Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Acts 2:1-11, Romans 8:14-17, and John 14:8-17, 25-27.
In Genesis, we read about God interacting directly with certain individuals. Then in Exodus, God speaks with Moses and, through him, creates the nation of Israel. God must have thought their work was done, that they had set humanity on the right path. Like a parent who thinks that once their kids graduate high school or college think that their job is done and their kids are on the right track. But the reality for a parent is that the job is never really done, and the reality for God was that the nation of Israel was clearly not aligned with God’s plan for them. You can almost see God shaking her head through the time of the judges, and through David’s sins with Bathsheba, and through the dissolution of the kingdom of Israel and then Judah. Geez, I told them what to do, and they just don’t get it. Someone’s got to go down there and straighten them out.
A big part of the problem is that we have God’s divine spark within us, but it gets swamped by our sinfulness and brokenness and worldly desires. God the Father just can’t understand that, having never been in human form. So Jesus came down here to experience humanity, in all it’s beauty and ugliness. He was tempted just as we are, so like the recent ad campaign says, he gets us. He learned what life is like as a human being and is now our Advocate to God the Father.
A few problems remain, though. For one, Jesus could only be on earth as a human being for a few short years. Whether he was crucified at the age of 33 or lived to be 100, he would only be among us for a short time in the span of human history. For another, Jesus could only be in one place at a time. He really didn’t travel very far in his life. Some estimates say he walked over 3000 miles, but that was in a region that measures about 100 miles in extent. A region much smaller than Missouri. Then there’s the issue that while Jesus could become our Advocate in God’s realm, we need an Advocate here on earth.
So after Jesus departed, he sent the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit can be everywhere at every time. She can work through us to heal our human relationships, and in doing so, she can really learn how humanity works from the inside. Jesus was only one person, but the Spirit can be in and among us as a group.
Today we celebrate the birthday of the Christian church. On the first Pentecost after Jesus’s death and resurrection, the first disciples had a vivid encounter with God. The Holy Spirit descended upon them with a sound like rushing wind and an appearance like fire.
I have never personally had such a vivid encounter, nor have I had any visions like Peter or Paul reported. I’d like to share with you one time that I felt God’s presence in a special way, though. It was June 2015. Jesse and I went to an interfaith worship service at Pride STL. This was immediately after the Obergefell decision on marriage equality, so the mood was jubilant, to say the least. The interfaith service was led by the Metropolitan Community Church, whose choir is great but with a music style that I don’t much care for. Let’s just say the songs they sang would never fly here. There were speeches by secular humanists and a homily by a Polish Catholic priest.
Then Rabbi Randy spoke. He talked about the tradition of breaking a glass at Jewish weddings. That tradition is intended as a reminder of the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Why is it a part of a wedding? Well, as Rabbi Randy said, if you ask five Jews, you’ll get five reasons. But he said that he sees it as a reminder that even at a time of ultimate joy over the union of two people in love, this world is broken. I don’t know why, but at that moment, I had a sudden awareness of God’s presence. God was in me, in that gathering of people who all had different understandings of the Divine but who all sought greater unity and to heal the brokenness of this world.
Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris in the 1600s. His schooling was limited at best and he spent most of his time in the priory working in the kitchen. And yet, he was a great spiritual teacher whose writings were gathered into a book, The Practice of the Presence of God. He wrote:
[A]fter having given myself wholly to GOD, to make all the satisfaction I could for my sins, I renounced, for the love of Him, everything that was not He; and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world. Sometimes I considered myself before Him as a poor criminal at the feet of his judge; at other times I beheld Him in my heart as my FATHER, as my GOD: I worshipped Him the oftenest that I could, keeping my mind in His holy Presence, and recalling it as often as I found it wandered from Him. I found no small pain in this exercise, and yet I continued it, notwithstanding all the difficulties that occurred, without troubling or disquieting myself when my mind had wandered involuntarily. I made this my business, as much all the day long as at the appointed times of prayer; for at all times, every hour, every minute, even in the height of my business, I drove away from my mind everything that was capable of interrupting my thought of GOD.
The Practice of the Presence of God, First Letter, by Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection
That is the essence of the Christian life. Continual awareness of God’s presence in the world. God doesn’t live in this building. God isn’t only revealed on Sunday mornings, or only in mountaintop experiences like I had in that St. Louis city park. God is everywhere. God is in all things, and as Brother Lawrence taught, we lack awareness but can develop a sense of God’s presence through continual practice.
Jesus had that awareness and calls us to follow him. In his Farewell Discourse, he first explained that he had to go away, but then promised the disciples that he would send the Paraclete, a word translated as Advocate, Helper, or Comforter. The Greek word parakletos is analogous to a Latin legal term, advocatus. It referred to someone of high social standing who would speak on your behalf. When I read the description of the role, I was reminded of CASA, the Court Appointed Special Advocates who work on behalf of children who cannot navigate the legal system on their own. In the same way, the Holy Spirit works on our behalf in this world that is broken and beyond our comprehension. Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as speaking through us, guiding us. Yet at the same time, the Hebrew word ruach and the Greek word pneuma that are translated as Spirit both mean wind or breath. Like the wind, the Spirit flows where the Spirit wills. Like breath, the Spirit gives us life and sustains us all.
The global Christian church is in decline. But one segment, one expression of the Christian faith is growing: Pentecostalism. The Pentecostal tradition dates back in one sense to that first Pentecost, but in another sense has its roots in Wesleyan holiness movements. The Holy Spirit started peeking through. In 1817, Jarena Lee was at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The preacher was suddenly unable to speak, and Jarena was moved by the Spirit to stand and preach. She was the first African-American woman to preach publicly, speaking to mixed-race audiences from the mid-Atlantic to New England and Canada. Remember, this was a time when slavery was legal and neither African-Americans nor women could own property or vote.
The big turning point came almost a century later in 1906 at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. Charles Parham had split from the Methodist Episcopal Church in Topeka and tutored William J. Seymour, who then moved on to Los Angeles. After being rejected by the local church that was meant to be his host, Seymour led worship services that were marked by all of the signs we associate with Pentecostalism, like speaking in tongues. They were able to keep their momentum for about 7 years and then kind of fizzled out. But their legacy was widespread, with existing denominations like the Church of God in Christ and new denominations like the Assemblies of God carrying on the flame of Pentecostalism. Today, there are 644 million Pentecostal and charismatic believers worldwide, 26% of all Christians. While the global population is growing at a 1.2% rate and Christianity as a whole just slightly faster at 1.27%, Pentecostal strands are growing at 2.26%, close to double the population growth rate, and accelerating.
Why? Why are charismatic expressions of Christianity growing so much faster than traditional ones? There are lots of reasons, but I think the critical one is their awareness of God’s presence. They experience the presence of the Holy Spirit in a tangible, sometimes dramatic way.
Now, I’m not suggesting that one must experience the baptism by the Holy Spirit, accompanied by speaking in tongues, in order to be saved. As I’ve said, I believe in universal salvation. I am suggesting that we can all become aware of God’s presence in the world, and be empowered to share that awareness with others.
There are many ways to experience God’s presence. One path is described by Brother Lawrence, by the anonymous author of another classic work called The Cloud of Unknowing, and others in the contemplative tradition: centering prayer, apophatic prayer, wordless prayer that seeks God as God, not for God’s gifts. I’ll admit that I struggle with that. I pray regularly, but really struggle with contemplative prayer. Another path that I’m working on is kataphatic prayer, wordy prayer, in which I communicate with God whatever is on my mind. Something I started recently is to pause throughout the day and pray the Prayer of St. Francis. That’s a way to re-center myself on God and on the way I want to be more Christ-like. Using a fixed prayer relieves me of the need to think of what to say and just dwell in the moment. You might want to try something similar, maybe with the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer or Thomas Merton’s prayer or any other prayer that speaks to your heart.
Another way to experience God is through scripture. People have different understandings of the nature of scripture, but I believe that it is a recording of ways that people throughout history have experienced God. By reading about their experiences, perhaps you can catch a glimpse of God in the world. There are lots of different ways to approach scripture regularly. I use a book called Year of the Bible that identifies a few chapters to read each day, and I read it every night. Usually, there are two Old Testament chapters and one New Testament, or sometimes a psalm or two instead of the New Testament, or sometimes more chapters if they are short. It takes me about 15 minutes, more or less. That allows me to skim the surface of the whole story. Another way is to use the daily lectionary, which is a two-year cycle that hits the important parts of the Bible just like the weekly lectionary we use in worship. The nice thing about using the daily lectionary is that there are lots of resources available if you want devotional studies or prayers.
But maybe reading isn’t your thing, and maybe you have a hard time centering yourself and quieting your mind for prayer. Why are we here today? So that we can experience God through other people. We experience God through worship, and we experience God through Christian fellowship. Each person reveals to us another aspect of God. Our unity in Christ’s body lowers the barriers between us and allows us to enter deeper relationships with each other and with God.
And above all, we can experience God if we follow Jesus’s new commandment given earlier in his Farewell Discourse: Love one another. Love is from God. Love IS God. In loving, we participate in God’s continuing work to reconcile all people and all things and welcome them into God’s eternal realm. We can experience a glimpse of the heavenly realm HERE and NOW if we have love.
In the Tower of Babel story, we read about people who were self-reliant and productivity-oriented. God said, Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them, and so the LORD scattered the people. We were not created for doing things and building things. We were created to love. On the day of Pentecost, the disciples turned from self-reliance to God-reliance. If we depend on God and God’s love, then nothing will be impossible for us. The Holy Spirit will move with us, bind us together, flow through us, and advocate for us. And we will experience a glimpse of God’s heavenly realm now, God’s eternal presence waiting for our awareness. Amen.
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