We walk by faith, not by sight. But God is bringing the harvest. So we do not lose heart.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 11 B
Texts: 2 Corinthians 5:6-17 (with reference to other parts of this section, before and after); Mark 4:26-34; 1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

“So we do not lose heart.”

We’ve heard this encouragement in the past weeks as we’ve heard Paul write to the Christians of Corinth. You might feel fragile, not strong, like jars made of clay, Paul said two weeks ago. But you do this ministry by God’s mercy, he said, and you carry the extraordinary power of God’s love in that fragile, clay jar. So don’t lose heart.

You might feel the weight of your mortality, or the struggle of this life, Paul said last week. But God is preparing a life for you beyond death. So don’t lose heart.

Paul doesn’t deny our experience of how challenging it is to follow Christ. He understands you worry about what you can’t do for the world, on how impossible it is that all the problems the world faces can be helped. I don’t need to list them again, we know them well, we talk about them with each other all the time. As people of God we see so much in our world, our society, our city that needs God’s healing and grace, and we know we’re called to be a part of that.

But if you’re like me, or like Paul, some days you despair, and wonder what you could possibly do to make a difference. Today Paul gives an astonishing answer: always be confident, for you are a new creation, and God will accomplish much through you.

You are the person God is making new to be a part of God’s healing.

That is to say: you are God’s new creation. You are exactly the child of God needed for where you are in your life in this world. You not only carry God’s love within you to witness and live in the world. God is making you new, healing your fragility, strengthening your weakness, until you are God’s creative force for healing in the world around you. Everything old is passed away in Christ’s death, Paul says. All is made new in the life of Christ’s resurrection. And in the verses following today’s reading, he says it’s all for God’s reconciliation of all things.

But, Paul says, we walk by faith, not by sight. So don’t be surprised if you don’t look in a mirror every morning and see this new creation.

That’s what Jesus says in these parables about seeds.

In one parable, there is planned, cultivated sowing of seeds: agriculture. In the other, wild, random seeds, cast into the world by wind and birds. Both are mystery.

The farmer, who knows which seeds to plant and when to plant them, doesn’t know exactly how they grow. The seeds are sown, and faith takes over. Work is done in the meantime, of course, tilling, tending. But the harvest is mystery.

The lowly mustard seed, growing in a ditch with no one to plan for it or tend it, likewise grows to its potential, a bush big enough to make shade. No one knows how. Even today we can explain the growth of seeds scientifically, but the mystery of their spark of life eludes us.

Jesus says that’s what God’s reign is like. A new creation. But it starts very small, and grows to be a blessing. Whether planned or seemingly random, growth happens. Some days it’ll look like nothing is happening. But we walk by faith, not by sight. So we don’t lose heart.

Which brings us to the young shepherd, David.

Despite our writer’s adoration, who says David was ruddy, handsome, and had really pretty eyes, the truth of this story is David is overlooked. Whether Jesse knew why the great judge and prophet Samuel wanted to see his sons one by one isn’t clear. What is clear is that his response was to bring seven of his sons. Not the kid out back watching the sheep.

God takes this opportunity to remind Samuel that God ignores outward appearances and looks into the heart for the truth of a person. Something in David drew God. David, forgotten by his own father, becomes Israel’s greatest king. And yes, he’s flawed. He does horrible things along with the good. But at this point, David is the mustard seed. Not seen to have much value.

But we walk by faith, not by sight. So we don’t lose heart.

We can trust God with this mystery. We’ve seen this often.

Long before there was a statue of him on the National Mall, Martin Luther King, Jr. was just a pastor in the city of Montgomery. When Rosa Parks was arrested, he was the one local leaders chose to lead the boycott. A local minister, just trying to be faithful to Christ in his city.

Rosa herself wasn’t always a hero. She was a hardworking African-American woman asked to do what she did, to stand up to the oppressive Jim Crow laws. A regular person, just trying to make a difference in her own city.

Long before she became Mother Teresa, beloved international symbol of Christian life and ministry, Teresa was simply a nun from Albania who saw a need in one of the most desperate places in the world and went to Calcutta to be of help. Just a servant of God, trying to be faithful to Christ.

And a rich Italian playboy of the thirteenth century would have been unnoticed by history or anyone else except that he had a spiritual awakening and decided to follow the path of Jesus. Now there are statues of St. Francis of Assisi all over the world, and the movement of teachers and servants he founded has done wonderful ministry. But he was just an ordinary person, trying to be faithful to Christ.

These are beloved saints to us, people we admire and respect. The harvest of their lives is magnificent, and continues to have a great impact. But we’re looking back, from the harvest. The seed planted for their new creation was just as small as any of us to start.

We walk by faith, not by sight. So we do not lose heart.

It’s not likely we’ll produce such a famous harvest.

Those are remarkable people who somehow connected with their times and found a bigger stage. We probably won’t be remembered beyond our lives here except by those closest to us.

But that’s not the point. You are a new creation. The seed of God’s grace and love has been planted in you. You are growing into a force for God’s healing in your world, and if you’d look back at your path right now, you’d see that growth.

Like the farmer, you don’t know how it happens. But like Martin, and Rosa, and Francis, and Teresa, and millions of others, the fact that you’re just one person in a complicated, broken world, means nothing. God’s mystery is that you are needed, and you will be able to do what is needed.

We walk by faith, not by sight. So we do not lose heart.

You are a new creation. The seed is planted.

And you don’t have to wait for the harvest to hope, Jesus says. First the shoot breaks through the earth. Then there’s a stalk, then a head, then the full grain in the head. There might be long periods of time you can’t see growth, hope, promise. But watch: there will be signs.

And the promise will be fulfilled. There will be a harvest one day, feeding the world, breaking down walls of hatred and violence, healing all people. At some point the farmer sees the harvest is ready and gets the sickle. At some point there’s enough shade under the mustard bush that some birds decide to nest there. At some point the kid caring for the sheep becomes God’s leader for the people. At some point the person who saw a need in their own neighborhood changes something for the better. The harvest will come.

How, that’s a mystery. That’s in God’s hands.

But it will come: we walk by faith, and not by sight. So do not lose heart.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Sometimes it might even seem to us that Christ is out of his mind in what he asks of us: but the love we are called to live is the love we have already received. So we follow.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 10 B
Texts: Mark 3:20-35; 1 Samuel 8:4-20

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Some people thought Jesus was out of his mind.

Isn’t that stunning? Sure, lots were following him. Many brought loved ones for healing, others came to listen. But at home in Nazareth, crushed by the crowds, some folks thought he’d lost it.

So his family tried to restrain him. “You’re embarrassing us in front of our neighbors,” perhaps they wanted to say.

But are we sure of what we think of Jesus? This story, along with Israel’s demand for a king, places us firmly at the intersection of our faith and doubt. What do you really think about Jesus anyway? How much does what your neighbor thinks about you matter?

Some would say our faith in Christ is a sign of we’re out of our minds.

Plenty in our modern world look at us, people who hold belief in an unseen God, as separated from reality. By their measurements, we don’t fit. It’s a matter of point of view.

In 17th c. Salem, Massachusetts, the communal belief about witchcraft led to an hysteric period of trials and executions of people we today might call misguided, even mischievous teens, and others caught in the web. The community decided what was normal.

We gather in this space, collectively go on our knees to pray to a God we can’t see, and sing to this God, and listen to words from this God. This seems strange to many. But is there any sign apart from this that we’re not sane?

Not really. We’re flawed. We make mistakes, or in our faith language, we sin. But we’re mostly rational, functional human beings, we contribute to our communities, do good, care for our families, we’re normal people. We’re likely not out of our minds.

But consider the strangeness of what we hear about Jesus, and about faith.

In today’s Gospel Jesus casts out demons. Today we see signs in many of these exorcism stories of actual disease. Some look like epilepsy, others like serious mental illness. Whatever Jesus actually did, we sometimes understand it differently than back then.

For two millennia people of faith have had visions of God that taught us, inspired us. People who were perhaps transported out of their mind to see the love of God on an intense level, to understand creation and the divine will. But today, wouldn’t these people be sent to a psychiatrist, and medicated? Today’s world understands visions very differently.

Yet those stories of exorcism witness to God’s power to enter our lives and bring wholeness. We are blessed by them. Those visions over the centuries open to us the truth about God’s love and grace. We are also blessed by them. Who says they’re not normal?

Each group and culture decides what’s within the pale and what isn’t. But what if we’ve got a problem with Jesus ourselves?

It’s possible that we sometimes think Jesus is out of his mind.

At this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has cast out a lot of demons. He’s done many healings. But he’s also offered forgiveness, as if he had God’s authority. He’s claimed authority over God’s Sabbath command. He’s spent time with publicly outcast people. Tax collectors. “Sinners,” as if that’s a title.

People likely weren’t bothered by the healing or exorcising demons. But declaring God’s forgiveness and grace, spending time with so-called “bad” people, interpreting God’s law as intended to bless, these were problems. They’ll only get more so. Wait till he starts talking about taking up crosses and following him to the cross.

But are you also embarrassed by Jesus? Do you wish you could restrain him when he calls you to vulnerable and sacrificial love? Are you willing to forgive utterly as God forgives? To welcome into your company people you find objectionable?

It does seem that, like Jesus’ family, sometimes we’d like to get him to stop talking and come inside, before the neighbors think we’re crazy like he is.

It’s a question of who we want as our true authority.

The Israelites were tired of the era of the judges. When things got bad, God raised judges to lead the people. But Samuel, a good judge, named his sons judges, and the people didn’t like them. So they asked for a king, like their neighbors had. An authority who was in control. Trusting God to guide them, following God’s ways, that wasn’t what they wanted. Even with the very dark side of having a authoritarian ruler that Samuel laid out for them, they rejected following God as ruler.

We prefer ourselves as our final authority. “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul,” the poet has said.[1] We don’t want an authoritarian ruler. But we’d rather have ourselves as the final verdict in how our lives are run. Like Israel, this is a rejection of God.

Jesus’ radical view of servant love, shaped by the cross, is often more than we want to do. So we sometimes think, “he’s a little over the top, let’s do it our way.” We restrain Jesus from annoying the neighbors, or making them think we’re strange.

But Jesus says his true family doesn’t restrain him, they follow.

Loving as he loves. Forgiving as he forgives. Hanging out with all people, all kinds. Not crushing people with God’s law. Loving God completely, and loving neighbors. Jesus’ family follows God’s path of love as authority.

It’s not an easy path. Why do you think we’ve tried to restrain Jesus so often? But Jesus longs that we realize this path of Godly, Christ-like love enables our lives to make sense, provides far more blessing and joy than it costs, makes our hearts and lives whole and well. You know this: you’ve met this astonishing Love of God in your bodies and lives, in Word and Sacrament, in each other. You know the love God took to the cross is the only thing that gives peace and hope. Walking in that path is the only thing that makes sense, too.

Others might think you’re out of your mind, but they already thought that with you coming here every week. What difference does it make to take it the whole way, and follow God fully, not yourself?

And what do you care what the neighbors think? Just love them and care for them in Christ’s name and you won’t have to worry about the rest.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)

 

We listen for what God wants, what Jesus, God’s Son, says is compassion and love; in our listening we have God’s gift of Elis who help us hear.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 9 B
Texts: Mark 2:23 – 3:6; 1 Samuel 3:1-20; Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

What do you hear when you listen for God?

What insight or guidance comes? Do you hear God’s compassion for the creation, God’s undying love for all? Do you hear God’s judgment and wrath on others, on you?

There is no question in human history that has caused more destruction and suffering than “What does God want?” Bitter wars have endlessly been fought between different faiths and within the same faith. Hatred and violence and abuse and oppression and evil beyond comprehension have been done by humans to humans, to other creatures, and to the creation, because someone claimed, “this is what God wants.”

The story of Samuel begins, “The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” It was long since the last judge, and no one was hearing God speak and telling the people. But now God calls this little boy – how old we don’t know – to be a prophet. God speaks to Samuel, who will declare to the people what God is thinking, what God wants. But right now this boy, our writer says, “did not yet know the LORD.” Samuel had never heard God speak. The word of God was rare.

What about you? Have you heard? What do you hear when you listen for God? And how do you know you’re listening to God, and not someone or something else?

This is the dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees today.

The Pharisees aren’t bad guys here. Like Samuel, like Jesus, they listen to God, and teach what God is saying. So they know God’s Sabbath commandment is central, one of the Ten. They’ve faithfully created rules to help the people keep this law, do what God wants.

When Jesus lets his hungry disciples work on the Sabbath – picking grain was work – they rightfully say this violates their understanding of Sabbath law. When Jesus heals a withered hand, again, they declare him in violation.

But this rabbi Jesus, the Son of God, hears God differently. They don’t recognize him as God’s Son, of course, only as a teacher. But this rabbi declares that the Sabbath commandment was designed to be a blessing to humanity. A gift from God. Something Orthodox Jews today would completely agree with. So, Jesus reasons, if Sabbath is gift, letting someone go hungry, or delaying someone’s healing, violates that gift. As he asks, do you think it’s lawful to do good on the Sabbath, to save life?

This is just a normal dispute between Jewish rabbis over following God faithfully, though it ends with ominous foreshadowing. So as we witness this, wondering what God wants, who’s got it right?

Well, we who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection and filled with the Spirit of God find that’s an easy answer.

We believe Jesus is the face of the Triune God, who reveals the Father’s heart and gives us the Holy Spirit for new birth. If Jesus, God’s Son, says that compassion and love is how to interpret God’s commandment on Sabbath-keeping, that’s our final answer. Jesus is the living Word of God, God’s desire, God’s intent, in our flesh. We read the written Word of God through Jesus: his take on Scripture and God’s will is our norm.

Yet this doesn’t answer “what do you hear when you listen for God?” Because believers in Jesus have led the killing and destruction over God’s will for the world. We’ve killed millions: each other, and people who weren’t Christian. We’ve permitted the destruction of the environment, and either quietly or openly supported oppression and prejudice and hatred, all in the name of the Christ who wouldn’t let a man wait a single day more to have his hand healed.

In our nation alone, an outside observer of Christians would conclude that there are serious, nearly unsolvable disagreements between Christians over what God wants. When we hear what some Christians say about the poor, immigrants, war, race, gender, really just about everything, we wonder if they’re even Christian at all. And they say the same of us.

Maybe Eli can be of some help.

Samuel may not have heard God before. God’s Word might have been rare then. But Eli had heard God. Eli had been faithful. He was flawed, yes. His sons were evil and destructive, and God said this was partly Eli’s fault.

But this story is about Samuel. And Eli is God’s gift. When Samuel hears a voice, Eli realizes who is calling. Eli helps Samuel recognize what he has no experience with: knowing when God is speaking to him.

Carrying this wisdom, Samuel now hears God speak, and begins his path to be one of God’s greatest prophets. One who, our writer says, never let a single word of God “fall to the ground.” Eli made it possible for Samuel to find this faithful path of listening to God, holding on to God’s words, and carrying them to the people.

Eli still works today. That’s God’s gift.

When you struggle to hear God, to know what God wants and desires, look around. Find an Eli to help you sort out what’s going on.

Think: who has served as Eli to you in your life? Who has said, “I think that’s God leading you,” or sent you to a place in Scripture, or to worship, or to a community of faith, where you could hear God more clearly?

In this place we gather to worship when we could easily each pray at home, because here we meet God in Word and Sacrament. God speaks to us through Scripture, and through the actual presence of Christ in this place. We find the heart of God’s love in the Meal of grace we share that gives us forgiveness and life.

But we also have each other as a means of God’s grace, as Elis. You have others here who are also listening for God, trying to understand God’s desire. These Elis help you listen. And in the mystery of God’s Spirit, you are also Eli, to others here, and even in the world.

As we help each other listen, we hear God’s desire clearly from Jesus today. Love and compassion for all. A desire to heal and not destroy. A love that God will unmistakeably prove in dying on a cross and rising to new life. It may even be with the Spirit’s grace we can serve as Eli to other Christians who don’t hear this love, don’t offer it to others.

Thanks be to God, our times aren’t like when Samuel was called.

God’s Word, alive in the risen Christ and in our hearts through the Spirit, is with us constantly. It’s not rare. And we have the written Word to shape our listening and discerning. We have each other as Eli, opening our ears.

So always keep listening. How God’s compassion and love are to unfold in this broken world will need your best mind, your keenest ears.

And as Eli says, your first step is always to say, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We are born in the Spirit into the very life of God, part of the family of the Triune God, and are no longer “I” but “we,” living each day with God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Holy Trinity, year B
Texts: John 3:1-20; Romans 8:12-17

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

To be in a family is to belong. To be connected. To be a “we,” not an “I.”

In a family, everything is more complicated. Your own needs and wants are counted among everyone else’s, so meeting them is always a conversation, a give and take, a sharing of life.

But what a glorious thing, to be a “we” instead of simply an “I.” There is life and joy and hope and love in “we”.

The Trinity shouldn’t be so hard for us to grasp, then, should it? God is also a “we,” not an “I”. That’s always how God comes to us. Whatever we understand about the Triune God, the relationship of family, community between Spirit, Son, and Father is probably the easiest and most helpful for us to imagine. God belongs to God – one God, yet three Persons – living together in love and dance and joy. A divine “we” creating all things.

Consider what this means for us, created in the image of God.

As I wrote in this week’s Olive Branch, God’s creating word in Genesis 1 is deeply significant: “Let us make humankind in our own image.” If the Triune God is an “us” not an “I,” and this communal God created humanity in God’s image, then this is our deepest reality. We are God’s image when we are connected to each other, to all humanity.

God created a beautiful diversity of genders, languages, colors, and shapes in humanity, and all this, says the Triune God, all this, is God’s image.  This rich diversity is the way God expresses the breadth and depth of the truth about God.

So without every child of God, every person, included, we can’t see or be the whole image of God. You were made to be complete in connection with all God’s children. I cannot be who I am made to be apart from you. There is only “we.”

In this community of faith here we learn how blessed this is, and are taught to be family in a way we can take beyond here to our whole world. Each of you is necessary to this family gathered here, whether it’s your first time in this room for worship or your fiftieth year. Here in this community we glimpse the grace of being a “we” not an “I” and our eyes learn to see how being connected to all God’s children of all kinds is our true identity.

This alone is wonder and joy enough for us today. But then we hear the astonishing words of John, chapter 3.

Father, Son, and Spirit are all here, but we tend to focus most on the first two. We repeat John 3:16 and the love of the Father, print it on signs and posters and bumper stickers. We focus our faith on the grace of the Son being lifted up on the cross, as Jesus says here, for our healing and life.

But the greeting with which I begin each Eucharist, Paul’s greeting in 2 Corinthians 13, speaks not only of the grace of Jesus Christ, and not only of the love of the Father. There is also this wonder: the fellowship, the koinonia, the sharing in the Holy Spirit, as Paul literally says.

And that’s in John 3, also. Perhaps, like Nicodemus, we’re so confused by the idea of a new birth from above we skim right past it. Clearly Jesus isn’t talking about a new physical birth. And not a “born again” moment once and for all when we each, as individuals, somehow find a depth of faith.

Jesus simply says: You are born of water and the Spirit. The Spirit mothers you into new life. And if you are born of the Spirit – and Jesus will repeat this often – you are born into the life of God. The Spirit gives you birth into the “we” that is God.

Paul says today we are joined into God’s family. Heirs of God. Jesus says the Spirit is our mother, giving us birth, and, as Jesus promised last week, walking alongside us, our Advocate, our guide, and she delivers us into the family life of the Triune God.

So you are never apart from God, born into God’s internal, eternal family life.

And that changes even how you view yourself individually. The 14th century Sufi Muslim poet Hafiz describes it this way. He says he used to wake in the morning saying “What am ‘I’ going to do?” But a seed cracked open inside him, he says, and now he is certain that he is not the only one “housed in this body.” There are two of us, he says. Two “doing the shopping together in the market and tickling each other while fixing the evening’s food.”

“Now when I awake,” he writes, “all the internal instruments play the same music: ‘God, what love-mischief can ‘We’ do for the world today?” [1]

Can you imagine such joy? To dream not “what will I do today,” but “what will we – God and me, living together – do?” The Spirit of God is within you, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, Paul says, so you are no longer only an “I.” You are a “we.” God and you, as one, walking in the world, loving your neighbor, joined to all humanity.

This is our true reality: “we” with each other as the image of God, and “we” within the Triune God in every breath we take.

You might not feel either kind of “we” deeply right away. Whenever you join any family, there’s time needed to live into that family’s life, learn what the family feels like. If you’ve never even thought about God within you as a “we”, or all people together as the completed image of God, it will be new. But it will be beautiful. And in our life together as a community, as a “we,” we help each other. As a friend of mine said, our calling is to be the midwife of the Holy Spirit. She gives birth to all; we help that birth along in each other and in the creation.

As you awaken to the Spirit within you, mothering you in the family of the Triune God, showing you your life with all people, knowing it is true is a good start. From there you live into the reality, until you also find yourself waking up each day and saying, “God, what love-mischief can ‘we’ do for the world today?”

What indeed.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] From The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master, translated by Daniel Lodinsky; Penguin Compass, 1999.

 

The Spirit still comes, gives us the ability to reach the world with God’s Good News, gives us the language – rich and broad and diverse – to tell all what God has done, and is doing.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Day of Pentecost, year B
Texts: Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15; Ezekiel 37:1-14

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Language has always delighted me.

I love learning words, using words. Foreign languages come easily to me. But love of language isn’t always a blessing. On my first report card in the first grade I received a C in citizenship. My teacher wrote there, “Joseph over-exercises his freedom of speech.” And Mrs. Peterson actually liked me!

My verbal fluency also didn’t help me when I became a parent. I had many frustrating experiences as a father in the years when my children were non-verbal. This went both directions. I couldn’t understand their needs sometimes, especially after trying food, changing, or holding, and I couldn’t explain anything to them. I loved it when, with each child, I could communicate with my beloved words, and could hear them speak.

“Give us language to proclaim your Good News,” we asked the Holy Spirit at the start of this liturgy. But language is more than words. Even once my children learned to speak, my tone of voice, my body language, my facial expression, even my volume, I’m sorry to say, conveyed more to them than my actual words. Communicating love is complex, challenging, and richly diverse in how that communication happens.

So when we ask the Spirit, “Give us language to proclaim your Good News,” when we hear once more of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit onto the faithful believers, we are asking for words, yes. And for much, much more.

This Pentecost event meant finding language – so a diverse group of people could hear the Good News about what God was doing.

Imagine the scene. At the Passover, Jerusalem was filled with Jews from all over the world, who carried news of this strange death and resurrection back to their various homelands. Fifty days later, Jerusalem is filled again, for the harvest festival of Pentecost. It’s an astonishing litany of nations represented, as far away as Rome – over 2,000 miles – and northern Africa – over 1200 miles – and as near as Asia Minor, faithful Jews filling Jerusalem to overflowing once again.

What a cacophony of languages represented there! Only one hundred and twenty followers of the risen Jesus were gathered, speaking only Aramaic, though some knew Greek. How on earth would they tell all these foreign people what God is doing in Christ and what the Spirit is bringing into life?

The Spirit gave them the ability to communicate, Luke says. Over 3,000 joined that group of 120 believers that day. These thousands heard, saw, marveled. And they believed God’s Good News.

The Spirit gave the believers the ability to reach these people.

That’s why we ask, “give us language to proclaim your Good News.” If we’re going to witness to God’s love for the universe revealed in Christ Jesus we’ll need as much help as those hundred and twenty did 2,000 years ago.

We’ll need help to communicate that the God of the universe can bring life even to dead, dry bones. That the God of the universe loves all creatures beyond our understanding and description. That the God of the universe lived a human, mortal body among us and showed us the path of vulnerable, sacrificial love that can heal the earth. That this God will draw all creation into the love and dance of the life of the Triune God. And that this love of God we’ve found gives us life and joy – and hope for us and the whole creation.

How on earth can we tell all this? Well, the Spirit gave them the ability. That’s our only hope.

And the language we pray for is words, and much more than words.

In the Church we constantly pay attention to the words we use. We cherish our ancient words, and here at Mount Olive we lovingly tend that tradition. But we also listen and hear that some words we use, even beloved ones, block others from hearing of God’s Good News. We need the Spirit’s help to hold the balance between beloved tradition and new language, so people aren’t prevented from hearing of God’s love, but are drawn into the heart of God’s love.

We also pay attention to our other languages. St. Francis said, “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” We attend not only to what comes out of our mouths, but what our mouths look like, our faces, our gestures. Our bodies are gifts of the Holy Spirit, and we will convey compassion, grace, forgiveness, and love far more by how we are with people than by the words we choose. This is true in this place, and our hospitality to guests who sojourn here for a day or months or years. But it is true for every place you go. In your home, at the market, at work, on the street.

What do God’s children you don’t know see in you when you meet them? Do they see welcome, love, grace? Do they see judgment before a word escapes your lips? Is God’s love visible in you? The Holy Spirit fills you to be the embodied love of God. The language you need for that witness is the fullness of communication: voice, hands, heart, eyes, posture, attitude.

Jesus promised God’s revelation wasn’t completed with his teaching.

The Spirit will guide you into all the truth, when you’re ready to bear it, Jesus said. That’s why we delight in this Pentecost language we pray for. We carry the words and attitudes and bodies of our ancestors to proclaim God’s Good News. But as we’re ready, as you’re ready, the Holy Spirit will teach new things to add to the old. Will sometimes urge a change in words or actions. Will remind you of your call to love.

Pentecost isn’t really about that event 2,000 years ago. It’s about the truth of God’s Holy Spirit continuing to give birth to witnesses today, among all God’s children, young, and yes, Joel says, even old ones.

The Spirit will give you the ability. So be ready. It’s breathtaking when God’s wind and fire blow into your life. And just imagine whom God will reach through your witness!

In the name of Jesus.  Amen