Sermons

Sermon, The Rev. Christopher McLaren, May 23

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St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Sunday May 23, 2010 Pentecost
Preacher: Christopher McLaren
Text: Acts 2:1-21
Title: Private Investigators of the Spirit or Conspiring with God

Take a breath. Breathe in the Spirit and release that Spirit back into the world. Did you know that in almost any gathering of people, slowly without noticing they begin to breath together, their bodies adjusting to one another’s rhythms unconsciously? Interestingly the word conspire means to breathe together. Take a breath. Now let it go. There you have just launched a new conspiracy right here at St. Michael’s. I must confess, that I rather like the word conspiracy. I like the idea that the church could be conspiring to do good. You can hear the word spirit within the word conspire, just as you can in the word inspire. To conspire with others is to be filled with the same kind of spirit, to be enlivened by the same idea or same passion, to move with the same purpose.

Every Sunday morning we gather here as a community worshiping God. It is a rather dangerous and strange endeavor. If we could see what was happening we’d realize that God is busy swooping in and among us, fashioning us into a people, binding us together through the songs we sing, the prayers we share, the breaths we breath, the meal in which we partake. This creation of a community where no existed before can happen with small groups or large. More than likely you’ve experienced both. The Spirit can act on us in a whole variety of ways, challenging us, providing deep comfort, bringing much needed clarity, or perhaps confusing us in such a marvelous way we find we are once again depending upon God. One comforting thing about the Holy Spirit is that the Spirit never bullies people into anything. When the Spirit blows or descends or stirs us we are always free to choose how we will respond without compulsion.

This day is dedicated to the life of the Spirit. It is a classic story of our beginnings. For Christians it is our Genesis story like God moving over the waters at the beginning of time. Our story begins with the followers of Jesus gathered together, moping around and wondering what they are going to do without Jesus when suddenly there is the sound of a “mighty wind” that filled and surrounded their gathering sparking and breaking things loose. As it turned out, the wind was not a summer monsoon or a storm but the powerful breath of God, filling them up, indwelling them and setting them afire with God’s own Spirit. What happened next is can only be described poetically as the playfulness of God, with dancing tongues of fire that became varied tongues of languages. It was a disturbing, delightful, breath-taking, life-giving romp of the Spirit with all sorts and types of people hearing the Good News of God in the language closest to their heart and all of it hilariously coming from the mouths of Galileans – country folk – not a bunch of erudite university linguist types.

At the end of the day the important point of the story is that the community gathered and transformed by the Pentecost experience is empowered. Empowered to share their experience of Christ in such new ways that the movement rapidly gathers momentum. The church of roughly 120 that day grew to 3,000 Luke tells us. But more important was the changes in the disciples. Those who were discouraged were full of energy. The shy became bold. Scared people had become confident. Those who seemed lost now had a sense of direction. They began to do the things that Jesus did, healing people they touched, loving folks into the kingdom, telling stories that wooed listeners into the ways of Christ. The only explanation for it was that they had inhaled on the day of Pentecost and been changed. They had taken the breath of God into their bodies and been transformed into a people of power. They had not been left or abandoned by God. No, quite the opposite was true. The Holy Spirit had come to dwell in them and they, like Mary had, were giving birth to God in the world as a community in new and powerful ways.

Because the book of Acts is the story of the disciple’s adventures after they had “Sucked in God’s own breath,” Barbara Brown Taylor likes to call the book of Acts the gospel of the Holy Spirit. In the first four books of the New Testament we learn the good news of what God did through Jesus Christ. In the book of Acts, we lean the good news of what God did through the Holy Spirit, by performing artificial resuscitation on a room full of well-intentioned bubblers and turning them into a force that changed the history of the world.

The real question is whether we, those of us gathered in this place of worship today believe that God still acts like that. Do we still believe in a God who blows through closed doors, wakes up the neighborhood with wild forms of communication, and sets our heads and hearts on fire? Do we still believe in a God who has the power to transform us as individuals and as a people of God? Or have we come to a kind of quiet, unspoken agreement that our God is pretty old and pretty tired by now, I mean it is someone we can feel free to direct our prayers toward but certainly no someone likely to change our lives or alter our course?

Every time we evacuated from New Orleans with the threat of a large hurricane coming our way, there was always a little interest in me for sticking around, to experience the storm, the power of it, just to witness what that kind of wind and fury could do. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience of wanting to stay out on the porch when there is a powerful storm moving through to the see the trees being moved, to feel the wind on your face, to get a sense of the awe and wonder of nature, and to feel alive in a way that is rather hard to describe. If you can understand these kinds of feelings then perhaps you too are a good candidate to have an experience of the Holy Spirit. “The Spirit blows where it chooses, you hear it sound but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8)

There is no substitute for experiencing the spirit. There are fine theories and wonderful theological discourses on the Holy Spirit, but I hope you will never ever be satisfied with them. The point of Pentecost is not to rest until you have felt the Holy Spirit blow through your life, breaking things open, unsettling you, opening things up and maybe, just maybe setting your hair on fire. There is not a lot you can do to make it happen save for daring to pray one of the most radical prayers in the tradition, “Come Holy Spirit.” It is the same prayer that is on the banner hanging at the west end of the church. “Come Spirit Come.”

One of the skills we all need to work on it seems is recognizing the Spirit when it is at work. I have a friend who is always asking me, “Where have you seen God at work this week?” She is a kind of private investigator of the Spirit, always on the lookout for clues for what God is doing in our midst? So here are some examples of where I think the Spirit has been at work.

Examples of the Spirit at Work
Recent election of our New Bishop
Not many weeks ago several of us from this community had the honor of participating in the election of our new bishop for the Diocese of the Rio Grande. It was a truly amazing and Spirit led experience that I had never been a part of before. What was truly amazing was that in a Diocese not know for getting along or widespread agreement, we elected our new Bishop The Rev. Michael Vono on the 3rd ballot a far cry from the 9 or so ballots many were fearing. What was even more amazing and a witness to the work of the Spirit was the feeling of joy and hope in the room, no one seemed angry, slighted or upset by outcome. The Spirit had actually brought us together to one mind, which for those of us who have seen quite a different attitude in this diocese in the past, was nothing short of a miracle of the Spirit.

Rekindling a relationship – a phone call from a friend. Describe the renewal of a relationship. Whenever you experience the reconciliation of a relationship you are participating in a work of the Spirit.

Walking into East Central Ministries – inspired.
This past week I had the pleasure of visiting a ministry in SE Albuquerque. It was a truly amazing experience, one that I have described to people as walking into the kingdom of God. East Central Ministry is an amazing ministry that has been doing good in a difficult part of the city for nearly 10 years. The building they use as their office and ministry center used to be a crack house. When the drugs and prostitution that were a regular occurrence there ended the business owner next door bought it sight unseen, he just could afford to have a drug house next door to his business. One day when pastor John Bulten was walking the neighborhood, the owner handed him the keys and said simply, “Do something good with it.” Since then they have begun a food pantry, a medical clinic, several micro businesses to provide employment including an urban farm, an after school mentoring program and more serving the immigrant families, the poor, and those down on their luck. It is a truly amazing place, which is a living local example of the Spirit at work. Today we are supporting this ministry and our Journey to Adulthood youth program through a wonderful plant sale that is one of East Central Ministries works of the Spirit.

Another work of the Spirit is seeing our New Ministry Complex go up in such challenging times. It is a truly amazing work of the Spirit to see this community stretching and growing in ministry to our community. The Spirit is alive and at work in our midst.

Recognizing it when it comes.
Once you get the hang of it you begin to realize that the work of the Spirit is everywhere around us.
Whenever you find yourself fearing a meeting and the conflict and go home with a surprising sense of people coming together. The Spirit it at work.
Whenever you find yourself offering forgiveness you had not meant to offer. The Spirit is at work.
Whenever you find yourself taking risks that you thought you did not have the courage to take. The Spirit is at work.
Or when you discover that you are reaching out to someone that you had intended to avoid. The Spirit is at work.
In any and all of these situations you can be relatively sure that you are learning about the Gospel of the Holy Spirit.

But more importantly you are taking part in the life of the Spirit yourself, breathing in the life of God and exhaling it into the world with loving care. As Barbara Brown Taylor says it, “Taking God into you and giving God back to the world with some of you attached.”

Now breathe in and out the breath of God. Keep breathing this eternal gift in our very midst. You can think of it as just oxygen passing over the surface of your lungs and making life possible, or you can begin to understand it as mysterious action of the Holy Spirit, God’s own gift to us.

What I’ve come to realize is that the Holy Spirit is a collaborative spirit, it invites us into a wild partnership and in doing so sets us aflame with new life. For most of us this is a terribly dangerous and wonderful thing, and we are more likely to embrace it as a people than we are individually. So, my invitation today is this: come let us conspire together, to love without measure, to care for the least and lost, to nurture our children with hope and character and compassion, to challenge our local leaders and politicians to truly serve the people especially the poor and sick and needy. Let us conspire to embrace the way of life that Jesus dared to teach us, and then we will know what it means to have the flame of he Spirit licking at our heads. And maybe just maybe our hair will catch on fire.

I with to acknowledge my debt to The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor for her sermon entitled The Gospel of the Holy Spirit upon which this sermon draws much of its inspiration. Thanks is also due to The Rev. Sue Joiner who is teaching me how to become a private investigators of the Spirit looking for clues to the Holy Spirit at work in our midst. I also give a shout out to The Rev. John Bulten of East Central Ministries and the incredible ministry the people of that faith community are doing in conspiring with the Holy Spirit.