Playing with Fire

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.19.13; Pentecost Sunday

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 2:1-21

I’ve always loved fire.  It’s just part of how I am, that fascination with flame, and it goes back quite a ways.   I’m not a pyromaniac, mind you.  Pyrophilic, perhaps.  

My memories of fire go way back.   As a little boy growing up in Africa, I can remember one afternoon going to the movies.   That was exciting, because there weren’t a whole bunch of broadcast entertainment options in Nairobi.   Most of what was broadcast over Kenyan national television wasn’t exactly must see TV.  Imagine if there was only one channel, and it was CSPAN.  That was Kenya in 1974.   Using the TV to sit your kids wasn’t an option, unless your kids liked watching sweating men in ill fitting uniforms talk about Kenyatta’s five point agricultural plan for the next year.

Screens showing fun stuff were a rare treat.   The moviehouse seemed to me like this great big warehouse of a space, which means...given that I was in kindergarten...that it was probably a building around this size.   Parents would drop off their kids with a few shillings in their pockets for popcorn and lemonade, and an old projector would clatter to life, and in that hot crowded room we’d watch old Woody Woodpecker cartoons and silent Buster Keaton films and old damaged prints of Herbie the Lovebug.

It was at least twelve times as magical as an iPad.   But there were better things.  On one afternoon, as the movies wrapped up, I became distracted.  Snuck out, in fact, because another boy had told me something even better was happening outside.   There was a fire, and we went out to watch it.

It was a semi-controlled brush fire, the tall grass having been set alight to prepare it for farming the fields right by the moviehouse.   It’s an old memory, so it may not be entirely accurate, but I do have a deep sense recollection of just how immensely hot it was, standing in the cut grass just a few yards from that roaring wild thing.   The flames were higher than the building behind me, three, four, five times the height of a man, leaping skyward.   It was ferocious and alive and dangerous, and that made it fascinating. 

I seem to recall getting quite the talking to about that, being pulled away by my folks who were equal parts worried because they didn’t know where I’d snuck off to and because they’d found me standing yards from a wildfire.   I remember my face, my arms, my shirt, still glowed with heat.

Because fire is dangerous.  Don’t play with it, said your teachers and your parents.   Matches are not toys, we were told.  But from a British Scout Manual from the late 1950s, I’d learned that you could make tiny little solid rockets out of paper matches, and I would sneak off on sleepy Sunday afternoons to fire them at my toy soldiers.

And no, I’m not going to provide schematics.

We are taught to be wary around fire.   But Pentecost, this day we’re celebrating today, is all about fire.

It’s a strange word, Pentecost.  Here we have a word describing a Jewish holiday, and it’s not even in Hebrew.  It’s a Greek term, and it has nothing to do with fire.

Pentecost means, in the Greek, “The Fiftieth Day,” marking fifty days after the celebration of the Passover.  This festival was often called either the Festival of the Weeks or the Feast of Harvest.  Traditionally, this festival was also assumed to remember the giving of the law to Moses. 

We’ve been working our way through the Acts of the Apostles these past few weeks, and much of what we’ve been hearing has to do with preparing us for Pentecost.  This is a pivotal story in the tale told by the author of Luke and Acts, one that has been carefully foreshadowed.   In Luke 24:49, Jesus tells the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they receive what God has promised.   “Stay until you have been clothed with power from on high,” he says.   In Acts 1, he’s more explicit.  “...you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

In Luke’s story, the Last Supper is Passover, so they wait for fifty days.  During that time, Acts chapter one tells us that they pray and have meetings to discuss organizational structure and leadership transition dynamics, a sure sign that the earliest church may have been Presbyterian.

That foreshadowed event does arrive, and when it does it is significant.

The first thing that the disciples encounter is a sound, in the Greek, an echos.   That doesn’t meanmeanmean that ititit repeated itselfselfself.  It’s just the term for a sound.   It also is not the blowing of wind itself, so any visions you might have of that Upper Room being blasted with wind machines needs to be set aside.  It is just the sound, like the thundering of a train that augurs a tornado or the dragon breath roar of an incoming derecho, but wind is the closest analogue we can think of.

Following that comes the arrival of tongues of fire, again, not actual fire, but something remarkably like it.   Fire is fairly consistently used to describe the divine presence in the Bible.  There’s the burning bush from Exodus 3, the pillar of fire that leads the Jewish people to freedom in Exodus 13, among others.   At the beginning of the story of Jesus, John the Baptist suggests that the arrival of the Holy Spirit will be a baptism not like the baptism in water, but will involve a different form of transformation.

The impact the arrival of the tongues of fire have is to suddenly allow the gathered followers of Jesus to speak in an array of languages, languages that allow them...as they pour out into the street...to speak and be understood by all who had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival.

“Who are these people,” they ask.  “Galileans?”   That would have been especially confusing, because the people of Galilee were generally assumed to be the most backwards and linguistically incompetent of people.  In the ancient world, Galileans were the sorts of people who spoke with a drawl, droppin’ their cons’nants and not speakin’ cirectly and generally showing themselves to be ignorant backwoods types.  Here they could barely speak Aramaic, their own language, and suddenly they’re talking in every language under the sun?  

But what is most striking, most significant, most notable about the arrival of the fires of Pentecost is that they are dangerous.  Oh, they’re not dangerous in the way that fire is dangerous, but they nonetheless pose a threat to the way things are.

It’s not a soft wind, a gentle babies’ breath, the sweet sussuration of the breeze through a willow in some pastel motel room painting.  It is a pneuos biaios, a violent wind, a “mighty rushing wind.”  

And what the Spirit does, much to our consternation, is destroy those things that tear us apart.  It is a radical and unmediated interaction with our Creator, and that’s an immense and terrible thing.   It is dangerous to our persons, and it is dangerous to our communities.

That’s not because it bears the weight of God’s anger.  It’s because it is the expression of God’s radical love.

That love is a threat to us personally because it challenges those things within ourselves that we’d prefer left unchallenged.  Those deep resentments and carefully nurtured hatreds, those sustaining fears and the anxieties that we use to organize our lives, none of those things survive an encounter with the Spirit.  That fire consumes them, and turns them to nothing.

It refines us and purifies us...which is why “fire” is the metaphor of choice for God’s presence.  We get the word “purify” from the word puros, the Greek word for fire.

That Spirit does the same thing for us as social creatures.  It takes down the biases and bigotries and selfishness of our gatherings.   On that first Pentecost, the gift given to the disciples was that very gift, the ability to make themselves known across the boundaries of culture and language, to speak the grace of what Jesus offered in a way that everyone could grasp it.

Some fire, we need to be wary of.  But the Spirit?  Where you feel it moving, where you feel it challenging, where you sense it at work, let it be at play in you.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

As the World Gives

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 05.05.13

Scripture Lesson:  John 14:23-29

Be a non-anxious presence, they tell you in seminary.

Which is funny, because of all of the folks I know, few are more anxious and stressed out than pastors.  They’re rushing from meeting to meeting, worried about their life-balance, and lamenting the sorry state of their sermon on Facebook at 11:47 pm on a Saturday night.

Being non-anxious is easier said than done, particularly in a culture that lives and breathes stress and tension.  We do, of course.  Anxiety is central to our society, woven into the very fabric of our life together.

Because being at ease and comfortable with ourselves simply won’t do.  We need to be continually comparing ourselves to others, worrying that our house isn’t large enough or that we aren’t thin enough or that our smartphone didn’t do well enough on the SATs.   We need to stay hungry and tense and uncertain, because that keeps us motivated.

A survey released this week by the National Journal revealed just how deeply that tension runs.  Americans have legendarily been an optimistic people, driven and certain that their manifest destiny was to strive and succeed in a never-ending march of progress.  We’re all can-do and stick-to-it, a nation of self-confident strivers and achievers.

But the last few years haven’t been quite so gentle to many of us, as the National Journal Heartland poll revealed.   Mixed in with our hopefulness was an equal portion of gnawing doubt about our futures.

For most of us, there was worry.  That great swath of the American middle class isn’t exactly brimming over with positive vibes about the future.  A significant majority of us think we have less opportunity to get ahead than we did a generation ago, that there’s less job and financial security than there was a generation ago, and that we have to push harder to make ends meet.

Paying for college and having enough savings to weather a financial storm?  The majority of folks surveyed viewed that as something that only the rich could manage.

The American Dream, increasingly, seems to involve us walking through a door and finding ourselves standing in front of Congress, where we have to deliver the State of the Union address, only we’re not prepared and we’re only wearing our tighty whiteys.

Us?  Stressed?  Really?  Anyone see the picture of that girl from the Jamestown colony this last week?   It’s pretty rare that archaeological news makes the headlines, but the discovery of her four hundred year old remains confirmed, for the first time, that early American colonists resorted to eating one another in times of crisis.  Our stress would make sense if things with us were as they were in that colony during that Starving Time, that period between 1609 and 1610 when the first US colony went from a community of 500 to a community of 60.

Things are not anywhere near that bad.  Hopefully.   Although if you find anyone unusually interested in making sure you eat a few more donuts at the fellowship hour, I’d be a little careful.  

This is strange, because by all rights, we should be happy.  Here we’ve been blessed with a land that provides enough food to feed not just ourselves, but much of the rest of the world.  There are more than enough homes out there for everyone.  We have an abundance, a great overflowing cornucopia of possessions unmatched in human history, and yet we’re still afraid of what tomorrow will bring.

Nonetheless, we remain terrified of what might happen.  We are so busy scrambling and holding on to what we have that we can forget to enjoy it.   We are so worried about what tomorrow might bring that today itself becomes nothing.

As we move into the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel this morning, it is that fear that Jesus is challenging in his disciples.  Things are coming to a close for John’s story of the life and teachings of Jesus, and they aren’t trending particularly well.

In the previous chapter, Jesus first washes the feet of his disciples, and then warns them that he is soon to be betrayed by one of them.  It was at just about this moment that Judas Iscariot remembered he needed to get something at the store.

Beginning in chapter 13 verse 31, Jesus starts talking.  It’s the beginning of what is called John’s Farewell Discourse, perhaps the biggest hunk of Jesus-teaching in the entire New Testament.  It runs all the way through the end of chapter 17, as we’re presented with an extended expression of what Jesus views as most important to pass along to those who had gathered around him.

What he offers them, first and foremost, are words of comfort.   Why?  Because he has just told them that he expects to be betrayed, and that he will soon no longer be with them.

He does so in the obscure, circuitous language of this Gospel, with phrases like:

“On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.  They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them...”

 “OK, wait, now, I’m in...and they who...and you...um....OK.”   But in that whirl of concepts, the idea gets across.  He is leaving.

So to calm the hearts of his disciples, Jesus speaks words of comfort to them.  He also makes them a promise.

What he is promises them he calls the Advocate.  It’s the promise that the message that he has offered them will never be separate from them, never distant.  John’s Gospel, along with Luke, focuses on the presence of the Spirit.

In the face of all of the troubling, challenging, and nail-biting anxieties handed us by this world, we are reminded in this passage that what Jesus offers is different.   Faith is different.  It’s not grasping.  It’s not feeling driven by anxiety over what you might have or not have.  It’s not being driven by concern that you’re not meeting standards, or terror over losing something.

It’s a different thing altogether.

Grounded in the Spirit, faith guides us to approach everything around us differently.  It guides us to view our interaction with the material things around us differently.   

The world does give, here and there.  Sometimes it gives in abundance, sometimes we find ourselves struggling to get by.   Sometimes we have exactly that thing we want, but then what the world around us tells us is that that thing is not enough.  We need more.  We need what that other guy has, the newest, the shiniest, the latest and the best.

It’s not enough.  It can never be.  It is not meant to ever be enough.

And when that way of viewing things becomes the way we view people, our anxiety only deepens.  We hold onto them, tightly and desperately.  We approach relationships with a hunger...not a Jamestown hunger, hopefully...but a hunger nonetheless.  Our fears, of being unloved, of being abandoned, of being 

What the Spirit gives instead is comfort.  Guided by God’s grace, we no longer view our possessions as something that drives us.  Instead, we remember, as Christ taught in the  Sermon on the Mount, that worry can devour us.  Worry takes a potentially joyful moment and turns it sour.  Worry turns us in on ourselves, and prevents us from either experiencing joy or sharing it.  A heart guided by the Spirit finds joy not in grasping or controlling, but in giving and supporting.

But how does that work?  Oh, sure, it’s good to say it, but the actual doing of it is sometimes beyond us.  Our fear of loss is so strong.

And for the disciples, faced with the imminent absence of the human being they’d oriented their whole lives towards, that anxiety would have run deep.   What will we do now?

What Jesus was reminding them, gently, was that the gift of the Spirit is not like other gifts.  It isn’t a thing.   It’s the presence of God’s own spirit, the creative and loving power that sustains and creates all things.  If that is present in us, then we cannot lose anything or any one, any more than God can lose anything or anyone.

And with that knowledge, fear has no place in our hearts.  

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Picky Eater

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.28.13 

Scripture Lesson: Acts 11:1-18

It used to be that I could go just about anywhere, and I wouldn’t have any trouble finding something to nosh on.

Back in the day, I was a full-on omnivore.  Well, actually, I was mostly a carnivore.  I’d eat pretty much anything you set in front of me, particularly and especially if it was beef.  Burgers and roast beef and steaks, you name it.  If you could hack it from the flank of a cow, I’d eat it.

When I was a college age devourer of flesh, one of my very favorite things was to wander over to Big Jim’s, this joint off Route 29.  It served up the Big Jim’s Platter, which was a mess of slaw, a pile of fries as big as your head, and a half-pound burger.  I liked that, but even better was the Barbeque platter, which was a monstrous sloppy mess of a beef barbecue sandwich, a mess of slaw, and a pile of fries as big as your head.

Big Jim’s is gone now, but so is my twenty year old metabolism, so that’s probably for the best.

But shortly after getting married to my vegetarian wife, I began to eat meat less and less.  That dwindled to nothing just about fifteen years ago, and now?  Now I’m studiously and fastidiously vegetarian.  Not vegan, mind you.  If the good Lord hadn’t meant us to eat ice cream, he would never have created Ben or Jerry.  I’m just vegetarian.

I am that way for a variety of reasons.  Oh, sure, it started as habit.  I began mostly because I was too lazy to make my own food.  But then all those reasons that my wife had began to stick, and I layered on ecological, moral and spiritual reasons of my own.

That’s made me carefully observant of what I consume.  Is there meat in that, I’ll ask.  What’s in that, I say?

On occasion, I’ve accidentally taken a mouthful of meat.  And like a five year  old who in a distracted moment accidentally eats some broccoli, I’ll subtly attempt to spit it out.  Or sometimes, not so subtly.

It’s just such a part of my identity now that I have a hard time accepting that I’d actually eat anything that involved animal bits.

Strange, how something can come to define you, so much so that you sometimes can’t imagine life being any other way.

It does mean, though, that I can feel where Peter is coming from in today’s passage from the Acts of the Apostles.

Here we are, eleven chapters in to this story of the early church, and we’re already getting a sense of deja vu.  The section of Acts you’ve just heard is a section that a reader of this story would have already heard, all the way back in chapter 10.  What we’re getting is a recap, not quite an “in the last episode of the Acts of the Apostles,” but pretty darn close.

This chapter is important to the author of Acts, and so instead of just telling us something like, “And Peter told them what had happened,” he chooses to spin the entire story again.

Why?  It’s not laziness, or a desire to bump up the word count of his manuscript.  The repetition here serves a specific purpose.  Here we have one of the most significant events in the development of Christianity as a world religion.

What’s happening here is the movement of Christianity from being a subset of Judaism to being a related but free-standing faith of its own.  Peter, we hear, is being challenged by a group of Jewish Christians.  He’s been hanging out with people outside of the faith, they claim, and worse yet, he’s brought them into the fold.

For this action, Peter’s been called on the carpet to ‘splain himself.  There are a couple of details in the chapter 11 story that are missing, though, ones that are worth resurfacing as we get into the story.

In describing events to those in Jerusalem, Peter somehow manages to completely leave out the name of the person involved.  But this is a story being told by a man to men, so name schmame.  The storyteller who brought us the acts of the Apostles doesn’t forget, though.  The man was named Cornelius, who is described not as Jewish but as a Roman centurion, one who commanded a force of 100.  He’s also described as  a “God fearer,” a term which has specific meaning.

It doesn’t just mean someone who has a church phobia.  As a term, it specifically describes someone in the first century who found Judaism fascinating.  God-fearers were spiritually moved by the stories of deliverance from Exodus, and by the powerful calls for justice they heard from the prophets, but they just couldn’t quite bring themselves to take that last step to enter into the Jewish community.

Adult baptism is one thing, and adult circumcision entirely another.

Cornelius had had a vision, one that made him seek out Peter, who just so happened to have another vision.

Sitting up on a rooftop, Peter’s feeling a mite peckish, and while waiting around for room service, he falls into a trance.  

Or, rather, he falls into what is described as an “ecstasy.”  The Greek term used is “ekstasis,” which literally means “outside-standing.”  He was no longer in himself, but was in a different state of being, no longer part of the reality he normally inhabited.

And from that place, he found himself encountering something fluttering down from the sky, not a sheet but  "something like" a sheet.  It was a vision, and most visions described in the Bible don’t just say, it was this, or it was that, but instead use analogous imagery.  “It was like this,” or “it was like that.”

What he sees is a cornucopia of living creatures, wildebeests and wombats and lemurs, fruitbats and llamas and the majestic moose.  And he hears:  Get up, kill, and eat.  He does not hear that it all tastes just like chicken, but that is implied.

There is no textured vegetable protein, nor is there any tofu.  It’s not quite my worst nightmare, but it’s getting close.

What it is is a challenge to the kashrut laws as a boundary.  As an observant Jew, Peter would have consumed some of the creatures on that fluttering platter.  Other foods, though, would have been off limits, the bacon and calamari and even cheeseburgers, which blend milk and meat in a way that is forbidden.  Peter is repeatedly pressed to embrace the possibility that things that he has viewed as profane might in fact be sacred.  Particularly bacon.  Crispy, crispy bacon.

Profane is an interesting word.  We tend to think of it through the lenses of our word “profanity,” those seven words that George Carlin told us we would never hear on T.V.   How quaint, think we in this blankety-blanking era of cable and internet television, but still.  We hear Peter protesting it in verse 14.  Nothing profane has ever entered my mouth, he says in the NRSV.  Nothing impure has ever entered my mouth, he says in the NIV.

But the word for “profane” is “koinon,” and it more accurately means “common.”  The Greek used in the ancient world, for example, was called koine...it was the common tongue.

Peter does not kill, nor does he eat.  He is not required to.

But what he is required to see is that those who are not him, who do not share his history or his culture or his specific faith practices, those people are just as worthy of the path of Jesus as he is.  He is challenged to see the presence of God’s spirit, even in these souls who are not as he is.  And he is particularly challenged by the radical assertion that God is at work not just at work in the obviously holy, but in those things we might consider common and plain and everyday.

This was a deep struggle in the early church, and it is something we too struggle with.  Our own sense of our identity, those behaviors and patterns that establish who we are and how we come into encounter with God, these things can be destructive of our own  ability to convey the grace of God to others.  

We can fold in on our own social connections, 

We can cling to our own party or people.

But none of those things reflect the reality that Peter encountered, the transforming truth that in the message of Jesus of Nazareth.  Just as he opened himself, we are asked to do the same.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.