God's Spirit Changes Us
Stories
Object:
Contents
What's Up This Week
"God's Spirit Changes Us" by W. Lamar Massingill
"Backdraft" by Frank R. Fisher
"Hope and Optimism" by W. Lamar Massingill
"Dump Ducks" by C. David McKirachan
What's Up This Week
The power of the Holy Spirit to change lives is truly amazing -- today every bit as much as back on that first Pentecost. In this edition of StoryShare, Lamar Massingill meditates on how God's Spirit breathing on us daily gives us strength and power that we aren't always aware of. But Frank Fisher (a former firefighter) reminds us that the Spirit also appears as tongues of fire -- and he uses this imagery to point out that the Spirit can be potent threat to our comfortable lives. Are we willing to open the door, to respond to the call of the Spirit, and rush into the heart of the fire? Lamar Massingill closes with a brief examination of the difference between optimism (which can be disappointed) and hope in the Lord (which can never be crushed). And David McKirachan concludes this week’s installment with a wry commentary about sea gulls and what they might teach us about play.
* * * * * * * * *
God's Spirit Changes Us
by W. Lamar Massingill
Acts 2:1-21
They are the worst words I have ever seen, and the biggest marketing lie ever: "easy to assemble." After reading the instructions I know that unless I have a degree in architectural engineering I'm in for a rough evening.
Joyce and I almost separated (well, not really, but it felt like it!) in 1994 over an "easy to assemble" Christmas tree, as after hours of trying, I finally said in defeat, "I ain't doing this no more."
Then by 2001 things had changed. We purchased an "easy to assemble" crystal cabinet and paid our son $200 to come and put the darn thing together! I guess we realized that things are easy to assemble for those with a strong left brain for nuts and bolts, but not so easy when you don't have your certification in nuts and bolts architecture.
Human beings aren't that easy to assemble, either. In fact, without the breath of God we cannot grow into full humanness, the kind that Jesus modeled. And what exactly is the breath of God? Whether it is the Hebrew word ruachbi or the Greek word pneuma, both are translated as "spirit" or "breath."
What happened at the high festival time in Jerusalem recorded in Acts 2 was genuinely dramatic, as the Holy Spirit or the Holy "breath" of God came upon them. This was what Jesus had promised his people before he was crucified -- that there would be a "comforter" to be within them on the journey, the last thing his people would need to be "spiritually assembled" and ready for the journey of a lifetime. We human beings can no more live fully without spirit than we can without breath. It's no wonder these two words are simultaneously translated from the Greek pneuma. Sadly, many do not recognize their own breath or spirit as a gift from The Holy One that has the power to change them into the fullest of human beings.
This brings me to one of the effects of this dramatic occasion that means more to me than any other: the change that had happened in the disciple whose name was Peter.
His story is among the most dramatic in Holy scripture. Peter was literally the one who set the interpretive word, not only around the event of Pentecost but also around the early church. He was so brave and courageous in the words he spoke. He was the one who emerged as the true leader of the Jerusalem church.
Peter was not always the tower of strength you see and hear in these passages about the coming of the Holy Spirit and the consequent formation of the early church. It is sometimes assumed -- and I think wrongly so -- that impressive characters are born rather than made. One way of evading our responsibility is to come to the simple conclusion that "some people got it and some don't." Therefore, we think there is nothing one can do about one's self. However, such fatalism finds no support in the life story of this man who was called Peter.
When we first encounter Simon Peter, he is anything but strong and stable. In fact, he was one who could oscillate between poles of good and bad faster than any of the disciples. This is pretty much the kind of person Jesus first encountered in Peter. He was emotional, impulsive, and erratic. No figure in all of scripture was given to more violence, betrayal, and fatalism than Simon Peter. He could rise higher more rapidly and then fall lower just as rapidly as anyone you could imagine. He could at one moment be uttering words that were nothing short of revelations from God, then the very next minute be sounding like Satan himself.
The old Simon Peter was an incarnation of Saint Paul's statement that "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Something obviously happened between the time of Peter's broken beginnings with Jesus and the emergence of the tower of faith and strength we see in the Acts of the Apostles.
I believe that as we grow and experience pain, emptiness, and hopelessness, and feel as cut off as Peter did after he had betrayed Jesus, God starts breathing. God starts "Spiriting," if you will. The result of that is that Peter received all the things he needed to make a difference in the lives of others.
I once had a professor in divinity school who used to say, "Only life can change life." That is, when another life touches us in spiritual ways, we are inspired, in-breathed, or inspirited; the very word that is literally translated "breath."
God breathes on us daily. God gives of his life and spirit to us daily. And like Peter and the multitude there on that dramatic day in Jerusalem, we find that when the Spirit of truth comes to us we discover, to our surprise (God's other name), a new life and boldness, and we stand up, a vast multitude who are called the church.
W. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, is now the minister at Richton United Methodist Church in Richton, Mississippi. He also serves as religion editor for the Magnolia Gazette and as a guest columnist for the United Methodist Advocate and the Richton Dispatch. Massengill is the author of two books, New Eyes: A Spirituality of Identity Formation and Soul Places, and he has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He is a graduate of William Carey University and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
Backdraft
by Frank R. Fisher
Acts 2:1-21
And 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 2:2-4
>
[a knocking sound effect]
From the door directly to your right, the banging sound reverberates through the smoking wood and echoes down the long, steaming hallway. The sound increases in urgency and then tapers weakly off. It's the weakness that catches your attention as your mind flashes back through the day's events.
For a change your day began quietly. As usual, you arrived at your firehouse and put your bunker gear on the hook and ladder. Then you sat down for a cup of coffee as you awaited your officer and the department's plans for your day.
By the time your coffee was finished you'd learned your company was due at the academy for training. That time of learning occupied most of the day. Much of the material was quite old to you, and often it was very dry. But you paid attention because you knew your life might depend on it some day. You paid particular attention to a discussion of backdrafts: the explosive reaction of a smoldering fire when it's suddenly gifted with a new source of oxygen.
Now, as you crouch below the smoke in the sweltering hallway, the discussion of backdrafts comes quickly to your mind -- for you reach out to the door where you heard the knocking sound. You find that it almost burns you through your protective glove. Instinctively you know that means there's fire on the other side of the door; fire that could explode outward if the door is opened; fire that could cause a backdraft, consuming everything in its path.
Quickly you radio for help. But you find help can't arrive for several minutes. And a quick survey shows you there's no other entrance to the apparently occupied room. You've just about decided to wait until an officer and other firefighters arrive, when the knocking sound comes again. This time it's combined with a weak cry. "My baby! Help! My baby!" gasps a voice from directly behind the door.
The time for hesitation's over. You stand upright into the smoke and haze, brace yourself on the left-hand wall, and lift your feet to smash down the door. Your feet tear into the wood. The hinges start to give way. And you know your life may be about to end in an instant.
But you are a firefighter, sworn to protect the people on the other side of the now-splintering door. And for you to be the person you are called to be there are moments when you must dare to rush into the heart of the fire.
>
From the windows of the room the banging sound reverberates and echoes throughout the hidden upper room, the room in which you and your friends are hiding. The sound constantly increases in urgency, and it brings your mind back to the events of the last few weeks and months. All in all, you still feel a bit dizzy as you think of all that's happened in your life. In your mind it felt just like yesterday when the Master rode into Jerusalem at the head of a triumphal procession. It was a wonderful day. But all too quickly it was followed by the trial and then by the crucifixion.
All of you had stayed limp and numb for three days until Mary burst into the room, shouting the wonderful news of the resurrection. Your whipsawed emotions had barely had time to recover when the Lord was off again. This time, as you'd watched the ascension into the clouds, you had a feeling the Light of the world had gone away for good.
Of course there had been a promise; a promise of God's continuing presence with you; a promise of power allowing you to tell the whole world the wonderful good news. But now, as you hide here from the Romans and from their collaborators, a promise seems an empty replacement for the physical presence of the Living God.
So all of you continue to huddle about the table while you talk and wonder aloud about that promise. "When," you all ask each other, "will this promise be fulfilled?" But your talk and questions are interrupted once again by the knocking sound reverberating from the windows.
"Could it be the Romans?" you gasp out. "Could this be…?"
A vast booming noise catches your words in your throat. The windows all blast open together as something like a wind rushes into the room and sends anything lying loose flying into the air.
Your hair stands on end as you look up into the face of the gale and see the ceiling covered in something like flame. Then the flame swoops downward, and something like tongues of living fire reach out to touch your head and the heads of each person in the room.
The gift the Master had promised has arrived. All around you your friends rush to the doors and burst through them without bothering to throw open the latches. They're shouting and speaking in languages you never heard. All of them you somehow know are joyfully bellowing the still living story of Jesus the Christ.
Somehow the gift has touched you differently. For to you it brings not new language but the courage to rise from your hiding place and bravely explain to the bemused crowd outside just what was going on in their midst.
You hesitate just for a moment. You know to go outside the door and tell of the Lord's life, death, and resurrection will one day bring about your own death. It will be like opening a door to a fire that will burst out and consume your body in a devouring flame.
Your hesitation, however, lasts only for an instant. Then you race through the door and you hear your voice shouting, "People of Jerusalem, these are not drunk as you suppose..."
The fire will consume you. This you know, and this you accept, for you are a follower of Jesus the Christ. You live and breathe through the wind and flame of the Spirit of God; Christ's blazing gift to Christ's people. And for you to be the person you are called to be there are moments when you must dare to rush into the heart of the fire.
>
From all around you the knocking sound reverberates. It echoes down the hallways of your memories and rebounds through the pathways and hallways of your life.
You began to hear it when you first moved in your mother's womb. You heard it sing at the moment of your birth and felt it dance when the baptismal waters washed over your head. Through all your life it's been there, though you may manage to ignore it for a time.
"Follow me," it knocks and calls to you! "Tell the good news! Speak it and live it in a way that all may hear and see!"
The knocking is Christ's gift to you: the same gift that burst into the room at Pentecost, the same gift that changed a group of frightened women and men into the transforming church of Jesus the Christ, the same gift that can transform churches and turn about lives today.
You may hesitate to answer the knocking when it comes calling deep within your soul. And hesitate you should -- for when you open the door the gift will burst through as a devouring fire, a fire that will drive you to go where the Spirit bids you go and to speak as the Spirit bids you speak.
Do you dare to open that door?
Do you dare to take this part of your life so seriously that it will define who you are and who you will be?
It is your choice to make -- for the Spirit will push hard but does not often compel. But in your choice, remember, you've declared yourself to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. And for you to be the person you are called to be, there is a moment when you must dare to rush into the heart of the fire.
>
Frank R. Fisher is a second-career interim/transitional pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA). He currently serves as the interim pastor of Waltham Presbyterian Church in Utica, Illinois. During the final years of his first career as a paramedic and administrator for the Chicago Fire Department, Fisher graduated from McCormick Theological Seminary and was ordained. He is an Oblate of the ecumenical Abbey of John the Baptist and Saint Benedict in Bartonville, Illinois.
Hope and Optimism
by W. Lamar Massingill
Romans 8:22-27
I confess that I used to be an unapologetic optimist, but I've been cured of that now. Still, optimism is not the same as hope. Now I would say that I am a hopeful realist.
A case in point is what upset us all last fall when AIG executives spent government bailout money, or more specifically our money meant to help the ailing corporation out of debt, on resort luxuries, drugs, prostitutes, alcohol, golf, and who knows what other abuses. Do you think for a minute that if for some reason or another someone at those resorts started saying the pledge of allegiance that these powerful people would not raise their hands to their hearts and start saying it as well? Then, while walking away to play more games at our expense, say under their breath, "Ain't America great?"
The government bailout was optimism, not hope. The problem with optimism is that the definitions change. People who benefited obviously defined optimism in direct contradiction to how the government "of the people, for the people, and by the people" defined it. Injustice is always comfortable when it falls your way. Said Saint Ambrose, "The world is given to all, and not only to the rich."
As I was thinking about this sad and disappointing injustice last fall, I saw a car that was smashed into a telephone pole in Petal, Mississippi, close to where I live. I found myself recalling these hard-to-forget words of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovski: "And now, as they say, the incident is closed / Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind."
Yes, I can be optimistic about these things that smash us daily; I can desire that they get better -- but I can't be hopeful they will disappear, because these things have been happening since the beginning of time. Moreover, optimism needs a reality on which it projects its desires. Hope, however, is as eternal as God. Hope says that, in the midst of the worst kinds of crises, Jesus comes to us in the best kinds of forms.
Optimism, then, is human; but hope is a divine, eternal gift from God. It is not tangible and therefore cannot be explained; it is only known in the daily journey of experience. As Saint Paul says in our epistle: "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." When we are cured of optimism then we are ready for hope, because hope is what's left when all the optimism of the world has failed. We wait for an eternal hope, not a temporary optimism. Thank God. Thank God.
W. Lamar Massingill is an author, columnist, and the minister at Richton United Methodist Church in Richton, Mississippi.
Dump Ducks
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
I'm one of those people who need to be near the ocean. The deep calls me like a magnet draws iron. Long Beach Island, a large sand bar off the Jersey coast, was my center of operations as a kid. No matter where the minister's family moved, we always went back to the house on 16th Street in Surf City. Besides, down there, in the sun and wet and sand, I wasn't the preacher's kid. I was David.
The main purpose of the shore is play. Fisher folk work there, so do the people who serve the food, clean the pipes, sell the groceries, patch the roads, and clean up after the drunks. Believe me, I was a local. The shore is a different place from their point of view. But even they, the ones who live there instead of spend their vacations there, have a bit of the grit and blow and openness of the beach stirred into the stew of their lives.
There are few symbols of the shore more appropriate than the ubiquitous sea gull. Black backs, herring gulls, terns, and the raucous laughing gull are omnipresent in the sky and on the sand. No boat that resembles a fishing boat can move without an escort. No picnic can get started without commentary and visits from the uninvited guests. No post of dock or sea wall is long without a topper, turned into the wind. No dumpster or dump or carelessly dropped Big Mac will long be without a clamoring, wheeling, swooping cloud of scavengers. Thus the name "Dump Duck."
But what always amazed me was how they sail. These animals, whose sole purposes in life are to eat, mate, and make noise, spend an awful lot of time hanging on the breeze, gliding up on thermals and then with a small correction riding them down. Are they sighting lunch? Nope, they're playing. Somebody studied them. The gulls probably laughed at the scientists a lot. The study focused on how they spent their time. When the gulls heard the subject matter of the study they probably laughed more. A good 80% percent of any gull's time is spent flying around for no apparent reason. That's a scientist's way of saying "playing with the wind."
Being a sailor, I understand playing with the wind. It's not where you're going that matters. The wind is a fairly lousy way to get anywhere specific. What matters is the feel of the wind on your sail — read "wings." What matters is the thrill of being hooked up to something you can't see that could squash you like a bug, but has become a partner with you in this glorious moment of communion. That's probably a little high and mighty for gulls, especially laughing gulls, but you get my drift.
I'm a Calvinist. In other words, playing is always suspect. But after reading the 104th Psalm, I feel a bit better about God's sense of stewardship. If God could waste all that energy on making mammoth beings like leviathans that play in the deep, I guess maybe it's not such a waste to body surf all afternoon. Maybe we ought to work on a revised Calvinist theology of play. Hey, if the gulls do it… Well, maybe that's not the best recommendation.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
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StoryShare, May 31, 2009, issue.
Copyright 2009 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
What's Up This Week
"God's Spirit Changes Us" by W. Lamar Massingill
"Backdraft" by Frank R. Fisher
"Hope and Optimism" by W. Lamar Massingill
"Dump Ducks" by C. David McKirachan
What's Up This Week
The power of the Holy Spirit to change lives is truly amazing -- today every bit as much as back on that first Pentecost. In this edition of StoryShare, Lamar Massingill meditates on how God's Spirit breathing on us daily gives us strength and power that we aren't always aware of. But Frank Fisher (a former firefighter) reminds us that the Spirit also appears as tongues of fire -- and he uses this imagery to point out that the Spirit can be potent threat to our comfortable lives. Are we willing to open the door, to respond to the call of the Spirit, and rush into the heart of the fire? Lamar Massingill closes with a brief examination of the difference between optimism (which can be disappointed) and hope in the Lord (which can never be crushed). And David McKirachan concludes this week’s installment with a wry commentary about sea gulls and what they might teach us about play.
* * * * * * * * *
God's Spirit Changes Us
by W. Lamar Massingill
Acts 2:1-21
They are the worst words I have ever seen, and the biggest marketing lie ever: "easy to assemble." After reading the instructions I know that unless I have a degree in architectural engineering I'm in for a rough evening.
Joyce and I almost separated (well, not really, but it felt like it!) in 1994 over an "easy to assemble" Christmas tree, as after hours of trying, I finally said in defeat, "I ain't doing this no more."
Then by 2001 things had changed. We purchased an "easy to assemble" crystal cabinet and paid our son $200 to come and put the darn thing together! I guess we realized that things are easy to assemble for those with a strong left brain for nuts and bolts, but not so easy when you don't have your certification in nuts and bolts architecture.
Human beings aren't that easy to assemble, either. In fact, without the breath of God we cannot grow into full humanness, the kind that Jesus modeled. And what exactly is the breath of God? Whether it is the Hebrew word ruachbi or the Greek word pneuma, both are translated as "spirit" or "breath."
What happened at the high festival time in Jerusalem recorded in Acts 2 was genuinely dramatic, as the Holy Spirit or the Holy "breath" of God came upon them. This was what Jesus had promised his people before he was crucified -- that there would be a "comforter" to be within them on the journey, the last thing his people would need to be "spiritually assembled" and ready for the journey of a lifetime. We human beings can no more live fully without spirit than we can without breath. It's no wonder these two words are simultaneously translated from the Greek pneuma. Sadly, many do not recognize their own breath or spirit as a gift from The Holy One that has the power to change them into the fullest of human beings.
This brings me to one of the effects of this dramatic occasion that means more to me than any other: the change that had happened in the disciple whose name was Peter.
His story is among the most dramatic in Holy scripture. Peter was literally the one who set the interpretive word, not only around the event of Pentecost but also around the early church. He was so brave and courageous in the words he spoke. He was the one who emerged as the true leader of the Jerusalem church.
Peter was not always the tower of strength you see and hear in these passages about the coming of the Holy Spirit and the consequent formation of the early church. It is sometimes assumed -- and I think wrongly so -- that impressive characters are born rather than made. One way of evading our responsibility is to come to the simple conclusion that "some people got it and some don't." Therefore, we think there is nothing one can do about one's self. However, such fatalism finds no support in the life story of this man who was called Peter.
When we first encounter Simon Peter, he is anything but strong and stable. In fact, he was one who could oscillate between poles of good and bad faster than any of the disciples. This is pretty much the kind of person Jesus first encountered in Peter. He was emotional, impulsive, and erratic. No figure in all of scripture was given to more violence, betrayal, and fatalism than Simon Peter. He could rise higher more rapidly and then fall lower just as rapidly as anyone you could imagine. He could at one moment be uttering words that were nothing short of revelations from God, then the very next minute be sounding like Satan himself.
The old Simon Peter was an incarnation of Saint Paul's statement that "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Something obviously happened between the time of Peter's broken beginnings with Jesus and the emergence of the tower of faith and strength we see in the Acts of the Apostles.
I believe that as we grow and experience pain, emptiness, and hopelessness, and feel as cut off as Peter did after he had betrayed Jesus, God starts breathing. God starts "Spiriting," if you will. The result of that is that Peter received all the things he needed to make a difference in the lives of others.
I once had a professor in divinity school who used to say, "Only life can change life." That is, when another life touches us in spiritual ways, we are inspired, in-breathed, or inspirited; the very word that is literally translated "breath."
God breathes on us daily. God gives of his life and spirit to us daily. And like Peter and the multitude there on that dramatic day in Jerusalem, we find that when the Spirit of truth comes to us we discover, to our surprise (God's other name), a new life and boldness, and we stand up, a vast multitude who are called the church.
W. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, is now the minister at Richton United Methodist Church in Richton, Mississippi. He also serves as religion editor for the Magnolia Gazette and as a guest columnist for the United Methodist Advocate and the Richton Dispatch. Massengill is the author of two books, New Eyes: A Spirituality of Identity Formation and Soul Places, and he has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He is a graduate of William Carey University and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
Backdraft
by Frank R. Fisher
Acts 2:1-21
And 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 2:2-4
>
[a knocking sound effect]
From the door directly to your right, the banging sound reverberates through the smoking wood and echoes down the long, steaming hallway. The sound increases in urgency and then tapers weakly off. It's the weakness that catches your attention as your mind flashes back through the day's events.
For a change your day began quietly. As usual, you arrived at your firehouse and put your bunker gear on the hook and ladder. Then you sat down for a cup of coffee as you awaited your officer and the department's plans for your day.
By the time your coffee was finished you'd learned your company was due at the academy for training. That time of learning occupied most of the day. Much of the material was quite old to you, and often it was very dry. But you paid attention because you knew your life might depend on it some day. You paid particular attention to a discussion of backdrafts: the explosive reaction of a smoldering fire when it's suddenly gifted with a new source of oxygen.
Now, as you crouch below the smoke in the sweltering hallway, the discussion of backdrafts comes quickly to your mind -- for you reach out to the door where you heard the knocking sound. You find that it almost burns you through your protective glove. Instinctively you know that means there's fire on the other side of the door; fire that could explode outward if the door is opened; fire that could cause a backdraft, consuming everything in its path.
Quickly you radio for help. But you find help can't arrive for several minutes. And a quick survey shows you there's no other entrance to the apparently occupied room. You've just about decided to wait until an officer and other firefighters arrive, when the knocking sound comes again. This time it's combined with a weak cry. "My baby! Help! My baby!" gasps a voice from directly behind the door.
The time for hesitation's over. You stand upright into the smoke and haze, brace yourself on the left-hand wall, and lift your feet to smash down the door. Your feet tear into the wood. The hinges start to give way. And you know your life may be about to end in an instant.
But you are a firefighter, sworn to protect the people on the other side of the now-splintering door. And for you to be the person you are called to be there are moments when you must dare to rush into the heart of the fire.
>
From the windows of the room the banging sound reverberates and echoes throughout the hidden upper room, the room in which you and your friends are hiding. The sound constantly increases in urgency, and it brings your mind back to the events of the last few weeks and months. All in all, you still feel a bit dizzy as you think of all that's happened in your life. In your mind it felt just like yesterday when the Master rode into Jerusalem at the head of a triumphal procession. It was a wonderful day. But all too quickly it was followed by the trial and then by the crucifixion.
All of you had stayed limp and numb for three days until Mary burst into the room, shouting the wonderful news of the resurrection. Your whipsawed emotions had barely had time to recover when the Lord was off again. This time, as you'd watched the ascension into the clouds, you had a feeling the Light of the world had gone away for good.
Of course there had been a promise; a promise of God's continuing presence with you; a promise of power allowing you to tell the whole world the wonderful good news. But now, as you hide here from the Romans and from their collaborators, a promise seems an empty replacement for the physical presence of the Living God.
So all of you continue to huddle about the table while you talk and wonder aloud about that promise. "When," you all ask each other, "will this promise be fulfilled?" But your talk and questions are interrupted once again by the knocking sound reverberating from the windows.
"Could it be the Romans?" you gasp out. "Could this be…?"
A vast booming noise catches your words in your throat. The windows all blast open together as something like a wind rushes into the room and sends anything lying loose flying into the air.
Your hair stands on end as you look up into the face of the gale and see the ceiling covered in something like flame. Then the flame swoops downward, and something like tongues of living fire reach out to touch your head and the heads of each person in the room.
The gift the Master had promised has arrived. All around you your friends rush to the doors and burst through them without bothering to throw open the latches. They're shouting and speaking in languages you never heard. All of them you somehow know are joyfully bellowing the still living story of Jesus the Christ.
Somehow the gift has touched you differently. For to you it brings not new language but the courage to rise from your hiding place and bravely explain to the bemused crowd outside just what was going on in their midst.
You hesitate just for a moment. You know to go outside the door and tell of the Lord's life, death, and resurrection will one day bring about your own death. It will be like opening a door to a fire that will burst out and consume your body in a devouring flame.
Your hesitation, however, lasts only for an instant. Then you race through the door and you hear your voice shouting, "People of Jerusalem, these are not drunk as you suppose..."
The fire will consume you. This you know, and this you accept, for you are a follower of Jesus the Christ. You live and breathe through the wind and flame of the Spirit of God; Christ's blazing gift to Christ's people. And for you to be the person you are called to be there are moments when you must dare to rush into the heart of the fire.
>
From all around you the knocking sound reverberates. It echoes down the hallways of your memories and rebounds through the pathways and hallways of your life.
You began to hear it when you first moved in your mother's womb. You heard it sing at the moment of your birth and felt it dance when the baptismal waters washed over your head. Through all your life it's been there, though you may manage to ignore it for a time.
"Follow me," it knocks and calls to you! "Tell the good news! Speak it and live it in a way that all may hear and see!"
The knocking is Christ's gift to you: the same gift that burst into the room at Pentecost, the same gift that changed a group of frightened women and men into the transforming church of Jesus the Christ, the same gift that can transform churches and turn about lives today.
You may hesitate to answer the knocking when it comes calling deep within your soul. And hesitate you should -- for when you open the door the gift will burst through as a devouring fire, a fire that will drive you to go where the Spirit bids you go and to speak as the Spirit bids you speak.
Do you dare to open that door?
Do you dare to take this part of your life so seriously that it will define who you are and who you will be?
It is your choice to make -- for the Spirit will push hard but does not often compel. But in your choice, remember, you've declared yourself to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. And for you to be the person you are called to be, there is a moment when you must dare to rush into the heart of the fire.
>
Frank R. Fisher is a second-career interim/transitional pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA). He currently serves as the interim pastor of Waltham Presbyterian Church in Utica, Illinois. During the final years of his first career as a paramedic and administrator for the Chicago Fire Department, Fisher graduated from McCormick Theological Seminary and was ordained. He is an Oblate of the ecumenical Abbey of John the Baptist and Saint Benedict in Bartonville, Illinois.
Hope and Optimism
by W. Lamar Massingill
Romans 8:22-27
I confess that I used to be an unapologetic optimist, but I've been cured of that now. Still, optimism is not the same as hope. Now I would say that I am a hopeful realist.
A case in point is what upset us all last fall when AIG executives spent government bailout money, or more specifically our money meant to help the ailing corporation out of debt, on resort luxuries, drugs, prostitutes, alcohol, golf, and who knows what other abuses. Do you think for a minute that if for some reason or another someone at those resorts started saying the pledge of allegiance that these powerful people would not raise their hands to their hearts and start saying it as well? Then, while walking away to play more games at our expense, say under their breath, "Ain't America great?"
The government bailout was optimism, not hope. The problem with optimism is that the definitions change. People who benefited obviously defined optimism in direct contradiction to how the government "of the people, for the people, and by the people" defined it. Injustice is always comfortable when it falls your way. Said Saint Ambrose, "The world is given to all, and not only to the rich."
As I was thinking about this sad and disappointing injustice last fall, I saw a car that was smashed into a telephone pole in Petal, Mississippi, close to where I live. I found myself recalling these hard-to-forget words of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovski: "And now, as they say, the incident is closed / Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind."
Yes, I can be optimistic about these things that smash us daily; I can desire that they get better -- but I can't be hopeful they will disappear, because these things have been happening since the beginning of time. Moreover, optimism needs a reality on which it projects its desires. Hope, however, is as eternal as God. Hope says that, in the midst of the worst kinds of crises, Jesus comes to us in the best kinds of forms.
Optimism, then, is human; but hope is a divine, eternal gift from God. It is not tangible and therefore cannot be explained; it is only known in the daily journey of experience. As Saint Paul says in our epistle: "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." When we are cured of optimism then we are ready for hope, because hope is what's left when all the optimism of the world has failed. We wait for an eternal hope, not a temporary optimism. Thank God. Thank God.
W. Lamar Massingill is an author, columnist, and the minister at Richton United Methodist Church in Richton, Mississippi.
Dump Ducks
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
I'm one of those people who need to be near the ocean. The deep calls me like a magnet draws iron. Long Beach Island, a large sand bar off the Jersey coast, was my center of operations as a kid. No matter where the minister's family moved, we always went back to the house on 16th Street in Surf City. Besides, down there, in the sun and wet and sand, I wasn't the preacher's kid. I was David.
The main purpose of the shore is play. Fisher folk work there, so do the people who serve the food, clean the pipes, sell the groceries, patch the roads, and clean up after the drunks. Believe me, I was a local. The shore is a different place from their point of view. But even they, the ones who live there instead of spend their vacations there, have a bit of the grit and blow and openness of the beach stirred into the stew of their lives.
There are few symbols of the shore more appropriate than the ubiquitous sea gull. Black backs, herring gulls, terns, and the raucous laughing gull are omnipresent in the sky and on the sand. No boat that resembles a fishing boat can move without an escort. No picnic can get started without commentary and visits from the uninvited guests. No post of dock or sea wall is long without a topper, turned into the wind. No dumpster or dump or carelessly dropped Big Mac will long be without a clamoring, wheeling, swooping cloud of scavengers. Thus the name "Dump Duck."
But what always amazed me was how they sail. These animals, whose sole purposes in life are to eat, mate, and make noise, spend an awful lot of time hanging on the breeze, gliding up on thermals and then with a small correction riding them down. Are they sighting lunch? Nope, they're playing. Somebody studied them. The gulls probably laughed at the scientists a lot. The study focused on how they spent their time. When the gulls heard the subject matter of the study they probably laughed more. A good 80% percent of any gull's time is spent flying around for no apparent reason. That's a scientist's way of saying "playing with the wind."
Being a sailor, I understand playing with the wind. It's not where you're going that matters. The wind is a fairly lousy way to get anywhere specific. What matters is the feel of the wind on your sail — read "wings." What matters is the thrill of being hooked up to something you can't see that could squash you like a bug, but has become a partner with you in this glorious moment of communion. That's probably a little high and mighty for gulls, especially laughing gulls, but you get my drift.
I'm a Calvinist. In other words, playing is always suspect. But after reading the 104th Psalm, I feel a bit better about God's sense of stewardship. If God could waste all that energy on making mammoth beings like leviathans that play in the deep, I guess maybe it's not such a waste to body surf all afternoon. Maybe we ought to work on a revised Calvinist theology of play. Hey, if the gulls do it… Well, maybe that's not the best recommendation.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
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StoryShare, May 31, 2009, issue.
Copyright 2009 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
