Of Right Mind

Luke 8:26-39

House of Hope Presbyterian Church

22 June 2025

               The great twentieth century Reformed theologian Karl Barth taught preachers to preach with the Bible in one hand the newspaper in the other.  Meaning that our preaching should reflect on the concerns of the day and the people in the pews. 

               These days, when we carry a smart phone in hand and when the news is constantly changing, the task to frame a sermon that keeps up with current events becomes ever more challenging.

               I believe that the stories in the Bible and the teachings of our Christian traditions are always relevant to what we encounter, because we are drawing upon the collective wisdom of thousands of years of human experience as they too grappled with similar events.  We must open ourselves and cultivate the ability to hear God speaking to us in these ancient stories.

               Hear now the Word of the Lord from the Gospel of Luke:

               What are the pigs doing in this story?  It’s one of those tiny details that we might slip by, missing their importance.

               Because first century Jews didn’t eat pigs.  So, if you wanted to make money in the local economy, and raise some livestock that would feed your neighbors—pigs would not be a wise investment for a Jewish farmer. 

So, what are they doing here?  Obviously somebody was having bacon for breakfast.  If someone’s going to the trouble of raising a herd of swine, it is for some economic gain.  Who is buying the pigs?

The non-Jews, of course.  And most likely the occupying Roman imperial forces.  Roman soldiers and functionaries of the government and any Roman citizens living in the area—they were the consumer market for bacon and ham.

The pigs in this story are a clue.  A message we have to decode.  They point to a colonial economy.  They aren’t being raised for any local good, but to participate in the economy of the occupying, and oppressive, Roman Empire. 

This story has layers.  It’s more than a story about the healing of a deeply troubled and unwell man, though it is also about that.  It’s a story that invites us to think well, to think deeply and critically, about what it is that makes humans unwell.  What possesses us?  What haunts us?  What drives us out of our right minds?

This isn’t just a story about supernatural demons or even, if we take a more modern, medical lens and think of the man as experiencing a mental illness.  The story is also about the culture and society, the systems that create the conditions for this man to be unwell.

There is, of course, another clue in the story that the Roman imperial system is implicated in the story—and that is in the name the demon gives to Jesus—“Legion.”  A clear reference to the Roman army.  This man is possessed by the spirit of the Roman army.  His mind has been colonized.  Colonial occupation has driven him out of his right mind. 

And Jesus restores his mind.  Makes him well again.  Gives him back his dignity and his humanity.

Jesus does that by casting out the spirit of the Roman army and sending it careening over the cliff into the sea by casting it into the accursed herd of swine. 

Layers of symbolism and meaning in the way Luke tells us this story.

What occupies us and drives us out of our right minds?

In the last few years have you ever felt like the situation of the world, or the news of the day, was driving you nuts? 

Have you been consumed with worry for your grandchildren and the world they will inherit?

Have you felt so weighed down that you had trouble thinking or motivating yourself?

Have you had more trouble sleeping?

As a pastor, I hear these sorts of things from people.

Last night our family was leaving the movie theatre, having seen the new Disney film Elio, when I looked at my phone and learned the news of our attack upon Iran.  What had been a fun evening immediately soured, of course.  You could see the weight falling upon us.  Ironically, the Disney film was about ending conflict by caring for one another.

When I returned home, I opened Facebook and started seeing all the bewildered and worried responses.  And then, the memes began to appear.  My favorite was, “I can’t believe it’s WWIII season already . . . I still have my pandemic decorations up.”

Last week we gathered here in worship in the wake of an assassination, when the perpetrator was still at large.  This week we gather as the war drums sound.

It’s a lot.

So, what should we do?

First, let’s NOT be like the Gerasenes.

The commentaries I read were critical of the community this man has grown up in.  They have excluded him from normal society, such that he now lives in the place of the dead.  A clear indication of a form of what Orlando Patterson called “social death.”  Patterson coined the term to refer to the impact of enslavement upon the dignity of a human person.  This week we celebrated Juneteenth and the moment when emancipation finally spread to all of the United States.  A great and joyful celebration of human freedom.

But also a time to remember and to reflect.  The way we are treated by society can rob us of our dignity and our personhood and foreclose any opportunity to flourish.

The Gerasenes didn’t want to deal with this troubled man, didn’t want to face the reality of what was making him unwell, and their role in it.  So, better to drive him away.  Then, they don’t have to see it. 

Commentator Brendan Byrne reads all of the Gospel of Luke through the lens of hospitality and how God, through Jesus, is extending hospitality to a wide range of people.  This is one of the stories that upholds his analysis. 

The Gerasenes are inhospitable towards one of their own.  But Jesus extends a form of hospitality in restoring the humanity and the dignity of this troubled man.  Then the Gerasenes are further inhospitable, this time towards Jesus and what he’s done.  They still don’t want to face their own actions or the ways they are implicated in oppression and the social death of this child of their community.  Byrne writes, “They can cope better, it seems, with the presence of the demonic than with a power that has reclaimed one of their number by confronting and naming the evil.”

Jesus has restored this man by “confronting and naming the evil” that has oppressed him and drawing our attention to it.  The evil in this story flows from the imperial occupation, and the oppression, exclusion, injustice, and violence that results from it.  The demonic is the evil of imperial occupation.  And the effect it has upon the Gerasenes, leading them to inhospitality and the social death of one of their own.

               This week I turned to the books of the theologian Walter Wink, who has helped to teach us how we should think of the demonic in our own time.  Wink wrote a series of books on “the powers that be.”  The first in that series is called Naming the Powers. 

               Wink argues that not only for this story, but for others in the biblical canon, the demonic is not really a supernatural force, but is a spiritual embodiment of how human power is organized, used, and abused.  The demonic spirits in the New Testament are the powers—political, economic, cultural, religious, etc.  He writes, “They are the systems themselves, the institutions and structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and relationships.”

               Think of all the systems, institutions, and structures that make organized human life work.   These are the “powers.”  Anything from the water department to the police to public schools, Wall Street, Amazon, and PBS.  Even our artistic and cultural endeavors.  And, yes, the church.

               These things aren’t inherently bad or evil.  In fact, as Wink writes, “They are necessary.  They are useful.  We could do nothing without them.”  However, as he then quickly adds, “the powers are also the source of unmitigated evils.”

               The worst violence, oppression, and injustice results from when the powers misuse their power and authority.  They can crush the human soul, rob us of our dignity and our lives, and prevent our happiness and flourishing.   When they are operating at their best, performing as God created them to, then they respect human dignity, protect our rights, develop our capacities, and support our flourishing.

               As this Gospel story tells us, one can be made unwell and not of right mind, by the wider systems and structures that one has little to no control over.  And that the path to a right mind is when those forces are cast out.

I had written the first draft of my sermon this week before the Supreme Court ruling that allows states to ban gender-affirming health care for trans kids and teens.  So, I couldn’t help but frame my thoughts about the ruling through this Gospel lesson.  While the ruling focused on the legislative powers of states to regulate medical care, the majority of the court seemed blind to the actual reality of trans kids, as writer M Gessen pointed out in the New York Times.  They wrote, “I am asking you to imagine what it’s like to be a transgender teenager because that is exactly what the majority of the Supreme Court justices refused to do.”  They continued:

I ask you to imagine that teenager, the one who has to leave Tennessee or this country. The one who has to go through “natal” puberty when everything about it feels wrong. The one who spends those hours in front of the mirror not trying to make their hair look good but trying to hide body parts that make them hate themselves. The one who adjusts, stuffing their desire, their shame and their hope into some dark closet of the mind.

The court seems have dealt in the abstract and not focused upon the well-being and dignity of actual human persons.  A decision that will lead to death, both social and physical.

In the Gospel, the Gerasenes were afraid of this man, one of their own, and couldn’t face the reality of what was troubling him.  That seems the same in this situation.  M Gessen believes that this diminishment of human rights is occurring because of fear.  They write, “This retrenchment is fueled by fear: fear of the future, fear of unfamiliar concepts, fear of not knowing one’s child.” 

I would add that it’s also fueled by a refusal to face society’s role in causing gender dysphoria in the way we construct gender roles, set expectations, and put pressure upon our children. 

So, to our trans and nonbinary children and youth and to their families, I say, “I’m sorry.  We have worked hard to secure your human and civil rights and won’t stop in that effort.  Today we cannot fix this ruling, but we can provide a place of belonging, where you are loved and cared for and your inherent human dignity is respected.”

To be more hospitable, is to be more like God.  To be more open, inviting, inclusive, welcoming, friendly, compassionate.  To respect each other and to recognize our inherent human dignity and the rights that come with that.  The more we are hospitable, generous, and gracious people, the more we are like God and the way God desires us to be.  That’s the basic lesson of this story and one of the central themes of the Gospel of Luke.

There is not much that we can do today to change a Supreme Court ruling, stop the bombs from falling, or even deal with the long history of slavery and its lasting effects upon this nation.  We exist within larger social systems and structures that affect us.  And those systems often cause us harm.  They rob us of opportunities to flourish.  Their actions weigh us down, sometimes even colonizing our minds and binds.  We can be made unwell and not of right mind through no fault of our own but because of what happens in the wider world around us.

What we can do is try to be more like Jesus.  To be more loving, giving our time and attention to the least of these.  We can work to cultivate communities of compassion and belonging that are hospitable, welcoming, and inclusive.  And we can engage in the work naming the powers that harm and oppress us, drawing attention to them, and then, cast them off.  It’s not generally as easy as saying the right words and sending them over the cliff in a herd of swine.  That work is long and hard and sometimes we face setbacks. 

This week I was also drawn to the words of the theologian Kathryn Tanner.  She writes, “The fulsome character of [God’s] grace means [that] . . . one has all one needs to meet the present the challenge.” 

God wants us to live well.  God wants us to flourish.  And God has blessed the world with enough that we all might share in the blessings, if only we learned how to live well with each other. 

               In a time of war, violence, injustice, and oppression, I believe that the Christian church can, and must, be a witness to the wider culture.  We must bear witness to the fulsomeness of God’s grace, a life of abundance and flourishing.  We must bear witness to the goodness of God’s creation, God’s ongoing blessings, and the redemptive and reconciling project of God’s mission on the Earth.  We must bear witness that something better is possible—a life of beauty, joy, adventure, and peace.

               If we learn any actions from today’s gospel lesson, and the story of Jesus’ exorcism and healing of the Gerasene man, it should be that something better is possible.  We can extend the hospitality of God, respect the inherent dignity of our fellow humans, cast off the evils that possess us, and bring healing and hope.  We can be of right mind.

Spirit of Truth

John 16:12-15

House of Hope Presbyterian Church

15 June 2025

               Yesterday’s events—the assassination of Speaker Hortman and her husband Mark and the attempted murder of Senator Hoffman and his wife Yvette, plus the ongoing search for the gunman—have underscored that we live in violent and dangerous times.  The escalation of political violence in the last few years has been a frightening development, an assault upon our deepest values and our dreams for our nation and our world.

               Much of the Bible was itself written in the context of violence and in response to trauma.  Scholar David Carr claims that the Bible emerged precisely as a people’s response to suffering.

               So, we can turn to these ancient words to find human beings grappling with some of the same concerns we have, including how to handle our grief and anger, how to muster resilience, how to heal, and how to keep dreaming and hoping and working for a better world.

               Today’s Gospel passage is part of a long discourse Jesus gave to his disciples during the Passover gathering the night of his arrest, according to the telling here in the Gospel of John.  Jesus is preparing his followers for the trauma they are about to experience, and providing them encouragement for what will come—when the Holy Spirit arrives to fill them with power.

               Hear now these good words of Jesus:

When the Spirit of truth comes,
They will guide you into all truth.
They won’t speak on their own initiative;
rather, they’ll speak only what they hear,
and they’ll announce to you
things that are yet to come.
In doing this, the Spirit will give glory to me,
for they will take what is mine
and reveal it to you.
Everything that Abba God has belongs to me.
This is why I said that
the Spirit will take what is mine
and reveal it to you.

The town of Tilden, Nebraska lies near the Elkhorn River in the northeast part of the state, about halfway between the larger towns of Norfolk and Neligh.  Tilden’s population is currently just under one thousand. 

               There’s a vibrant little church in the town—Peace United Church of Christ—that maintains a strong music and children’s program for the benefit of the wider community. 

               If you were to visit Peace UCC you’d find the church history corner and in that corner a section devoted to the memory of beloved pastor August Brueggemann who served there almost a century ago. 

               But what you might not realize standing in that little white church is the giant impact that Peace Church has had upon the Christian church as a whole.  Because that beloved pastor had a son Walter who grew up in that church and who then became the greatest Biblical scholar of our time.

               The great Walter Brueggemann died last week at the age of 92.  Ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ.  Professor at Eden and Columbia Theological Seminaries.  And author of over 100 published books.  I think it is safe to say that no other contemporary scholar has had as deep an impact upon the practice of Christian ministry in our time, particularly in the Mainline Protestant churches.  Brueggemann wrote and spoke for preachers, helping us understand the Bible and how to communicate its stories and themes to the people in ways relevant to the concerns of the modern world.  I frankly can’t imagine being in this career without new wise words from Brueggemann, who was always there to provide guidance.  For example, he published a book on how to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic that came out in either April or May of 2020, just weeks into the lockdowns. 

               This week I was perusing some of his books that have deeply influenced my reading of the Bible and my preaching and teaching.  And ended up writing my next Anchor column about the influence of his prophetic imagination.  One of those books was his comprehensive Theology of the Old Testament, which has been a constant companion.  In the preface of that book, which was published in 1997, Brueggemann wrote that the scholarly consensus about the Bible that once existed in the middle of the twentieth century was now in disarray.  There were now many different voices and perspectives and no one set of theories dominated Biblical interpretation.

               Of course, many might find such a landscape confusing and disorienting.  Maybe even troubling.  But Brueggemann delighted in that disarray, because, as he wrote, it permitted “venturesome efforts at Old Testament theology.”  He enjoyed the many different voices and perspectives and taught us ministers to appreciate it as well.

               But there were two deeper, more theological reasons that Brueggemann delighted in the multiplicity of interpretations in our postmodern era.  First, he said the disarray better reflected the nature of scripture itself.  The Holy Bible is not monolithic, speaking in one voice.  The Bible is full of differing voices and perspectives, and much of his academic scholarship was oriented to teaching us to hear those various witnesses and be open to the reality of God’s word spoken in various, different ways. 

               But, there was an even deeper reason Walter Brueggemann delighted in the pluralism of our time—he thought it better reflected who God is.  As he wrote in the premise to his Theology of the Old Testament  “the unsettlement is a reflection of . . . the unsettled Character who stands at the center of the text.”  With “character” having a capital-C, indicating that he means God.  God is the unsettled character at the center of the Biblical story.   God cannot be contained by any one name or set or titles or one particular voice, perspective, or witness.  God, and our human experiences of God, are too big, too diverse.  They exceed our understanding and our ability to contain them, to pin them down.

               A fitting reminder on this Trinity Sunday.

               In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells his disciples that he will send the Spirit of Truth who will guide them into all the truth.

               In his commentary on this passage, Eugene Bay, encourages us to see that the Spirit works within the community.  This gospel text isn’t about individuals receiving private messages or special knowledge.  It is, rather, about the Spirit speaking and working through the fellowship of Jesus’ followers. 

               God might speak to individual people, but those various perspectives and voices need to be in dialogue and conversation with one another.  It is together that we discern the Spirit’s guidance.  It is together that we discover truth.  Which means that skills such as listening and empathy and working to understand one another are vital to the work of the Church, and to our health as a society.

               The Christian community the Spirit desires is one that is open and receptive.  Eugene Bay adds this to his comments on the gospel:  “What the text wants most to do is encourage within the community an openness to fresh encounters with the revelation of Jesus.  John intends to shape a community that is receptive to Spirit-guided growth.”

               I hope that’s what we want to be as well.  That we at House of Hope can be a community receptive to the guidance of the Spirit into fresh encounters.

               Eugene Bay writes that such a community—one that is open and receptive to the Spirit’s leadership—“can face the future with confidence.”  He adds, “John is confident that, relying on the guidance of ‘the Spirit of truth,’ the community will be led where it needs to go.”

               But sometimes it is difficult to muster that confidence, right?  To trust that the community is headed where it needs to go.  One reason we struggle with the confidence and trust necessary to take the risk is that it isn’t clear anymore what is true.  Or what is the way to discover truth.  Our social and political discourses include debates about basic facts.  People seem to exist in alternate realities with radically differing moralities.  Plus, now we have the growing quality of deep fakes and AI generated images and videos.  How to discern what is true will become even more complex and complicated.

               In response to yesterday’s events, Brian Klaas wrote in The Atlantic, “The United States is a fraying society, torn apart by polarization, intense disagreement, and ratcheting extremism.”  He continued, “We don’t know when or where the deadly conflagration will strike next, but more flames will no doubt come.  We may still be shocked . . . but we can no longer feign surprise.”

               In a society becoming more violent and dangerous, where cynicism and nihilism become serious options, how to form the courage to trust the guidance of the Spirit and be an open and receptive people?

               Among the temptations in a time such as this are to seek for certainty and to participate in unhealthy nostalgia.  Some people will retreat into ideologies that seem to have all the answers.  Others will try to compel a return to a time period they idolize.  Some will resort to force to get their way.  Others will give up entirely.

It’s clear why folks might yearn for what seemed simpler times, when maybe there was more confidence and a sense of certainty about many matters, including Biblical interpretation and theological ideas.  As Walter Brueggemann always understood, for many folks the proliferation of perspectives and voices and interpretations seems challenging, or even threatening, to the way they make sense of the world and organize their lives.  There is a deep appeal in a sure foundation, a center that holds.

               One of the great challenges of faith in the twentieth-first century is to learn to let go of that sense of certainty and to live more comfortably with uncertainty, ambiguity, nuance, and doubt.  And to learn that it is through this multiplication of voices, ideas, and interpretations that the Spirit is leading.  The present pluralism is the movement of the Holy Spirit.  Our challenge is to trust in the Spirit’s guidance and face the uncertain future with confidence.

               So, how do we learn to embrace the plurality of interpretation as a good thing that can still lead us to truth? 

One of my guides in that adventure is the Reformed philosopher James K. A. Smith who teaches at Calvin College.  In his book The Fall of Interpretation he argues that one of the lessons from the story of the Tower of Babel is that attempts to find one monolithic way of approaching God in one common language is wrong.  Because God thwarted the endeavors of those tower builders, multiplied human language, and spread people out into different social groups to evolve their own unique cultures and ideas.  He writes, “The sin of Babel was its quest for unity—one interpretation, one reading, one people—which was an abandonment of creational diversity and plurality in favor of exclusion and violence.”

[A reminder of how often attempts to uphold one perspective as certain truth leads to violence and harm.]

               Smith claims that “plurality of interpretation is not the original sin; it is, on the contrary, the original goodness of creation.”  And this original creation is recreated in the moment of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit arrives and is poured out on the diversity of flesh who then begin to prophesy, dream dreams, and have visions. 

To be a human being in this world is to live with risk and uncertainty.  Our faith is how we stay rooted and find guidance through all the noise, confusion, and danger.  Smith identifies  the “primordial trust” of the Spirit’s guidance that roots our faith.  But this trust in the Spirit is not achieved by challenging reality or the human condition with an attempt to establish certainty—one interpretation and one way of life.  Our primordial trust in the Spirit should come through embracing the goodness of the diversity of God’s creation.

               Smith calls this a “creational-pneumatic hermeneutic.”  Which is a fancy academic way of saying that our approach to interpretation should be centered on God’s creativity and the inspirations of the Spirit.  What Smith describes is that this approach, this “creational-pneumatic hermeneutic” opens up a space—(and listen to this great quote)— “a  field of multiplicitous meeting in the wild spaces of love where there is room for a plurality of God’s creatures to speak, sing, and dance in a multivalent chorus of tongues.”

               Doesn’t that sound amazing?!  That’s a party we want to go to.  Fortunately, Jesus has already invited us.

               In essence, if we learn to let go of our need for certainty and take the risk of listening to the Spirit, the Spirit will speak to us, speak truths to us, and will guide us through these challenging times.  And where the Spirit is guiding us is into a new, better, healthier humanity, and a newly recreated world of love.

So, let’s do it.  Let go of our need for certainty, take the leap of faith, trust the guidance of the Spirit, and, be like Walter Brueggemann, delighting in the adventure that leads us closer to God and who God dreams we might yet become.

The greatest Bible scholar of our time died on June 5.  Walter Brueggemann was a deep influence on thousands of clergy, including myself.  His Biblical scholarship was written for the pastor, with a focus on the proclamation of the Word.  He wrote well, with the skill of a poet.  Plus, he was a constant presence at preaching conferences—as effective a public speaker and preacher as he was a writer.  It’s strange for me to imagine being in this career without new, wise words from Brueggemann.

He was 92 and continued to write and publish.  He had taught at Eden and Columbia Theological Seminaries and was an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.  Brueggemann was born in Tilden, Nebraska and grew up at Friedens Evangeliche Kirche (now Peace UCC) where his father was the longtime, beloved pastor.  In my church in Omaha, I had one congregant who had also grown up in that church with Brueggemann.

In their obituary, the World Communion of Reformed Churches wrote of him, he “was more than a scholar; he was a prophetic witness to a collapsing world and a vision for new life beyond that collapse. His work challenged the church to face hard realities — the failure of old certitudes, the disintegration of empires, and the urgent call to love neighbour amid economic and social injustice.”

I have relied deeply upon his books, commentaries, articles, and lectures, to understand the Bible and the task of preaching.  For instance, after the inauguration in 2017, he published an essay in which he encouraged preachers to go “back to the basics” and simply let the basics of the Biblical message speak to congregants.  His conviction was that the core themes of the Bible were relevant to our current needs without having to respond directly to each new event in the news.  He also somehow published a book on responding to the pandemic that came out in 2020 while we were all still in lockdown!

I treasure his commentaries on the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah.  His Theology of the Old Testament is a constant companion.  In the preface of the latter, he wrote about how the scholarly consensus that had existed in the middle of the twentieth century is now in disarray.  But he delighted in that disarray because it permitted “venturesome efforts at Old Testament theology.”  Even more importantly, he thought the disarray better reflected the nature of scripture and “the unsettled Character who stands at the center of the text.”

But his single most important work, including on my own thinking and preaching, was The Prophetic Imagination.  Not only did that book present a framework for understanding the prophetic books of the Old Testament, it was also a call to the vital role of prophetic ministry for the contemporary American church which Brueggemann found to be numbed and too “enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism.”  The thesis of the book was clearly and boldly stated, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”

May this great Christian scholar of our time rest in peace and rise in glory for all his contributions to the gospel.

Filled with the Spirit

Acts 2:1-21

House of Hope Presbyterian Church

8 June 2025

               This week, while reading the very familiar story of the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts, I was struck by the final bit of the text—the passage from the book of the prophet Joel—that sets the context as “In the last days” when there will be portents of the coming, glorious, Day of the Lord. 

               The passage from Joel is apocalyptic.  Which is not the usual perspective we take with this story from Acts.  Maybe that perspective leapt out at me this week because of the troubled times in which we live?  Many people read or watch the news these days and see portents of worse to come.  I’m sure many feel that we are living in apocalyptic times.

               If so, if a similarity of feeling exists between us and the time of the prophet Joel and the telling of the story of Pentecost in the Book of Acts, what word from God might we hear for us, that helps us see portents not of doom and destruction, but of the glorious coming of the Lord?

               The last few weeks I’ve started getting to know you better.  Your staff, your systems, how you do things, your worship, the many things going on every week, the big projects and issues, and your building.  If you follow me on Facebook, you know I’ve been delighting in noticing all sorts of little details around this building. 

               This beautiful building, of course, is rich in detail, and I assume I will sit here for years and still see something new.  The prospect of that delights me.  Mark, our office administrator, has challenged me to find the cricket in the stained-glass windows, and I haven’t located it yet (please don’t tell me if you know, I want to find it myself).

               Monday morning, after I finished reading this week’s lectionary texts, and began the process of thinking through them, this apocalyptic perspective leapt out at me.  When it leapt forward I then had an idea—go look at the Apocalypse window. 

               You can’t see it right now, as it is behind you, and the wonderful Fisk organ impedes your seeing it, but the grand window that adorns the choir loft and the front of this building is the Apocalypse window.  I know that our Bible study class recently spent one of their sessions in the choir loft examining the window.

               I had, myself, not carefully looked at it, so on Monday morning I left my office to stroll over here to look.  Funny enough, on the way down the stairs, I ran into Peter Swanson, a man who was here on Monday studying and taking photos of some of our windows, those by the stained-glass artist LeCompte, and he and I got into a lively conversation about stained glass.  I pointed out the serendipity that I was that very minute headed the sanctuary to examine one of our windows.

               So I climbed the balcony steps, pulled up a chair, and just sat, looking carefully at the window.  I didn’t take any of the descriptions of the window with me, wanting to first see what I could see.  I read the in depth descriptions afterwards.

               And you know what you don’t see in our Apocalypse window?  Dire portents.  Blood and fire, smoky mist and darkness, are not there.  Oh sure, there are obvious images from the Book of Revelation—the seven golden candlesticks, the angels sounding the seven trumpets, the Agnus Dei—the slaughtered and risen Lamb of God.  But this window is no dark image by Albrecht Durer or Peter Bruegel.  Not even the mix of hell and heaven of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.  In fact, for an Apocalypse window, ours is rather serene.

               Because our Apocalypse window reveals the coming glory of the Lord, and that is ultimately a vision of beauty and peace.  What I see in that window are images of God’s sovereignty and grace extended to the world, the final fulfillment of God’s dream for creation.  David Johnson’s description of the window, in the book he wrote about the church, is that “it represents the Kingdom in fulfillment, Christ in his glory in the company of the redeemed.”  A window that was intended to “throw a brilliant illumination into the church.”

               Our Apocalypse window reveals something about the nature and vision of God.  Which is really what apocalyptic is all about in the Biblical understanding of the concept.  Apocalypse isn’t about end-of-times portents of doom and destruction, but a pulling back of the curtain, a lifting of the veil, a revealing of what’s truly going on behind-the-scenes and underneath the surfaces.  What our window proclaims is that when one really looks, with eyes that can see, one beholds the peace and glory created by God’s sovereignty and grace.

               The story of Pentecost is also a revealing of who God is and what God dreams for us.  In our own troubled times, God speaks words to us in this story, and if we hear them, if we open ourselves to be filled with the spirit, God’s words to us can calm our fears and bring us peace.

               Which is not the same as saying that the story itself is calm and comforting.  For it is not.  There is a wildness to this story.  A wildness that evades our attempts to contain it.  For the Spirit isn’t too keen with our proper order, she likes to blow wherever she wants, on whomever she wants, doing surprising and new and sometimes discomforting things.  She wants to fill us, to embody herself in us, in ways that lead to bold new happenings.

               One of my United Church of Christ colleagues, Dr. Bruce Epperly, says that Pentecost is a day for the mystics and spiritual adventurers.  He writes, “God is doing a new thing and we must prepare for the breakthroughs of divine spiritual novelty.”  Pentecost teaches us that “God is imaginative and we are to embody divine imagination in our daily lives.”  Bruce Epperly proclaims, “Don’t be afraid. Be bold. You are God’s beloved and God is at work in [you].”

               Our own Jimmy Hoke goes further in pointing out what’s happening in this story.  He describes, in his commentary on this passage, “the wild and messy multiplicity of queerness that moves around Pentecost.”  After all, there are pyrotechnics (tongues of fire) and speaking in tongues and people criticizing the whole thing as a drunken mess.  To be filled with the Spirit is not a cautious and orderly enterprise.

               June, being Pride Month, fits well with seeing the queerness in this Pentecost story.  The multiplicity of voices, of people from all over, speaking and hearing and understanding one another.  Of finding unity in our acceptance of diversity, not in some enforced conformity.  As Jimmy writes, “When we look closely at the meaning of ‘tongues’ we understand how this story is really about language and difference—the queer multiplicity of many different people being able to access community without having to change their ways of speaking.”

               He draws the conclusion that “Pentecost is a queer invitation to chaos, to chatter, to a wild and critterly multiplicity, and to making our world and our history more complex and just.”

               These colleagues who draw out the mystical and the queer possibilities in this story help to lift the veil for us to see in fresh and new ways what God is doing in this story and what God dreams for us.

               The Christian Church does believe that this story helps to teach us something about who God is.  We meet the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as she descends upon the gathered disciples and births the movement that becomes the church.

               One of my favorite theologians is the Baptist James McClendon, who wrote a rich and wonderful systematic theology that approached the great topics of the faith in novel ways.  For example, he began his systematic theology with an exploration of human embodiment and with discussions of what we learn from the Blues, and the love letters of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards, and the prison writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He concluded the enterprise with a Pentecostal vision of God’s dream for creation that flows from the very nature of who God is.

               And who God is, in McClendon’s words, is “an ecstatic fellowship.”  That’s what is revealed in the concept of a Trinitarian God—a God who is in constant relationship that overflows.  A relationship of deep, mutual, ecstatic love that births creation.

               And this ecstatic fellowship is what God dreams for humanity.  God desires that we too are caught up in the ecstasies of genuine fellowship with one another and mutual love that brings about a new and better world.  This is the adventure of life that God calls humanity to.

               And in order to bring this vision for the world and for humanity to fulfillment, God has given birth to a church.  I love how Julia puts it, that God’s church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church.  The church is God’s great instrument to bring about God’s desires and dreams for the world.

               And what we see here in the Pentecost story is a church of many voices, stirred to new and wild and messy expressions by the winds of the Spirit.  A church that dreams dreams and has visions.  Where young and old and all genders speak boldly the prophetic words that God has given them to speak.

               In my candidating sermon last February, I presented to you some of my sense of the vital need for the church during these troubled times in which we live.  Last week I read yet another great thinker making a similar claim, this time the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa.  My son Sebastian and I attended our spring church retreat up at Clearwater Forest, our Presbyterian campground, and what a lovely place that is.  We hiked in the woods, played on the ropes course, chased each other in games of tag, paddled the lake, and enjoyed each other’s company.  And what I most needed and most enjoyed was sitting beside the waters in an Adirondack chair and reading a book.  In all the busyness of moving the last few months my own reading life had suffered.  So, to get away from all the boxes and to do lists and tasks and just sit, and rest, and enjoy the natural beauty, and read, was a blessing. 

So while the heron skimmed the water and the loons made their plaintive cries, I read a leading sociologist analyzing the troubled times in which we live, explaining why the church is needed right now to embody the spiritual and humane values. 

I feel this conviction deeply—humanity needs the resources, traditions, and skills the church possesses: from our stewardship of the arts to our work for justice in the streets; our quiet contemplative practices and our moments of fellowship and belonging over a cup of coffee or a picnic on the lawn. 

Humanity needs us, and God is calling us to meet that need. 

Because God is calling us, we are not alone in this adventure.  No, Jesus promised to send us another Advocate.  And so the Spirit comes and blows among us, filling us with power and gifts and glory, that we might be who God desires us to be.

If we open ourselves to the Spirit.  To the queer, mystical, diverse, wild, messy, ecstatic, and prophetic voices of Pentecost.  To the bold adventure of the new.  Then God will use us to meet the world’s need and help fulfill God’s mission and dream.

And then, we will arrive at that vision of the glorious coming Day of the Lord we catch a glimpse of in that window up there—the beauty, joy, and peace that results from God’s sovereignty and grace.  In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.  On that great and glorious day, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

That this vision may be so, this Pentecost, let us here, today be filled with the Holy Spirit.