TEXTS FOR PREACHING
Book of Acts (2:1-21)
“Veni Creator” by Czeslaw Milosz
Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lifts its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.
John 7:37-39
On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
SERMON
Sometimes Pentecost is a huge celebration
with red balloons
and a cacophony of many voices
simultaneously reading Scripture in many languages.
Sometimes Pentecost is a still, small voice
barely heard within rushing wind and thunder.
“…But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.”
I don’t know if you believe in God or not,
I wouldn’t assume that just because you come to church
you have had a personal experience
or association with the God-of-all-that-is.
But if you do,
and if you have,
I would bet that any marveling
you may have done at the Creator-of-all-that-is,
was via the magnificence of nature –
in its exquisite interdependent relationships
or the awesome scale of its grandeur.
“Signs” as we might call them,
intimations of God
or echoes of holiness
seem most accessible for most people
in nature, rather than via human beings.
It should be said that human beings
are every bit as much a part of Nature as the Grand Canyon
or Lake Ontario,
but more often than not, we think of nature
as a scene of earthly beauty or cosmic majesty
without the appearance of human activity.
For many people, the glittered dome of the night sky
or a Great Blue Heron stone-still on one leg
in the shallows of a lazy creek –
somehow evokes more awe
and divine resonance
than human beings.
I suppose that makes sense,
because we are often most impressed
by the things we cannot make or do for ourselves
when we see them rendered with excellence
by someone else.
The vast scale of the cosmos on one end,
and the impossible intricacy of even subatomic particles
on the other end, is enough to blow our minds.
Still – fiords, lightening, and manatees aside –
many of us have had the experience
of being touched by the holy
via the touch of another human being.
Deep within the iris of someone’s eyes
we have felt soothed
and known.
Still – thunder, Big Sur, and naked mole rats aside –
many of us have been brushed by the holy
incarnate in human flesh.
The silent presence of a single love
held us up when we might otherwise
have collapsed into a puddle of grief, or pain, or exhaustion.
Still – the lull of ocean surf, the fierce hazard of a creeping lava flow,
and the absurd mishap of small puppies at play aside –
many of us know the bone dry ache of loneliness
that is only ever assuaged
by the love of another that seeps in
even when we had not opened to it.
“…But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one woman, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at her, to marvel at you.”
That is not really so different from Jesus saying,
“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.
(For) ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’’
It all comes down to the believer’s heart.
You and I, all human beings,
almost never see what we are not looking for.
In fact, if we do not think we will see something,
we almost never see it,
even if it is present.
If we do not look for something, we rarely find it.
This is not merely common sense
it is also behavioral and neuro science.
In studies of human perception
the evidence is clear that we see what we are looking for;
and we do not see what we have decided is not there to see –
whether or not it is actually there to see.
This of course leads to the hazards of confirmation bias
and circular logic, but those hazards
do not change the fact
that human perception is limited
and enhanced
by what we assume is possible or impossible
before we go looking.
“…But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.”
There is no scientific,
logical,
or rational proof of God.
None.
Great intellects have tried
and even the so-called proofs rendered
by some of history’s greatest thinkers,
can be popped by even a mediocre student.
But God can be,
and is,
perceived by those predisposed
to experience God
within the realm of the ordinary.
If I have one theme as a preacher,
writer, and spiritual guide
it is that the sacred is available to us
and encountered in the ordinariness of life.
We do not need a doctrinal lens
in order to see and know God –
and in fact, doctrine more often than not
gets in the way of our perception.
We need only an open mind
and an open heart
that is willing to be surprised
and dares to be astonished.
We need the near-sightedness of the mouse
and the far-sightedness of the hawk
and the willingness to wonder
and poke
and dig.
Oh, and some imagination; we need some imagination.
Imagination is the bi-focal on the lens of openness.
It allows us to add color and shape
to the wispy and ephemeral outlines of the holy
so we can see its presence with greater verve and clarity.
The hazard of course,
is that we confuse our imagination
with the holy itself.
But that is just another hazard
we can only navigate and not eliminate.
“…But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one woman, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at her, to marvel at you.”
The God-of-all-that-is,
as cosmic as the most distant star
and as close as our most intimate love,
is filtered through men and women
we know, and meet,
and some we only hear or read about.
God is filtered
through human beings
just as light is filtered through art-glass windows.
We want miraculous moving statues,
and death-defeating cures,
and thrilling emotional orgasms
(can I say that from the pulpit?),
or spirit-induced intoxication.
But we do not get those
and if that is the only place we look,
we will probably not perceive
or encounter the holy.
Being in a new home for the first spring this year,
and watching the yard transform into colors
and shapes and textures
without knowing how it might look ahead of time,
I have been reminded of childhood.
Can you remember that sensation
of pioneering into the world
for the first time?
And every year it seems,
was the first time for many years –
the exhilaration of the first snow
as marvelous at age seven as at age four?
In childhood, bugs you had never seen before
were a spectacle evoking joy and fear and surprise.
Plants that prickled or felt smooth or tasted sweet
were singular marvels.
Lounging in the grass
and toes in the mud
and digging in the dirt
had no down side.
A snail was a mystery,
a worm was a sensation,
a bird with a broken wing an entire day of amazement.
If we can somehow unload the burdens
of our tired, wounded, beat-up adulthood blinders,
and take an afternoon to wander through
the ordinariness of our lives
with that kind of renewed openness and wonder,
then we might –
maybe even probably – will bump into the sacred.
It may not produce the ecstatic intoxication described in the Book of Acts,
but that will not lessen the thirst-quenching sensation
of a small encounter with the God-of-all-that-is
inside the confines of our small ordinary life.
And here is the challenge.
No one can give us the open eyes
and borderless heart
to perceive the holy in the ordinariness of our lives,
if we do not go looking for it ourselves.
There are no experts,
there are no know-it-all gurus,
there is no seeing-eye dog
that can take us by the hand
and give us an experience of God.
Any help there may be
is supplemental to our own effort
to open wide
and let go assumptions
and wander with imagination
into our own lives.
So this Pentecost,
instead of mimicking episodic binge-drinking of the Spirit,
let’s go looking for bugs.
Better yet,
let’s rummage around in the people we know
and stumble into the sacred.
Amen.