Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Acts 2: 1-21,
Psalm 104: 25-34, 35b, Romans 8: 22-27, John 15: 26-27, 16:4b-15

Pentecost, of course, remembers the birthday of the Church. The dramatic rendering Luke offers in this week’s lection from Acts speaks of the “rush of violent wind” filling the house where the disciples had gathered. “Tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and…rested on each of them.” While Genesis 11 depicts the confusion of tongues created by the arrogance of Babel, the opposite is evidenced among these early followers of Jesus. The sudden ability to speak and understand many other languages is meant to demonstrate to us all the power and energy of that new beginning.

Yet is seems the challenges presented to first century Christians have continued unabated to confront even those of us who live twenty centuries later. Witness Phyllis Tickle in her recent book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. She describes both the large and small changes that have changed and challenge us today. Attention is called to the dramatic changes that occur about every five hundred years. In 451 CE there was Chalcedon, an ecumenical council that shaped our definition of Jesus’ nature in the incarnation and created all kinds of turmoil and division in the process. About five hundred years later in 1054 CE the Patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy in Constantinople hurled his anathemas at Leo IX in Rome who responded with his bulls of excommunication so dividing Christianity into East and West. Five hundred years after that in 1517 CE there was Luther and those who followed him. Once again both church and world were changed by the Protestant Reformation. Tickle points out in her book that every five hundred years or so the church has undergone dramatic change! And, interestingly enough, now another five hundred years has nearly passed, and it seems certain that the whole church, including our small element within it named the United Church of Christ will either adjust to the huge change that is taking place in our world or at best face the danger of fading into obscurity.

Tickle sees a large part of the problem as a nibbling away of our credibility. Galileo or Darwin, for example, didn’t have anything against the church, but their new insights threatened some within the church and divided it. Freud and Einstein did the same. Our credibility suffered in our different interpretations of sacred scriptures on questions of slavery, women’s rights, prohibition and homosexuality. A proud and contemporary atheist, Christopher Hitchens, and others like him blame religion for about everything that’s gone wrong in the world. And just as profoundly, we’re in danger of further marginalization by the i-pod or the Sony Walkman. When I see young people, their ears soundly plugged, walking down the street with their fingers clicking, their feet jazzing and their eyes half closed, I wonder about the hymnody that’s served us so well during my lifetime.

I, who love tradition, now access my information through reading newspapers on line. Recently I bought an amazing device called a Kindle. It allows me to access books in less than two or three minutes at half the price and no need for more bookcases. All of these realities are changing us. They’re shaping the future whether we like it or not.

Which brings me to another lection assigned for this week: Paul’s letter to the Romans offers us that magnificent verse, “all things work together for good” which the best translations now tell us should be read as a demand that people find the good in everything — which must mean even all the change that continually shapes our world.

I believe that the future is exciting and can evoke the energy and power of the church in exciting ways. For example, Stanley Fish in a recent New York Times article quoted an English critic, Terry Eagleton, who wrote this: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can every be properly raised.” These are questions of meaning, questions like “why is there anything in the first place?” And questions like that can best be asked and struggled with in a setting very much like the local congregation, like Immanuel Church.

Someone has said that the church is like an anvil that’s outworn many a hammer. I believe that’s because as human beings we need the encouragement of a questioning, dialogical faith, the depth of human experience that we find in covenant communities, having the privilege of listening to music of quality, and the very human and healthy satisfaction of serving others through various programs of mission and benevolence.

So while Pentecost marks the power and energy of a new beginning, there’s no reason why that energy and power cannot be released again and again as we tap into the source of that energy and power through our participation in Christ Jesus as his twenty-first century followers.

Ralph Ahlberg

~ by Immanuel Congregational Church on May 25, 2009.