of intentions, they’ll think of the weather events of the past few days, pray for the people of the Great Plains, and then launch into a sermon that begins, “We know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  The temptation will be strong, but I urge you to avoid it at all costs.

First, unless you are actually the one suffering, quote Romans 5 sounds at best, trite, and at worst, condescending and idiotic.  Second, it is too soon, way too soon to saying anything like, “suffering leads to hope.”  And finally, and perhaps more theologically, while I’m sure Paul could have been thinking of natural disasters, it seems highly more likely, given his constant focus on the cross of Christ, that Paul was equating “suffering” with persecution for the sake of the Gospel, that is to say, the suffering to which Paul refers is the result of a decision for Jesus, not because one happens to live or go to school in the mile-wide path of a tornado.

Romans 5 might look like your out this Trinity Sunday, dear reader, but I implore you, resist the temptation.  Instead, preach Jesus or the ever present Holy Spirit or the good work of the Red Cross and ERD or even the Trinity.  Goodness knows, it’ll be better than whatever foolishness Pat Robertson will get press for saying.

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Canticle 13 – A Song of Praise

It takes a lot to get me jazzed about the Service Music in our current hymnal (1982) or any of its supplements (LEVAS II, WLP, and Voice Found).  You would think, with the 1979 Book of Common Prayer’s move to the Eucharist as the “principal act of worship on a Sunday morning,” there would be some impetus to create decent setting for the Gloria and Sanctus.  After six years of searching, it seems clear that very few have taken up the call to write good Eucharistic service music for the liturgy of The Episcopal Church, which is a real shame.  My sadness is made more profound by the loss of some of the great musical setting of our Church, the Canticles, which rarely get airtime outside of seminary and monastic communities because nobody does the Daily Office with music anymore.

It takes a lot to get me jazzed about the Service Music in our current hymnal (1982), but this note does it for me.

This Sunday, the First Sunday after Pentecost is a chance for the Church to contemplate the depths of our Trinitarian faith.  While Scripture is fairly weak on a systematic theology of the Trinity, and the lessons appointed for Trinity Sunday, Year C don’t help much, we are given the chance to sing or read Canticle 13, “A Song of Praise” instead of a Psalm this week, and I encourage every person reading this blog to take that option.  I’ll even be so bold as to say that you should sing John Rutter’s high and lofty setting, S-236, if only to hear your organ belt out that high G pictured above.  The Trinity can’t be explained in a three leaf clover or as fire, flame and heat, but the love of God, poured out in perfect relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, can surely be experienced in the hearts of those who raise their voices to the high vault of heaven and sing, “Glory to you!”

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The sermon I didn’t preach

I wrote and threw out a sermon for Pentecost Day this year.  If you care to see what I didn’t preach, you can read it below.

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I’m told that in the early-80s, The Episcopal Church did marketing very well.  As the story goes, in 1979, The Reverend Doctor George H. Martin, a priest in Minneapolis decided it was time for the Church to go beyond its walls to start telling the Good News of Jesus Christ to the world at large.  He took his idea to a brand new ad agency in downtown Minneapolis and The Church Ad Project was born.  The original six advertisements have been turned into posters that are almost as timely now as they were 34 years ago.  One simply shows the picture of a coffee hour coffee pot and reads “Free coffee.  Everlasting life.  Yes, membership has its privileges.”  My favorite one is a black background with a very simple picture of Jesus in the middle.  Above it in large, bold text, it reads, “He died to take away your sins.  Not your mind.”  I love that little ad because I think sits at the heart of the Pentecost message.  In Christ, we have been set free.  With the Spirit, we are equipped to grow into the fullness of God’s dream for us, and often that requires us to ask questions.  Sometimes, lots and lots of questions.

The full Pentecost story, of which we heard a part this morning, takes up the entire second chapter of the Book of Acts, and it is full of questions.  There’s the unspoken question, as the disciples look around at one another, puzzled by the events unfolding as they hear the rushing wind, see the flames, and have their mouths thrown open to speak languages they’ve never known before.  Then there’s the crowd, devout Jews and Proselytes, Jewish converts, from every nation under heaven, who are bewildered by what they are seeing.  They ask simple questions like “Aren’t all these people Galileans?” and “How is it that we hear them in our native tongues?”  But they do not stop there.  As the events roll on, the crowd begins to ask deeper questions, questions that Peter is eager to answer.

The first important question asked by the crowd is, “What does this mean?”  This is a fair question.  They need someone to interpret for them what they are seeing.  We all know the feeling of seeing or hearing something so unbelievable we need help processing the events before us.  We ask, “What does this mean?” in moments of tragedy: after the assassination of JFK, on 9/11, or the day of the Sandy Hook School shooting.  We ask, “What does this mean?” in moments of joy: a promotion at work, the birth of a child, or winning the Powerball.  We ask, “What does this mean?” anytime the events before us are just too big for our minds to comprehend, like standing on the beach at Camp Beckwith, in the full beauty of God’s creation watching three new members join the family of the faithful.

The crowd gathered on the streets of Jerusalem needed someone to explain to them what was going on, and so Peter, speaking up over the cacophony, preaches a sermon based on the book of Joel.  Peter tells the crowd that Pentecost means that God has brought forth a new era of human history in which the Holy Spirit is no longer available only to a select few and given only for a finite time, but that in these days, these last days, the Spirit is poured out upon all flesh.  Peter tells the crowd that Pentecost means that it is no longer ethnicity that brings us into the household of God, but instead living in the fullness of the Spirit is the new symbol of membership in God’s family, and that all people: men and women, old and young, slaves and free will be agents of God’s love upon the earth.  Peter tells the crowd that Pentecost means prophecy: that God will do whatever he needs to, even to the point of handing out foreign language skills at a moment’s notice, in order to share the Good News.  Peter tells the crowd that Pentecost means living as a community of visionaries and dreamers.  Young men will see visions.  Old men will dream dreams.  Everyone will be privy to the imagination of God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Peter continues with a rather dense and lengthy speech that the Lectionary wisely skips.  As Peter wraps up his sermon, Luke tells us that the Good News of Jesus had cut the crowd to their heart and they ask one last question, “Brothers, what should we do?”  This is often the second question that gets asked after, “What does this mean?”  We ask, “What should we do?” when we see pictures of destruction following natural disasters or when we hear news of failures of leadership in Washington DC or Montgomery, Alabama or when a friend is diagnosed with cancer.  We ask, “What should we do?” when the Good News of Jesus prevails upon us, or when seeing others do good works enlivens our hearts to bear fruit, or when our community of faith invites us into a deeper relationship. We ask, “What should we do?” when we know that something has to be done, but know that we aren’t equipped to do it alone.

To the crowd gathered, wondering “What should we do?” Peter replied simply, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the Holy Spirit.  For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord God calls to him.”  Which is exactly why we are here, doing what we’re doing today.  From the earliest days of the Church, people have gathered on Pentecost to remember the birth of the Church, to ask the Spirit for renewed vigor, and to welcome new members into the family.  So today we gather to celebrate, to splash water, and to pray for Christians: young and old; male and female; unchurched, de-churched, and re-churched; and to invite the Spirit to take hold of our lives, by giving us inquiring and discerning hearts, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love the Lord, and the gift of joy and wonder in all his works.

With the wind and the flames and the tongues, Pentecost would have been a great feast all by itself, but it is made all the greater because the crowd gathered and asked questions.  What does all this mean?  What should we do about it?  How can we have what y’all got?  Repent, be baptized, enjoy forgiveness, and receive the Holy Spirit.

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Above the Noise

You can listen to the dry run of this sermon by clicking here.  Or read on.

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Life these days is inherently noisy.  There is a cacophony of sound flying past our faces seemingly every minute of every day.  Every waiting room, dining room, and more and more rest rooms has a TV in it, usually blaring the latest thing one of the news agencies thinks we should be concerned about.  Places that aren’t bombarding us with television instead pipe in some variation of smooth jazz music for our ears to tune into while we spend extra money at the grocery store or clothing boutique.  As smartphones become ubiquitous, chimes of varying styles, lengths and volumes can be heard with every email, text, tweet or poke.  Even in the silence, there is noise: the whir of a laptop fan, the clicking of a keyboard, and the sound of water running in the ice machine.  No matter where we are: the beach, the car, the office, or at home, there are conversations going on live and virtually around us at all times, and I’m not even counting the voices in our heads.  And don’t get me started on the noise that comes with having children.  Life is noisy, and it has become increasingly difficult to figure out what we should actually pay attention to and what can fade into the background noise.

It is no wonder then, that we’ve become really good at making a distinction between hearing and listening.  We hear lots and lots of things on a daily basis, but if you ask any parent, teacher, or spouse, it’s clear that we actually listen to very little.  The underlying assumption is that hearing is strictly an automatic physiological process.  Sound waves float throughout the air at all times, they make their way into the ear canal, vibrate the ear drum which turns it into an electrical signal that the brain can process and we hear a sound. <CLAP>.  If you are not hearing disabled, then you just heard me clap whether you wanted to or not.  Hearing is a totally passive process.  Listening, on the other hand, requires you to make the choice to pay attention.  As you begin to turn your focus onto one item among the many sounds going on around you at any given moment, your brain begins to function “like a set of noise-suppressing headphones,”[1] pushing things into the background those things that you will simply hear and bringing to the forefront that thing to which you want to listen.   Sometimes, the choice of what to listen to is obvious.  Sometimes, the sounds compete for your attention.  Sometimes, there’s nothing worth listening to, but in the high powered, fast moving 21st century, we work hard to discern between hearing and listening.

In the earliest hours of Church history, however, the differences between hearing and listening were much less obvious.  In fact, for Luke in his two-part series, Luke-Acts, there seems to be no difference between hearing and listening.  Certainly, there was still a cacophony of sound in first century Palestine: bleating donkeys, flies buzzing, blacksmiths hammering, myriad conversations happening all around, while merchants shouted, selling their wares. Linguistically, however, Luke makes no distinction between hearing and listening, using the same Greek word to mean both passive hearing and active listening.  In the story of Pentecost, of which we heard only a part this morning, the crowd is “amazed and perplexed” as they passively “hear” the disciples speaking in a myriad of different languages, while later they are admonished by Peter to “listen” to the Good News.

Peter’s sermon is addressed to a divided crowd.  Some have seen the events of the morning and are asking, “What does this mean?”  Others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine!”  As Peter stands up to speak over the myriad of other noises, some listen to Peter’s words with eager expectation, while others only are barely willing to hear what he has to say.  We could make a whole lot of the difference between passive hearing and active listening, but the Pentecost story makes clear that it doesn’t matter.  Instead, it is the Spirit that opens our ears to the Good News of Jesus, whether we are listening or not.  Peter preaches at some length, explaining in detail how this amazing Pentecost scene fits into the larger story of God’s salvation history,  and as the story ends, Luke tells us that, “when the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’  Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.’ … So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.   They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

This morning, we add our voices to the sound of celebration, rejoicing with those who over the course of the last two-thousand-ish years have heard the voice of the Lord over all the other sound in their lives.  We remember with great joy the millions of souls whose ears have been opened to the Good News by the Spirit and have followed the model begun on that first Pentecost Day: full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church. We rejoice with two adults: Myrna Rivas and Patrick Faust; who have listened to God’s calling above all the other noise in their lives and have decided to join Christ’s Body in the waters of baptism.  We celebrate alongside the Branch/Roberts family as they commit, with God’s help, to teach John Cole to tune his ears and heart to know the voice of the Lord when he calls, even as we recommit ourselves to listening to the voice of the Father who calls us to

  • continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers
  • to repent and return to the Lord every time we fall into sin
  • to take our place as the prophets of God – proclaiming by word and example the Good News of God in Christ
  • to seek and serve Christ in everyone we meet, loving our neighbor as ourselves
  • to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being

Hearing may be a fully automatic, physiological function, but like everything else, it too was created by God, and he uses it to help us listen to his voice and follow where he leads.  Send your Spirit, Lord God, open our ears, speak to our hearts, and bring forth your Kingdom.  Amen.

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What Should We Do?

If I were in the smokey room, sipping a glass of 25 year old MacAllan, and debating the pericopes that would eventually make up the Revised Common Lectionary, I think I would have suggested a change to the Pentecost lesson.  The RCL is quite fond of “Selected Verses,” that is, they are really good at cherry picking the Scriptures to try to make 1) a coherent narrative or 2) force a theme upon the preacher.  I find it odd, then, that in their attempt to not deal with Peter’s exegesis of the Joel and the Gospel, they didn’t jump back into Acts 2 at verse 37.

“Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’  Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you n the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may forgiven; and you will receive the Holy Spirit.  For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord God calls to him.’” (Acts 2:37-39, emphasis mine)

While pinning down an Apostolic tradition is like nailing Jell-o to a wall, my reading ahead of this summer’s “Mapping Ritual Structures” class has led me to believe that the most ancient of baptismal traditions is Pentecost Day baptisms.  Baptism is, according to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, “Full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ Body the Church.” (298)  That sentiment is stated more fully in the prayer over the neophytes immediately after they’ve been washed with water (and optionally (this action is required, but can happen before or after the prayer), “confirmed” by the laying on of hands and marked with the sign of the cross (with the additional of option of sealing with chrism)).

“Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace.  Sustain them, O Lord, in  your Holy Spirit.  Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere  a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.  Amen.” (308)

As I read Acts 2 and subsequent Church history, the ancient ideal appears to be that when the Gospel message “cuts to the quick” one is immediately baptized, receives the gift of the Holy Spirit, and is fed at the Lord’s table (an addition that comes not too far after Acts 2).  While the tradition would grow to make certain days (i.e. Pentecost and The Easter Vigil) better suited for baptism than others, the reality is that what is happening in the Sacrament is always the Church catching up with what the Spirit is already doing.  The 3,000 who were added to the fold on Pentecost Day were asking “What must we do” because the Spirit was already at work, leading them by way of Peter’s sermon, to life in the Kingdom of God.  The ritual actions of baptism and the laying on of hands are the outward and visible sign of the power of the Spirit already at work.

Even in our very modern liturgy, we don’t presume that the Spirit arrives on the scene in the waters or the chrism, but instead we pray that the neophytes might by “sustained” in the Spirit: that the Spirit might continue the work already begun.  So, as the Saint Paul’s family gathers on the shores of Week’s Bay this Sunday to take our place in 2,000 years of historical precedent and baptize an infant and at least one adult, we do so, fully realizing that God is already at work, that grace has already been poured out, and that the Spirit’s power is working in and through the Church and her members all the time.

What should we do?  Give thanks.  Splash water.  Live in the Spirit.