SermonStudio

It may surprise you to know that from time to time, ministers get complaints. Would it further surprise you to know ministers get complaints about hymns that are sung in church? Most people want to sing the old, familiar hymns which are about ten in number. However, from time to time, we get complaints from people griping that we always sing the same old hymns.

One such complaint was registered last Easter. After a triumphant, spirit-lifting service, a lady in a dour mood greeting the minister saying, "I'm never coming back to this church again." Taken aback, the minister maintained his composure and diplomatically asked, "And why won't you be coming back? Was something wrong with the service? Did someone offend you?"

She replied, "I'm not coming back because every time I come, all you do is sing the same old hymns." "Oh, really?" replied the minister, "and what hymns do we always sing when you come?" he asked. She replied, "O Little Town Of Bethlehem" and "Christ The Lord Is Risen Today."

Most ministers have gotten used to CE Christians: Christmas and Easter Christians. We have even gotten used to the parishioner who comes occasionally saying to themselves:

Every time I pass a church
I stop in for a little visit,
So when at last I'm carried in,
The Lord won't say, "Who is it?"


So while every church has some of those, and while every church has CE Christians, not many churches have CEP Christians. That's right, there are very few Christians who make a point of coming on Pentecost, because Pentecost, the birthday of the church, is the forgotten festival day.

Often coinciding with Memorial weekend, or the beginning of warmer days when June is busting out all over, Pentecost frequently is obscured by patriotic parades and pilgrimages to the beach or summer place (not to mention golf courses and boats). And yet, Pentecost is one of the most important celebrations of the church -- the time when the Holy Spirit of God was given in a new way to signal the beginnings of a new age and a new people.

Christians often see Pentecost pre-figured in the lectionary reading for this Sunday from the Prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel, that unique and sometimes almost bizarre visionary, saw a valley filled with dry, bleached, human skeletons, and as he sees the pathetic sight, God asks, "Can these bones live?" Dealing with God, Ezekiel is smart enough to say, "Thou knowest, Lord."

The bones were symbolic of the Judeans who lost their lives when the Babylonians (ancestors of the Iraqis) conquered and exiled them in 587 B.C. The terrible defeat of the Judean armies, the death and decay of the Judean nation, were symbolized by the valley of dry bones.

Then in the vision, Ezekiel saw an amazing thing. The Spirit of the Lord came upon the bones, brought them together with a loud voice, put sinew and flesh on them and then breathed into them the breath of life as God did with Adam at creation. God, said Ezekiel, was going to restore the dead nation of Judah in that way, breathing new life and hope into them. And he did, returning them to their homeland in 538 B.C.

Pentecost also celebrates the coming of God's Spirit into a so-called "dead" people, to breathe new life and hope into them, and thereby to create not an old Judah or Israel, but a new Israel, a new people of God. So the Spirit of God came mightily upon Jesus' disciples in Jerusalem in 30 A.D., coming upon them and empowering them for the New Age.

That same Spirit of God came upon Saul of Tarsus, changing him into the great Apostle Paul, champion of the cause of Christ and harbinger of the New Age. The Spirit, says Paul, is always working to bring in the New Age, both corporately and individually. We are always in the birthpangs of the New Age.

I

Notice first the birthpangs of the New Age for the individual.

It is a strange paradox that Paul speaks of, the promise of the new in the face of the power of the old; he talks of liberation in the context of bondage; and he alludes to the fullness of health in the midst of suffering.

In Paul's view, the individual is caught in a no-win situation. Paul earlier had been brought to despair about his own powerlessness to become the person he wanted to become. Born with an impeccable pedigree, prestigiously educated, and energetically brilliant, Paul despaired nevertheless that he would never become the person he wanted to become -- that is, until he was empowered by the Spirit of the living Christ.

Paul had come to see the futility of a giddy optimism on the one hand, and on the other, the despair and emptiness of a negative pessimism. He would have agreed with theologian Karl Barth that "Art, science, and morality display the passionate longing of men for infinity." And yet he knew with Barth that, "Even the greatest genius is born, dies and lives as we do."1

But when Paul experienced the Spirit of the living Christ, he tells us he became a new being, a new creation. It was as if he were born again into a new reality, into a new self-understanding, into a new way of seeing. It was as if the Spirit of God had come amongst the dry bones of his pessimism and despair, and had breathed a new and vital Spirit with him.

In his excellent book, True Resurrection, Harry Williams talks about the dramatic experiences of people closer to our own time. Consider for example, Ludwig van Beethoven. As most people know, this great composer, at age thirty, began to suffer from deafness, which would be the equivalent of an artist beginning to suffer from blindness. Beethoven did not know when his piano was out of tune and sometimes, when playing for friends, he touched the piano keys so lightly no sound came out, but he did not know.

He was lonely and often in love, but remained a bachelor. At age 31, he wrote, "You can scarcely imagine how lonely and sad my life has been during the past two years. My weak hearing haunted me everywhere, and I ran away from people and was forced to appear like a misanthrope, though that is far from my character."

Beethoven goes on to say that at one time he was at the point of suicide, but instead of suicide, came the miracle of the resurrection. He then wrote, "You will see me as happy as my lot can be here below ... I will seize fate by the throat. It shall never wholly overcome me. How beautiful life is." So this great composer -- musical "father" to Wagner and Brahms, completed his famous Ninth Symphony with its great and triumphant "Ode To Joy." And when he finished conducting it for the first time, the musicians had to turn him to face the audience to see the thunderous applause which he could not hear. Suffering was the birthpangs of the new Beethoven, the Beethoven of the new age, "a suffering made triumphant by the Spirit of God."

It has been my friend's high privilege to visit Florence, Italy, a couple of times, and each time he made it a priority to visit the Academia di Belle Arte not only to see Michelangelo's famous David, but also to view his four sculptures leading up to the David. They look unfinished. The human figures are emerging from the rough stone as though they were tearing themselves out of it with tremendous effort and anguish and pain.

The figures are, of course, us, our potential selves, struggling to be actualized, to be drawn out of the stone bondage of past fixities into the liberation of true selfhood. And yes, it is the hammer blows of suffering, the chiseling of experience which help shape us. Out of the hard blows and knocks of life, God, the great sculptor, is attempting to sculpt us into our true self, our real self, the next self that is always waiting to come to be, no matter what our age.

I suppose if we could speak to all the eight-month-old fetuses in the wombs of the millions of pregnant women, to ask them if they wanted to be born, they would probably all vote "No." They would say, "We're comfortable, warm, well-fed, protected, and content. Who wants to take chances in separation, in cold and loneliness, in independence and risk and possible conflict? No thanks, we'll stay right here."

At each stage of our life, whether eighteen or eighty, we are, as it were, in a womb, being developed for a new selfhood. It is the living Spirit of God which calls us forth, which lures us through the travail of labor to become the "new you." It calls us to be the more complete person we are destined to be, and on this Pentecost, if we are open to him, God is ready to bring us into a new age of selfhood.

II

But if that is true of the individual, it is also true of the church. God is ready to bring the church into a new age.

In l966, Harvard Divinity School theologian, Harvey Cox, wrote a book which became a surprising best-seller. In the book, titled The Secular City, Dr. Cox predicted, along with many others, that religion would die out to be replaced by the "secular man," the "man come-of-age," the person who would "do it on his own." He would need no religion as a crutch to lean on, no imagined heavenly Father to save him in his dilemmas.

About the same time, many theologians across the country were speaking of the "death of God." Time magazine ran a bold cover story which asked, "Is God Dead?" "Yes," said many theologians, "God is dying" and so is religion, hinted Cox in his book, The Secular City.2 But in his new book, Fire From Heaven, Harvard's Dr. Cox says bluntly, "I was wrong" and the death-of-God theologians were wrong, dead wrong.3

Religion is extremely alive and well in the world, says Cox, and in many places it is growing like wildfire. It is not, as popularly believed, Islam, which is the world's fastest growing religion, no, not Islam or Buddhism, but Christianity. It is not mainline Christianity like Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, which is growing rapidly; it is Pentecostal Christianity growing like wildfire especially among the Third World countries and among the poor and dispossessed of richer countries.

Pentecostalists get their name from the festival we celebrate today, and just as the Spirit of God descended on the first Christians in Jerusalem, empowering them, converting them, giving them the ability to speak in tongues, transferring them into a kind of religious ecstasy, so Pentecostalists of our time claim a similar kind of experience.

American Pentecostalism had its beginnings in 1906, in the Azuza Street Church in Los Angeles, in a building that had once been a livery stable. At once interracial, non-denominational, and with no attention to class distinctions, people at the Azuza Street Church claimed to have a powerful experience of the Holy Spirit -- so powerful that people would swoon in trances, or babble ecstatically in unknown languages, which was called "the speaking in tongues" just like that which happened on the original day of Pentecost. Some people possessed by the Spirit of God, would roll in the aisles in ecstatic happiness, and thus gained for the group the often derogatory name "Holy Rollers." Others would jerk or shout or sing praises to God in highly emotional services that were shocking and distasteful even then to the more sedate and refined and reserved Christians of America.

But Pentecostal Christianity, not to be equated with fundamentalism, grew and grew and leapt across racial and national and ethnic and class and religious boundaries. The disenfranchised, the poor, the oppressed, the outcasts, the wretched of the earth were, and are, experiencing the overwhelming affirmation of the empowering and enabling Spirit of God. In South Korea, for example, the largest Christian church in the world and in history, is the Yoido Full Gospel (Pentecostal) Church with 800,000 members. Once a Buddhist country, South Korea is rapidly on its way to becoming a majority Christian country, and Pentecostalists are leading the way, because, as they tell us, they are open to experiencing anew the Spirit of God, whereas many mainline churches are not.

In his book, Harvey Cox quotes the song of British rock star, Sting, which says:

You could say I lost my faith in science and progress.
You could say I lost my belief with the holy church.
You could say I lost my sense of direction.


Dr. Cox suggests the rock singer's song typifies many people today. In the last two or three centuries two contending forces have slugged it out, claiming to be the ultimate source of meaning and value, says Cox. One force was traditional religion and the other was scientific modernity, and now, like two tired boxers they have reached an exhausted stalemate, says Cox.4

People today remain somewhat intrigued with conventional religion, but use it only as a kind of toolbox to get at spiritual values. People are no longer concerned with "one dimensional modernity or with stagnant religious practices," says Cox. People are more into intuition, immediacy, participation, and practicality. Traditional clergy or correct doctrines or professional theologians have little authority. People weary of dull religion and empty scientism, want to experience the divine, not just talk about it, or point to somebody else's experiences of the divine in some distant past. Rather than rehearse a previous generation's peak religious experiences many people today want to have their own -- that is, if they are not afraid.

But when we become educated, successful, well-to-do, gentrified, skeptical, stratified in ethnic, class, and socio-economic groups and neighborhoods, we tend to shut out the empowering, transforming, uniting power of the Spirit of God. David Halberstam, in his book, The Next Century, quotes a Japanese intellectual worried about the effect of prosperity on his people. The intellectual says, "For thousands of years God and poverty kept man disciplined. Now, in the modern age, God is dead and poverty is disappearing. How will we be disciplined?"5 How indeed!

The answer is to be found in Pentecost, in an openness to the Spirit of God, in a willingness to be born anew in a way that overpowers our defensiveness, our fortress mentalities, our rigidities, our presumptions that the past experiences of this church were better than the present or future can ever be, our unwillingness to inquire of the mind of Christ as to the kind of church he would have us be, rather than presume we are to be a replication of the past, however glorious.

Perhaps there is waiting here in the womb of time a new church ready to be born, a church willing to learn some new hymns rather than rigidly insisting on singing only old ones; a church willing to consider that its organization and institutional procedures are deadening and counterproductive and out-of-date; a church ready to concede more time for feeling and less for formality; a church willing to humble itself before God, instead of presuming it knows what God's will is for it in this time; a church willing to experiment with new forms of worship and learning; a church willing to consider the priority of the faith over the so-called securities of wealth or success or fame or the fixities of an outdated churchmanship; a church open to the ecstatic and the new; a church that is willing to say that whatever else happens, God will be first in our lives, even before Sunday morning sports; a church willing to be inclusive, to reach out across class and racial and ethnic boundaries to experience the oneness of the original Pentecost.

"Can these bones live?" a coy God asks Ezekiel. An equally coy Ezekiel replies humbly, "Thou knowest, Lord," for he knew as Jesus knew, that with God, nothing is impossible. And the valley of dry bones became alive and vital and vibrant with the empowering Spirit of God.

Can we become the new people and the new church we are destined to be? "Thou knowest, Lord." But already, says Paul, we have been given God's Holy Spirit. That urging we feel within, that longing, that hope, that expectation, that dream on the verge of fulfillment -- they all are the birthpangs of the new age -- the new age of you, the new age of your marriage, your career, your family, your faith, the new age of the church, the new age of the world.

For as Paul says, "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit which dwells in you" (Romans 8:10-11).

And that, dear friends, is Pentecost over and over again for individuals and for the church. May it be so with us.


____________

1.ÊKarl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), pp. 311-312.

2.ÊHarvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966).

3.ÊHarvey Cox, Fire From Heaven (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

4.ÊIbid., p. 299.

5.ÊDavid Halberstam, The Next Century (New York: Morrow, 1991), p. 117.