Sunday, June 11, 2017

Biblical Text:  Acts 2:5-12

John R. Sachs, a Catholic Theologian, writes that

“people are experiencing the Spirit in ways and places that often challenge traditional theologies and church structures and sometimes have little connection with traditional religious practices.”[1]

I believe that we are seeing and experiencing in the world today is a revival of the Spirit-is a renewing of the church, but it is not a renewal of the church that many of us who are in the church want it to be.  Those of us who grew up in the church—those of us who were in the church before we born and baptized in the church have a real clear sense of what is means to experience the Spirit, and that experience is always fundamentally connected with the church.

Many of us we were taught to believe that you cannot have church, outside of church, which logically means that if you want to experience anything relating the work of the Spirit then you need get yourself over the church house—otherwise is it not church, and logically speaking it is not the Spirit.

Even back in the day when folks carried the church in to the world, I’m thinking of baptism in particular, it always began and ended in the church.  There would be a processional that was led from the church to the river, and then there would be a processional that left the baptism waters and lead folk back to the church.

Even when the church had physicality– walls, floors and a roof and was relegated to both a particular place and a particular time.  The church, and by default the Spirit, could not be caught outside of a particular physio-chronological existence.  If you want the Spirit—go to the church, because that is where you get the Spirit, or reversed that is where the Spirit gets you.

Sachs suggests that “people are experiencing the Spirit in ways and places that often challenge traditional theologies and church structures and sometimes have little connection with traditional religious practices.”[2]  Frank Thomas, professor of Homiletics and Director of the Academy of Preaching and Celebration at Christian Theologian Seminary writes in his newly published book on African-American Preaching that the church, and not just the Black Church exclusively, is at risk of becoming “a relic and holdover from an old worldview that refuses to face new [a] twenty-first century flattened [hierarchy]. and consensus-building, social-media reality.”[3]

He furthers,

“If the church does not move from exclusion to inclusion and diversity, from insistence on gradualism and patience to sensing, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “the fierce urgency of now,” then the church will not be pertinent to the lives of young people. If the church does not move from charismatic leadership to collaboration, from focus on appeasing conservative ideology in the church and the nation to listening and responding positively to the pain, hurt, anger and activism of the new movements, then the church will not be valued or valuable” in the future.[4]

After the Spirit has come in, we have to get out!

What is true of white mainline churches is this:  milliennials have left the church.  Scholars and sociologists gave warning signs to the church nearly two decades ago, in the same way the warning sign are now being passed out to the Black Church.  What was said then was that young white millennials were abandoning the church but not discarding their faith but were discovering it places outside the church.  I began exploring this trend among urban youth in New York City at the Riverside Church, young intelligent college students who were eager to head down to New Orleans to put their faith in action, but were unexcited about gathering in the church for the standard functions of the church.  But if we gathered at a local bar with a beer (it’s called Theology on Tap now), we could talk about faith all day and all night long over a few cold frosties. It was not a question of whether or not they felt a sense of connection to the Jesus who preached Good News to the poor, or the Jesus who liberated persons who were oppressed and marginalized, or the Jesus who lifted the clouds of shame from women who caught in a lovers quarrel or forgiving and giving fresh starts to young tax collectors like Zacchaeus.  What they said was we need a church that get out.  What they said was we need a church that doesn’t just gather once a week.  What they said was we need a church that doesn’t just sign hymns once a week.  What they said was we need a church that doesn’t just listen to sermon, but is out in the world being a walking, running, living, breathing sermon.

Every morning when I look in the mirror and see yet another wiry grey hair on my head, or discover yet another patch of gray growing in my goatee and consider the expense cost of slathering on another coat of “Just For Men”—I am reminded that time is filled with swift tradition.  Covering the gray day by day–is an expensive exercise in biological futility—time is filled with swift tradition.

George Benson in 1977 sang it best, “…Everything must change…nothing stays the same.”

What is true of every age is that Spirit comes along, and breathes life into a particular place, upon a particular generation, in a particular place and new life emerges. Life that is filled with all of the signs and characteristics of the Holy Spirit: Accepting, Challenging, Creative, Compelling, Dynamic, Embracing, Energetic, Enterprising, Fluid, Inclusive, Influential, Joyful, Lively, Loving Magnetic, Open, Progressive, Revitalizing, Welcoming and Youthful.

Catholic Theologian Jon Sachs writes that “people are experiencing the Spirit in ways and places that often challenge traditional theologies and church structures” and we saw it happening in the early days of the Civil Rights movement.[5]  There were young reformers on one side and old standpatters on the others.  The young reformers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. Gardner Calvin Taylor, Ralph David Abernathy, Wyatt Tee Walker who embodied the movement of the Spirit in their time.  They caught the Spirit and got outside of the church—to do the work of justice, repairing the broken, bridging the divide, and making right what had long been wrong and broken in the American south.

In this weekend’s New York Times the Rev. Dr. William Barber talks about the Spirit like this:

“Rosa Parks didn’t just decided to sit down one day…We can’t choose the moment that the flame bursts out, but we can be the kindling” to spark for the flame of God’s Spirit  in our world.

We saw the Spirit moving then, and the Spirit is moving anew—now:

within the Black Lives Matter Movement demanding accountability and justice; within renewed energy on the Sanctuary Movement demanding safe, hospitable and fair treatment of stranger among us; within the Climate Justice Movement demanding that we both individually and collective do all that we can to care for and protect what God created and called good; within the LGBT Movement demanding the fair and equal treatment of all of God’s Rainbow children; within the Interfaith Movement that we respect and seeking religious understanding of the other; within the Poor People’s Campaign, re-aligning our moral compass to the real concerns of American poor—a work that King, Abernathy and the SCLC began in 1968.

And the call to the Church is to embody the Spirit of God and “Get Out!” in the world.

Get out in the name of the Jesus Christ.

Get out and proclaim with our lips that our faith is real!

Get out and proclaim with our lives that the Spirit is alive and free!

Jesus loved his synagogue—is was the place that he returned again and again to be in the community, to learn, and grow and stretch his faith.  But the place where Jesus’ ministry happened most was outside of the synagogue.  It was in the streets.  It was along the highways and byways!  It was along a mountainside.  It was at a funeral procession!  It was upon the sandy shores!  It was in unlikely people’s homes!  It was at a community well!  It was in a cemetery!  It was on the rough seas.  It was, most often, not inside the church—and when it was in the church they ripped up the roof to get the church out of the church.

The Holy Spirit is filling the church and empowering sanctified and fire-baptized disciples, but not so we can barricade ourselves off the rest of the world.  The Spirt is filling the church so we can get out and be the church in the midst of the world.  We must be open to the broad movement of the Spirit—and the rich diversity of approaches to the experiences of the Spirit.  Jurgen Moltmann, in his seminal theological work on the Holy Spirit simply titled, The Spirit of Life, writes that life in the Spirit is nothing less than the sanctified disciple of Jesus discovering and rediscovering how to integrate his or her life completely  “into the web of life …[which involves] defending God’s creation against human aggression, exploitation and destruction…[it involves a] reverence for life…[and a constant] search for the harmonies and accords of life.”[6]

After we’ve invited the Spirit in, we must get out!

In other words we have to “Get Out!” to the places in our world where life is happening and proclaim this liberating Good News that give us meaning to our lives.  We must live the word that compels us to do good when all other indications tell us that we shouldn’t.  We must live the word that demands while others are sitting at a safe distance watching injustice-that we “Get Out!” and do something and say something.  We must get “Get Out!” and live in the web of the world the Good News of God’s love that gives us joy in exchange for sorrows, that makes us love enemies; that gives us an upward lift when life all around is draggin us down.

…and when those who were filled with the Holy Spirit finished speaking, they asked “What this mean?

What it meant then, and what it means now is that God is in midst of the world; that God has not abandoned us but is alive and with us.  God is reconciling the world—yea even the entire cosmos to Godself.

Now, ain’t a that Good News!

[1] John R. Sachs, “Do No Stifle the Spirit:  Karl Rahner, the Legacy of Vatican II, and Its Urgency For Theology Today,” in Catholic Theological Society Proceeding, ed. E. Dreyer, 51 (1996): 15.

[2] Ibid., 15.

[3] Frank Thomas, Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016), 137.

[4] Ibid., 137.

[5] John R. Sachs, “Do No Stifle the Spirit:  Karl Rahner, the Legacy of Vatican II, and Its Urgency For Theology Today,” in Catholic Theological Society Proceeding, ed. E. Dreyer, 51 (1996): 15.

[6] Jurgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2001), 172-3.