Listening in Tongues

Sermon for Pentecost, May 19, 2024
Acts 2:1-21
Walking the Way of Love preaching series, week 7

With the wonderful problem of having several baptisms this morning, I want to give you back at least some of our typical sermon time.  So, if I’m a little more focused than usual, you’ll know why.

The reason for the baptisms is that we’re celebrating Pentecost, as we heard in the reading from Acts.  Jesus had promised his friends several times that, once he returned to his heavenly glory, he would send the Holy Spirit to continue his work here – guiding, teaching, inspiring, and empowering his followers in this new moment of salvation history.  Traditionally, we’ve called the time that starts with Pentecost the period of the Church – but that conjures images of institutions and bureaucracies, and who wants to imagine salvation as one committee meeting after another?  Instead, more recently, you’ve heard our presiding bishop call this current time of salvation history “the Jesus Movement,” with The Episcopal Church being one branch of it.  I like that – that our baptismal candidates will step out of the water and into a movement, not a meeting.

So, in our Pentecost story this morning, the Holy Spirit doesn’t just come on the scene but takes it over, and the disciples are blown away, almost literally.  A great wind whirls through the room (in Hebrew and Greek, the same word meant both “wind” and “sprit”).  Flames of fire dance on their heads.  And the disciples receive a gift – maybe the last gift they would have expected.  Pentecost was already a festival for the Jewish people, a time they gave thanks for Israel’s unique and exclusive covenant with the Almighty.¹ Well, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, God opened up that covenant to include everyone on the planet, potentially.  This new covenant of eternal life wasn’t just for the people who already had a special relationship with God; it invited everyone into a special relationship with God.  So, the first gift of the Holy Spirit to this new Jesus Movement was just what his followers needed if they were going to expand the circle of blessing – the gift of languages.  Suddenly, these Galilean fishermen and laborers could communicate with people from across the known world.  If you want to share good news with someone, it’s handy to be able to speak in that person’s tongue.

In fact, this gift of the Holy Spirit is often called “the gift of tongues.”  And in our culture, since the Pentecostal movement began in the early 1900s, that “gift of tongues” has had a more specific meaning – one different from what the apostles were experiencing on Pentecost morning.  In the Pentecostal church tradition, a mark of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit is the ability to speak in a language no one else knows, a language of prayer and praise and maybe prophetic witness, too.  This gift goes back to the early Church, when the apostle Paul set guidelines for how Christians should speak and interpret spiritual tongues in worship.  It may not be our vibe as Episcopalians, but it’s a spiritual gift with a long history.

But – that kind of speaking in tongues is not what the apostles are doing in today’s reading.  What the Holy Spirit gives the apostles is the ability to communicate not in special divine speech but in everyday talk – everybody’s everyday talk.  As the story says, the foreigners there in Jerusalem were “amazed and astonished” to hear about “God’s deeds of power” in the words of their own lands (Acts 2:7,11).

But, if you think about it, this first gift of the Holy Spirit empowered the apostles with something even greater than the ability to speak to people they didn’t know or understand.  It empowered them to listen to people they didn’t know or understand. 

When we think about sharing the good news of the Jesus Movement, we usually picture people speaking, right? – on a street corner, or at your front door, telling you what they think is good for you.  That’s what institutions do: They tell you what they think you need to hear.  But a real movement is different.  A movement connects with real, live people about their real, lived experience.  A movement comes alongside folks, and learns about them, and helps free them from what holds them back so they can build a better life.  First and foremost, a movement listens. 

Today, we’re wrapping up our preaching series on walking Jesus’ Way of Love.  So far, we’ve looked at six spiritual practices to help us go deeper in our relationship with God – turning, resting, blessing, learning, worshiping, and praying.  And today, on this birthday of the Jesus Movement, we come to the last of these seven practices, which is to go – to cross boundaries, listen deeply, and live like Jesus.  It’s another way to state the last promise in the Baptismal Covenant that we’ll affirm in a few minutes – that pesky promise to strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being.  To me, that baptismal promise has always seemed the hardest one to keep.  How am I supposed to bring about justice and peace?  How can I respect the dignity of everyone? 

Of course, the first break we get is that God isn’t expecting us to do the whole job by ourselves.  And the second break we get is that we promise to do this impossible task “with God’s help.”  But what really makes possible this spiritual practice of going toward others and living like Jesus is the fact that striving for justice and peace begins not with an open mouth or even an open hand but with an open ear.  When we come alongside people whose lives we don’t understand and really listen to their stories, we’re respecting their dignity in the most powerful way there is.

We have lots of opportunities to do that – getting to know a family through Andie’s Pantry, or gardening alongside kids at Banneker Elementary, or reading to kids at Gordon Parks Elementary.  The best outreach ministries are the ones that take us beyond our usual circles and move us out into someone else’s experience.

But there’s also an opportunity to go and respect people’s dignity right here, going no farther than the friendly confines of the Jewell Room.  It’s our Listening in Love series, when we gather to look each other in the eye and hear why on earth that person in the next pew believes something so different from what I believe.  Each person who comes gets three minutes to share our hearts about a topic that’s dividing us, while the others in the room practice the spiritual gift of listening to languages they never thought they could understand.  And each person speaking receives the gift of being heard, one of the greatest moments of dignity anyone can know.

On Tuesday the 28^th, at 7 p.m., we’ll put this gift of listening to a tough test as we consider the war between Israel and Hamas and ask, “Where’s my tribe?”  That’s a tall order, listening in love about such a divisive reality.  But it shows us something important about this spiritual practice of going – of crossing boundaries, listening deeply, and living like Jesus.  Even if the “others” don’t live far away or look much different from you, the differences that separate us can seem vast indeed.  But when we choose to go, and listen to those others speaking in “the native language of each” (Acts 2:6), and honor the dignity of their experience, we find ourselves seeing them not as an “other” but as a fellow pilgrim. 

In fact, we might even find ourselves wondering, “Hmmm.  Where else could we go together in this movement to live like Jesus?”

1.       VanderKam, James C. “Festival of Weeks.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 6. David Noel Freedman, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 895-897.

Praying for Someone to Trust

Sermon for May 12, 2024
Celebrating the Feast of the Ascension, transferred
Walking the Way of Love preaching series, week 6

Jordan and Finn, thank you so much for those reflections.  Yours is a tough act to follow.  But in the spirit of marking Senior Sunday and celebrating our graduates’ next steps on their journeys, I thought I’d frame the sermon this morning as a commencement address.  So it’s really for the nine of you, but the rest of the folks might get something out of it, too.

Doing something a little different with the sermon seems right especially today, given this is one of those preaching moments nobody would sign up for.  Here’s your task, Fr. John: Combine Senior Sunday, Mother’s Day, the Feast of the Ascension, and the spiritual practice of prayer, which is this morning’s installment of our preaching series on Walking the Way of Love.  Making sense of all that sounds like a job for … the Sermonizer – computer-generated sermons with the press of a button!

Wouldn’t that be great?  Well, it turns out, of course, the Sermonizer already exists.  It’s called ChatGPT, our instant access to artificial intelligence.  I’m probably the last person on the planet to try ChatGPT, and certainly our seniors are well aware of both its blessings and its temptations.  Like most innovations, AI is neither good nor bad.  It’s simply a power that’s been set loose; and like any other genie, this one won’t go back in its bottle.  It’s part of the world you seniors are inheriting, and part of the world oldsters like me are beginning to understand.  I can tell you this much: If you ask ChatGPT to write a sermon that includes the feast of the Ascension, Mother's Day, the spiritual practice of prayer, and graduating seniors, ChatGPT will do it. Five hundred sixty words and a few seconds later, you have something that would earn a C-minus for a first-year seminarian.  So, the Sermonizer lives … or, more accurately, the Plagiarizer lives. 

OK, this is not a diatribe against technology.  Instead, this is an old-fashioned, non-Sermonizer sermon encouraging you to ask yourselves a deep question:  Where can I put my trust?

One place I’d encourage you to look is to the other people we’re remembering in our worship today: mothers.  Now, as we’ll pray in a few minutes, that group of our original influencers isn’t limited to our biological moms.  But in whoever plays that role for us, one of the marks of a good mom is that you can trust her with everything you’ve got.  I’ve been blessed to know that reality first-hand, and here’s a quick example – although it’s definitely not a typical warm and fuzzy Mother’s Day memory.  While I was on sabbatical last summer, I wrote a journal article about the 1906 lynching in my hometown, Springfield, Missouri.  The article told the story of three Black men strung up on the public square, and it described how our diocese is remembering the 25 lynchings that took place in western Missouri across the decades.¹  Well, that article begins not with facts and figures about racialized violence but with the memory of my mother and me shopping for school clothes on Springfield’s public square.  As we hunted for jeans and shirts, my mother took the trouble to tell me the story of the lynchings – something I certainly never heard about in school in Springfield.  I could trust my mother to set me on a course that valued respecting the dignity of every human being; and years later, I can still trust the ethical wiring she helped to set.

Guidance you can trust is a precious commodity these days; and, of course, even the best mothers aren’t with us forever.  Soon, you seniors will be heading off to whatever’s next after high school; and eventually, you’ll be like my daughter, turning 30 and buying your own house and making your parents feel really old.  And then, someday, you’ll be the ones making care-planning decisions for your mother, which is what my sisters and I were doing just a couple of days ago.  So, in the journey ahead of you, where else can you look, beyond your mothers, for guidance you can trust as you navigate so many unfamiliar waters?

You can look to Jesus.  OK, it’s not really a surprise that I’d say that, but the answer stands.  And it stands especially today, as we celebrate what’s maybe the least understood of the principal feasts on the Church calendar – the feast of the Ascension, which was this past Thursday. 

As we heard in two of the readings this morning, after forty days of hanging out with the disciples after Easter morning, Jesus returned to the heavens from which he’d come, taking his place of power and authority with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  Now, if you find it a little hard to wrap your head around that this morning, you’re in good company.  For centuries, Christians have been trying to make sense of a deep paradox about the Ascension.  At the end of our reading from Acts, the story says the disciples looked on as a cloud “took [Jesus] out of their sight” (1:9), and two angels comforted his friends by saying he’ll come back eventually “in the same way as you saw him go” (1:11).  And the Gospel reading today – like Acts, also written by Luke – tells the story similarly, with Jesus being “carried up into heaven” (24:51) after he commissions the disciples to go out to “all nations” as his “witnesses” (24:47,48).  OK.  But if you read the ending of Matthew’s Gospel, you find no Ascension.  Instead, as Jesus commissions his friends to share the good news, he says, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (28:20).

So, which is it?  Did he stay or did he go?  Is Jesus still close by, or is he sitting on a heavenly throne?

You know what’s coming, right?  The answer is, “Yes.”  And how can that be?  Well, like so much of this Way of Love that God asks us to follow, the answer is both deeply mysterious and something our hearts already understand. 

The theologians will tell you the point of the Ascension is not that Jesus has checked out.  Just the opposite.  The point of the Ascension is that Jesus is in charge, the universe’s CEO.  As the first one to rise from the dead, Jesus has received “all authority in heaven and on earth,” as Matthew’s Gospel says.  Because God raised him to new life, Jesus has power that beats any other power you can name, even the power of death itself.  He may not be leading crowds into Jerusalem anymore, but the authority he wields is so much greater even than what the Romans feared he’d do on earth.  Like a CEO in the corner office, Jesus is in charge even if he isn’t micromanaging every moment of every day.

And yet … he’s with you anyway.  How can that be?  How can Jesus have ascended into heaven as the cosmic ruler and still be accessible to you, and to each of us? 

Here’s a simple answer – and it’s the theme of this week’s stop on the Way of Love in our sermon series.  We’ve been preaching since Easter on seven ways you can connect with God in your day-to-day life.  We’ve talked about turning – making the effort to pause, listen, and choose to follow Jesus.  We’ve talked about resting – letting our hearts be restored with God’s love and peace.  We’ve talked about blessing – showing God’s love through our words and actions.  We’ve talked about learning – reading the Bible and letting those words of hope soak in.  Last week, we talked about worshiping – gathering with other pilgrims to thank God for the blessings of our lives.  And today, our stop on the Way of Love is to pray – to dwell with God intentionally; to make time to reach out in the assurance that, believe it or not, reaching out is the one thing God wants most from us.  If we make the effort, God will show up, too.  Sometimes the message we get may be clear and direct; sometimes it may be “just” a greater sense of peace – but I’ll take that any day.  Prayer, in any form, is your direct line to the CEO.  How can that be possible?  I mean, we’d assume Jesus has a lot on his plate, running the universe.  So, how can someone who’s crazy busy make time to come alongside you and listen, no matter what?  Well, ask your mom.  It’s what love does.

So, seniors, you’re about to head out into a world where trust is in pretty short supply.  The research would say that you all don’t trust institutions; you don’t trust the media; you don’t trust the structures of government; you don’t trust authority figures.  Honestly, most of the time, neither do I.  Original sin is a thing, and you don’t have to look hard to find it.  But when you find it, don’t stop looking for something you can trust just because the institutions around us let us down.  Take your spiritual phone, so to speak; and open up the God app; and see what this feed called prayer will bring you.  Like a parent who always picks up when you need to talk, Jesus will be “with you always, to the end of the age.” 

1. Spicer, John. “Bringing Us to Our Knees: The 1906 Springfield, Missouri, Lynching.” Anglican and Episcopal History, vol. 93, no. 1, 2024, pp. 182–94. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27290761. Accessed 8 May 2024.