Spiritual Visionary

Pentecost - 2021

Today's Readings:

Acts 2:1-21 (The Holy Spirit descends on Jesus' followers)

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (Valley of the Dry Bones)

John 15:26-27 & 16:4b-15 (Jesus promises to send the Advocate)

Grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Come Holy Spirit, Come. Today is all about the Spirit; the breath of life, the wind that sweeps across the waters and brushes against our cheeks, the spark that catches fire but does not consume. The Spirit is about as easily caught and bottled as the air we breathe.. it might look like nothing, yet it’s power is unimaginable and without it we would perish.

The Spirit is part of the Triune God which we profess, yet maybe the part we talk about the least. Each year Pentecost comes and goes and I don’t know about you, but I’m guilty of thinking of it as a one day event – the ONE day we celebrate the Spirit and then we move on to what we often call ‘the ordinary times’ which last until Advent rolls around in the fall. But you know what dawned on me this Pentecost that I can’t believe I never realized before?! That this long upcoming stretch of ‘ordinary times’ is actually just a shorthand we have ascribed to this season RATHER than saying ‘the 18th Sunday after Pentecost’ (or whatever Sunday it may be). And these are ‘ordinary days’ not because they aren’t special or full of the Spirit, but because THEY ARE!

The Pentecost story is that Jesus ascends into heaven and sends the Spirit to continue working and being God’s presence throughout the earth. So you have the disciples gathering around with gentiles (those outside of the Jewish faith who came to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah) and the Spirit descends upon them. Mind you, this is NOT a sweet, soft sprinkling of pixie dust; this is like a violent wind and the flames of fire! The Spirit has come and filled these GENTILES of all people and they begin speaking in different languages. This causes the Jews in town to stop and take notice! They recognize some of these languages, but how could they be coming from these gentiles!? “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’” (v.12)

Some blew them off, ‘pshh, they’re just drunk!’ To which Peter, rightfully so, says ‘DRUNK!? It’s 9 o’clock in the morning! How could you be so blind to the work of the God you claim to know so well!?’ And then he recalls for them a story from the scriptures, where the Prophet Joel saw such an scene in his spiritual imagination – ‘God will pour out God’s Spirit on ALL peoples and your sons AND DAUGHTERS will prophecy! And the young will see visions and the old will dream again! Men, Women and even slaves will receive the Spirit of the Lord!’ (v.17-18)

How great is our God! Our God who follows through on every promise! Our God who refuses to walk away! Our God who has every right to see us as a failed project and start over or move on.. relentlessly chooses to enter into our story, our reality, every single time and lovingly does everything possible to show us the way. What a love beyond all human capabilities! What a love beyond all understanding! So easily we look around and find countless reasons to ‘lose faith in humanity,’ yet it is God who NEVER gives up on us.. perhaps we shouldn’t give up on one another either?..

The Spirit may have fell on Pentecost, but the movement didn’t stop there. In fact, many call this day the birthday of the Church. The lives of all those disciples were disrupted.. again. The winds of change were blowing and the call of Christ beckoned them go and tell.. go and tell EVERY nation how God has revealed God’self! Go and tell of this relentless love that will transform their lives and save their souls! These ‘ordinary times’ we are entering into aren’t that ordinary after all.. they are the long stretch of time when the Spirit was first on the move, when the disciples traveled and shared the good news of the kingdom come! Today we do this as part of our everyday, ordinary lives.. but really it’s just that time after Pentecost where the church is just being the church and THAT is holy! That is as sacred as Christmas and Easter morning! As sacred as that day the Spirit first fell fresh on that motley crew of Jews, gentiles, outcasts, and outlaws.

What a sacred day to remember and to embody in our everyday, ordinary lives. A day when the Holy Disrupter swept across the earth with her great winds of change; shaking up the dominant cultural norms and leaving the breath of revolution in her wake. It was almost as if the Holy Trinity was declaring, ‘even though Jesus is physically gone doesn’t mean everything just gets to go back to normal! I’m going to keep flipping tables, disheveling empires, dethroning the powerful, and lifting the voices of the silenced and oppressed!’ What Jesus had revealed.. what Jesus had set in motion.. no one can undo or overthrow. We, the Church, are the continuation of this revolutionary movement that changed history and cast a new vision for the future.

In this vision, the future God imagines for us include the voices and perspectives of ALL diverse walks of life! Men AND women, young AND old, Jews AND Gentiles, slave AND free! This means all nations, all races, all genders, all occupations, and yes even the oppressed. God envisions a time and place where the voiceless finally have their God given voices heard! Where no one is too young or too old to be relevant! Where men make space for the voices of women, children, and those they employ. Where the seemingly dead and forgotten are brought back to life; “Mortal can these bones live?!” .. “O Lord God, you know.” (Ezekiel 37:3)

Church, I ask you, what vision has God put in your spiritual imagination? Do you still see visions? Dream dreams? What is it that you see? ..Have we strayed from the vision God has cast? Have we silenced certain brothers and sisters? Have we held fast to traditions and exclusivity and left a valley of dry bones in our wake? Church, we get it wrong, just like our ancestors before us got it wrong, (Church - big C - not individual, but the Church universal) but we are a Church that almost weekly practices confession and forgiveness. We are a church named after Martin Luther, a theologian of the cross, who said ‘friends, we have to call a thing what it is.’ It does us no good to turn a blind eye to the valley of bones we have created – the harm the Church has done and continues to do. We must repent and return again and again to the vision cast by Christ himself, which is still in motion by the power of the relentless Spirit of God.

Who have we silenced, overlooked, turned away, cast out, blatantly rejected? In what ways have we built walls to divide rather than bridges for relationship? We cannot heal without confession; mortal these bones cannot rise to new life without acknowledging them first and turning to the transforming love of our God of reconciliation.

What wounds do we need to heal in order to restore our spiritual imagination? Let down your guard. Feel the wind on your cheek, the breath in your lungs. Friends, the dream is not dead – the Spirit is alive and well and WILL not give up on us. So Church, I ask you again, what vision do you see? What is it that you dream? May the Triune God bless you with the imagination of the Spirit, the will of God, and the love of Christ to go and live your everyday, ordinary lives, filled with divine fire, telling of the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.