The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the Day of Pentecost
20 May 2018
Readings:
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
This weekend, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry quoted both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in comparing the significance of discovering and harnessing the redemptive power of love to a second discovery of fire. Today, we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit in the rush of violent wind and dancing tongues of fire that filled the house as it filled Jesus’ disciples with that very power.
And in a weekend that started with another school shooting, and moved on to the first British royal wedding to feature a biracial bride, a black preacher, and a gospel choir, we have a lot to reflect on as God’s love challenges us to prophesy to the dried up bones and hearts lying outside our doors and filling our world with hopelessness and alienation.
As Jesus told his disciples, it was to their and our advantage that he departed from amongst them. So long as they had him to follow, they couldn’t realize the full potential of God’s love working in and through them as a community that continued to serve Christ’s mission and serve all those around them with Christ’s ongoing ministry in the world. Through the redemptive power of God’s love, the fire of the Spirit that alighted on each of Christ’s disciples spread through the community like the wild fire that it was, and ignited a movement that still threatens to capture the whole world in God’s embrace.
Amidst the sweeping despair of gun violence, the rekindling of overt racism and renewed persecution of minorities and the LGBTQIA+ community, the world saw, this weekend, a British royal prince wed to a biracial American actress, and heard Michael Curry’s strong and passionate voice prophesying—calling out—the power of love to change the world.
Today, we also renewed our Baptismal Covenants, reaffirmed our kinship with God, and with Christ, reaffirmed our inheritance of God’s love and our responsibility to carry that love with us into the world.
We might recall some of the other words at the end of baptism, by which we were signed and sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.
My dear family in Christ, we are a part of the second discovery of fire in our world.
Today, with the whole valley Ezekiel beheld and prophesied to, we too are called back to life, called back to God, called back to fruitfulness, called back to hope; and with Christ’s disciples, it is our time, our turn to bring that spark of life, God’s breath, God’s word, that wildfire of God’s love to every desolate valley of our own world. In every community and corner of the world where people are feeling cut off, feeling hopeless, feeling dried up and bereft of life, God’s love has work to do that we are called into doing.
The spirit is God’s presence in us, doing God’s work in us and through us.
Dr. King’s dream sparked a fire in our history as a nation, and Michael Curry called on that dream and called us back to its continuing significance as we work together to capture the energy of God’s redemptive love and bring its power to bear on the needs of our contemporary world in a second discovery of fire that, if we as a human family can finally tap into it as a global community, would be the coming of heaven, the coming of God’s kingdom, on earth.
In Presiding Bishop Curry’s words:
When love is the way, then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again.
When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever flowing brook.
When love is the way, poverty will become history.
When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary.
When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more.
When love is the way, there’s plenty good room – plenty good room – for all of God’s children. Because when love is the way, we actually treat each other, well … like we are actually family.
When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all, and we are brothers and sisters, children of God.
Brothers and sisters, with God’s love leading our hearts, leading our efforts, leading our community, we as a family have stepped into the breech here in Santa Cruz to make a difference. We have stepped out in faith to open our doors to the homeless, to fly flags of welcome to people who have been told for centuries that they are beyond God’s love, to offer spaces of healing and reconciliation to addicts in recovery, to connect those in need with the resources to help them achieve wholeness and purpose, to enrich the lives of our community’s children, to put relational power into community action, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, welcome the stranger, and all without strings attached—because that is what we do when we are instruments of God’s Holy Spirit. We love. We love God, we love one another as family, and we include even our own selves in the reach of God’s embrace.
This Pentecost Sunday we need look no further for the cure of the ails of the world than the hands that grace the tips of our own outstretched arms and the hearts and minds that, together, hold the imagination, the creativity, the resources, and the redemptive power of love to change the world. And we do it, as we all already know, one day and one life at a time.
So in the face of another school shooting that took the irreplaceable and beautiful lives of eight students and two teachers in Santa Fe, Texas; in the face of the growing fear with which students attend high school classes across our nation each day; in the face of my own fear for my children’s safety in a world where I can’t be with them to protect them from the hate, anger, malice, and indifference that claims lives in communities not unlike our own every day; and in the valley of dry bones in which many of us feel dried up, hopeless, and cut off from the senseless violence of our world, may we be reminded this Pentecost Sunday that the same untamed fire of God’s spirit that filled the disciples in their own world of senseless violence fifty three days after the power of empire crucified their dearest friend and teacher, Jesus, that same untamed fire fills us. It connects us, it draws us together as a global community that will never bow down to the violence of our world, that will never give up our hope, and that will never give up on the redemptive power of love to change the world—one day, one life, one world at a time.
May this day and every day be the day our hearts are ignited with the wildfire of God’s Spirit of redemptive love.
Amen.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.