Hear What the Spirit is Saying to the Church

            We can’t imagine the hate. We can’t imagine the mistrust, the whispers, the clandestine meetings devoted to the expulsion of these ungodly oppressors from their native land. We can’t imagine the heartbreak of seeing the Temple destroyed, of seeing the second vision of God’s glory laid in ruins. We simply cannot imagine the seething rage that first century Jews felt toward the Roman authorities in Judea. And the first Christians, still a sect of Judiasm looking for purpose, saw God incarnate flogged by roman whips, hung upon a Roman cross, and pierced by a Roman spear. We can’t imagine the hate, the mistrust, the whispers, the fear.

            Our reading from Acts doesn’t give us any reason to suspect that there’s anything out-of-place here. The Holy Spirit is working in the gentiles. That’s what the Holy Spirit does. If it didn’t we wouldn’t be here, but it did, so thank God.

            That’ however, is not the whole story. What the reading for this week lets us in on is the end of this particular story. We’re seeing the last 15 minutes of the movie. It has a happy ending. We kind of know who the characters are, but we have no idea how we got here. Here’s what we missed.

            Cornelius, a Roman Soldier, who believes in the God of the Jews, gives generously and prays frequently, sees a vision telling him to send for Peter who’s currently staying in a seaside town called Joppa, in a tanner’s house. The next morning he sends two slaves, who he gained through his military success, and one of his subordinate soldiers to Joppa to look for Peter. So two slaves, taken captive from their conquered homeland, and one of the soldiers, who did the conquering, start down the road searching for the Saint.

            While they’re on the road Peter, tired of the smells of drying skins and the ammonia needed to tan them, goes to the roof for air and for prayer. Lunch is far from being ready, and Peter, who is quite hungry at that particular moment, falls into a trance. The ammonia might have had something to do with it.

            A white cloth falls from heaven, held by its four corners. On that heavenly spread lies every animal, every fish, every reptile, and a voice says to Peter, “Get up; Kill and eat.” Peter knows better though, “I can’t eat this. It’s unclean.”

            The voice responds, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

            As the vision fades the slaves and the soldier arrive, asking for Peter, and no doubt terrifying the tanner. The Spirit speaks a final word to Peter, “Go with them.”

And they leave together.

            When Peter arrives at Cornelius’ house Cornelius’ whole household is gathered, where Peter says to the gathered crowd, “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection.” He continues to preach the word of Christ crucified, and then in the midst of the sermon the Holy Spirit is outpoured on the Gentile believers there. The Circumsized believers look on in dismay. Clearly the Spirit is contravening everything they knew to be true.

            What they knew to be true were the catagories of clean and unclean. That simply being in the presence of those who ate the meat of animals with uncloven hooves was problematic. Not to mention the fact that this was a household of the oppressor. This was not just a benign Greek. This was a Roman Centurion. The enemy in every conceivable way. This was so outside of everything they knew.

            They knew the commandments. The same way we do. We know the big ten by wrote, and we carry the rest with us, emblazoned into the back of our minds. These are the hard and fast lines that are not to be crossed, and like the ten commandments they come with a whole host of other statutes, those things we cast in big bold terms as “God’s law.”

            If you’re like me, however, you tend not to do so well with commandments, with the hard and fast rules. If you’re like me (and I can say this because the Bishop’s not here this time) you have a bit of an anti-authoritarian streak. Just hearing the word commandment makes you a bit edgy. The reading from first John definitely hit me like that. “For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.

            His commandments aren’t burdensome? Really? “Love one another as I have loved you.” Seems to be a pretty tall order. And that’s Jesus’ commandment that’s the one. That’s the one we have to live into. It’s not burdensome? Have you ever tried loving people, John? It can be burdensome. Remarkably burdensome.

            The fact of the matter is that commandments are loaded terms, with long and tired histories of abuse and misappropriation. The idea of “God’s law” gives us pause, not because we’re opposed to God’s truth, but because “God’s law” has been used as a weapon, arbitrarily wielded against those who we would oppress or demarcate as other. It seems like this story of the earliest Apostles would give us reason to take the commandments with a grain of salt. After all, the Spirit gave Peter a vision that ran directly contrary to what the “law” had contained for ages. The spirit and the letter come directly into conflict here. Don’t they?

            No. They don’t. If for no other reason than when Jesus said “Love one another as I have loved you.” I’m inclined to believe that he meant it. If we have anything to gather its that Peter, one of the select group of people who heard this in person, was, much as we are, not doing a very good job of it. If the spirit is truth, like John seems to think that it is, then the work of the spirit will always be the work of the truth, and in this case the truth is that we are to love one another.

            Peter was to love Cornelius as Christ loved him. The vision that he saw was not about food, however nice it is that we can now eat bacon, it was about Peter’s hesitance to love those who had for thousands of years been deemed “unclean.” The Spirit moved Peter to expand the boundaries of God’s kingdom broader than Peter thought they should go. The Spirit moved Peter to live into Christ’s commandment. Despite the hate, the mistrust, and the fear, Peter must love. Because “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

            We do ourselves a great disservice to think that these catagories don’t exist for us today. Clean and profane. Good and bad. Proper and improper. Educated and Uneducated. Christian and Athiest. Gay and Straight. All these terms keep we Christians from loving the way we are called to do. The way the Spirit moved Peter to. And while we lament dwindling numbers in the Church as a whole we continue to prop up these categories. We continue to demarcate ourselves based on criteria that are as arbitrary as the categories of First Century Jews seem to be to us today. Categories that Peter moved past in order to preach the Gospel of Christ and to see the Spirit outpoured on those who we would categorically deny it to before.

            The Spirit is moving always to love more than we think we can or should. In the words of the great Anglican preacher John Wesley we are to “Love with the love that is long suffering and kind, with the love that is patient, with the love that thinks no evil, that covers, believes, and hopes all things.” The spirit is pushing us to love in the hopes that God’s most Holy Spirit will pour out on those who we never imagined could receive it.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we can imagine the hate, the mistrust, the heartbreak, the whispers, the fear. Maybe, like Peter, the spirit is calling us to move beyond it.

Hear What the Spirit is Saying to the Church.

Amen.

                       

           

Second Person Plural

Growing up in Church the Advent wreath was always one of my favorite traditions, if for no other reason than it allowed me to gauge exactly how much time there was until I got presents. We never used the old Advent calendars, which kept a day by day countdown to the birth of Christ, the wreath gauges our progress in weeks. Weeks which, as kids, seem like little eternities and every Sunday a candle was lit meant that we were one less eon away from Jesus’ coming. Or from presents. I’ll leave you to guess which was more exciting to my childhood self.

Regardless of my motivations, the Advent wreath was a countdown to joy, a countdown to those occasions that contain the majority of my most wonderful memories, and yet, on those days in between Sundays, on those days when the wreath sat in that unoccupied sanctuary with its blackened wicks and uneven lengths of wax those little eternities got longer, and joy seemed forever away.

Our texts today invite us into those spaces. They invite us into waiting, into that childlike sense of eternity that our hectic schedules no longer allow us to savor. Our texts today demand that we sigh for the coming of joy again, and if we merely allow ourselves to sit back and enjoy the relative comfort of our pews I fear they will pass us by and the profound movement of the Spirit crying out to us will pass like Christmas lights fading in a rear view mirror.

This takes a remarkably uncomfortable degree of honesty. We have to acknowledge the fact that we are waiting in a broken world. We have to look amongst our community and see that sin still pervades us, that death still claims those who we hold dear. We need to want for joy like a child wanting for Christmas if only so that when we hear the proclamation “Comfort, O Comfort” we know what that longing feels like.

The fact that we’re English speakers doesn’t do us any favors in approaching Isaiah 40. From the translation we might expect that this is some divine proclamation of God bestowing divine comfort through our time of trial. We might think that comfort here is a noun, that it’s a thing that God is bestowing on us in the midst of our tumultuous life, we just have to take it in and be thankful. This, however, is not the case. “Comfort” here, is a verb. It’s something that needs to be done. That being said, it can still seem like the comforting in the passage is something for the prophet to do. Just like it can often seem like comforting is something reserved for the Priests among us. It can seem like God is making a call to good Pastoral care. Again, our language fails us here, because, Y’all, I’m afraid that God is a bit more southern than our Bibles let on.

The Hebrew here is presenting a thought that isn’t easily communicated North of the Mason-Dixon line, or west of the Mississippi. God is addressing the community like my mother raised in may’retta. “Comfort my people, Y’all, Comfort them. Says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. And tell her she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” God is speaking to us. She’s speaking to all of us. In the same way a mother’s call booms down the street at suppertime God’s call lifts off of the page and into our reality beckoning us to a place of renewal and divine restoration. Naturally we have to object. Isaiah does. “What shall I cry?” Do you not see that we are grass? That we are sinful and broken and grieving? We are waiting for the word to break into our lives in the birth of our Savior, but until then. This is honesty. This is a frank assessment of our situation as fallen creatures that is as true for Isaiah as it is for us. What then do we do with this call?

We do what John the Baptist does.

Don’t take this to mean that I’m recommending locusts and wild honey and hair shirts. John’s ministry looks an awful lot like the Church on its best days. John proclaims the forgiveness of sins. John offers hope, and calls for a dramatic re-orienting our lives to the reality of God. What’s more John does this in the face of Roman occupation, religious corruption, and civil unrest. John stands tall among the grass that we are. And it is precisely because he stands tall that he is cut short so early. And, even though, his time was brief his message rings out a truth that echoes in eternity, the truth that there is a loving and forgiving God. All that is required is that we turn and face that truth.

This is, on our best days, the message of the church. Like John we’re called to proclaim it and offer the healing waters of baptism to all who feel so called. Like John we’re to stand in the wilderness, at the margins and ring out a truth that stretches beyond us and our condition. Like John we are to be a comfort to so many who believe that they have nothing beyond the waiting, we are to point them to the one who is coming after us whose sandals we are not worthy to untie. There’s work to do in the waiting. And while we can still watch, and hope for, and ready ourselves for that moment which will come like a thief in the night we can not ignore those words that ring out past the pages of scripture: A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

A voice in the wilderness , “Cry Out!”

That voice is us, y’all.

Miles Davis and the Life of Faith

I had my first “Oh my God, I just had a religious experience” experience while listening to Jazz. I was driving home a little too late from a friends house and I pulled out onto A1A in Cocoa Beach. I was the only one on the road. It was that kind of ride where you know that all you have to do is keep the car on the pavement. As long as you keep the wheels straight you can disappear. You can sink back into the machine and just be for a bit. We don’t get many moments like that here in Atlanta.

The boardwalk lights were dead. The port had shut down for the night, and the bars surrounding it were getting ready to turn off the neon. I was listening to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, not with any attention, until the first chords to Blue in Green started playing. I leaned back in my chair, and then sank into the dashboard lights, little blurs of orange and green letting me know that the one job I had was still being done. I suddenly felt cared for. Loved. Not like an immense ecstatic love, but like there was some cosmic presence drawing me from the periphery of existence into direct view. Like God was focusing in on me in my 92 Toyota Celica and saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

It only lasted as long the time it takes to blow a note through a muted trumpet, but something was changed in me. Something was awakened, and I spent the rest of the ride home trying to figure out what it was.

I thought it had something to do with the song. After all, we all know that if Jesus listens to anything on his heavenly iPod its Miles Davis. I kept listening to Blue in Green, I kept trying to recreate that experience, and it wasn’t happening. I was convinced there was something about that combination of notes, that chord progression something in there triggered it. It had to have been the song.

I went to Barnes and Noble the next day. I was an aspiring Jazz guitarist at the time (something I have only barely held onto) and I could read the music well enough to get further in touch with whatever tonal concoction Mr. Davis wrote that so affected me. I bought a book that had the sheet music to the song, ran out to my car and opened it, furiously turning to Blue in Green. Furiously looking for the secret to my divine encounter the night before. I finally found the page, and it hit me like wall.

There were only two lines on the page. Only 12 bars of music and the skeleton of a melody.

I had no clue where to jump into it. I had no idea where to go from there. Blue in Green is a six-minute song, and this book was only giving me 12 bars that would fill half a minute at best if I took the song at tempo. I had no way in. There was too much improvisation, too much extemporaneous beauty. The text itself wasn’t going to be enough.

We can come to the Bible like this too. We have those texts that make us feel overjoyed to be worshiping such a loving, just and compassionate God. We have texts that sing to us off the page, and while we are encountering them we feel embraced in that all loving presence. Then we close our Bibles, go about our lives only to return, opening the text that gave us so much joy, and we see those 12 impenetrable bars staring us in the face. We have no way in.

The first 12 verses of Matthew’s 23 Chapter came to me like this, and not without good reason. These twelve verses we read today make the highlight reel of verses that have inspired virulent anti-semitism throughout Christian history. The make it far too easy for us to look at the “scribes and Pharisees” and write of the entirety of Judaism as legalistic hypocrisy. For much of our history this passage has caused Christians to look at Jewish prayer shawls and wrapping teffelim (the practice of binding passages of Torah to the arms and forehead) as clear signs that this nation of God had missed the boat, and we could supplant them and end their blatant hypocrisy in violent ways. Ways that made we Christians the hypocrites. For far too much of our history we proclaimed God’s unlimited love all the while proclaiming that the actions of a people deserved unlimited condemnation.

We have some confessing to do when we think about everything that this text carries with it. Especially when we as Christians take on many of the same behaviors condemned in the passage. It’s a laundry list of common practice. And it should give us pause. We have all heard stories of those unduly burdened in the pews as those placing the yoke walk away easy. We all know the crowds where the phrase “Good Christian Man, or Good Christian Woman” instantly grants one a place of honor, if not at the dinner table, then it at least privileges us over others who are conversely “good for nothing.” And there we find ourselves. There is nothing new under the sun.

So there it is. 12 verses hitting us like a wall. And, on the face of things, it seems like we’re lacking a way in.

The longer I looked at the Miles Davis piece, the more I listened to the recordings and fumbled my way through those 12 bars the more I realized what it took. I needed to improvise. The way to move past the limits of the page, the way to produce the sound that so moved me on that empty highway did not lie between the lines, it lay outside them.

It is precisely for this reason that I have come to cringe at the phrase “Bible-believing Christian.” We are not bound to a text; we are bound to the risen and living Lord. We come to this building and to this table encountering a God who was and is still with us. We encounter God in a very real way. A way that lets us improvise. We have 12 bars and a melody; It’s up to us to fill it out. To make it sing, to get it to the point that it connects with ourselves and those around us in a way that makes us sink into our seats and feel cared for, feel loved.

The life of faith is a life improvised.

This is not to say we don’t have roots. This is not to say that we can go anywhere with it. The blessing of the text is that we have the limits of a melody, we have a chord progression to follow, we have stories and sayings that we can connect to That we can use to guide and shape our lives together. It’s a blessing, but only if we treat it as such.

The Gospel reading for the day, this problematic, troubling passage, leaves us with one of the most beautiful lines in scripture. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” There comes a point in every musicians life where they realize that they are doing something that is entirely beyond them they break free from the page, and their fingers move, and they find themselves in the presence of a music that is more than ever could have been put to paper. This is holy improvisation. As we prepare ourselves to come to the table I pray that we would have that same experience, that we would kneel at the rail and find ourselves in the presence of something that is entirely beyond the text. This too, is a holy improvisation. This is the life of faith. Amen.