Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Playing with fire




On the day of Pentecost, says the book of Acts, the disciples of Jesus “were all together in one place.”  And that “together” is a prelude to what happens next.  Because the sudden sound of a howling wind from heaven brings people running to them from every direction.  They come rushing together into that same place, and when they get there we see that a kind of United Nations has spontaneously broken out.  And just like at the United Nations, where the delegates put on their headphones and listen to the simultaneous interpreters in the back room, these people all hear the same speech, but each of them hears it in his or her own native tongue.  

But you notice that as soon as the extraordinary experience is over, they all turn to each other and start conversing normally about what has happened.  And then Peter stands up, and addresses all of them together at once, and quotes at length from the Bible.  He can do this because they all know the Bible in the same translation, and they share a single language that all of them can understand.  It is the common language of business and government, of science, philosophy, and literature, of magic and religion.  It is called Greek.   

Greek was the language of a unity enforced from above, imposed on the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean by a conquering empire.  But in the flaming tongues of the Holy Spirit, these pilgrims and residents of Jerusalem experience a new possibility—a unity of the heart.  The “all together in one place” of the Jesus community opens up and invites them to enter a new world.  And this invitation comes to each of them, individually, in a way that reminds them of home.

I once had a girlfriend from Germany.  More precisely, she was from East Germany, and she had come to Berkeley to study theology a couple of years after the wall came down.   We met during the final year of her graduate fellowship, and when it was over she decided to return home.  She had already determined that she would not go on to get her doctorate.  And she was an only child, estranged from her parents, so I asked her why on earth she would want to go back to the grimy, depressed, post-Stalinist world she had grown up in when she could remain in California with me.  And she told me how homesick she was for the German language.  As a theologian and lover of poetry, her true home was not a place, but the sounds and the meanings of her mother tongue.  

This first part of the Pentecost story appeals to us today.  “Diversity” is a positive watchword of our culture, and the “spirituality” that is not “religious” believes that languages as diverse as psychology, physics, and the world’s varied sacred traditions all say essentially the same thing.  But while it is the new orthodoxy that we must tolerate each other’s differences, and there are no differences that really matter, real unity seems far beyond our grasp. 

Even on Pentecost Day, there were those in the crowd who were cynical and scornful of what they had seen and heard.  That’s when Peter stands and refers the crowd back to their common story.  He quotes to them from memory their sacred scriptures, in the Greek translation they all know.  And he says that the ancient promise of God is coming true, the promise of the pouring out of God’s Spirit, making prophets of everyone, young and old, men and women, even slaves.  And again we hear this and it makes us feel good, because it seems very egalitarian and progressive, just the kind of collective spiritual experience we would want to have. 
 
But Peter keeps going with his quotation from scripture.  Because in this prophecy the Spirit that is promised to all people is not an isolated thing; it is but one part of a greater fulfillment—the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.   “What you have just experienced,” says Peter to the crowd, “is a sign of the times, a harbinger of the climax of God’s saving acts in history, and the promised judgment of the world.”  If only Peter had stopped a verse or too sooner, because this is a promise that sounds to us like more of a threat, the kind of thing that makes “spiritual but not religious” people shudder, and religious people, well, embarrassed.  

But that is because we imagine that God’s judgment is like ours.  We like to think we are tolerant, but we have judged the world and found it guilty, so we assume that God will do the same.   We judge the world and find it guilty, when we see the needless suffering of the innocent and the folly of the mighty and shrug our shoulders and say, “what can you do?”  We judge it guilty when we accept our own simplistic explanations for the actions of our enemies, and refuse to consider that they might have reasons for the things they do and say.  We judge the world and condemn it when we have no hope for its future, and pray to escape to some other, better, one in the great beyond.  

But I think that deep down in many of us, maybe all of us, is the longing for resolution, the hope for real unity.  We live in a world of conflicts—over power and money, and market-share, over water, and land, and minerals; conflicts over the interpretation of law and memory and sacred text; over borders, and who belongs on which side of them; over who is the bigger victim, and who got more love from Mom, and who’s to blame when something goes wrong.  But in this welter of conflicted nations, and sexes, and religions, of conflicted persons, with conflicted thoughts and conflicted feelings, there are some who still hope for authoritative judgment to decide what is right for everyone, and what needs to be done.

The Holy Spirit is the power of that judgment, already at work in the world.  For Peter and the disciples, it is the Spirit that was in Jesus, and according to the Gospel of John, he gave it to them on Easter night.   They are in their little upper room, hiding from the world in fear, and he comes to them, and to their conflicted hearts his word is “peace.”  In that peace sends them, as he was sent, not to condemn the world, but that it might be saved.  And so they can carry on his messianic work, Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on them, giving them the power of judgment.  "Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

We Christians have tended to treat forgiveness as if it were a law to be obeyed.  But to forgive without making a judgment is to refuse the gift of the Holy Spirit.  It is to scorn the mighty act of God that Pentecost reveals in tongues of many lands—that in Christ God entrusts the loving judgment of the world to human hands.   The kind of forgiveness that flows from the wounds of Christ is not a magic wand that we wave over situations of injustice, of cruelty and pain, and say “all is forgotten.”  It is forgiveness founded on the power of the Spirit to move hearts of stone to repentance.  It is about the restoration of broken relationships and the healing of the soul.

The judgment of the world is worship in Spirit and in Truth, and this requires that some sins be retained.  Not so that they can be punished—that is exactly the kind of self-righteous hypocrisy Jesus condemned so fiercely—but so that they can be forgiven.  Because without the acknowledgment that sin has been committed, and harm has been done, forgiveness never comes.  We remember the things that were done and we remember that they are sins, because this is the judgment that saves the world. 

This judgment is a grave responsibility, that falls on us as we bring it to bear on others, and if you don’t feel a sense of awe in the face of this power, I fear for you.  To accept it is to play with fire.  It can get you killed, and it can turn you into a monster.  To use it wisely requires tremendous humility, and patience, and total surrender to the wisdom of God.  But it is in this judgment that that we will come at last to the unity that all people, from every land, have sought for a thousand generations, the unity of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.    

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.