Pentecost 2014

 You Tube video of sermon is:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEBBlFqB5qs


A Reflection for Pentecost                                         All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC June 8, 2014                                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 2:1-21                                         John 20:19-23

Today is the Feast of Pentecost, but before we deal with the Pentecost story, let me remind you of another story - the Tower of Babel story/myth from the Book of Genesis.

I call it a myth because a myth is a story which attempts to explain why things are as they are. Myths show up in in many different cultures in similar ways because most civilizations want to understand the world about them. Each culture gathers together and, in their search for truth, they enter their unconscious connections to a collective unconscious and relate their public dreams in symbolic form which end as stories which may or may not be factually correct but which carry a deeper truth. A way for me to understand the concept of a myth is by defining a myth as a public dream and a dream as a private myth. In the individual experience, the events of a dream may be rather fantastic as our logical mind remembers them, but they are messages from our true Self, our Soul if you will, the place where God's true self connects with us and we are in connection with all of creation which occurs in our unconscious when we are asleep. These dreams may come to drive home a deeper truth about us, about the divine, and about the world we live in.

As you remember in the Tower of Babel myth/story, the people of the earth are all connected to each other, through inheritance from Noah after the flood story and from Adam and Eve as part of the whole creation myth - which may or not be factually correct, but is backed up by the DNA evidence which shows that people all over the world are genetically connected to each other. In the story, the people who are all connected to each other but who are also filled with their own pride and arrogance decide to build a tower on the plain of Shinar to reach to the Heavens to make a NAME for themselves. To make a NAME means to be in charge of their own identity as equals with God. Out of this folly, the tower is scattered and the people are scattered from each other by language as their differences develop and harden into habits of culture and race and color. The myth tells us that we are all related as brothers and sisters, but we act as strangers to each other as, in our arrogance, we view each other as potential enemies. 

The story of the Pentecost experience is a recapitulation of the Tower of Babel story but told in reverse. The disciples are gathered together, men and women, all as an intentional community, not to rise up as a challenge to God but to enter into the NAME of God, to have their identities fashioned by the Spirit of the Living God. They face a challenge and they have some anxiety about having enough strength to meet that challenge. Here in that room the community’s members empty out their fears, arrogances (for indeed, arrogances are only fears in disguise) and differences and rediscover that they are connected at a deeper level to each other and indeed to all the world. The emptying out of themselves that they are the special ones is to leave room in their soul for God's spirit to come into their lives. The Spirit, the wind, the breath of God comes and drives them out into the world, to meet the world on its own terms in order to share the contents of their souls in such a way as to knock down and transcend the barriers of geography, habits of life, language, race, and color. 

Now, we can spend a lot of time arguing how or if this factually happened, or we can accept the Book of Acts as the stories the church tells to explain how the followers of Jesus changed their dependence on the physical presence of Jesus and allowed themselves to be filled with the wind, the breath, the spirit of the Living Christ.  This transformation allowed them to leave their homes and go into all the world in order to share their hearts and souls with previously unmet people who were members of the larger family and only disguised as strangers.

The disciples had a choice - they could be like the people at Babel and try to build themselves up as Towers to take the place of God in their lives, or they could empty themselves out in love in order to bring peace and forgiveness to the broken world.

The stories of the Book of Acts indeed act as our mythic story of how we deal with our faith and especially how we go out into the world from this church. I am especially aware of it as I look out at our group of graduating high school seniors who I first met when they were finishing first grade. They are no longer to be kept safe from the world; it is time for them to face new challenges.  Part of what we will do is to breathe the breath of God on them and send them out to be adults in the world, doing the ministry of sharing the divine spirit within them. This is still their home and they can always return because they are always in our hearts, but we send them out as our ministers.

As they go on to the next phase of their lives, they will meet many different kinds of people, from many different cultures and different belief systems. Their job is not to convert people but to honor them where they are and, at the same time, share with them the truth that is in their own souls. What our graduates will find is that they need to go deeper into their own souls to be able to communicate the mystery that is inside them. This is not a time for glib doctrines or memorized prayers or easy cynicism, but rather, for a hard struggle to find the dreams that are percolating inside their true self, the one they were created to be. God does not speak to their souls in chronic undifferentiated formulas, but each dream the divine dream maker implants is different as each of them is different, and yet each of them and each of us and each of the brothers and sisters we have not yet met are all connected in God’s love.

The lesson from the Gospel of John for today shows us who we are to be. In that Gospel, Jesus came to the people who had let him down and he announced Peace and Forgiveness.  We are Peace-givers and Agents of Forgiveness. Peace is not the cessation of conflict but the bringing of wholeness to broken people. We live in a broken world and we have a love affair with violence, and our job is to heal the brokenhearted, strengthen the weak, stand up for the persecuted, and work for justice. Forgiveness is a gift that we give to those who have disappointed us. I ask the graduates to forgive me as your Priest when I have not been there when you needed me, to forgive us, the church, where and when we have let you down. We ask them to forgive their parents; we try as much as we can, but we wish we were better. We ask that they learn how to forgive themselves as God has already forgiven them and us.  

I ask you as a Parish to keep these students in the Holy Space of your hearts as they do our work of ministry in other places to bring about God’s dream for us.