Warren UMC, 6/4/95
What would be Good News for your life right now?
Where are you feeling hurt or stress -- not just physically but psychologically?
Where are you feeling the greatest uncertainties, doubt, fear, anxieties?
What "language" would the Good News need to be in for you to best hear and understand it right now at this point in your life?
Words: Inspirational? Encouragement? Hope?
Preaching? What kind of preaching? preaching that reminded you of God's judgement and called you to remain steadfast? preaching that told you of God's love in stories and parables? preaching that explained some part of the Bible? personal testimony?
What language would speak most clearly about God: words that referred to God always as Father, words that referred to God with a variety of images, such as Word, Creator, Spirit?
Would you need to hear something more directed towards building self-esteem or solving some problem? Such as How to Get What You Want Out of Life, Think and Grow Rich, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche.
Would you need to hear the Good News in Art? Poetry? Novel? Film? Music?
Would you need to experience the Good News through movement and dance? small group sharing or Bible Study? a party? prayer group? sunset over the continental divide? a gorgeous flower garden like Washington Park?
The witness of Acts is that people from many areas of the known world then heard the Good News in their own language. We often think of that as a kind of supernatural miracle, but it is helpful to remember that Luke, the writer of Acts, is writing more to tell us what an experience meant, not a news story like we might hear on TV today. The experience meant something very important to the life of the church, and it might not be hard for us to understand how it could have happened, if we understand that we hear, see, and experience good news in many different ways and in many different "languages."
The experience at Pentecost meant that God had established out of many diverse elements a group that became self-consciously the Church, the New Israel, the Body of Christ.
One Old Testament witness [appointed for this day] is the story of the Tower of Babel, the story of people deciding to build a tower "up to heaven." The story says that God saw their idolatrous intention behind this plan and made their languages different so they could no longer cooperate and work together. People were trying to become like God and to deny their createdness, finiteness, and limits, and as a result their understandings became more and more confused.
Again, it is important to realize that there is a different view of history at work here, and it is not important to the story tellers that somewhere there are ruins of a tower, but it is important that we understand that the situation described in the story can still happen today. And it is not dependent upon our higher degree of technological skill. It is not dependent upon our ability to send an astronaut into orbit, or build a skyscraper.
The meaning of the story for today is that we humans still try to deny that our understandings are partial, that our economic and social structures are imperfect, that our understandings of right behavior are to a large degree conditioned by our times.
We continue to try to deny our dependence, our createdness, and our interdependence on each other, on God, and on the natural world. We try to escape the uncertainties of life by building certainties of our own. And as a result, community is injured or destroyed, and confusion reigns.
Jesus' disciples faced times of uncertainty after Jesus' death and particularly as they began to experience him in different ways in those days following Golgotha. As they dealt with their uncertainties, doubts, and fears, they recalled sayings about another Comforter, an Advocate, a Spirit of Truth, a Helper--sayings they had not understood when they heard them the first time.
But their understanding grew as they began to be aware of God's continuing presence with them in a way they recognized as similar to Jesus' presence, but yet new and different.
As we face honestly and squarely the times of uncertainty in our personal lives, in our lives as a community, a church, a nation, we too can experience the sustaining presence of the Comforter, the One for Us, the Advocate, telling us we are loved, that there is One who is on our side, for our continued growth in being human and experiencing life to its fullest.
This can be said a number of different ways. James Nelson, a theologian and ethicist at United Seminary in Minneapolis has paraphrased Paul Tillich's classic sermon on grace, You Are Accepted.
Nelson wants to emphasize that it is our whole being that is accepted:
God's word of acceptance is addressed to the total self, not simply to a disembodied personality. Grace strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted! You are accepted, the total you. Your body, which you often reject, is accepted by that which is greater than you. You are accepted in your attempts to deny your body or to lose yourself in your body. You are accepted. When that light breaks through, you experience grace.
When do you experience that kind of grace?
I experience that kind of grace when I listen to music like the Messiah, or Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony. I experience that kind of grace when I dance (not very frequently now). I experience that kind of grace when I sing great hymns or anthems of our faith that point to God's goodness and sustaining power. I experience that kind of grace when I am quiet enough to listen, meditate, and experience God's love and sustaining power.
But our lives don't stop with receiving Good News in a language that speaks to us. If Good News is truly good, it carries a power with it that is transforming and renewing. Our being is shaken sometimes, transformed or strengthened, perhaps directions are reassessed and clarified.
That was the experience of the disciples as they grew in their awareness and certainty of Christ's presence continuing with them in a new form. The grace-full experiences that they had known during Jesus' time with them before his death took on new and deeper meaning. The terrified band of followers came out from behind their locked and bolted doors to proclaim what they had experienced. They were witnesses to these things. And we can be witnesses to these things, too.
Much of Peter's speech is reference to Old Testament prophesies coming true: that where Joel had predicted that young men would see visions and old men would dream dreams, that time had come! that where God's spirit would be poured out on all persons, that time had come. they were witnesses to these things.
I think it adds a level of understanding to know what word is used for witness in the Greek language that this story was written in. The word used is μαpτupiα. Sounds vaguely like our word martyr doesn't it? And for good reason: the witness of those who were preaching then faced great persecution at times, not only in verbal abuse, but physical beating, imprisonment, and death, to say nothing of danger to and even loss of jobs! For Peter and the others, to stand up where and when they did was to face ridicule, jeering, and physical danger.
The word martyr has fallen into some disgrace among many people in our society, both within and outside the church. To act in a way that challenges the existing order is to be called a dreamer, unrealistic, immature, or even criminal.
To act in such a way as to face any serious danger to job, career, and to one's security of living or to life itself is often denigrated as "not working within the system," "not taking the needs of the institution seriously," or "endangering what progress has been made so far." It is to be vulnerable to charges of being a "sacrificial lamb."
Accommodation has become one of the highest values in our society, so much so that much of the significance of the word "witness" μαpτupiα has been lost or diluted to mean a testimony spoken in obsolete language and worldviews. Witness has come to mean for us only words.
Witness in other parts of the world has a higher price tag. Central America saw the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero as he was celebrating mass in El Salvador, after he had become a voice of those who had no voice, the poor and oppressed peasants who were crying for reform.
He had said, "As a pastor, I am obliged, by divine command, to give my life for those whom I love--and that is for all Salvadorans, even for those who may assassinate me. If the threats should come to pass, I offer God, from this very moment, my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador."
Witness in this country in the Civil Rights Movement had a high price too. Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white housewife and mother of three children from Detroit drove 3 days in the family Oldsmobile to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to help in the movement. She shuttled many of the hundreds of civil rights marchers between Selma and Montgomery for six days. On one trip, she was chased and murdered by a carload of white men. Malcolm Boyd said of her, "she epitomized the very strong person in the freedom movement who doesn't ask to be a leader. People like Mrs. Liuzzo make up the moral backbone of the movement. They are so committed to freedom that they are really prepared to die for it." (Jack Mendelsohn, The Martyrs, Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice, 1966, p. 187)
Some of you know Pat Washburn, religious educator at First Unitarian down the street. Pat believes so strongly that war is immoral that she will not participate in any way, including paying the portion of her income taxes that go for support of the military. After several years of struggle with the IRS and after much harassment and threats from them, her house was taken by the IRS for her unpaid taxes. Here was witness in words and in costly deeds.
Witness has often come to be divorced from and even set in opposition to service and action. Parts of the church sometimes call for increased evangelism instead of more service-oriented programs.
But when we think of witness in the form of Jesus, we can see witness for what it is in its most profound sense: speaking, doing, and being. In Jesus' actions, in Jesus' words, in Jesus' intention, in Jesus' very being was a unity of witness which pointed to the reality and purpose of God's love, the creative source of all goodness. In Jesus, witness and service were one.
In the witness of Peter, Oscar Romero, and Viola Liuzzo, we see a witness which explains where our term martyr comes from: we see a witness unto death.
In Peter's witness that first Pentecost, we see a public action, a witness to God's own public action in our world, He quotes from the prophet Joel, with a significant change: the great Day of the Lord is not great and terrible now, but great and glorious. We see God beginning not a final day of terrible judgment on the day of Pentecost, but a glorious beginning of a people who will carry God's good news to all the peoples of the earth, and in their own language. God is beginning a people by an action that opens the door of faith. Whoever calls upon God will experience transformation and renewal.
In God's action at Pentecost we see the divisions and misunderstandings of Babel overcome, the usual confusion become unusual understanding. In God's action--in any age--the order is overturned: what has been divided becomes unified; what has been separated becomes reconciled: what has been dead becomes alive again!
We today experience that kind of presence when we are open to it. We today can be witnesses to these things. We today can re-present what God has bond through our witness of service and speech.
In the action of God's spirit, we see the Helper working in two ways: to overturn the world's pride, separations, and assumptions about what is right; and we see work to support, help, and strengthen those who are witnesses to God's reconciling power, in times of trial and trouble.
We live in times of trial and trouble. We live in uncertain times. The Helper is for us. The Helper as the Spirit of Christ is present with us.
I have found helpful the image of "the mind of Christ" as I face the uncertainties and rapid changes of our times. What would be Christ's spirit in this situation or that? Where would Jesus be concerned about inequities and injustice? How would Christ's concern for and love for a person be expressed? Where would Christ's loving, accepting, challenging presence heal, reconcile and strengthen deeper growth?
In this way, using the image of the Mind of Christ, I see a way for us to get some sensitivity to the presence of the Spirit of Truth, the Helper, the Advocate, the Comforter today, in 1995.
The Spirit of truth is with us today. If we are open to receiving it, we can receive not only new understandings of God's love and acceptance of us in our own language, we can also be comforted, helped, and challenged as we walk the journey of faith today.
The hymn we will be singing at the close of the service is particularly good for worship in a time such as ours as we celebrate God's presence. Ruth Duck, the author, wanted to write a hymn about God's leading presence and set it to the tune of Lead On O King Eternal, but she wanted to put it in a language particularly meaningful to her and her life experience. It has enriched my own faith and supported me on my own journey over the years.
Everflowing Streams: Songs for Worship. Ruth Duck with Michael Bausch. NY: The Pilgrim Press, 1986.
In The Faith We Sing, Nashville, Abingdon Press, 2000. #2234, "Lead On, O Cloud of Presence."