June 12 Sermon (Pentecost)

O Lord, still me. Let my mind be inquiring, searching. Save me from mental rust. Deliver me from spiritual decay. Keep me alive and alert. Open me to your truth. O Lord, teach me so that I may live in your Spirit. Amen. (adapted from The Sacrament of the Word by D. Coggan)

Come Holy Spirit; breathe on us and set us free.

On Friday night, you could feel the Spirit alive at Masuk High School. People were gathered from Monroe & Trumbull to celebrate life, to remember and to fight back against cancer. So many people were engaged in the cause that it was awe inspiring. At the Luminaria Ceremony, it was very moving to see people walking silently around the track, you could only hear the rustle of fee, each one with a glow stick, surrounded by those luminaria lit to remember loved ones who have died and honor the living. It was a fitting tribute for the place was alive with God’s spirit, because it was all about life. (The Nicene Creed reminds us that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life.)

Yesterday afternoon, 11 different churches gathered at Trinity Church in Southport for our deanery confirmation. Many people came before Bishop Ian to be confirmed or received in this church and the Spirit was alive in that church as we sang and prayed and broke bread together. Ray Lopez from St. Peter’s was confirmed The laying on of hands by the bishop and the prayerful presence of so many people gathered, made you feel that God was in the room at that moment.

This morning we are gathered once again at our altar for the Holy Eucharist, to taste and see that the Lord is good. Today we will welcome Benjamin Wokanvoicz into the Body of Christ, as he is baptized. In Baptism, each of us was sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. In Baptism, we become part of the body of Christ, for there is one Body and One Spirit.

At Confirmation, we recognize those baptismal vows and once again the Spirit is recognized as force in our lives. It is that Spirit that is given to each of us at our baptism and remembered in our confirmation, the Spirit of God that guides us for the common good, and at Relay for Life on Friday night, our faith was put into action and the same spirit that was with us at our baptism and confirmation was alive that night on that field at Masuk.

Come Holy Spirit; breathe on us and set us free.

Our Scriptures tell us two different accounts of the bestowal of the Holy Spirit upon the gathered church. In the Acts of the Apostles we have the big public event, with lots of people and dramatic special effects. The event takes place on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter.

They were "all together in one place [when] suddenly there came from heaven a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability" (Acts 2:1-4).

In the Gospel of John, the Spirit comes to the disciples on Easter Day, in the evening, in an intimate setting. Jesus gave his gift of peace to the disciples and "breathed on them" to commission them: "as the Father has sent me, so I send you" (John 20:21).

The word Spirit in Hebrew & in Greek comes from the word for wind or breath. They are two different stories but they each speak to the power of God’s spirit that frees us from fear and sends us out to use the gifts God has given us for the world. Emmett Jarrett my former spiritual director put it this way,

“Two very different pictures of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church at Pentecost confront us in our readings. But both of them speak the same message of the Spirit's power to triumph over death and sin, and the church's commission to proclaim the Gospel of new life and forgiveness to the world.”

Come Holy Spirit; breathe on us and set us free.

The Spirit is always active in our world. We need to look for it; to see it in our lives, happening at our Church, in the fields at our schools and even unexpected places…

In the last years of his life, the great cellist and conductor Pablo Casals suffered greatly from rheumatoid arthritis and emphysema. At 90, he was badly stooped and his head pitched forward; his breathing was labored. He needed the help of his wife, Marta, to get dressed in the morning. Marta would then help him shuffle into his studio where he would, with great difficulty, arrange himself on the piano bench. Casals would then manage to raise his swollen, clenched fingers above the keyboard. A visitor describes what he saw one particular morning:

“I was not prepared for what was about to happen. The fingers slowly unlocked and reached toward the keys like the buds of a plant toward the sunlight. His back straightened. He seemed to breathe more freely. Now his fingers settled on the keys. Then came the opening bars of Bach’s Wohltemperierte Klavier [Well-tempered Clavier], played with great sensitivity and control . . . He hummed as he played, then said that Bach ‘spoke to him here’ — and he placed his hand over his heart.

“Then he plunged into a Brahms concerto and his fingers, now agile and powerful, raced across the keyboard with dazzling speed. His entire body seemed fused with the music; it was no longer stiff and shrunken but supple and graceful and completely freed of its arthritic coils. “Having finished the piece, he stood up by himself, far straighter and taller than when he had come into the room. He walked to the breakfast table with no trace of a shuffle, ate heartily, talked animatedly, finished the meal, then went for a walk on the beach.” [From Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration by Norman Cousins.]

It is the Spirit that set Casals free from the bondage of that arthritis to do as God gave him breath to do, to give life with the beautiful gift of music. God has formed us into a community, the church, an instrument for bringing his life and love into our world. But what makes our Church more than just a gathering of good people is his “breath” infusing the Church with his Spirit to go and use the gifts we have.

Today we celebrate the presence of God in our midst, that promised gift on Pentecost. In Jesus’ breathing upon the assembled disciples the new life of the Spirit, the community of the Resurrection — the Church — takes flight and is free. In the outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples from the book of Acts, they go out to speak the Good News to everyone.

That same Spirit continues to blow through our Church giving life and direction to our mission and ministry, to preach the Gospel to every nation, and to guide us in all that we do. For today we are called to walk in that Spirit, for the Spirit also blows through us to the world. How will we use our God given gifts today?

Come Holy Spirit; breathe on us and set us free. Amen.

Sermon: Pentecost (Mother's Day - May 11)

Holy Spirit, still me. Let my mind be inquiring, searching. Save me from mental rust. Deliver me from spiritual decay. Keep me alive and alert. Open me to your truth. O Lord, teach me so that I may live in your Spirit. Amen.
(adapted from The Sacrament of the Word by D. Coggan)

"Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts!” so begins the Mother's Day proclamation, first uttered in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe, rallying mothers to stand up and speak for peace in our world. We have forgotten that piece of our history of Mother’s Day with its humble beginnings after the civil war to promote peace, it was revived in 1908 and finally in 1914 recognized by president Woodrow Wilson as a way for American citizens to honor those mothers whose sons had died in war. Mother’s Day has continued to evolve, and has become a day for others in the family to honor their moms with gifts, with relaxation, with love.

Today is also Pentecost, 50 days after Easter when the Holy Spirit blew into town, settling upon the disciples and the church was born. I was reminded that today’s celebration of Pentecost, invites us to see God in another way — to think of God in terms other than as a noun. Pentecost is about God as verb. God as doing, being, acting. The Spirit of God is God breathing in us, God animating us, God pulling us together as a Church. God loving and healing and reconciling. God sanctifying the everyday, God comforting the grieving, God seeking out the lost. The Spirit of God is the manifestation of God as a verb — God not only is but does.

That Spirit is still alive today, still animating us to go and do. I was reminded of one mother who recently did what the Spirit of God led her to do. “I want to love the world, but I need to make sure that it happens one person at a time that I encounter.” These words are from the Rev. Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest in Nashville, TN. Inspired by her own mother who rebuilt their lives after their father’s sudden death by a drunk driver had ended his ministry as an Episcopal priest in TN, she has reached out in love with that Spirit of God that called her forth to go and do.

Becca founded Magdalene House in Nashville, a non-for-profit recovery community for women with a criminal history of prostitution and drug abuse, and Thistle Farms, a for-profit cottage industry launched to help support Magdalene House and its residents. With all of that ministry and her ministry as a college chaplain at Vanderbilt, she felt a call to go with some from Magdalene House and share the message of love and hope that has been part of the Magdalene House with women in Rwanda.

Becca writes: “Rwanda was amazing! The women we met fell in love with the message and community of Magdalene. We read letters the women from Nashville sent and in response, the women who are part of the sisters of Rwanda started sharing their experiences of surviving incest, violence, addiction and prostitution…the stories that are hauntingly similar. Rwanda is full of people walking around with ghosts while new life is strapped to the backs of women. Hearty crops are blooming next to people so poor they can't feed their children. It was so much to take in sometimes my legs would shake or my head would throb. Sometimes it's just a fishing pole people need. They already know how to fish. The faith we saw was inspiring and a little intimidating. The singing and dancing were beautiful. The landscape is hilly with mists that come in like sweet blankets. It is strange to think of a million people dying on that land.” (from her blog)

Becca Stevens is a mother of three and many of those sisters in Rwanda are also moms, but mothers who lived through the worst of violence, the worst of what we can do to each other, still trying to live, giving love to their children, learning how to make ends meet, and survive it all. In the midst of such a meeting is the Spirit of God, who breathes into us, the love, the hope, the longing for the richness of life that God gives. And that same Spirit that calls us to do, to reach out in love, one person at a time. A Spirit that called sisters in one part of this planet to visit others, to reach out in love and hope.

This morning, the Spirit has called us to welcome into this fellowship, into this Body of Christ, Bianca Davila and Nichole Tabor, who will be baptized this morning and sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. It is that Spirit that dwells with us from our Baptism that empowers us through the gifts of the Spirit – wisdom, knowledge, discernment, prophecy, miracles, tongues, and interpretation – that is given by the one Spirit for the well-being of the common good. The same Spirit poured upon each one of us allows us to do the ministry that God gives to us to do with the gifts we have. Bianca and Nicole will in time join us in sharing their gifts with the world.

Like those tongues of flame that once rested on the disciples, God gives us that fire, that spirit to go, to speak out, to touch, to love, to do. I think of a story from the Desert Fathers who knew so intimately in their walk with God about what it means to be a soul burning with the Presence of God. Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” The old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

The Spirit of God is blowing through this world and some have caught hold of that flame which is active, for God is doing things, enabling disciples to be “fire-givers” in the name of Jesus like the Rev. Becca Stevens, or the Desert Fathers or the mothers whom we honor and cherish this day. "Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, everyone who has heart!” May we lift up our Spirits to do what God is doing in our world and try to become that flame that touches others in Jesus’ name. For Today we celebrate our mothers and we celebrate the Holy Spirit that has ignited and empowered the Church to be Jesus Christ in the world; for we are all called to arise and play our part. Amen.