pentecost-2020-monroe.md

May 31, The Day of Pentecost – Monroe

Whitsunday: white clothes of Pentecost.

In the BCP the collect for this day is titled: The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday

I first heard about the source of “Whit” in “Whitsunday” when my youngest children were being born.

Several different interpretations have been offered through the years. The title goes back many centuries. The first explanation I heard was that it had to do with the nasty weather in Britain in the months of March and April. Looking back many centuries before that, the custom was that Baptisms were most appropriately done on Easter. They usually included some form of taking your old clothes off and putting new clothes – after you had been dunked in water. By the middle ages baptisms were usually of infants, who might be unhappy with being dunked into the frigid water in the font. It might even be dangerous.

Since the next most advantageous time for baptism was the end of the Easter season – Pentecost – baptisms in Britain were often delayed for 50 days until the Feast of Pentecost. Now the norm, again, going back millenia, had been that when you came out of the water, having shed your old clothes and been washed in the water of baptism, you would be dressed in white garments. White – thus “White-Sunday” or “Whitsunday.”

Apparently there’s a competing explanation that attributes the “Whit” of “Whitsunday” to a form of the word “wit” – as in e.g. “the wit and wisdom of Mark Twain”. 500 years ago the word “wit” meant “knowledge.” Now, what happens on Pentecost? The knowledge and wisdom of the Holy Spirit is spread upon the newly formed church – the fuel that has run the church ever since. link here

Transition

Life is marked by change. Transitions are inherent in being alive. If you’re not changing you’re dead.

There was a transition for Jesus from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. There was a transition from Good Friday to Easter – Crucifixion to Resurrection. Ascension-tide – we’ve been in that since the feast of Ascension – marks another transition. Pentecost marks the time – well, the time for Christians that is “the rest of the story.” Pentecost and after is everything that happens after the infusion of the Spirit into the Church – all who would be followers of Jesus.

I thought about a memorable scene in episode 1 of the TV series “This is us.”

When Dr. K gave us the “sourest lemon” speech that Kate, Kevin, and Randall still quote.

• “I like to think that one day you’ll be an old man like me talking a young man’s ear off explaining to him how you took the sourest lemon that life has to offer and turned it into something resembling lemonade. If you can do that, then maybe you will still be taking three babies home from this hospital, just maybe not the way you planned.”
• He forged their family with just two sentences.

It’s a foundational scene. In these few words much of the foundation of everything that follows is established. It’s established on a gift. That there is a gift is totally unexpected. The gift is life. Pentecost. This is us. It’s important.

Owen’s baptism:

In some ways much of my adult life has been formed by the feast of Pentecost. Clearly one of the most important events for me was the birth of my first born. Easter that year was Sunday, April 10, 1977. He was born May 11.

I was learning about what was expected of a Christian in those days and I had been taught that Easter was the appropriate time for baptism. I didn’t really understand what baptism was or what it meant.

• As an aside, I’d like to say that now that I’m older, I still don’t understand what baptism is or what it means. I know a lot of things about it – I’ve taught classes on it – but there is far more that I don’t know than that I do know. In fact it seems appropriate that the ancient church called it a mysterium.

It seems clear to me that the notion that the sacraments – baptism in particular – ought only be celebrated when we know what they mean – is ludicrous. Being born into new life in the power of the Spirit – that is a great mystery.

And it is Pentecost.

My oldest, Owen, was born a month too late to be baptized on Easter. A Pentecost baptism was the next best. So that’s what we did.

For various reasons, as it turned out, all the rest of my children were baptized on Pentecost. It started out as a kind of lemonade made from sour lemons. And it ended up being foundational, life-giving, all-important.

• By the time of my 2nd son, Julian I was determined that he would be baptized by the most appropriate method – dunking. He did training as a 4-month old by swimming in the bathtub. He was thrust under the waters of baptism and in some ways his was the most perfect. But it’s not really about the technique – is it – it’s about the Spirit.
• Miriam was next. She would follow in the footsteps of her big brother. She was older because she was born in the fall. We had to find the right size and shape of tub for her.
• By the time Lydia was set to be baptized on Pentecost, I was rector – I had more of a say in how things were going to go. But what I wanted was to make such a case before the congregation that they would recognize that this was the way to do baptism.
• The last, Emma. By then the pattern was established. And by then the congregation was beginning to get it – adults were coming to me asking, Would you do that for me?
• Ultimately the pattern established back when I was young would be celebrated in its fullest form with the baptism by immersion of a child in Honolulu. I was older. The child was a miracle in hundreds of different ways. We baptized him in a tub. And it poured down rain on us, just as we were getting into the water.
• Isaiah: https://photos.app.goo.gl/mAR3uUaAuPx8BPuB6
  

Pentecost

From Leonard Bernstein’s Mass

• For the Word created mud and got it going,
  it filled our empty brains with blood and set it flowing,
  and for thousands of regimes
  it’s endured all our follies and fancy schemes.
  It’s been tough, and yet it seems to be growing!
  O you people of power,
  your hour is now.
  You may plan to rule forever, but you never do somehow!
  So we wait in silent treason until reason is restored,
  and we wait for the season of the Word of the Lord.

The gift of the Spirit got it going in the beginning. The Pentecostal fire has been burning for so long – but we still desperately need the heat and energy. If Pentecost brings us “wit and wisdom” – all too often it’s in short supply. We need Pentecost. If it’s new life and a fresh clean white start – bring it on, for we need it.

Pentecost is vital in the life of the church. It’s promise is vital for the world we live in. And each of us lives because He lives in us.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

Notes

lectionary

• Acts 2
• 1 CO 12: one body from many, gifts of the Holy Spirit
• John 20 or John 7

easter-7-2020-monroe.md

May 24:The Seventh Sunday of Easter:

The Sunday after the Ascension – Monroe

Ascension was last Thursday

It was the day we scheduled to record this our community celebration of the 6th week of Easter. One day revolving and emerging as another day, each linked and urging us into the presence of God.

Psalm 19

Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
the sky is proclaiming his handiwork.
² One day gushes the news to the next,
and one night informs another what needs to be known.

It is the Sunday between the feast of the Ascension and the feast of Pentecost. Ascension Day occuring on the 40th day of Easter. Pentecost occuring on the 50th day after Easter.

In another week, on Pentecost, we will observe a Week of weeks. That’s the magic of the 50 in the name of Pentecost.

The Christian festival of Pentecost is derived from the older and original Jewish feast of weeks. The week of weeks. In their case 50 days after Passover.

For me, this weaving of weavings of days and weeks, numbers and multiples of numbers, a feast deriving from the Exodus from Egypt woven and transformed into a feast of the Resurrection – for me – these are exciting and inviting messages and signs.

Today

Today we celebrate the presence of the Living God. Our masks don’t cause the Living God a moment’s pause.

Psalm 42

⁷ Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your cataracts;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.
⁸ By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.

Today we are here because Jesus Christ is Risen from the dead – today and tomorrow. Though we may be experiencing anxiety, or frustration, or fear, or excitement – This is the day the Lord has made.

The presence we mark today is sacred. Today is sacred. It is sacred because God has acted in it.

We live in a sacred time.

Standing on Holy Ground

Again this week I heard a particular song, repeated over and over. And it’s not just the music or the words that I heard repeated.

It’s the events, the moments, the places, the occasions – at which I have listened to the song and wept. The name of the song is Holy Ground. I read to you a few of the lines:

When I walked through the doors I sensed God’s presence
When I knew this was a place where love abounds
…
And we are standing in His presence on holy ground
…
For I know that there are angels all around
…
For we are standing in His presence on holy ground
…

I first heard the song in the 1990’s. It was introduced to me by a musician I didn’t think of as particularly holy or particularly charismatic.

But I knew that he had experienced the presence of the living God. And I thought of that this week, anticipating being here, recording this liturgy with a mask on, on a day which wasn’t the day we were observing, celebrating in a manner that we wouldn’t have chosen, marking the time as recorded in Luke’s gospel and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles when Jesus “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

Mark an “absence”?

The church has utilized Luke’s texts in its observance of Ascension and the Pentecostal flames marking the arrival of the Holy Spirit. The end of Luke’s gospel reads: “He led them out as far as Bethany, where he lifted his hands and blessed them. As he blessed them, he left them and was taken up to heaven.”

In the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke, he describes with greater detail, a period of 40 days when Jesus appeared to his disciples. Then, “as they were watching, he was lifted up and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

For all of my life – and in fact for centuries and millenia – Ascensiontide commemorated a new kind of absence that began – according to Luke’s account – 40 days after the Resurrection.

I have preached about the new kind of absence that Ascension brought – with intention, of course, of proclaiming the new presence ushered in by the Holy Spirit.

Preaching on the absence becoming a presence. But not today.

It seemed to me that today, at this time, in this place, there isn’t room to preach on absence. We don’t proclaim the absence of Christ. We proclaim Christ is Risen. Alleluia.

Sacred / Profane

The time and place we live in can be experienced by some as an absence. Discourse in our country is being driven in the direction of freedom and liberty to do what we want. We rail against being prevented from this or that.

Quarantine is described as a privation, as a keeping apart.

Absence. Absence of the things we have grown to accustomed to. Absence of the fullness we want.

Sacred Presence

It seems to me that the gospel we preach is something different from the message of absence or lack that what we see and hear around us.

What we preach is the power and the life of the living God, all around us, especially in the challenging times, especially when we don’t feel it or see it.

As I pray here in this place I can look out at the absence around me. Pews are empty. I don’t see or hear the kind of feedback I am accustomed to in a gathering of Christians. I hear silence when I am accustomed to laughter and smiles, voices lifted up in song.

It’s tempting to focus on the absence. But I won’t do it.

We are standing on Holy Ground. It is in this silence that the living God rushes in. We preach not an absence but the fullness of God.

Presence of God

In both of his books, the author of Luke and Acts addresses someone named Theophilos. Perhaps that was a real person. Perhaps it is a kind of metaphor for all those who would come to know the presence of the living God. Literally, in the Greek, it means “Lover of God.”

The gospel is addressed to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear the living God in our midst. The gospel is addressed not to those who experience the absence but to those who bask in the presence of the living God.

If we are to perceive that “One day gushes the news to the next, and one night informs another what needs to be known” then we must listen and look closely.

When “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your God’s cataracts” we must be ready to recognize the living God. It’s not about the deep and it’s not about the cataracts – it’s about the living God.

The Presence of God isn’t built on peacefulness and quiet. Peacefulness – shalom – is the product of the Presence.

The presence of God is not built on pleasant feelings. A feeling of gladness is the product of Presence.

Ascensiontide marks the anticipation of a fullness that awaits – but it’s not the fullness itself.

The Holy Spirit is the anticipation. It is the fullness. We wait in what may feel like an absence – for the presence of the Living God.

Notes

Lectionary for Sunday and also lectionary for Ascension

easter-5-2020-monroe.md

Easter 5 – Monroe

Before I say anything more, I want to acknowledge a major secular feast that is marked tomorrow. Mother’s Day. It is a day that has traditionally been observed in churches with a variety of special events. At my church in Hawai’i the equivalent of St. Paul’s “E-males” serenaded the women of the parish. For some time it has seemed to me important to acknowledge the huge range of emotions and memories that are conjured up when we say “Mother.”

There is nostalgia but also anguish. There is celebration as well as sadness. Not all women become or are able to be mothers. I tried my hand at “mothering” for a while in the 1980’s.

What has seemed to bind us all together is the notion that we all have or have had mothers. We pray for our mothers. We pray for Grace and favor. We pray for forgiveness. We give thanks for mothers past and present. Thank you.

The times they are a changin’

I know it evokes Bob Dylan and the 1960’s. But it feels more true to me today than did even then. I spent a good bit of time this past week – along with many many others in the church – reflecting on how the church is going to transition toward opening up our sanctuaries and meeting spaces, our food pantries and our schools.

It seems clear to me that, as in society in general, there will be no return to the way life used to be.

We are going to be changed

As a church, as a people, & as a society we will emerge from this time changed

I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I think that there will be limitations on the numbers allowed into our spaces so that social distancing can be observed. I think communion is going to be different than we have known. I don’t know when the transition is going to happen, but I think it will begin soon.

If we focus on our natural resistance to change – you have heard I’m sure the old adage, “How many [ fill in the blank ] does it take to change a light bulb?” After you respond with, “How many?” the answer is, “Change?” If we focus on our resistance to change it is going to be difficult and painful.

Scripture today invites us to a different response. We can embrace the change because it is light and life.

A song

Once again this week I heard a song as I read these passages from the Bible. It was a song that I used to listen to over and over again, by John Michael Talbot. Today, so many years later, he looks the part of a biblical prophet, long flowing hair and a beard down to his waist, as if he has been alive for centuries. The song is “No longer strangers.” It evokes a vision of a people transformed by the grace of God:

Once you were strangers to the covenant
The promise of God
Born without hope, you were without God
In this world
We once were far off
We have now been brought near

No longer strangers
No longer aliens
Now we are citizens
With the saints
In the kingdom
Of God

Peter’s letter

In the 2nd reading today we hear similar words:
Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation …Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood

A people transformed.

You are a holy priesthood

"Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;

once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy."

called to model Jesus

Stephen

From the time I was an adolescent, at a time when this reading came around every year in the Sunday lectionary, I was hit upside the head with the awareness that Stephen was doing and saying what Jesus did and said.

When the time came for my ordination as a deacon, I was the last candidate from Colorado scheduled for ordination on June 2, 1982. There were 7 of us – the same as were ordained deacons that day with Stephen, so many centuries ago. My life changed that day. Some of it I can describe for you. Some of it is so intensely personal I don’t really have words for it. I joined the community that was originally formed by Stephen.

In today’s first reading we hear of the final moments of Stephen’s life. The first martyr for the faith. He took on the life of Jesus so thoroughly that he took on the death with some of the same responses that Jesus himself had shown.

Katie’s book

Mary Pat put into my hands this past week a book, Daring to Hope: Finding God’s Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful by Katie Davis Majors. The failures, the gaping holes, the woundedness of those who would follow Jesus – the trust required to take one step after another – the hope required to take on the garment of Christ in a broken world – these the author Katie freely acknowledges in her moving account of being a disciple, a missionary in today’s Uganda.

She is following in the footsteps of Stephen.

“Change” – conversion

I once made the claim in a gathering of the local clergy in Honolulu, that the fundamental experience of the Christian is conversion . I made that claim, knowing very well in my heart and head, that I meant something very much more than the conversion preached by many in the conservative evangelical church.

I meant, and intended to explain more fully, that what I meant was the basic process of moving from darkness to light, from futility to life in the fullness of God, that I think is quite explicitly taught in both the Old and New Testaments of our Bible.

I didn’t get the chance to do that, however, because one of my colleagues – a person who later became a good friend – took umbrage at my words. She was angry at what she took to be my faith stance. She didn’t know at the time that our positions were in fact very sympathetic.

I stick by my claim. To be a Christian is to change. We are called to become facsimiles of Jesus himself.

Sir, we would see Jesus

Philip speaks with such emotion and feeling in the 14th chapter of John. “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” As if all the longings of his whole life were reduced to these few words. As if he were saying, “Nothing else much matters. All the riches and knowledge I might have accrued are nothing compared to just a glimpse of God. Let me see.”

And Jesus himself responds with poignance and tenderness – with the kind of patience a loving parent shows day in and day out – “You’ve been with me all this time and you still haven’t got your gimpse? Philip, open your eyes and see .”

The pulpit

I have heard lots of sermons in my life. I think most of you will identify with that statement. Maybe you’ll identify with this: “The vast majority of them were forgotten in a very short time.” Very few of them do I remember for some length of time. One I remember from 35 years ago.

The preacher was a Episcopal priest and Emeritus Professor from Notre Dame. His name was Gerhardt Niemeyer. In time I would recognize that his theology and his approach to life in the church was radically different from my own. Yet I can clearly remember to this day the sermon he preached at St. James Cathedral on today’s text from the gospel of John.

He began it with a story from when he had been invited to preach at an old Lutheran church in his native Germany. He described an elaborate pulpit, enclosed and perched high. One had to climb a circular staircase to enter the pulpit. The day he described in his story he climbed those steps and entered the pupit and immediately latched his eyes on a small card tacked to the inside. No one could see it but the preacher. There in large letters were printed the words: " show us the Father, and we will be satisfied ".

Gerhardt went on to preach the message that all of us are commissioned to reveal to those around us the God and Father of us all. And to none is it more directly commissioned than it is to those called to preach.

I have remembered that message through countless sermons that I have myself preached.

A changed church

As we transition in coming weeks toward a changed church, one thing is clear to me. There is much about what we have been that is of relatively little importance. There are a few things that are of ultimate importance. One of them is the responsibility to reflect the Father to the world around us.

What is it going to look like?

Such a question can serve to guide us as we make decisions on how to be the church in a new, emerging world. It should somehow reflect God the Father. So that people can see.

• radical hospitality
• generosity
• emphasis on abundance of grace, not scarcity. There is enough for all of us.
• delight in creativity
• readiness to restore, heal, and strengthen the most broken and vulnerable

And I could go on and on.

To reflect the Father

Created in the image of God

The first chapter of Genesis glories in a God who creates things, takes delight in what is created, and pronounces it “Good!”

(26) Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”

What is required of us is that we cooperate with this creator God.

Ready to put on Christ

We shall be courageous enough to become: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

We must be humble enough to follow in the path that Stephen walked – to walk the walk and talk the talk – that Jesus himself trod.

Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen .