Spirits (A Sermon for Pentecost)

Scriptures:     Acts 2:1-21,  Psalm 104:24-34,     Romans 8:14-17    John 14:8-17

 

Today is Pentecost, when according to Luke’s account in the book of Acts, 50 days after the resurrection, the Holy Spirit came like the rush of a mighty wind, and like divided flames of fire on the head of each of the apostles.  Jewish believers and converts from all over the known world were present, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the apostles spoke in the languages of all those present, so that each one present heard the good news of Jesus in his or her own language.  Pentecost is also known as the birthday of the church, because it was on this day, with the coming of the spirit, that what had been a disorganized band of dispirited disciples became a mighty witness to the goodness of God.

Usually on Pentecost – originally a Jewish festival commemorating the giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and now celebrated by Christians as commemorating the giving of the Holy Spirit – the law of love written on the hearts of believers -  to the early followers of Jesus – we focus on the account in Acts, on the gathered crowd of Jewish believers and converts from all over the known world, on the spirit coming like the rush of a mighty wind, on the appearance of divided tongues of fire on the heads of the apostles, on the apostles proclaiming the good news of Jesus in the many languages of those gathered there that day.  It’s an amazing account – in effect, like the Tower of Babel story in reverse – at the Tower of Babel, God confused the languages of those who were trying to rebel against God, while on Pentecost, people of many languages heard the good news in all their many and varied languages. The Tower of Babel was an occasion of division and scattering; the day of Pentecost was a day of gathering and mutual understanding.

I think it’s natural to focus on the sound and light show, on the special effects described by Luke to identify this moment as something beyond everyday human experience.  But for this moment I’d like to focus, not on the special effects of that particular day, but the ongoing effects of that day in the life of the believers.  And so I’d like to read again these words from Paul’s letter to the Romans:

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him”.

Paul describes the Holy Spirit as “a spirit of adoption”, which he contrasts with a spirit of slavery and fear.  For Paul, a spirit of slavery and fear is our “default setting”, our normal existence, unless the Holy Spirit steps in to free us and give us the spirit of adoption instead.

Frank Herbert’s 1984 movie “Dune” contains the following lines: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.”  There is truth in these words.  Fear can be a useful emotion, a rational response to potential danger. If I see a dog lurching toward me, mouth frothing from rabies, guess what, I’m not gonna run up and pet it.   Sometimes fear and avoidance are rational responses.  But fear is a powerful emotion that we can misuse, or that others can misuse to control us. And so words such as “do not fear” and “do not be afraid” appear over and over throughout the Bible, Old and New Testament, Genesis to Revelation.   (There’s an internet meme that says that the words “fear not” appear 365 times in the Bible, one for each day of the year…I’ve done a few quick online searches and don’t come up with that number, and so once again you can’t take everything you read on the internet as gospel truth, but even though the math may not add up, there’s still a valid point:  the words “fear not” or similar words pop up in the Bible plenty often.)  When there are encounters between humans and angels or between humans and God, often the first words spoken by the angel or by God are “Do not be afraid”.  In Genesis, when God appeared to Abram, God said, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield.”[1]  At the Last Supper, Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”[2]  In the book of Revelation, when John had his vision of the Son of Man exalted in glory and nearly passed out from terror, we’re told that “He laid his right hand upon me” – that is, upon John – “saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last, and the living one.  I was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.”[3] If I heard those words, I’d probably be more terrified than ever…unless I come to trust the One who holds the keys.  If I trust the one who holds the keys, I have nothing to fear.
“Fear is the mind-killer.”  Indeed, fear has the power to destroy our powers of rational thought, if we let it.  Fear has the power to make us give over control of our lives to others, if we let it.   A fearful person is a puppet lying around waiting for others to pull its strings.  Truly, the person with the power to make us afraid is the person who has the power to manipulate us and control us.  Let me repeat that, because it’s important:  The person we allow to make us afraid is the person we allow to control us. Throughout religious history, religious leaders – or rather religious misleaders – have used fear – fear of eternal torment, fear of separation from God – to manipulate their followers into giving over their money, their time, even their lives, to the control of the leader.  Religious cults win over their followers by isolating them from their families and friends, and then making their followers fear the consequences of leaving the cult – “If you leave us, the leader won’t love you anymore. If you leave us, God won’t love you anymore.”  Or sometimes the threat is more down to earth – “If you leave us, we’ll send people to hunt you down and hurt you, make you lose your job, attack your family, maybe even kill you.”
It isn’t just toxic religious groups that use fear to manipulate their followers.  Politicians use fear all the time to gain votes.  All the time!  Those of you alive in the 1950’s remember the McCarthy era, the Red Scare, when people were looking for so-called “godless communists” under their beds. Now, when I look under my bed, I find dust bunnies, but apparently looking under your bed for communists was quite the hobby in the 1950’s.  Careers and lives were ruined as a result.  With the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s and communists no longer available as a bogeyman, politicians have whipped up fears of different targets:  fears of blacks, fears of gays, fears of immigrants, fears of Muslims, fears of transgendered persons, on and on and on some more, to the point of nausea….   Meanwhile, off camera, these fearmongering politicians laugh at us, as they laugh all the way to the bank with campaign contributions stoked by fear.  It’s a great racket – scare voters silly and watch the dollars roll in.  And in most elections, the majority of political ads are what are called “negative ads” – that is to say, ads based on fear.  More money is spent trying to make voters fear the opposing candidate than to say positive things about their own candidate.  The effect of such political advertising is to make people stay home, so that turnout in our elections becomes increasingly pathetic with every year, and our political leadership is being selected by an increasingly small sliver of the populace.  Especially in off-year elections, the candidate of choice for most people is “none of the above”.
We can do better than this.  God does not intend for God’s people to live in fear.  I John 4:18 states, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears is not perfect in love.”  And I think this sheds some light on what Paul meant by “the spirit of adoption”.  Through the work of Jesus, God adopted us because God loves us.  Because God loves us, we don’t have to cower in terror before the powers that be.  Because God loves us, we can have confidence that, in our trials, God will be with us.

There will be trials.  Let’s hear these words from Paul again:  When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him”.  We’re quick to claim the good stuff – “children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” – and we like the phrase “so that we may also be glorified with him” but want to wish away the phrase: “if, in fact, we suffer with him.”  Jesus did not promise that his followers – that we - would not suffer, but rather than the Holy Spirit would be with us in our sufferings.  What the Holy Spirit does is cast out the spirit of slavery to fear, help us get past our fear of suffering so that we can follow where Jesus leads.  Often the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.  If we follow Jesus, truly take his teachings seriously, we will be out of step with those around us.  And as a result of being out of step, there will be a price to pay – at the very least, loss of popularity, loss of respectability – “respectability” itself can be an idol, a false god, if the fear of losing it keeps us from following where Jesus leads, and following Christ may force us to lose respectability in the eyes of the world, as we become “fools for Christ”.[4]  And at the most, in some countries, following in the way of Jesus can lead to imprisonment and death.   And make no mistake: Christians can be arrested even in this country, if their beliefs – if our beliefs - lead them and us to oppose the powers that be.  But we can have confidence that Jesus will be with us; as Paul wrote, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ”[5]

I want to say one more word about the spirit of slavery to fear from which the Holy Spirit would lead us.  The Holy Spirit, the spirit of adoption, seeks to cast out our fear of others.  That same spirit also seeks to cast out from us the kind of dominating, bullying spirit that would seek to cause fear in others.  Whether it’s bullying on the playground or bullying from the pulpit, it doesn’t come from God.   It is people who are insecure, people who feel something lacking within themselves, who feel they have to prove their power by dominating others.  People with the Holy Spirit, the spirit of adoption within them – people who are confident in God’s love – people who are confident, period, don’t need to try to impress the people around them by bullying or beating up on those they consider “less than”.  Indeed, Jesus said that our lives will be judged by what we did to help the least of our sisters and brothers, not by what we do to terrorize them – because whatsoever we do to the poorest and weakest of our sisters and brothers – for good or for bad – we do to Jesus.
Tony Campolo is emeritus professor of sociology at Eastern University – located right here in Philly - and an  American Baptist pastor.   Tony Campolo is invited to speak at religious gatherings across the country, and in his talks often recounts a tale from his high school days.  He tells of a classmate named Roger, who was gay. Campolo is now in his early 80’s, and so we can only imagine the abuse his classmate Roger would have faced as a gay teen in high school some 65 years ago, back in the early 1950’s, when gay and lesbian adults were being fired from jobs, evicted from apartments, and even arrested.  On one fateful day, Roger was cornered in a locker room by a number of bullying classmates, who urinated on him.  No doubt they went home from school congratulating themselves on having carried off a fun prank.   Roger also went home from school that day, and after he got home, he committed suicide by hanging himself.  Campolo writes of his reaction at the time: “I knew I wasn’t a Christian.  If I was a Christian, I would have defended Roger.”  Even in his teens, Campolo knew his Christian duty was to defend Roger, not to stand by and let abuse happen – and he knew he’d failed.  Almost 70 years later, Campolo is still carrying that awful memory of bullying – not even bullying that he himself did, but bullying by others that he had failed to prevent.  Almost 70 years later, Campolo is speaking out, telling of the bullying and suicide of his long-ago classmate Roger, and trying to prevent the bullying and suicide of present-day Rogers. 
“Fear is the mind-killer.”  Whether we are dominated by fear, or whether we use fear to try to dominate and bully others, our mind are not right and our hearts are not right with God.  May we live, not as slaves to fear, nor as bullies seeking to enslave others by fear, but as believers filled with the Holy Spirit, the spirit of adoption, confident in God’s love for us; indeed confident enough in God’s love that we are willing to risk inconvenience, unpopularity, loss of respectability, even suffering, to follow in the way of Jesus, and to love and serve those whom Jesus lead us.  Where Christ leads, may we follow, confident of God’s love for us, and confident of God’s call for us to invite others to experience God’s love.  Amen.

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[1] Genesis 15:1                                                                                               

[2] John 14:27

[3] Revelation 1:17-18

[4] I Corinthians 4:10

[5] Philippians 3:8

Witnesses (A Sermon for Ascension Sunday)

Scriptures:       Acts 1:1-11, Revelation 22:8-21,       John 17:20-26, Luke 24:44-53

What does it mean to be a witness?  If you’ve ever watched Law and Order or Judge Judy or such, you know.  A crime happens – or someone is accused of a crime – and in their investigation, the police call witnesses – and if the case goes to trial, these witnesses will tell what they saw.  Did they see the accused person at the scene of the alleged crime, or not?.  Did they see the accused person shoot or stab or hit somebody, or not?  Or if it was a traffic case, was the driver exceeding the speed limit, or swerving and driving erratically in a way that would indicate that the driver was under the influence of alcohol or drugs.  Sometimes witnesses in a police investigation or a courtroom disagree – one will say they saw something, and another will say they didn’t – or that they saw something entirely different.  And the outcome of the police investigation or court case depends on which witnesses the police or the jury or the judge believe.

On the church calendar, Thursday was Ascension Day, when we recall that Jesus led his disciples to a high mountain and, after giving them some parting instructions, ascended to heaven, returning to God the Father.  Since we don’t have an Ascension Day service on Thursday, we read some of the Ascension Day texts today. 

Luke gives us the fullest picture of Jesus’ return to the Father.  Luke was the writer, not only of the Gospel of Luke, but of a sequel, which we know as the Acts of the Apostles – and Acts picks up right where the Gospel of Luke left off.  We’re told that, for forty days after his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples, proving to them that he had been raised from the dead and speaking about the kingdom of God, about God’s reign on earth.  Then he gathered them together one last time, on the Mount of Olives.  The disciples seemed to sense that something big was about to happen, but, as usual, they misunderstood Jesus’ intentions, as they asked, “Lord, is this time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  They were asking whether Jesus was now going to drive off the hated Romans so that Israel could be an independent country again.   They were thinking on a nationalistic level, but Jesus had something much greater in mind.  Jesus responds by telling them, “It’s not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority” – in effect, to the disciples’ question about when Israel would regain independence, Jesus tells them, “Mind your own business!”  But then he goes on to tell them just how large their own business was about to become:  “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  Suddenly Jesus is talking a much bigger game:  the disciples were concerned about political independence in their own country, but Jesus is giving them a mission that, while it starts in their country, would expand to cover the whole world.  Just as an aside – this is where we get the UCC symbol – it’s in the bulletin and you may want to look at it briefly - of the cross and crown on top of the globe, symbolizing the Lordship of Christ over the whole world, and the globe divided into three parts, symbolizing Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the whole world.  It’s scary to think about Jesus giving such a huge mission to these disciples, because they’d misunderstood Jesus at every turn, had even in that moment misunderstood him, but nonetheless Jesus was giving them a mission to be his witnesses all over the world.  But, Jesus had also said they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them – and so, with the Spirit’s power and guidance, at last they would understand.

And then Jesus was taken up in the clouds!  Kind of like the end of the old Warner Brothers cartoons…..”That’s all, folks!”.  That’s all, folks, at least in the sense that Jesus would not be walking around with them any longer in bodily form, that from now on he would be with God the Father in heaven.  And so this is why when we celebrate the Ascension, we sing hymns about Jesus being crowned with many crowns, crowned as Lord of all – as Philippians chapter 2 says, having emptied himself of power and glory to be with us in his earthly ministry, at his ascension Jesus was exalted and given even greater power and glory, given the name that is above every name, so that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  On the church calendar, Ascension Day is basically coronation day for Jesus, and the point at which the work shifts from Jesus to the disciples, to the church, to us.

“You will receive power….and you will be my witnesses.”  To proclaim the good news of Jesus to the whole world, to tell the whole world what they had seen and heard when they were with Jesus is a huge undertaking – especially since what they had seen and heard in their time with Jesus indicated that Jesus was greater than anything else in their society.  They would need all the power they could get.  In the time of the disciples, to proclaim that Jesus was Lord in a society that said Caesar was Lord was dangerous business.  They would face constant opposition.  They could get arrested – and the disciples did, frequently.  They could be killed – and that happened too.  How could they keep going?  What kept them from throwing up their hands and quitting, from throwing in the towel and walking away.

Two things kept them going:  the coming of the Holy Spirit, which we’ll celebrate next week, on Pentecost, and Jesus’ prayer that “they would all be one, as he and the Father are one.”  Jesus would no longer be in the flesh, walking beside them.  Instead, the Holy Spirit would be inside them, teaching them and reminding them of everything that Jesus had taught them.  Before, Jesus was in one place; now, the Spirit would be everyplace.  Jesus had assured his disciples that even though he would be going away, he was not abandoning them – that their lives mattered to him, and that he would send the Holy Spirit so that they would not be alone.  Anyplace that Christians went, the Holy Spirit went with them.

And then there is Jesus’ prayer for his disciples, that they would all be one.  Our reading from John’s Gospel is part of Jesus’ high priestly prayer for his disciples at the Last Supper, as he knew his time with them was almost over.   Notice what Jesus didn’t pray for them:  he didn’t pray that they would become superheroes, or be able to shoot laser beams out of their eyes to incinerate their opponents.  He didn’t pray that they’d be able to walk on water or leap tall buildings in a single bound.  He did ask the Father to protect them from the evil one.  But he didn’t pray for them to be invincible or indestructible.  He was sending them out into the world fully vulnerable, like lambs among wolves.  Instead, he asked the Father that they would be one, as Jesus and the Father are one.  Jesus’ prayer for the disciples was community, a community so close as to be inseparable, a community that would give them the strength to stay in mission in a world that has other priorities, a world that would try to kill them, as it tried to kill Jesus.

Indeed, before the coming of the Holy Spirit, the disciples act like lost sheep, staying together, but with little power.  Our reading from Acts 16:16-34 – my last minute substitution for one of the readings – demonstrates the power that comes from the Holy Spirit, and from Jesus’ prayer that they may all be one.  In last week’s reading from Acts, Paul and Silas had met Lydia, been arrested and released and cared for after their release by Lydia.  In this week’s reading, they were going to the place of prayer when they are stalked by a slave girl with the power of telling fortunes – which the writer of Acts attributes to her being possessed by an evil spirit.  This slave girl made money for her owners by telling fortunes.   As Paul and Silas tried to move about from place to place, this slave girl started heckling them:  “These men are slaves of a Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept stalking Paul and Silas and heckling them, following them wherever they went.  You’d think they’d have appreciated the publicity, but we’re told that Paul was very annoyed and cast out the evil spirit that gave her the fortunes she told.  We’re told that when the girl’s owners realized that the girl’s evil spirit was gone and she could no longer make money for them, they had Paul and Silas arrested, beaten severely, and imprisoned.  We’re told that at midnight Paul and Silas were locked in their cell, singing hymns, when an earthquake came and broke all the chains and prison bars.  But they didn’t leave.  The jailer thought everyone had escaped and was going to kill himself, but Paul shouted, “Don’t harm yourself, we’re all here.”  The jailer and his family welcomed Paul and his companions into their home, washed his wounds and fed them, ended up being baptized and becoming disciples of Jesus. 

Last  year during the Wednesday night services, we were reading through the book of Acts, and as we were reading, one thing that struck me is that Paul and Silas and the other disciples were major league jailbirds – they were always getting arrested for proclaiming Jesus.  While it’s much safer to be a Christian today in this country than it was in the time of Paul and Silas – not safe at all in other countries – but even today, even in this country, following Jesus is not always a walk in the park.   Of course, so long as our faith goes no further than the church door, so long as it goes no further than singing hymns and listening to sermons on Sunday morning, nobody will bother us – but if we try to take our faith out of the church building and into the world, when we try to live our faith the other six days of the week, life can get…..interesting.  As a follower of Jesus, you’ll probably enjoy some walks in parks, but you may also end up walking into controversy, into opposition, in some cases perhaps even onto a picket line or into a police barricade or a jail cell.  It happens.  Just as the slave girl owners had Paul and Silas arrested when they interfered with their money-making scheme by breaking the chains that had bound the slave girl, Christians today still get in trouble when they go up against of entrenched power, entrenched corruption, entrenched oppression. 

This is not something to be attempted alone – none of us has the strength to deal with this on our own.  And this is why Jesus prayed that his disciples would be one, as Jesus and the Father are one.  Here in Bridesburg especially, we may have some glimpse of what this looks like, as our neighborhood has a strong ethic of sticking together.  As followers of Jesus, we need one another.  We need to stick together.  Even pastors are constantly being encouraged and reminded by Conference Ministers and such to stay connected, to meet and talk with other pastors, to encourage one another and hold one another accountable, because pastoring can be a lonely undertaking.  And it’s the same for all of us – we need each other, to encourage one another and to hold one another accountable if someone’s going off course. 

Jesus prayed for his disciples, “I ask that they may be one, as we are one.”  “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.  May our life together at Emanuel Church be an answer to Jesus’ prayer, and may the Holy Spirit grant us power to witness to God’s love by serving God and neighbor in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

 

Remember

Scriptures:     Acts 16:1-15,  Psalm 67     Revelation 21:10, 22-27; 22:1-5    John 14:23-29

One of the annoyances of having reached my mid-fifties is that I’m finding I need to write things down – dates of appointments, names of people I need to call, occasionally even things I need to pick up at the store.  All my life I’ve had a good memory – and for the most part I think my memory is still mostly ok most of the time -  and up until the past few years have been able to keep my calendar and my list of contacts organized in my head without having to write myself reminders.  But now, sticky notes are my friend; otherwise, I’m apt to walk someplace and by the time I get there, I forget why I went.  And God help me when it comes to remembering the names of people I’ve just met; I can’t very well be pulling sticky notes out of my pocket every time I meet someone for the first time.  Even though I often ask people I’ve just met to repeat their names a few times until I remember them, I still have a lot of mishaps. Sort of brings a whole different meaning to the phrase “having a mind like a steel trap”:  at this point in my life, anything that gets into my mind gets mangled.  

Memory – it’s such a big part of what makes us human.  Without our memories, how do we know who we are, or where we fit in to our family, our workplace, our friends, our church, our lives?  Without memory, life is just a sequence of events, with, as Fr John McNamee, former pastor of St Malachy’s in North Philadelphia, would put it, “no beginning nor end nor middle nor sense”.  With memory, we connect what we experience in the presence with what we’ve experienced in the past.  In connecting our experience of current events with our memories of past events, we create meaning for ourselves.  Because of our ability to remember, our lives are not just a sequence of random events, but become a narrative, a story, as we reinterpret past events to help us understand future events.  We all experience trauma in our lives, but the stories we tell ourselves about that trauma have the power to shape our present and future, for good or ill.  On one hand, the fear we feel about some tragic event may cause us to close off parts of our world:  this person or place or event made me feel terrified or furious or caused excruciating pain; I never want to feel that way again, so I’ll never again subject myself to similar persons or places or events.  It’s a very natural reaction, the reaction that keeps a small child from touching a hot stove a second time after their finger has touched a hot stove the first time.  Once burnt, twice shy.  On the other hand, we may be able to tell ourselves a different story, that this person or place or event made me feel terrified or furious or caused great pain, and with God’s help I was strong enough to get through it, and now I feel so strong I want to help others get through it.  Same tragedy; two different ways of responding, all because of our gift for creating meaning for ourselves, all because of our ability to remember. 

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is eating his last Passover meal with his disciples.  He knows he’ll be betrayed and arrested that very night, subjected to a farce of a trial, given a sentence that is a mockery of justice, and executed.  (And yes, we from our vantage point know he’ll be resurrected, but his disciples knew no such thing; even when Jesus talked about rising on the third day, they had no idea what he was talking about.)   So, from the standpoint of the disciples in that moment, Jesus’ time with them was running short; indeed, Jesus’ time with them was quickly running out.   And when time is short, when time is running out, there’s no time for small talk; we have to get real and say what needs to be said. 

We’ve been listening in on this conversation.  Last week, Jesus told his disciples, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another.”  Like I said, getting real, saying what needs to be said.  And in today’s reading, he tells his disciples, “Peace I leave you; my peace I give to you.  Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”  A little later on, he tells them that he is the vine and that his disciples are the branches, that they must abide in him and he in them if they are to remain alive and lifegiving. 

But that’s a lot to hold onto.  Perhaps the disciples were anxious that they would forget what Jesus said and lose track of his message – “Stop, Jesus, slow down, you’re going too fast, I can’t keep up with all this….” because Jesus said, “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and *remind you* of all I have said to you.  It’s striking that the writer of Luke’s gospel, who also wrote the Acts of the Apostles describes the Holy Spirit, and so does the writer of John’s gospel, but Luke and John describe the Holy Spirit in very different ways.  It is Luke’s image of the Holy Spirit that has stuck with us, the image of the Holy Spirit that we will celebrate two weeks from now on Pentecost – the Holy Spirit coming down with the rush of a mighty wind and alighting on the disciples heads like divided tongues of fire, causing the faithful to speak in tongues and preach.  But John speaks of the spirit in a different way, in a quieter and gentler way, as God teaching us and reminding us of Jesus’ words. 

Memory, and the ability to observe our lives and those of others and create meaning from them, is part of what makes us human.  If we are to be followers of Jesus, we must remember what Jesus told us, and in order to remember, we must sometimes be reminded. You see, there are many ways to remember any given event, and we can create meaning from our experiences in many different ways.   It is the work of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, to teach and remind us so that we create memory and meaning in our lives in ways that are based on the life and teachings of Jesus.  Indeed, it is the work of the Holy Spirit to make Jesus the lens through which we view our lives and all around us. As we go through life, encounter struggle, encounter temptation, it is the Spirit that helps us make the connections between these struggles and the words of Jesus.  When we are tempted to hatred or, worse, indifference, it is the Spirit that reminds us of Jesus’ command to love one another.  When we are agitated or anxious or depressed, it is the Spirit that reminds of Jesus’ words in today’s gospel, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.”  When we feel isolated and alone, it is the Spirit that reminds us that we are never alone, that we are connected to the body of Christ and a part of the body of Christ.  

We see the power of the Holy Spirit’s mission to teach and remind in our reading from Revelation.  The writer, John, exiled to the isle of Patmos, one of the Roman Empire’s dumping grounds for dissidents and troublemakers, exiled to work in the quarries on Patmos, exiled from the Roman Empire, is having a vision of a very different empire, the reign of God to come.  In this vision, he speaks of the Tree of Life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, one kind for each month of the year.  In this vision, God is helping John to reach in his mind all the way back to the book of Genesis – back to the Garden of Eden, where there was the Tree of Life.  The tree of life appears like bookends in our Scripture, back in the beginning, in Genesis, and at the end of the book, in Revelation.  Despite all the sin and hatred and ugliness of thousands of years of human history, despite the hatred and exclusion that John experienced from the Roman Empire, God still held out to John, and God still holds out for us, the vision of the tree of life, and the river of life, there for the taking, without money and without price, offering life to all who will have it. And John goes on to say, “But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”  The Spirit’s work of teaching us and reminding us of everything Jesus said will be so complete in us, that Jesus’ name will be on our foreheads; there will be no possibility of mistaking who we are and to whom we belong.

Our reading from Acts gives us a striking portrait of what it looks like when we are in the process of having Jesus’ name engraved on our foreheads, of what people look like when the Holy Spirit is active in their lives.  Paul is out and about preaching the word. He had just parted company with Barnabas, because Barnabas wanted to work with John Mark – by tradition John Mark was the writer of Mark’s gospel, the earliest of the four – and Paul didn’t.  Paul settled on another man, named Silas, and they began to go about preaching.  Oddly, we’re told that Paul had wanted to preach in Asia – what we would now call Asia Minor, the present day country of Turkey – but the Spirit of Jesus didn’t allow it.  So while the Spirit of Jesus often pushed Christians into proclaiming their faith, oddly in this instance, Paul was instructed by that same spirit to bypass Asia.  Perhaps it just wasn’t the right time. Instead, Paul was redirected to Macedonia by means of a vision. Paul and Silas went to Philippi, and went outside the city gate to a place near the river where there was a place of prayer for Jews.  We’re told there was a certain woman, named Lydia, who sold purple cloth.  Purple dye was very expensive in those days, so this Lydia would have been used to dealing with society’s movers and shakers, and likely was comfortably off herself. And we’re told that the Lord opened Lydia’s heart., and she and her household were baptized.  This Lydia, used to dealing with society’s movers and shakers, apparently could be quite forceful herself; we’re told, “When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, ‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.’ And she prevailed upon us.”  Having been led to Jesus by Paul, Lydia wanted to show Paul hospitality, and she wasn’t taking no for an answer. Remember that it was never part of Paul’s plan to be at Lydia’s house in the first place – he’d wanted to preach someplace else entirely, in Turkey.  But Paul was opened as the Spirit taught and reminded him, and so he followed the Spirit’s leading, and Lydia and her household were saved.  Not long after, Paul cast a demon out of a fortune-telling slave girl and was arrested for this – and it was Lydia who in effect provided jailhouse support, welcoming Paul after he was released.  Her example was so striking that by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Lydia’s name and story were included in Scripture – especially striking when we consider the number of women who remain nameless in Scripture, and the patriarchal culture of that day in which women were to be seen but not heard, if not ignored altogether.

Memory, and the ability to connect events to create meaning, are part of what makes us human.  Our scriptures today call us to remember – to remember the words of Jesus, the words of Scripture, to remember those like Lydia who have provided help and hospitality to us in our journeys, to remember to make room for the Spirit to work in our lives.  As we prepare for communion, this, too, was a way in which Jesus asked us to remember.  Amen.