The Feast of Pentecost Year A June 8, 2014
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Hutson
Numbers 11: 24-30 + Acts 2: 1-21 + John 20: 19-23
Come Holy Spirit, breathe across the face of the earth; renew the hearts of your people and kindle in us the fire of your love. Amen.
Today is the Feast Day of Pentecost, the day when we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit and the gifts that come from her. We wear red and sing hymns about the Holy spirit and the sanctuary is dressed in red. Some years we speak in other languages, as they did in our reading from Acts today.
As I prepared for this sermon, I was drawn to phrases in verses 17 and 18….your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves both men and women in those days I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy.
Most particularly I was drawn by the idea of dreams and visions. Certainly a part of this is because your Council, for the past couple of years, has been doing just that….visioning what it is that God is calling us to. Dreaming about how we might use what we have been given, particularly our parking lot, in service to the mission of this congregation. We have been forming a vision that would put flesh to our mission statement of Actively Sharing Christ’s Love in Community.
I began to pay more attention to the movement of the Spirit among us. Because the Spirit moves and has always moved. The Spirit moved in the camp where Moses and the elders had gathered as two outsiders began to prophesy.
And then I got distracted. I’m usually a Wednesday or Thursday sermon writer. Thursday, as I finished a meeting and planned to begin writing, news came of the shooting at Seattle Pacific University. Perhaps like some of you, I found myself unable to stop watching the media coverage. All I could think of was that it could have been Seattle University, where our daughter is a student. Of course, it could have been anywhere. And it has been, it seems, everywhere. The list of school shootings is a long one and reports are that the SPU gunman was fascinated by them. It’s a story that only stays around until the next news cycle. After every one we cry out NOT ONE MORE. And then we find ourselves distracted and the story fades and we forget.
The pulpit is not the place for politics and I’m not going to talk about gun control. But it is the place to talk about justice. And if we are going to prophecy we are going to need the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Our visions must be visions of a society where life is precious, where we dream that the safety of our children is a paramount concern. Where we can boldly put the safety of our communities ahead of our personal armament.
I could not stop thinking about the mother of the young man who died at SPU, Paul and the mother of the young perpetrator. I cannot imagine their grief. But perhaps their grief is what will compel us toward faithful action, empowered by the Holy Spirit, so that other sons and daughters might live to prophesy, vision, and dream.
On Friday morning I was determined to make some progress on this sermon when my mother called to tell me that my grandmother’s health has taken a turn for the worse. She has stopped eating and drinking. I am so fortunate to have a grandmother at my age. So much of who I am is because of my grandmother. Receiving this news meant that I could not write, my mind and my heart were elsewhere.
At noon on Friday I went to have lunch with colleagues whose congregation is also visioning and dreaming about where God is calling them. We had arranged to meet to discuss how we see the movement of the Spirit in the lives of our congregations. As we sat down, in a public restaurant in Edmonds, I received a text message from our daughter….Seattle University is on lockdown, she wrote. There is a man with a gun at 10th and Union. I hear helicopters. Our conversation stopped and right there in the middle of the restaurant, we prayed. We prayed for that situation as it unfolded, for Taylor in her fear, and for our world that seemed at that moment and in many other moments to have gone completely mad.
Our conversation took a different turn as we talked about the absolutely unimaginable nature of this violence. Rather than enthusiasm for visions and dreams, we spoke in halted, hushed tones. We agreed that we felt helpless. They stayed with me until I finally heard from Taylor that they’d received an all clear.
So it was Friday night and I still didn’t have a sermon. At this point I began to pray for visions and dreams and whatever else it was going to take for the Spirit to move….from her spirit to my hands and heart and computer keyboard.
And I went to a retirement reception for another colleague. Forty pastors in a room at a church….surely I would find inspiration for a sermon there. But no one had an idea that seemed to speak to me, that seemed the word that we need to hear as this community of faith. Eventually, as the evening wore on, I shared this conclusion with one of those colleagues. Nothing was coming together, I lamented. I am so distracted…the SPU shooting, my grandmother’s illness, and the scare at Seattle U.
Where is the Spirit at work in that? she asked.
This is the question. Where is the Spirit?
When we hear of another shooting….when innocent lives are lost and the mentally ill have legal access to guns….where is the Holy Spirit?
When the woman whose life has impacted mine in ways that no other person’s has…and we all have these people in our lives…when their mortality becomes more real to us….where is the Spirit?
When our children are afraid or unsure, where is the Spirit?
When people stand brandishing guns in our streets…where is the Spirit?
God declares that the Spirit will be poured out upon all people. And when we wonder where the Spirit is, when we worry that the Spirit is absent from us, we only need to look around.
Certainly the Spirit was present at SPU…those stories have been well documented in these days. The tremendous courage of the young man who stopped the shooter and the other students who helped subdue him. The very public displays of faith, so seldom seen in news reports…praying and singing and the lighting of candles. A university president saying that faith in Jesus will sustain a community in their grief.
A community that publicly prays for the shooter and his family. The Spirit is present.
Certainly the Spirit is present when time on this earth becomes short. The Spirit is the great Comforter and we trust that when those we love, and finally when we, take our last breaths, we will all be accompanied by the Spirit who was with us when we took our first breaths.
And we trust in the Spirit to be present with our children and all children in their fear, in their curiosity, and in their successes.
Which brings me back to where I started on Thursday morning. What will it mean for us as the people of God at Luther Memorial Church to let the Spirit guide or dreams and visions?
As I drove home Friday evening the sky became brilliant shades of orange and pink….blazing colors across the horizon at sunset. And when I arrived home there was this prayer by Jan Richardson in my inbox:
A Pentecost Blessing:
To bear this blessing, you must first take yourself to a place where everyone does not look like you or think like you, a place where they do not believe precisely as you believe, where their thoughts and ideas and gestures are not exact echoes of your own.
Bring your sorrow. Bring your grief. Bring your fear. Bring your weariness, your pain, your disgust at how broken the world is, how fractured, how fragmented by its fighting, its wars, its hungers, its penchant for power, its ceaseless repetition of the history it refuses to rise above.
I will not tell you this blessing will fix all that.
But in the place where you have gathered, wait. Watch. Listen. Lay aside your inability to be surprised, your resistance to what you do not understand.
See then whether this blessing turns to flame on your tongue, sets you to speaking what you cannot fathom
or opens your ear to a language beyond your imagining that comes as a knowing in your bones a clarity in your heart that tells you
this is the reason we were made, for this ache
that finally opens us,
for this struggle, this grace that scorches us toward one another and into the blazing day.
Beloved community, in the words of this blessing may we wait, watch and listen for the Spirit to reveal to us how she will enliven our visions and empower our dreams. Come, Holy Spirit. Amen.