St. James' Episcopal Church, Cambridge
Diocese of Massachusetts
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with
the world.” Paul Farmer
Pentecost Year A
5-11-08
©Holly Lyman
Antolini
Lections: Acts 2:1-21; Ps. 104:24-34, 35b; 1 Cor.
12:3b-13; John 20:19-23
O Holy Spirit, by
whose breath, life rises vibrant out of death; come to create, renew, inspire;
come, kindle in our hearts your fire.
Amen.
Shalom!
Peace be with you! According to
the omniscience of Wikipedia, “shalom” doesn’t just mean “peace.” It means, “Nothing broken. Wellbeing.
Complete.” In other words:
WHOLENESS. WHOLENESS BE WITH YOU!
Come on, everybody:
speak for Jesus: turn to the person
nearest you, look them in the eye, and wish them “SHALOM! PEACE
AND WHOLENESS BE WITH YOU!”
Welcome to Pentecost:
the Feast of Gifts. This day, this Fiftieth Day after the Resurrection of Jesus
from the Dead, is the great celebration of the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the
first and foremost of gifts, given in the first breathing of Creation and
re-given by Jesus in the resurrection.
From that first gift flow ALL the gifts:
the utterance of wisdom and knowledge, as Paul tells the Corinthians;
faith; healing; miracles; prophecy, the discernment of spirits; tongues and the
interpretation of them; and
that’s just the BEGINNING of them! All
the gifts are important; none more important than another; all flowing from and
contributing to the great creative, connective force that made us and binds us
to one another in community.
All gifts are the
fruits of that First Fruits Gift: the gift of the Holy Spirit. All gifts are given not merely for their own
enjoyment, but for the sake of SHALOM, for the sake of the PEACE that comes from
WHOLENESS, the WHOLENESS not of PART, not of just EACH OF US as individuals but
of THE WHOLE OF US, the WHOLE OF CREATION, each of us bending our gifts to the
task, all of us pouring BACK the gift of the Spirit poured out on
us.
Of course, WHOLENESS
has NOT, SAD TO SAY, been the NAME OF THE GAME. You know, as I climb my OWN
learning curve (and wow, every new beginning is a STEEP learning curve, so MUCH
to be encountered for the first time ever, each little piece to be fit into the
Bigger Picture, and often stuck in the wrong place at first and needing to be
moved later…WHEW! And has anybody
here gotten BEYOND the climb up the never-ending Learning Curve of Life? Anyone GRADUATED off the Learning Curve? NOT ME!)…
As I climb, I often wonder about GOD’S LEARNING
CURVE. Do you suppose when God breathed
the first breath of life into Adam, Earth Person, that God really thought PEACE was
going to characterize human life? Do you
suppose God really thought this Image of God’s Own Self was going to BE ABLE to
live in seamless love, flawlessly realizing all the potential God had breathed
into him? I suspect so. I suspect the Earth People’s decision to
assert independence and separateness from God by acting AGAINST God’s
instructions came as a shock to God as much as its consequences were a rude
awakening to the Earth People. I bet you the chaotic consequences of Earth
Peoples’ independent, contrary, self-serving-ness were NOT the “GOOD” God saw in
Creation when God had completed it and was resting on the Seventh Day! But pretty much ever since Adam
– Male Earth Person – and
Adamah – Female Earth Person –
decided to go against God’s intention for them, there has been BROKENNESS, and
consequently, alienation, dishonesty, loneliness, pain,
chaos.
I’m not telling YOU
anything. The newspaper and Internet and
TV back me up, daily. Jesus’ own
backstory backs me up – misunderstanding creating fear, hostility, and
contention, followed by threat, then attack and desertion, and finally the
extremity of crucifixion. Your own
intimate lives – with whatever illness or loss or communications breakdown or
isolation or disappointment you, or those you love, are wrestling with – back me
up. WHOLENESS is not where we’re AT, at
the moment.
Yet here, at the Climax
of the Easter Season, is Pentecost, the Feast of the Giving of the Holy
Spirit. And here is Jesus, in John’s
Gospel, reiterating again what we heard on the Second Sunday of Easter: PEACE I
GIVE TO YOU. MY OWN PEACE I LEAVE WITH
YOU. SHALOM, dear ones.
WHOLENESS TO YOU!!! Here is
Jesus, RISEN from the crucifixion, RISEN FROM THE DEAD, “trampling down death
by death,” [Easter Troparion in the Orthodox
tradition], BREATHING THE SPIRIT OF
WHOLENESS BACK INTO US.
RE-CREATING US FOR WHOLENESS, COMMISSIONING US TO BE THE
BEARERS OF WHOLENESS. Commissioning us to pour out OUR OWN GIFTS against
all chaos, all pain, all injustice.
Against all ugliness, all loneliness, all separation, all greed, all
conflict and war. Commissioning us to be “GOD-BEARERS.”
Not naïvely, mind you.
By this time in this 21st Century, we’ve all lost our naïveté – we
and God too, if I’m right that God ever was naïve about our human
capacity to choose to act in love. We’ve
learned hard lessons from Holocaust and Nuclear War and Genocide, from our
environmental heedlessness and greed, from endless destruction precipitated by
ideological orthodoxies of all kinds, religious, political, and military; hard
lessons about how HARD WHOLENESS IS TO COME BY.
How ESSENTIAL HUMILITY IS IN ACHIEVING IT. How slim-to-none our CONTROL IS, in the
process. How evanescent is the Spirit
that generates the WHOLENESS we seek to further, blowing “where it
listeth,” and not where WE THINK
WE’VE DOMESTICATED IT to blow, to DO OUR BIDDING. Showing up in the most UNEXPECTED TIMES AND
PLACES, winds blowing, tongues of fire flaming overhead, to EMPOWER THE MOST
UNEXPECTED PEOPLE TO ACT ON BEHALF OF WHOLENESS.
Or showing up so
quietly, without any drama at all, in the tiniest, most vulnerable, most
ORDINARY things: IMPOSSIBLE that such things could effect any of the monumental
change we know we need! Let us
NOT OVERLOOK the importance of SUCH SMALL THINGS. Things as small as tiny Gwen here, whom we
are baptizing today, who can’t even sit up on her own yet, let alone REPAIR THE
BROKEN WORLD. Yet the Spirit took just
such a tiny being – the being of Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s baby – and did
impossible things in and through him.
And the Spirit, who made Gwen in the first place in the fundamental
miracle of life, who beats in her tiny heart and pulses in and out of her tiny
lungs, will pour itself through her in ways we cannot possible know or predict,
whose power we can only pray for. May
she, in the power of her baptism, she as just one member of the vast and
many-gifted Body of Christ, may Gwen enlist the Spirit to devote HER gifts as
they develop to the WORK OF WHOLENESS, “growing up in every way…into Christ,
from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which
it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in
building itself up in love.”[Ephesians 4:15b-16]. May she
not LET those gifts be DIVERTED into a path of DESTRUCTIVENESS. May she REMEMBER to RENOUNCE “all the
spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, all the evil powers of
this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, all the sinful
desires that draw us from the love of God,” and TURN TO THE GRACE AND LOVE OF JESUS CHRIST,
however often she has to turn … and turn … and turn again. And may she learn – and this is SOOOO
IMPORTANT in our SO-BROKEN WORLD – that sometimes even our seemingly most
IRREMEDIABLE BROKENNESS CAN, IN THE
POWER OF THE RESURRECTION, BRING ABOUT MORE WHOLENESS than our strength
can. SOMETIMES OUR MOST WORDLESS
GROANINGS CAN, IN THE SPIRIT, BECOME THE HEALING WORD!
May WE, renewing OUR
baptismal vows today, ALSO REMEMBER to enlist the RECONCILING POWER OF OUR RISEN
LORD to assist us in devoting our gifts – and even our BROKENNESS – to
WHOLENESS. And when we discover to our
dismay and shame that we’ve been sidetracked into using those gifts for our own
small ends, or wasting them altogether, or pitting them fruitlessly AGAINST each
other, MAY WE TURN BACK, CONFIDENT that God is only WAITING PATIENTLY to assist
us toward WHOLENESS AGAIN, WAITING TO POUR OUT THE SPIRIT AGAIN UPON US, to
BREATHE IT INTO US, TO SET US AFIRE to bring the great wonder of Creation
further toward what God created it to be:
in all its wondrous diversity of GIFTS, ONE. PEACEFUL. WHOLE.
In the words of Jesus
himself: Receive the Holy
Spirit. As the Father has sent me, so I
send you. SHALOM.
WHOLENESS. PEACE.
Amen.