Pentecost 2010

Today we officially welcome Jennifer into the family of Jesus Christ. Today you are making a new commitment to follow Christ, and we are making a commitment also to support you in your journey. We also get a chance to renew our own baptismal vows. God is also, coming to you now in a new way, making a commitment to you as well, sealing the deal as it were, filling you with the Holy Spirit, just like on that first day of Pentecost, the birth of the Christian community. It is like a marriage, a three way covenant between you and God and us. Like in a marriage you are joining this new family with all kinds of crazy in-laws and relatives that come along as part of the package when you are in relationship to God.


This new community you are joining is by no means perfect. We have not arrived at our destination. But we seek to be signs of a new community of radical hospitality and welcome and inclusion. We are ambassadors of reconciliation and we are on a journey together all of us, coming to understand day by day as we live out our lives, the implications of the Good News that Jesus Christ reconciles all things to himself. In this new community we are able to be together across incredible barriers, in the early church it was the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles that was brought down as these communities found a new way to be together and in our own times the implication of the gospel about who is included continues to lead us forward into new understandings and new adventures.

This vision of a new inclusive community, finding unity in diversity, is contrasted with the story from our reading in Genesis of the city of Babel. In this story we have a mono-culture society in which everyone is the same and everyone speaks the same language. This story functions as etiology, a story meant to explain why something is the way it is. In this case why there are so many different kinds of people, and it imagines a time when this was not true, when everyone was the same and tells how that changed.

I imagine Babel as a fortified, walled city based on fear and anxiety of things that are different, in which sameness is enforced on everyone inside and differences outside are kept out by their walls. The only differences tolerated would be those necessary to do the different functions needed to build the city. There would be a dominant class that lords it over everyone else to enforce sameness. They build towers, sky scrapers that dominate the landscape as symbols of their power they want to exert on the world. Babel is in the east from Israel’s perspective, in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. The study of anthropology tells us that this actually is the kind of thing that happened when some people settled down after thousands of years of a nomadic life of hunting and gathering, and turned to agriculture. They built these big cities to support their growing stable populations, they established artificial boundaries, cities and states that divided up the unity of God’s creation and the family of God, and they amassed power and wealth, sought to spread their influence and conquer others, repeating what we have always done as “civilized” people, try to take over the world.

But this ancient story tells us that God purposely confuses this sort of reality. It is God who creates diversity, scatters the people and confuses their tongues so that no one understands each other anymore. According to this story it is God who constantly works against our tendency toward dominance and exclusion by constantly creating an abundance of diversity both biological and cultural. Some of us think of this as a curse and the story certainly reads like it is a curse, but I think we need to claim this diversity as God’s will, and see this curse as a blessing in disguise. Rather than being threatened by diversity, to be faithful to God we must celebrate it and thank God for it.

This interpretation is only confirmed by the story of the First Pentecost in the Book of Acts. Pentecost is actually built on the Jewish agricultural festival called the Feast of Weeks that gets a whole new meaning with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Here we have a sign of a new community in which all the diversity of the world is gathered from every language and nation. The miracle is not that everyone speaks the same language, nor suddenly has the same culture, nor thinks exactly the same way. No, the miracle is that when the early church leaders speak, nor the gathered crowd hears the gospel in their own language. It is a glimpse of a time when finally the whole world, all of God’s people, across the diversity of languages and cultures and places can hear and understand one another as if for the first time. It is a vision of unity in diversity.

Through this Holy Spirit we have been born anew into a different kind of community that exists on the edge of the way the world is set up now. We are called to be pioneers, to go back into the wilderness, to go back even further and be hunters and gathers, listening to the spirit of the land once again in all its wild diversity, back when the world was one, before the dividing walls of our kind of civilization tore us apart. We are called to live into the future, to live our lives searching always to be a sign of that new community, the Kingdom of God, in which all are including in the blessing of God’s creation.

Living into this kind of new vision of community means that you must take risks and you will make mistakes and you will discover all the time your own limitations and your need to continually rely on the Holy Spirit to guide you. For this kind of unity is only achieved through the Spirit.

I have plenty of stories of my own shortcomings along this line. Of the many pitfalls I have fallen into and land mines I have stepped on in my cross cultural relationships. Of the confusion and ambiguity that seems a curse. Hilary’s mom and I many years ago were buying our first car together.

The Filipino salesman was so thankful for our pending purchase that he invited us to his modest apartment home where his wife prepared us a wonderful meal. The first time I had lumpia. However, Ann and I realized that we really could not afford the car and backed out of the deal the next day. We had unknowingly entered into a reciprocity relationship and dishonored it thoroughly and both of us still carry this memory with some shame to this day.

Another time I was working at a family shelter in Stockton and greeted an Hispanic couple who had been working in the fields all day. They were covered from head to toe in the fine peat of the San Joaquin valley and I jokingly said that it looks like they worked hard today. They were both so offended and shamed by my comments that they immediately left the shelter to live I assume in their car.

Another time here on the reservation we were working with NW Area Foundation who promised all of us 10 million dollars if we as a community could come up with a vision to end poverty! Hispanic, Native, African and European American from Sunnyside to Selah came together to try to try to create a common vision. It was doomed from the beginning. In one small group, I made some comment about being on a vision quest together and immediately a tribal member stood up and lambasted me for co-opting the term vision quest. He said his vision was, “That we all get back on the boat and go home.”

This work of reconciliation, stepping across boundaries, into the confusion of all the diversity around us is fraught with peril and risk and yet we must take the risk and learn from our mistakes to be in community with our brothers and sisters. And always we must pray that the Spirit of reconciliation and unity fill us and empower us for this work.

And when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, just like the early disciples on that first Pentecost, people will think you are drunk, or “on something” or crazy or worse for imagining that you can go against the way the world is set up. Those who have an investment in the status quo will be threatened by your insanity, others who see in it the hope of their own liberation will count it as a blessing, but nevertheless everyone might still think you are crazy.

I learned this weekend at Diocesan Council a little bit about the history of the Diocese of Spokane of which we are a part. It started in a saloon in Walla Walla. How’s that for having the reputation of being drunkards. The first Bishop of the Diocese, Bishop Wells was accused of being crazy for wanting to build a cathedral, and the architect that he hired tried to warn people that this guy was a mad man, and yet there is now an incredible cathedral in Spokane.

We spoke about the Spirit of the Diocese that builds upon the wilderness, pioneer spirit. That is informed by the wild diversity of eco systems and landscapes and communities of people that live in Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. We talked about how we can support one another and give permission for folks to continue in that pioneer, entrepreneurial, experimental, crazy Spirit as it plays itself out in all the diverse places of the diocese. Not what you usually think of when you think of Episcopalians: Wild and Crazy. But that is what we are going for!

Jan, a retired priest in the diocese, told me yesterday that her favorite image of what it means to be a Christian filled with the Holy Spirit comes from one of the drawings of the classic illustrated edition of Jane Eyre. It is a picture of Bertha Mason, the crazy first wife of the abusive Mr. Rochester. She is kept locked in the attic and sometimes escapes to rampage through Thornhill Hall, and finally in the end burns the place down.

There are lots of images of the Holy Spirit. There is the burning bush that is not consumed which causes Moses to turn aside from the path he is on to discover a whole new reality and a new direction for his life. There are the tongues of fire in the Acts story of the First Pentecost that creates a whole new community in which people from all across the world finally understand one another. Then there is the fire in the hands of a crazy woman, burning down the unjust abusive structures that have kept her locked up in the attic.

I say claim the crazy woman in the attic as your own image. If people think you are “on something” or “off your rocker”, maybe naïve, or seriously misguided, or just plain incompetent for all the mistakes you make along the way taking risks, entering into uncharted territory, challenging the status quo, standing up against injustice and so on, never mind. But instead rejoice and be glad, proclaim boldly who you are. You are headed across the wilderness to the Promised Land.

Today we all renew our commitment to Jesus Christ, and we celebrate the coming of a new Spirit that creates a new community. I pray that you all will experience this radical welcome of the Spirit of God. I pray that you become a part of this new family beyond all the divisions we set up, in which all are included in the abundant blessing of God’s creation. And as you experience this welcome yourselves, I pray that you will follow Jesus Christ in offering this same welcome to all you meet.

Turn with me in your hymnals to page 463 and I want you to recite with me a poem by WH Auden which is set to music in our hymnal. They may seem like strange words, but let them sink into your being and see if they find their way into words you can call your own. Words you can say to one another and to all you meet along the way. Read with me.

He is the Way.

Follow him into the land of unlikeness; you will see Rare Beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.

Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety: you will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.

Love him in the world of the Flesh: and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.