“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you.
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’”
(John 20:21)
I have been praying all this morning and much
of yesterday for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I’m about to preach my
nineteenth Pentecost sermon at Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia, and I can’t for
the life of me come up with something clever or novel to say. Help me, Holy
Spirit!
I need help because, as is the tradition of
our parish, we’ll celebrate the Rite of Confirmation at the 11 AM mass. That means
I’ll be preaching to two teenagers whom, I’m sorry to say, I barely know. Even
though I baptized one of them and have watched them grow up through the years,
I haven’t really had that much interaction with them. For the last two years my
congregation has been participating in a conference-wide joint confirmation
program. This was a well-intentioned program cooked up by some of my colleagues
(bless their hearts) with the idea that getting all of our kids together would
make for a lively and dynamic program full of energy—and vastly better than
having only two or three kids isolated in their home churches with their
pastors boring the snot out of them. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t need to
elucidate, the whole project blew up like the Hindenburg and has left me with
two pretty nice—albeit rather taciturn—kids whom I had only a marginal hand in
teaching.
Help me, Holy Spirit. What the freak do I
say to these two—and to my congregation—to inspire them on one of the principal
festivals of the liturgical year? I mean, this is supposed to be the birthday
of the whole Christian faith. What can I say that will make this matter to
them?
Maybe I’m expecting too much. I always
want to make Pentecost be like the story in Acts 2. I want fire and passion and
a stirring wind to blow through the church and fill us all with awe and
gratitude and love and an incredible feeling of the presence of God. I want
Pentecost to be like the Azusa Street Revival.
You know about the Azusa Street Revival,
don’t you? It was this weird thing that happened in L.A. back in 1906. It seems
this preacher named William Seymour was asked to speak at a local church. He
preached that, according to Acts 2 (in his opinion), the true manifestation of
God’s Holy Spirit could only be revealed by speaking in tongues. The host
church considered this and, concluding that Seymour was full of crap, locked him
out of the church the following Sunday. This did not discourage the preacher,
however. Invited by a few faithful let’s-speak-in-tongues devotees, Seymour
moved his operation to a house on Bonnie Brea Street (a street I know well as
it was once home to the synod offices of the old Southern California-West
Synod).
From the house on Bonnie Brea Seymour continued
to encourage his followers to seek the baptism of the Holy Ghost and the gift
of tongues—a gift which he didn’t actually possess himself. Three days into a
ten-day fast, Seymour’s host, a certain Edward Lee, hit the spiritual lottery
and began to babble incoherently. Soon a handful of other followers started
speaking in tongues and Seymour, after an all-night prayer marathon, finally
abandoned his native English for a miraculous prayer language.
The legend has it that the Holy Spirit
filled the house on Bonnie Brea Street. Uneducated working-class folks, mostly
African American, were said to begin speaking in actual identifiable languages
which they’d never studied, and others, similarly linguistically ignorant, were
able to interpret the ecstatic utterances. News of this miracle spread through
the neighborhood, including stories of miraculous healings and other fantastic
goings-on. So many people descended on Lee’s house on Bonnie Brea that the
front porch collapsed. This caused Seymour to relocate to a run-down former AME
church on Azusa Street where he set up headquarters. The Pentecostal movement
was born.
A lot of folks in Los Angeles were
initially scandalized by Seymour’s church. They weren’t convinced that the
babbling, moaning, and roaring which emanated from Azusa Street was
particularly godly. Worse, Seymour, an African American, was worshiping with
white folks, Latinos, and representatives of all of L.A.’s ethnic stew. Mixing
the races just wasn’t done in 1906.
I guess I have to admire Seymour’s revival
for the fact that, like the apostles in Acts 2, it managed to bring all kinds
of people together—albeit for only a short period. I certainly long for the
great emotional passion of Azusa Street, but I know good and well that
ebullient praising, shouting, fainting, and assorted hullabaloo-ing in church would
doubtless give most of my elderly Lutherans a spastic colon. And if my two teen
Confirmands want to experience inter-racial crowd ecstasy, they’d probably
prefer to find it at a Beyonce concert or an Eagles game.
So help me, Holy Spirit. Maybe the message
of Pentecost is neatly packed into that one verse from the assigned Gospel lesson
(John 20:19-23) which I’ve quoted above. The spirit which Christ gives us isn’t
to be found in passion or even in miracles. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit
is found in peace. It’s in the certainty that Christ, who is one with the
Father, is also dwelling in us through the Holy Spirit. This isn’t just a
sterile assent to a doctrine giving us the smug satisfaction that we won’t go
to Hell because we believe the right thing. If that were all then church would
be unnecessary and my Confirmands would be right in sleeping in on Sunday mornings.
No. The peace of the Holy Spirit is the
assurance that we have the comfort of an earthly family of believers who see
the cross of Christ as the lens through which they keep the world in focus. It
is also the inculcated knowledge that we are sent. We have a mission and a purpose in life. The Creator God has
given us gifts to use for his glory in this psycho-crazy world.
I may not know my two Confirmands well,
but I know in my soul that they are created by God and that God did not make
them without giving them a purpose. And that purpose can only be found through
the lens of Jesus Christ—through his compassion, his sacrifice, his exhortation,
and his faith that God can use us to do all things glorifying to him. Any goal
in life which is not Christ-centered will never be satisfying. It will lead to complacency
at the least or pain and frustration at the worst.
So come, Holy Spirit. We don’t have to
speak in tongues or shout “Hallelujah.” Just confirm our faith, guide our lives,
empower our serving, give us patience in suffering, and lead us to the peace
that come from knowing we share eternal life in you.
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