Something Old, Something New

	“'You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times... but I say to you....'” -- Matthew 5:21-22

Spiritual Intelligence

No Unexpected Places

June 21, 2015:
Psalm 121; Genesis 28:10-17

“The LORD is in this place
and I did not know it!"
-- Genesis 28:16

It's All Good

Sunday, June 14: Romans 8:18-39

“We know that all things
work together for good
for those who love God,
who are called
according to his purpose.”
– Romans 8:28

The Body of Christ

Sunday, June 7:
Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 10:1-33

“Because there is one bread,
we who are many are one body,
for we all partake of the one bread.”
– 1 Corinthians 10:17

On Being Born Again

Here's a conversation starter if I ever saw one!

With the Spirit's Help

Here are some highlights from last Sunday's sermon by Pastor Gene McAfee (the full text is available here), with links to some of the referenced texts. Comments welcome.

With the Spirit’s Help
Gene McAfee
Faith United Church of Christ
Richmond Heights, Ohio

Pentecost
May 24, 2015

“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other languages,
as the Spirit gave them ability.”
-- Acts 2:4

...If this were an adult education class and not a sermon, I’d ask all of you at this point to open your study Bible and turn to the maps at the back, and we’d locate the places all those names [in Acts 2:9-11] refer to. Once upon a time, what are just names to us were real places with real people, and some of the people from those places had gathered in Jerusalem, according to Luke, perhaps for Passover, which had been observed fifty days earlier. Fiftieth, in fact, is what the word Pentecost means in Greek – the fiftieth day after Passover.

Now, obviously – or perhaps not so obviously to many people – both Pentecost and Passover are Jewish holidays, so the first thing we should note about Pentecost is that this outpouring of the Holy Spirit is an entirely Jewish affair. Luke says as much in verse five, when he says that amazement fell on “devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem.” It is those devout Jews who were the recipients of the gift of Pentecost, and we Christians tend to forget that. In fact, you’ll often hear preachers say – and I’m one who used to say this – that Pentecost is the breaking out of the Holy Spirit from its Jewish roots, or, to reverse the metaphor, that the Holy Spirit is now bringing in non-Jews to the Jewish fold, the beginning of that grafting of the Gentile branch onto the Jewish stock that Paul writes of in Romans. We Christians tend to get a little confused about this when we hear all those names.... We think that a Parthian or a Mede must be a Gentile, that is, someone who’s not Jewish, but that isn’t the case at all. After the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., and the southern kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.E., the Jewish people were scattered everywhere, which was the beginning of what we call the Jewish Diaspora.

So when Luke mentions those devout Jews from practically the entire known world living in Jerusalem, he’s telling us that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost was on Jews and for Jews. Pentecost is so that the message of one group of Jews – Jesus’s followers --- can be understood by other Jews who haven’t yet heard their message. This is what we might call proto-evangelism, the earliest stage of spreading the good news, and that’s why we appropriately consider Pentecost the birthday of the church. The church is in the business of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ; that’s what we do. It’s who we are; it’s our raison d’être. Pentecost isn’t the birthday of the church because Gentiles are flocking to the Jesus movement, but rather because the Holy Spirit is allowing that most outlandish of tales – the story of Jesus – to be told and understood and believed by people just like us who happened to be Jewish.

Now, if we’d continued reading the rest of Peter’s sermon, we would have seen Peter connect the dots between what those Diaspora Jews already knew and affirmed of their own tradition and what the Jews who were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah had experienced with him. Pentecost is the story of experience speaking to experience, and it’s the Holy Spirit who makes communication like that possible.

Some of you may have read the article in last Thursday’s Sun Messenger about the Gathering Place. A few years ago, a group of us from Faith visited the Gathering Place, which is in Beachwood. The Gathering Place is for people whose lives have been touched by cancer. People with cancer gather there. People who have had cancer gather there. People whose loved ones are living with cancer or who may have died with cancer gather there. All sorts and conditions of people gather at the Gathering Place, drawn together by one fact, and that is the experience of cancer.

The Gathering Place does wonderful work. It allows people to speak, to be quiet, to weep, to laugh, and to love. The Gathering Place is a place of hope, of recovery, of dreams, of new undertakings, and, above all, of support. But it became that only through the power of the Holy Spirit. Cancer by itself does not form people into communities of caring and hope. It takes more than a frightening disease to do that. It takes the grace of God, working in the hearts and minds of people willing to be shaped and led by that grace, to create a community from what, for many people, feels like a calamity. When people can reach out to each other, across the myriad differences that we turn into barriers, community has a chance and peace has a home.

We all know, of course, that calamity does not always lead to community. Sometimes brokenness begets brokenness. Look at the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore and the fear here in Cleveland at the violence that may follow the verdict in the Brelo case.... We’re more connected than any people in history, and yet our communities are as fractured and fragile as they’ve ever been. The great illusion that keeps the telecommunications business humming is that technology creates community. It doesn’t. Technology simply makes it easier for people who want to be in community to communicate with each other. The desire to be together, however – to be in community – never comes from the technology that allows us to do so. That desire comes from the Spirit that hovered over creation, that makes us living beings, and that quickens our consciences to confront injustice and work for peace. Or, as the prophet Isaiah put it six centuries before Jesus, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. . . . He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”

To what ministry is the Holy Spirit calling you? We can’t all be Isaiahs, with the genius for sacred poetry that has made his words inspiring to so many for so long. Most of us don’t have the gift to heal as Jesus had it, working cures that were nothing short of miraculous in the eyes of his contemporaries. And few of us have the insight and the missionary zeal of the apostle Paul.

But every one of us who claims the name of Christian for ourselves has the one indispensable gift that can change everything, and that’s the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter that Jesus promised his disciples. Jesus told his anxious disciples on the eve of his crucifixion that it was to their advantage that he go away so that the Spirit of Truth could inspire those often bewildered and befuddling followers to achieve a greatness none of them could have dreamed of. Not one of those disciples – Peter, Andrew, James, or any of the others – not one of them could have imagined what the Holy Spirit would do with their lives, their movement, and their witness to the reality of their crucified and risen savior. They changed the world, and they did it with the Spirit’s help. Indeed, they changed the world only with the Spirit’s help. Nothing else explains the transformation of time itself into before and after Jesus Christ. It boggles the mind and staggers the imagination to consider the odds those unlettered and unremarkable women and men overcame to make the story of Jesus compelling throughout the ancient world. Born of a virgin, possessed of miraculous power, raised from death to deathless life – it’s all so implausible, no wonder people sneered and accused the disciples of being drunk at 9 a.m. on Pentecost.

But those untutored Galileans suddenly speaking Parthian and Phrygian and Egyptian and Elamite were not filled with new wine; they were possessed of and possessed by a Spirit that allowed God’s impossible truth to triumph over all the world’s plausible lies; and the body of Christ, the church, was raised from a blood-stained cross and an empty tomb. If that isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is. We’re Midwesterners, you and I, sensible people wearing sensible shoes, and we’re skeptical of extravagant claims and embarrassed by self-promotion. So I suspect that none of you thought of yourself as a miracle when you walked into the sanctuary about an hour ago. If I weren’t preaching this sermon, I wouldn’t have thought of myself that way, either.

But you and I and all our Christian sisters and brothers are just that – a miracle. The miracle of the living, breathing body of Christ that is the Christian church. We’re not perfect – as individuals or as a group – and we have many sins and weaknesses to answer for. But despite all the odds, despite our wildly improbable foundational story, and despite even our own self-destructiveness, here we are, “a serious house on serious earth” as Philip Larkin called us. And sometimes, as Paul says, “with sighs too deep for words,” the Spirit intercedes for us and we find ourselves in unexpected places doing unexpected things, and we know that the realm of God is among us. That, my friends, really is good news.

The Spirit Helps Our Weakness

One of the things I do as the Webmaster for Faith Church is to update the Worship page each week with the sermon theme, Bible readings and hymns for the upcoming Sunday service, along with a related piece of art or video. This week, in looking for something to go with the sermon title "With the Spirit’s Help," I remembered that Bach had written a motet titled "Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwaccheit auf" ("The Spirit helps our Weakness"), a musical setting of Romans 8:26-27, which is part of our Epistle reading for this Pentecost Sunday. So I did a Google search and found this performance on YouTube (German text and translation here):

Welcome to Coffee Time

Here at Faith Church, Coffee Time is when we get together for refreshments and conversations about the inspiration and challenges we've found in Pastor Gene's sermons, to share what's going on in our lives, to think together about the past, present and future of our church and The Church and the world, and anything else under the sun.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
-- Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter

Dear Internet friends, please feel free to grab a virtual cuppa, pull up a virtual chair and join in the conversation. Stay as long as you like; the virtual coffee house is always open. The volunteers from the Clean-up Ministry won't be coming around to start folding up the tables and chairs....