Of the 50 to 60 million inhabitants
of the Roman Empire, a tiny elite, perhaps one-half of one percent, owned some
80 percent of the wealth. Nearly every
scrap of writing that remains to us from those days, the novels, the poetry,
the plays, the works of history and philosophy and rhetoric, was written by
members of that elite. It was written for members of that elite. It speaks from their worldview. It addresses their concerns. We have a pretty good idea from the surviving
literature about how the one-half of one percent lived, what they ate, how they
spent their time. We know many of their names.
Contrast this with the peasants,
the small shopkeepers, the artisans and laborers, the miners and sailors and soldiers
and slaves who made up the remaining ninety-nine and one-half percent of the
Empire’s population. They didn’t write
books, and the people who did write them were not really interested in their
lives. Their names aren’t carved on
stones in the ruins of ancient cities.
We know next to nothing about them, so that when a distinguished
historian recently published a book describing what we can say about them from
the available evidence, he gave it the title Invisible Romans.
But there is one work of ancient
literature that is by members of the ninety-nine
and one-half percent. This book, really
a collection of books, is about ordinary people. Thanks to these writings we know some of their
names, some details about how they lived, and what they cared about. We know about them because certain experiences
that they had were so significant that they decided everyone should know about them. They organized themselves into resilient and
mobile little groups, dedicated to giving testimony to what they had witnessed.
Eventually these testimonies were
written down, so that they could be carried from place to place and passed down
through the years in something like their original form. Stories by ordinary people, about ordinary
people, intended, by and large, for ordinary people, that by one of history’s
great miracles have come down to us.
I am talking, of course, about the
New Testament. And today, on this day of
Pentecost, we whose very existence as a people called “Christians” is owed to those
ordinary people, celebrate the miracle that gave us birth. This miracle has two parts. The first part is the way in which Jesus’ disciples
discovered that they were now responsible for his mission. Not only responsible, but willing and able
and empowered by God to carry it out.
That is the transformation that we celebrate in the fifty days after
Easter—that this little group of
ordinary, invisible people made the journey from running away in fear on the
night of Jesus’ arrest to bravely carrying on the work that he started.
The second part of the miracle is
that when these people stood up to talk about God’s mighty acts of liberation,
redeeming the whole world through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ, people actually listened. Some
of them actually got it—as improbable as this message was, as unlikely as the
messengers were, it got through to them in a completely surprising way.
You’ve probably had the experience where
you are trying to tell your spouse or a friend about something that happened to
you earlier in the day that was particularly affecting, or hilariously funny, something
that for whatever reason you really want to share with another person. So you try to describe it with all the
significant details, and then you get to the climax, the moment that had the
real emotional impact, and the person you’re talking to just kind of looks at
you with a blank expression. Maybe they
force a little laugh just to be nice, and say something like “wow—sounds pretty
funny,” or “that must have been really cool,” but you know that they just didn’t
“get it” in the way that you hoped you would.
So you say “I guess you had to be there.”
Well the miraculous thing about
Pentecost is that these ordinary people, Simon Peter, for instance, Son of
Jonah, started talking about extraordinary things, amazing, mysterious,
mystical experiences of what they had learned from Jesus and how he came to
them after he died, and breathed his peace into them and sent them out on a
mission of healing and forgiveness to the whole world; and you know, it turned
out that you didn’t have to be there. You
didn’t have to be there to believe that what these people were saying about
Jesus was true. You didn’t have to be
there to feel like this was the best news you’d heard in a long time, maybe
ever, and that it was meant for you.
You didn’t have to be there to feel
like someone was speaking to what you’d always secretly suspected about God and
about yourself, but never dared to let yourself believe— that God loves you and
everyone else in this world like a Father or a Mother, and that you aren’t an
invisible person at all, but are heaven’s messenger, gifted with a high and
noble purpose. And just because you hadn’t
been there didn’t mean you were left out of that purpose—it was not too late to
join, and everyone was welcome, no matter if you were an important person or
not, no matter what background you came from, there was a place for you in the
brother- and sister-hood of the Messiah Jesus.
The
apostles looked at these miracles, the way they had come to accept the mission
of Jesus for their own, and the way all different kinds of people were actually
taken with their message, and they knew that only God could do this. That’s what God the Holy Spirit does, she
communicates. She connects. She enters into the space between people and
removes the barriers to love and trust and truth. That’s why we invoke the Holy Spirit whenever
we perform a sacramental act. We know
that only God can make the bread and wine really communicate the living body of
the Lord to us. Only God can really make
the baptismal water go all the way in, and cleanse us inside and out for new
life in Christ. Only God can really make
two people married, one flesh as Christ and the church are one. So we ask God the Holy Spirit to come, and
the message of Pentecost that she is not ashamed to be here, no matter how
ordinary the company. The church was
created and is most alive today when it includes all kinds of people, and embraces
all kinds of differences among them.
Take
Brandon and Briana, and their baby Dallas, who are being baptized here
today. They are ordinary people. Briana’s nineteen, and Brandon just graduated
from High School last week. They are not
married. It is not certain whether they
ever will be. And yet they come here
today, as they have been coming for the last year or so, seeking God’s blessing
for their family and their lives. They
could go a lot of places to hear people tell them where they’ve gone wrong or
what they should be doing differently, but in the grace of the Holy Spirit we say
to them here, “What an adorable baby!”
They could go a lot of places to hear that they’d be welcome just as
soon as they got married. In the grace
of the H0ly Spirit we say, “You have to make your own decisions, but remember—with
God nothing is impossible. What can we do to help?”
Mainly
we’re just grateful that they’ve decided to throw their lot in with Jesus. They are exactly the kind of people he chose carry
on his mission in the world. Just look
at us! You didn’t have to be there. You don’t have to have it all together. You don’t have to be one of the one-half of
one percent. You just need faith in the
Holy Spirit within you, who called you into this work and is giving you the
gifts to carry it out. And you need faith
in the Holy Spirit outside you who is hidden in the world, ready, waiting,
eager to respond to what you have to say.
No comments:
Post a Comment