Pentecost 2009

I am not sure why I am a Christian. For that matter I am not sure why I am a priest. Many of you may wonder the same thing, “yes, why is he a priest?”

My birth was like everybody else’s. I had a childhood that was a paradox of experience in that it was both good and bad at the same time. Good, in that I grew up with love and care knowing safety and security. Bad, in that I was a child of divorce, never knowing my father, developing early on in my childhood damaging coping strategies that have on more than one occasion caused me and those around me distress. Our collective upbringing sets the stage for a lifetime of exploration into the world of our self. Why we do the things we do, react the way we react, defend the way we defend, pursue the way we pursue, these are all tied into those early years. Our childhood experiences are not excuses for our behavior, they are simply places to explore and discover and then change our behavior for own betterment. And I will wager that each one of you could recall your own childhood, and your own paradox, your own two truths held in tension at one time.

So why are you a Christian? What brought you into this faith? We each have a story, a testimony as my Baptist cousins call it, a witness to the events that led up to our conversion. Some people recall mighty events of God in their lives, others recall more quiet moments of prayer, but each of the stories are united in a common thread. So often when I hear stories of people’s lives there is a preamble to the narrative, a catalogue of events that lead them up to a moment in time, a moment where they then express a place where words no longer worked. I have heard it countless times. Someone will describe the death of their spouse, and then they will stop and say, “Words cannot express what I felt.” When I saw my son and daughter for the first time, words left me. People use the description, dumbfounded, found dumb, wordless. The phenomena when experience comes on so fast that the brain fails to formulate the correct signals to send through the synapses into the language center to tell the lungs, larynx, tongue and jaw muscles what words to use. Perhaps the same is for you. What is your story? What brought you into this faith? What converted you from one way of living into another way of living? What was the dumbfounding moment for you? You all? All of us? Has it happened yet?

I grew up in a time of the “personal Jesus”. Depeche Mode sang a song about this 1989. Growing up, a question I was often asked was, “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.” In Waco, Texas, the answer had better have been, “yes”. Later in my life that question seemed so odd. As if accepting Jesus was accepting him to be a personal valet, someone to get your spiritual clothes for you, or run a special spiritual errand, a personal savior, one who saves only me. What about you? Well did you get yourself one of these personal saviors? They are all the rage. I got one in blue. Discounted. Very handy in times of sin.

A problem that I see is that we got too personal with our savior and we lost sight of the thing that the savior came to save. We got to singular in our salvation and forgot what we celebrate on this day. There is indeed a personal aspect of the Christian life, yes it is about you and me and our own walk with God. But the power of the Christian life is not found in solitary work alone. No, it is found in the community. Perhaps another question to ask is “has your group accepted Jesus as their Lord, their guide, their counselor?” Does the group, the community we associate with, those people we love, have we accepted the story of God’s saving work through the power of Jesus? Forget a personal Jesus, has the community had an experience of the Holy? Are you a Christian because the community you grew up in showed you a way of living that might just be a better way to live? The community asked you whether or not you turned to Jesus as your savior, and if you said you did, then you were a part of a group of believers that stretches back two thousand years. This is a paradox, it is simultaneously about you and then it is not about you. “Are you a Christian” moves to, “are we Christians?” And if so, what does that mean?

Today is the day of Pentecost. Christians do not own a total hold of that word. It comes from our Jewish roots, it is the festival of “Shavout” commemorating the fifty days after the Exodus and the giving of the Torah. It is a symbolic time for us, fifty days after an escape from captivity, through Moses, God gives the people the law. Fifty days after Easter, through Jesus, God gives the Holy Spirit. We have two moments in history where we say something extraordinary occurred. God moved through the created order in such a profound way that words could not express it, but after the event people were so transfixed by the experience that the reverberations of that initial moment still echo into the lives of people like you and me. And we commemorate this day as a birth day. A day likened to that moment when each of us had our solitary birth, and then with our single lives formed a community around the saving work of God. The birth of Christianity as we know it.

The birth of Christianity was an amazing event. At that moment there were People like you and me, people with joys and cares and concerns, people who had been amazed by the teachings of Jesus. People who witnessed something beyond words, the resurrection of a man thought to be dead. On the day of Pentecost, these people were suddenly able to speak in languages not their own, The reverse of the tower of Babal. Words came from no where, and each and everyone understood. They understood the power of God and were able to tell it to someone else who was not of their same background. The power of Holy Spirit so infused into the lives of the people gathered there, that it did not matter where you were from, and the nationality of your blood line was of no consequence, your station in the society did not matter. The movement of the Holy Spirit in that place, in that moment unlocked the ears of the faithful in such a overwhelming way that all people were able to have access to the saving power of God.

I have no idea why I am a priest. For that matter I have no idea why I am a Christian. It is the religion of my family, and after careful thought I have accepted it as the religion for myself, but I was not converted, I was “brought along.” It is odd to say it this way, but it is the language we use, I also believe that God called me to the priesthood, and oddly enough, I went. I thought for sure that at any moment someone very wise would come into the seminary and ask me to collect my books and clean out my locker, but they never did. When I was on my knees in front of Bishop Wimberly, surrounded by other priests, with several hundred of my friends and fellow believers looking on, I thought surely someone will come and pull me out of there, but no one did. The power of the Holy Spirit that was present on that fiftieth day after Easter was and has been a power that continues to infect my soul when I do not expect it and particularly understand it. Each time I walk into a hospital room, or a nursery, or a hospice, or a divorce, or a wedding, or a baptism, or a confession, or a Eucharist, or any of the countless situations I am placed in daily, in each of those instances I tremble at the reality that God has called me there. And the personal moves to the communal as I humbly stand up here, and tell you, that on this day of Pentecost, God is calling the people of St. Mark’s to get up out of your own pew and begin proclaiming the good news of God in Christ to anyone who will listen.

We are Christians. We are a paradox. We are two truths held intension at one time. We are human beings and we are holy beings. We are able to join together with each other and combine our holy selves and our human selves into one voice, one community, with one goal, to proclaim the saving help of God in Jesus. We are all priests, all ordained to the work of God through our baptisms. And we are the people of St. Mark the evangelist. We walk out of here and into a world that needs to hear what we have to say. A world divided by many languages, but a world that can understand what we mean when we feed the hungry, heal the sick, find the lost, gather the scattered, do justice, love mercy, seek humility. I do not know why God called us into this Christianity, but we are. And a question for us is what do we do on the day after Pentecost? Well, twelve disciples went in twelve directions and changed the world. I guess it is our turn. Amen