Pentecost, 2025-C: Continuing prophetic witness

Lectionary: Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17

 

Last week, the clergy of our convocation gathered at Emmanuel for a Clericus (which simply means a gathering of clergy), led by our bishop. Among the many concerns we discussed were the issues of serving victims of the tornado in the long haul given FEMA aid remains unattained and among reports that folks in some zip codes are being refused insurance referrals for construction help, inaugurating a modern form of redlining.

We also discussed serving vulnerable populations like people of color, LGBTQIA2S+ folks, and immigrants. Our bishop is, as you know, an immigrant himself. He is also a black, married gay man, making him a member of several vulnerable populations currently under fire in this cultural moment. He is married to a hispanic immigrant, and their family has already suffered from the arbitrary interpretation and enforcement of immigration law.

This led us to a discussion about the need for churches to be prophetic. Those of us who can must speak out on behalf of those who can’t, those who are being silenced, disappeared, ambushed, and dismissed to the margins.

Bp. Deon wisely reminded us that being prophetic doesn’t always require doing something flashy, but consistently doing the small things that demonstrate the truth we hold as Episcopalians.

And what is that truth? We can find it in our Baptismal vows on page 304 in the BCP: to gather and break bread together, prayerfully nourishing the bonds of our community of faith so that we can proclaim by our words and our lives the Good News we know; to persevere in resisting evil and repent, that is, return to God, whenever we sin; and to seek and serve Christ in ALL persons, respecting their dignity as we strive for God’s justice and peace. No small task.

There are two things we need to accomplish this: God and each other. Every Sunday we celebrate the love of God that binds us as a community of faith. We nurture ourselves with the spiritual food of Scripture and Holy Communion. Today, on the Feast of Pentecost, we celebrate the truth that we have God in us – individually and communally.

The story of the first Pentecost found in the Book of Acts is a familiar one, as are the images associated with it – the small tongues of fire emanating from the dove-like Holy Spirit, hovering over the heads of the gathered faithful. We imagine those same tongues of fire hovering over our own heads. To embody that, we wave a dove over us during our opening procession.

Fire, as you have often heard me say, is Bible-talk for the presence of God. The tongues of fire are small bits of the Almighty Themself, being given to imperfect, unfinished humans, who are motivated and equipped to serve by that very presence of God that rests on them.

Our remembrance of this event each liturgical year is an opportunity for us to reopen our awareness to the truth that God is co-existing with us and what that means. These tiny pieces in each of us, when taken together, become a powerful force for love, a prophetic, revelatory vision of the living God. We become more together than any of us can be alone. This is church.

Whatever gifts we have, individually and as a community, are evidence of the presence of God within us. One of our responsibilities as a church community is to be the place where each person's gifts are discovered and nurtured. We then discern what our collective gifts are so that we can use them to serve the world according to God’s purpose and plan for us.

Our churches also work together in community, which for us, is the Diocese of Missouri. All of us serving God synergistically - better and more faithfully than any one of us can serve alone – and we have plenty to do.

In Scripture, we learn that it didn’t take long for some of those disciples upon whom the spirit of God descended to be edged out to the margins of the community once again. As the fledgling church began to form its institutional identity the new wine of this Pentecost reality was shoved back into the old skins of the Jewish temple system, edging women, slaves, the poor, and others right back to the “outer courts” of the community. The doors that Jesus had flung open began to close, and that initial institutional system evolved into the one we have today, a system that continues to reflect an ancient ethnic and patriarchal advantage.

In the novel, “The Healing” by Jonathan O’Dell, set on a cotton plantation in pre-Civil War Mississippi, a young slave girl named Granada is apprenticed to a mixed-race, midwife and healer named Mother Polly. Mother Polly was purchased by the master to intervene in the cholera epidemic, which was wiping out his “stock” of slaves. Knowing abolition was on the horizon, the master wanted to treat his slaves well enough so that when freedom became an option, they’d have no need of it – a condition Mother Polly called being “freedom stupid.”

When Granada complained to Mother Polly that she didn’t want to leave the plantation to go to freedom-land, she asked, “Where was it, anyway?” It isn’t a place, Mother Polly told her, it’s a way of being.

This story is such a great metaphor for the church. Church isn’t a place. It’s a way of being. We don’t go to church. We are the church, the body of Christ in the world.

In the reading from Acts, Peter quotes the prophet Joel who declares God’s intention to pour out Their divine Spirit onto ALL flesh: sons and daughters, men and women, old and young, slave and free. This is that time, Peter proclaims. Emmanuel family, I proclaim to you now, this is still that time because God is still redeeming. God is always redeeming.

Like young Granada, however, so many in the church, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the freedom of God’s spirit and trust its power to transform us, our community, and even the world, choose to be “salvation stupid,” turning away and choosing to fall back into a spirit of fear as St. Paul said.

We look back at the pre-Civil War era and wonder how Christians could ever have believed that kidnapping and enslaving humans, snatching babies from their mother’s breasts, and children from their innocence; working people to near exhaustion, and killing them as if they weren’t humans, was in any way in keeping with Jesus’ commandments to love. Looking at our current news reports leads me to wonder the same thing about us today.

Thankfully, God is still redeeming. God is always redeeming until “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” God continually sends forth God’s own Spirit to create and re-create the world; and God has chosen us as partners in this work, making manifest on earth the eternal truth that God is love, and we ALL are God’s beloveds.

This is a tremendous gift, one that often overwhelms us, but when we gather together, the bits of God’s Spirit in each of us unites with the bits of God’s spirit in all of us, and the fullness of God is made manifest through us on the earth.

Even with all our imperfections, we can, by the grace and Spirit of God, be prophetic and revelatory of the loving God we serve in small and big ways. One small way we are doing this is the display of PRIDE flags on our church property. We used to have one flag on a pole next to a metal sign out front. That flag was stolen, and our pole was destroyed. In response, we screwed PRIDE flags onto the two metal signs on our property that are awaiting refurbishment. Those signs will soon have permanent PRIDE flags as a continuing, prophetic witness to our love for our LGBTQIA2S+ siblings in Christ.

Happy birthday to the church in our continual becoming... and Happy PRIDE Month. Amen.

Fst of the Ascension & Wear Orange Sunday, 2025: The unitive community of God

Lectionary: Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

 

En el nombre de Dios, nuestra vida, nuestra protección, y nuestra paz… In the name of God, our life, our protection, and our peace. Amen. 

The confluence of the Feast of the Ascension and Wear Orange Sunday may seem odd at first. It did to me - until I listened for the Spirit and realized that the need for Wear Orange Sunday is a consequence of the spiritual issue raised in the Feast of the Ascension. I’ll explain…

We often approach this story of the ascension like a movie. In this movie, we see the disciples hanging out with post-resurrection Jesus on the beach (which is from John, btw, not Luke). Jesus is demonstrating that he is real by eating with them. Everyone knows that ghosts can’t eat fish.

As they dine, Jesus reminds them that John the Baptist told them that Jesus would baptize them with the Spirit and fire, and Jesus says this would happen for them in just a few days. Then he commissions them as witnesses of all these things, instructing them to stay together until the Holy Spirit of God acts again, empowering them.

Then he blesses them and is carried up by a cloud into heaven. Two men in white (presumably angels) appear and ask the disciples why they are staring up toward heaven. They tell the disciples that Jesus, who “has been separated from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

Ever since, we’ve been waiting for Jesus to float back down from heaven on a cloud and fix (or end) the world once and for all.

End of movie. Sound about right?

The thing is, the Scripture tells a very different story - a story that is harder to tell, so we simplified it, combining bits of Scripture with explanations that made sense. Then we began to believe that this simplified version was the real story.

The real story in Scripture is about how Almighty God, who is Trinity in Unity, guided the disciples in their journey of faith; a journey that led them from fear to great joy; from the darkness of their limited human understanding to enlightened hearts.

It’s the same journey we’re on now, so this matters. Let’s retell this story with a little more context from Luke, without simplifying it.

Jesus has died, and the last everyone knew, he was in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Then the women come and announce that the tomb is empty, but the disciples didn’t believe the women, calling their proclamation an idle tale.

Then two of the disciples head out on the road to Emmaus, where they encounter the risen Christ. They don’t know it’s him until he breaks bread with them. Afterwards, they remembered how their hearts were on fire as he opened their minds to understand Scripture.

Next, these two find the eleven and as they’re telling them of their experience with the risen Christ, Jesus appears to them all and invites them to touch him, “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones.” The disciples were at once disbelieving and still wondering, so meeting them where they are, Jesus says to them, "Have you anything… to eat?" This is where today’s gospel picks up the story.

Jesus reminds the disciples of his earlier teaching that everything in the law of Moses must be fulfilled. Jesus opens their minds to understand how he is the fulfillment, and commissions them to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sin in his name, starting in Jerusalem and going out to the whole world.

He tells them to stay together during this liminal time, until they are “clothed with power from on high.” I love the definition from the Greek of the word “power” as it is used here. It is “the ability to effect all the purposes of rectitude and wisdom.” How’s that?!

This promised power that God will place within us, around and over us, will be evident to others - like clothing that identifies the work of its wearer. This power will be the ability to bring about God’s intent through righteousness (that is, right relationship with God and others); with experience, knowledge, and judgment that proceeds from our unitive relationship with God, a relationship of common purpose and action.

Then Jesus blesses them and is carried up into heaven, but he did not float out of their sight. The original Greek says that while he was blessing them, he was offered up, the way a sacrifice is lifted up and placed on an altar, bearing their sins by imputation.

“Heaven” in Greek means sky, but it also means “the dwelling place of God,” and it includes the entire cosmos, heaven, earth, and all that there is. It isn’t a location being described, it’s an expanded understanding: God who is all in all.

And they worshipped him - a startling statement, because only God is worshipped. This means that the new understanding given to them by God is that Jesus isn’t just a really great rabbi and teacher. He’s a divine reality, God Incarnate, who brings salvation by the forgiveness of sin and reconciliation to God. This new understanding filled them with so much joy, they couldn’t stop praising God together in their community of faith.

This is the end of the gospel version, but Luke tells the story again in the first chapter of Acts to the non-specified “Theophilus,” which means “friend of God,” filling in some details. For example, in the Acts story, Luke says Jesus reminded them of his teaching that they would be baptized with fire, which would happen just a few days from then. Fire, of course, is Bible-talk for the presence of God, and this points to Pentecost.

The disciples ask Jesus, When are you going to fix this and restore the kingdom of Israel? Knowing that they still are unable to perceive the bigger picture that salvation is for the whole world for all time, and not just for them in this moment in their history, Jesus responds by telling them they can’t know the seasons of the movement of the plan of God. That is beyond human ability.

But they will be given power when the Holy Spirit, the third person in the Trinity, comes upon them, literally breathes on them, empowering them to be Jesus’ witnesses, proclaiming repentance and the forgiveness of sin in his name, starting in Jerusalem and going out to the whole world.

As Jesus said this, he was lifted up and this time, a cloud took him from their sight. A cloud symbolizes divine action that is beyond human understanding. Luke is saying that the disciples’ current understanding of Jesus, was taken from them by divine action, and a new, deeper, broader understanding was about to be given them.

So, the Scriptural story of the Ascension is about the disciples on whom God acted, bringing them to a deeper, divinely inspired understanding of Jesus, our Scripture, and their common purpose with God. We are now, as they were then, endued with this same power by the Holy Spirit.

How does all this tie into Wear Orange Sunday? Our current society seems to be in a continual state of fear and anxiety. Guns represent, to some, the ability to control one’s life and protect oneself, and we want unfettered access to these. I will survive, even if I have to kill you.

But when we are in the unitive relationship with God in Christ established by Jesus at his Ascension, our minds are opened and our hearts are enlightened, so we know we have a common purpose with God. We know that we are not alone and are protected by God.

We hear Jesus’ continual reminder: “Do not be afraid. Do not let your hearts be troubled.” We live as part of the unitive community of God, a community of all nations and peoples, so we don’t need to protect ourselves at the expense of another member of the community of God.

Every single experience we have on this earth enables us to continue to invite God to open our minds and enlighten our hearts even more, further empowering us to trust and participate in the bigger picture of God’s loving plan of reconciliation for the whole world. We can, therefore, stop worrying about ourselves, our survival, and our present moment in history.

Instead, we can get on with our work: witnessing the love of Christ by our words and our lives; living in a community that is expanded to include all whom God has made, just as God made them; praising God continually together, and knowing by faith, not by human understanding, that God’s judgment is forgiveness and reconciliation through Jesus Christ.

When we share that good news in the world, we make space for others to accept God’s forgiveness, healing, change the course of their lives, and live as one with us in the unitive community of God. Amen.