Scripture: Romans 8:22-27 (text below, as part of the sermon)
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One of the more interesting side effects of our little community is that, because we do things more low-key, online, and usually at different times than the more traditional churches, I usually have the opportunity to really see at what other churches are doing on a given Sunday before I even get around to doing my preaching for the week.
Oftentimes this isn’t such a big deal. Unlike many my profession, I have a strict personal belief against “borrowing” from other sermons and services, so it isn’t really about that; I’m not looking for stuff to use. But it does give me a unique perspective, the ability to see just want things seem to be important in the larger Christian world; what things most pastors, whether we’re talking about the well-meaning, kind, accepting mainline pastors or the mildly psychotic megachurch pastors, feel is important to highlight come Sunday morning.
And this week…oh boy…it was all about the pageantry.
For those of you who are unaware, this past week the Christian church worldwide celebrated the Pentecost holiday. And for those of you who are unaware of this fact…well…I can only assume that you’re not connected to any other Christians on social media because, let me tell you, us Christian folk just do not shut up about Pentecost.
In peeping on various services around the world this week, I saw everything from multilingual performative prayer demonstrations, to interpretive dance, to actual fire used as a prop in church. And in the midst of all of this, both in service and out of it, were pastors, church leaders, and plain old regular folk who just can’t stop talking about that one time two thousand years ago when the Holy Spirit came down, and everybody spoke a bunch of different languages, or maybe people just…understood…a bunch of different languages, I dunno, but whatever it was it happened and GUYS IT WAS SO COOL!
It’s like we got that one awesome miracle moment, and we just can’t let it go.
Now, if I’m being honest, I could just let this entire thing devolve into a listicle-style “Top 10 misconceptions that everybody has about Pentecost” type deal today, and really dig into how we often misunderstand just what happened on that fateful day but…to be truly, brutally honest…I think that the Christian church has a bit of a “middle-school storyteller problem.”
That is to say, we’re really, really, almost excessively, to the point where it’s more than a little weird, invested in these “and then everybody clapped” stories in the scriptural narrative.
This kind of self-congratulatory, “look how awesome God is and therefore we also must be” storytelling is a central part of the American Christian experience (and, by virtue of American imperialism/colonialism, that’s baked into a lot of Christianity worldwide too). We love these kinds dramatic moments in our stories; we’re climax junkies, wanting to skip ahead to the point in the story where the good stuff happens, where God appears in flaming glory to make things happen miraculously…without any effort being had on our part.
Huh….wonder if there’s anything to that…
But one thing I’ve noticed, and I’m willing to wager a lot of you have noticed this too, is that making stories like these the focus of our faith, even on a singular holiday…it just feels like it’s falling flat these days. It feels more obviously self-congratulatory, like a guy desperately trying to hype himself up at a party full of people 10 years younger than him, praying that they won’t notice that he’s got nothing left in the tubes but this one story about this one time that something awesome happened…long before anyone else there was ever born.
When you look at churches today, you can almost feel that desperation…reaching for bigger, bolder, more dramatic things, trying to make these exciting moments bigger, bolder, even more exciting, hoping that this will be the year, this will finally be the year that we tell the story dynamically enough for people to get excited.
But…come Pentecost, truth be told…a lot of us aren’t feeling really self-congratulatory. A lot of us are looking at the state of the world, and the work of the church in it, and we’re not feeling in the mood of a miracle story, not feeling at all able to take joy in this idea of the descent of the Holy Spirit.
When we hear about the Holy Spirit, making dramatic, fiery work in the hearts and minds of people, facilitating communication between people, spreading the good news of peace and kindness into a world racked with hatred, violence and division…it isn’t the church people think of anymore.
We see a church which remains in far too many places committed to condemnation of large groups of people, on the grounds of their very identity. We see churches and Christians denying obvious facts, tossing science and basic health and safety right out the window in the name of their own self-interest. We see congregations crying out in support of fascists, cheering for racist police violence, grasping their guns and clutching their pearls while the Spirit moves inexorably farther and farther away from those who claim its presence.
We hear the story of pentecost, tall tales of tongues of fire, speaking in tongues and just…a lot of talk about tongue in general, and the great miracle of communication, and then we look to a church which seems to be gleefully celebrating the fact that it’s becoming harder and harder to communicate with each other, harder and harder for even those of us who speak the same language to be seen and heard by one another anymore.
And if you’re anything like me you see and hear all of this, you feel all of this in the depths of your soul, and when the pastors step to their pulpits with all these crazy, fire-based imagery, wild props and (and I really can’t stress enough that this was a real thing I saw this week), actual fire in church, you just want to shrug your shoulders, expel a frustrated sigh, and just say…’enough!’
This is why (among other, far lazier reasons) I have decided this week to forgo the pageantry, set aside my video editing tools, set aside video entirely actually, and just look, really look, to the word of God. I wanted instead to spend a little time with a different passage, which might have a better chance of telling us just how we can expect to encounter the Holy Spirit in our own lives, and not how it was encountered in exuberant, dramatic imagery, two thousand years ago.
Consider these words from Paul’s letter to the Romans:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not
only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly
while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved.
Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for
what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our
weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes
with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the
mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of
God.
Now before we settle into the text proper, I think it’s important to discuss one key fact that I think is vital to understanding what we’ve heard here.
Today’s text comes from a letter, written by the Apostle Paul. Paul, as you may have gathered from both his name and the fact that he made a career out of going from place to place telling other people what to do with their lives, was a man. A childless, unmarried, presumably celibate man. And, in the opening lines of today’s passage we find Paul, human male, waxing philosophical about the pains of childbirth.
This is by very definition, something he absolutely, unequivocally, knows precisely nothing about. Dude has no idea what labor pains are, but he is leaning into this analogy with all the unearned confidence of a rich Caucasian YouTuber who is convinced that poor people just need to work harder and that all women really hate “nice guys.”
Paul here is trying to give a succinct picture of the Holy Spirit, to explain as clearly and plainly as he can, exactly what the Spirit is and how it is at work in the community. He is trying to take a piece of an almighty, omnipotent deity, one-third of the Holy Trinity, and put it in a box; to make it make sense not just to everyone else in Rome, but to himself as well.
Of course, like a lot of us, he starts out with a sort of gibbering, self-absorbed, un-self-aware misstep founded on a bunch of assumptions about things he has no business talking about in the first place.
And what’s worse is that not only are his intentions so clearly good, but he’s not technically wrong about the point he’s trying to make in the general sense. His terrible analogy here is highlighting a real concern; that the Spirit of God is present in and among the people, yet suffering persists. God is here, but so is pain, and hurt, and loss, and it feels like these two things can’t co-exist, should not at all coexist, but nonetheless they’re here. It’s one of those contradictions that borders on paradox, two things that seem cancel each other out.
Paul’s intent here is to make it make sense, because he wants his readers to experience hope, rather than fear. He’s writing to a people who would definitely be fearful about this, fearful about suffering and persecution that was coming their way, that might already have been upon them. They wanted a word of hope, some sign that this Pentecost miracle wasn’t a one-off; that there was something more to the idea of God being present in and among us, preferably in a way that would preclude, or at least lessen, some of that suffering.
And the Apostle Paul, bless his celibate heart, makes the cardinal error that every first-time father has made at least once during their first go at labor with their wives. He stepped into the situation, proudly proclaimed “I know what this is! You’re gonna be fiiiine.”
By the way, if anyone listening to this is a young man on that journey towards their very first child, or really just likely to spend any amount of time with a pregnant woman near to giving birth, please avail yourself of the following advice.
Do not, under any circumstances, tell a pregnant woman that a) you know what they’re going through, or b) that they just need to not worry about it because something better is on the way I can almost guarantee you that whichever pregnant woman you choose to tell that too is likely going to punch you in a very discrete location on your anatomy in as indiscreetly as humanly possible.
And, truth be told, she’d be kinda right to do so.
As a guy, who may or may not have made that exact mistake myself during my wife’s first pregnancy, I know the temptation to use hope as a springboard to vault your way from painful present to a brighter future. I know the temptation to avoid confronting a difficult and uncomfortable now by using hope as a shortcut.
We hate discomfort, and it often feels like hope is an easy way out.
But hope only seems an easy way out if you’re not the one suffering. When you’re the one suffering, hope is a threat. Hope is empty promises, arrogantly delivered, as an excuse to avoid doing anything that might be mistaken for actually helping alleviate any of the suffering at hand.
And this is why Paul doesn’t stop with his borderline-hilarious exercise in arrogant presumption. He starts there because, like the rest of us, he’s human. But his motion from there through the rest of today’s passage is an example of what it looks like when we allow the Spirit to take us on the journey from our own self-contained arrogance to a place of real, Spirit-led compassion.
Hope, he says, real hope, is based in what is not seen.
Consider that, if you will, as churches around the world bask in the celebration of the most obviously visible miracle story in the New Testament.
Hope that is seen, is not really hope at all.
It’s the illusion of hope.
We humans love the visible signs of hope because they are powerful, and boy do we love power. Powerful, visible symbols of hope give us strength, give us courage, give us the ability to be firm and secure in our faith, utterly convinced that we’re the ones who are right, and that others are the ones who are wrong, and that those who disagree with our hope must…
…hang on…
…that isn’t really hope, is it? Kinda sounds like the other thing.
We hope for what we do not see. We hope for comfort, for peace, for security; for all the things that settle over our places of weakness and wounding like a balm, and whisper to us that we are going to be ok. That we are loved, cared for, and welcome in this space.
“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
While everyone is out there celebrating with banging cymbals, great bands and assemblies crying God’s glory loudly to the heavens, the Spirit moves in sighs too deep for words, in quiet breaths of peace and mercy not to the proud and the boastful, not to the worshipful and pious, but to the hurt and the wounded.
I know some of you who listen to this may have gone and enjoyed some of that fun, Pentecost pageantry, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s great to go out and celebrate God, especially if that’s what helps you connect with God in your own heart. But don’t mistake the songs and the streamers, the festivals and solemn assemblies, the props, gimmicks, and even the great miracle story itself; don’t mistake those things for the Holy Spirit.
For the Holy Spirit is at once larger and more quiet than all of that. The Holy Spirit is the whisper that binds us, the breath of wind that connects us, the unifying thread that binds us in the thought that all are welcome, and all are loved. The Holy Spirit is the echo of God’s divinity in us and in the world, which tells us that it’s OK to be broken, for the spirit is made perfect in our weakness.
The Holy Spirit is that inexplicable something that tells us that it doesn’t matter if we don’t get right, doesn’t matter if we start from a place of arrogant presumption, outright stupidity, overwhelming privilege, or just happen to be a complete screwup because we don’t know how to pray as we ought.
We all suck at figuring this stuff out!
But the Spirit is that which makes it OK anyways. The Holy Spirit makes our heartfelt attempts good enough, makes up the difference so that we can find that connection to God that we’ve been looking for all our lives. The Holy Spirit is the ultimate bridge builder, working with our own weaknesses, our own imperfections, and building out from those to connect us to God, and to connect us to each other.
So this week, I want to invite you all to keep your eyes open not for those moments of great pageantry, or those places of narrative drama where the stories of our lives take sudden and unexpected turns. Don’t go hunting for God like a deranged neophyte, expecting that God only turns up in moments when radical change happens, where things get weird and crazy.
Instead, look for the Holy Spirit in the silence. Listen for God in those tender moments where you’re alone with your suffering and pain, in that place where all you can ask is “why?”
Because our hope isn’t in what is visible, not rooted in the expectation of dramatic change to our reality.
Our hope is based in what is not visible, in that quiet whisper that God’s healing for us and for the world is going to be a journey, a journey in which we are invited and expected to take part. God’s healing for us and the world is a narrative that is still unfolding, a story that has a part written just for us.
Our hope rests in the Sprit that helps us in our weakness, intercedes with sighs too deep for words, and moves us beyond those places of arrogant presumption, beyond those broken places where we think we know who and what God is, and encourages us to be compassionate as we are healed, caring as we are cared for, and to love as we are loved.
Amen.
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