Filled not with spirits but with the Spirit (Sermon for Proper 15B)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

20 August 2006, Proper 15 B

at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Chicago, IL

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It seems that there is no end of things to worry about these days. We hear of new threats of terrorism. Even as plots are foiled, we grow more suspicious of others and odd behavior can set us instantly on edge. Despite a tenuous peace, further combat in the Mid East seems imminent, with the inevitable cost in noncombatants and the impact it makes around the globe. The conflict in Iraq drags on as its costs, human and otherwise, soar. The five year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks looms. And keeping in mind the attack not far from here this summer, violence and racial tensions here in Chicago exert their influence on us, too, heightening our anxieties.

Or when we consider our church in the wake of general convention, there isn’t the same cost in terms of lives certainly, but some have felt our disagreements so deeply they have walked away from the table and might at times feel hesitant to name us as brothers and sisters in Christ. Although we might not agree with them, we still feel the loss of them and the distance between us.

And perhaps some of us find ourselves upset by the wedding last month of Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock – whether this upset is out of dashed personal hopes or fear that they might reproduce, I refuse to speculate.

But seriously, it seems that there is no end of things in the world to cause us worry, anxiety, and fear. And a big part of what makes these events so worrying is a feature common to them all: we have no control over them.

Continue reading Filled not with spirits but with the Spirit

When we find ourselves in situations which have such a high cost, and we have no control over them, there are two common responses. One is to withdraw from the situation by giving up, by just losing all control and trying to escape. The other response, especially when the anxiety is as close as a family member or a situation at work, is to use as much power as possible to try to reassert control. We might say that we are caught between losing ourselves on the one hand and using ourselves to dominate on the other, between losing control and clinging to control at all costs.

Interestingly, the readings we heard for today give us some resources, as Christians, for how to deal with this bind.

First, let’s turn to something Paul says in his letter to the church at Ephesus. He says ‘Do not get drunk with wine…but be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ Again, as I said last week, it might be easy to read Paul here as engaged in cheap moralizing, as if he were saying ‘shame on you! Drinking is bad! You should stop.’ But Paul isn’t just giving free advice; he is suggesting something far deeper and more important than that.

Drinking to excess can be a way of escape. I think Paul isn’t just saying that getting drunk is a bad thing. I think because it is a way of losing or giving up control, a way of escaping, that Paul is saying that it’s important that we don’t take ourselves out of action; that we don’t despair or give up. That’s not how we are to live as Christians.

So what does he say in response? I think this is the intriguing part. He doesn’t say ‘you people need to avoid demon drink’. This is important, because we can often be tempted in these situations to a kind of moral earnestness, what some would call ‘Puritanism’. We could be tempted to go to some lengths to avoid all drinking, and would work really hard to walk the straight and narrow. But sisters and brothers this would just be seizing control ourselves. Instead of giving up control, we would just be re-asserting it. But these are just two sides of the same coin in what should be a devalued currency. The issue is not, after all, whether we have too much or too little control.

To this dilemma, Paul suggests something quite different. He says, in effect, ‘do not be filled with spirits, but be filled with the Spirit.’

The real irony here is that, to outside observers, at first glance, there might not seem much difference. In the book of Acts, when the Spirit descended at Pentecost and filled the disciples, bystanders poked fun at them, saying that these people were drunk on wine. And Peter had to say to them, ‘No, no. We never drink before noon. This is the Spirit of God poured out. God is here, doing something amazing.’

Or if we return to what Paul is saying, we find that being filled with the Spirit brings joyous singing and effusive gratitude to God. The Spirit doesn’t bring stick-in-the-mud sobriety but joy, pleasure, delight. Being filled with the Spirit, we are no longer left to focus on ourselves and our control – or being out of control. We are drawn into the overflowing love, wisdom and joy of God. And in that, we are transformed. We grow in love for God and others. We grow in wisdom and joy. And how can we help but sing our gratitude to God, who made and sustains each one of us: everything we have and everything we are is pure gift. Being filled with the Holy Spirit changes us, frees us in just these ways.

It would be fairly easy to stop there. But the truth is, when we are no longer preoccupied with ourselves and our control but are freed to love others, we are also freed to bear the burdens and costs of that love.

We simply don’t have the time this morning to do justice to the richness of what Jesus says in the gospel reading about being the bread of life. But I will take a moment to mark one significant aspect. All that he says about being the bread of life, about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, all of this is sacrificial language, about him laying down his life in a way which is able to sustain his followers. This giving of himself gives life to others, but in the process he is consumed.

Friends, he was not blithely unaware of the cost of this process, but he undertook it willingly, for us and for the world, out of a deep and abiding love. And I think as we are filled with the Spirit, we too are able not only to feel the joy and gratitude of that love, but to bear its burdens and costs, too.

Oscar Romero knew something about this.

As Oscar Romero studied for the priesthood in El Salvador, he self-consciously separated himself from other seminarians that were interested in the liberation of the poor and oppressed. It is said that for years he distanced himself from any such activities, quashing “community-based pastoral projects that he felt were too radical” and he unwaveringly defended the status quo. This continued even after he became archbishop of San Salvador, turning a blind eye to state-sponsored terrorism and brutality against the people of that country.* But one day, an activist priest named Rutilio Grande was murdered, along with a little boy and a 72 year-old layman. This was the turning point. Gradually Romero realized that his call as archbishop was not just to protect himself, but to be a shepherd to his people. He was taken up with a passionate, selfless love for them. This meant working for justice, resisting state violence, and publicly denouncing the atrocities committed against the Salvadorans. Romero had started off with certain expectations about a comfortable and conventional life. But in seeing the bodies of these three slain people, seeing Christ there in them, it was as if he was filled with the Holy Spirit for the first time. His expectations, his episcopacy, his life had been shaken up and changed by the Spirit.

In this experience, he was given what must have seemed like new life. Not only that, in his love and passionate commitment to his people, he also gave his life. For his speaking out, he was shot by assailants on March 24, 1980, while he celebrated mass at an altar near his home.

Archbishop Romero knew what it was, in Paul’s terms, to be ‘filled with the Spirit’. He was filled with passionate love for God and others. He no longer needed to be in control, or worried about not being in control. He grew in wisdom, joy, and gratitude. The Holy Spirit freed him from being preoccupied with himself and his own safety. And the Spirit also freed him to bear the burdens and costs of that love.

For Romero, it led him to give his life.

But of course for us, who knows where it will lead? Perhaps as we continue to grow in being filled with the Spirit, it will mean overcoming our fear and becoming a friend to a neighbour or a stranger. Perhaps it will mean talking to someone else about why we sing our gratitude to God, and what Christ means to us. Possibly it would be something like being a blood marrow donor. Or maybe it will be sharing some of our gifts with someone else: tutoring a child or being a companion to someone who is alone. Just where it leads brothers and sisters is not something that I can answer for you, but something we discern in prayer and worship. It might be quite surprising. It will certainly be glorious.

I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I can tell you this much: in being filled with the Holy Spirit, we will be freed from our worries, our anxieties and our fear. We will no longer obsess about the need to control, or else the desire to run away. We will grow in love, wisdom, and joy, and we will be taken up in gratitude to God, and freed to love others deeply. And we will be freed to bear the burdens and costs of this love, sometimes in quite surprising ways. All of this won’t take away those things in our world which inspire fear, worry and anxiety; but it will give them all a new meaning, as we are filled with God’s love – a love which casts out fear. Amen.

* From “The Reluctant Conversion of Oscar Romero” in the Mar/Apr issue of Sojourners Magazine. Online at http://www.sojo.net/magazine/index.cfm/action/sojourners/issue/Soj0003/article/000312.html

Renaming, Realigning, Recreating (Sermon for Proper 14B)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

at the Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Chicago, IL

on 13 August 2006

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The new rector was fresh out of seminary and he felt a bit awkward around children. Still, he felt he should get to know the kids of the parish better, so he asked the usual Sunday School teacher to step aside for the day so that he could lead a class of third graders. The children sat on the floor, while the priest nervously towered over them at the front of the class.

He planned to start with what he thought was an easy question. “Children, where is God?”

Of course, he thought they would say “God is everywhere” so that he could launch into his carefully prepared lesson, but the question met with bemused silence.

Trying again, the priest asked, “Class, can you tell me where God is?”

Again, the students offered only stares in return, the anxiety quietly building.

Taking a different tack, the priest called on a youngster near the back, “You there, can you tell me where I might find God?”

At that, the child made a frenzied dash from the room and found his mother at coffee hour: “Oh mommy, there’s big trouble…it seems that God is missing…and they think we’ve got something to do with it!!”*

Continue reading Renaming, Realigning, Recreating

The little boy thought that somehow God had been stolen and he worried that he was going to get fingered for it. Theft – whether real or, in this case, imagined – has a way of heightening fear and hurting community. The church in the ancient city of Ephesus knew about this, because they had a problem with stealing, too.

In the reading from the letter to the Ephesians that we heard this morning, Paul** addresses this problem. He says, briefly, “Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.”

It might be easy to hear this and dismiss it simply as moralizing, as if Paul were saying ‘shame on you for stealing, why not go out and get a job like the rest of us?’ But there is much more depth to what Paul is saying here, a depth into which each of us are invited. Let’s take a few minutes to look at just what he says.

First, Paul addresses what he says to ‘thieves’. He doesn’t say ‘Bob and Susan’, he doesn’t call them ‘those people who are stealing’. He says ‘thieves’: these are people who are known entirely by the negative thing that they do. There’s no name or description of them beyond saying they steal. That’s where Paul starts; but it’s where he moves on from there that is most significant.

Paul says that these people are to ‘give up stealing’. So these people who are known for stealing are to give it up. But Paul isn’t just saying ‘cut it out’; he’s suggesting a total reorientation for these people. This is like being given a new name, or a new identity. Those people who before were simply known as ‘thieves’ are now to be known as something entirely different.

And note here what Paul does not say. Paul does not say to the community that they are to separate themselves from the people who are stealing. The church in Ephesus isn’t to cast out these people as beneath them or of no consequence. And Paul doesn’t say that they need to work on these people, and make them stop stealing. In fact, everything that Paul says here is calculated not to separate these people from the community, but to restore them to the community.

What Paul does say is that these people should work so that they have something to share with those in need. Think about it: this isn’t Paul just callously saying ‘look, get a job’. He isn’t just saying they should work to provide for themselves, so that they don’t bother the church any more. He is actually re-identifying these people. They are no longer to be known only for their anti-social behavior; they are no longer people who only take. They are full members of the community, with responsibility for themselves and others. They are no longer known as those who only take, but as those who are able to give and receive.

In short, Paul renames them. They are no longer ‘thieves’, known only for the negative things that do, but they are full members of the community, and as he says later in the letter, ‘beloved children of God’. That is a radical realignment.

And just in case you think he or I are only talking about thieves, let me assure you that this applies to all in the church. We are given all sorts of names by the world, or even sometimes by each other. But the Holy Spirit is at work in this community, re-naming us, re-identifying us not as the negative things we’ve done, or the negative images others have given us, but as beloved children of God. And each of us then becomes an integral part of this community, able to care for others and allow others to care for us, able to become all that God intends us to be.

Fred Craddock, a professor of homiletics, tells a story that I think illustrates this nicely.***

At the time, Fred taught in Oklahoma, and he and his wife got away to Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a short vacation. One night they went out for dinner, eagerly hoping for a quiet, private meal together.

As they sat waiting for their dinner, they noticed a distinguished looking white haired man working the room, moving from table to table greeting folks. To their dismay, he made his way over to them and started to make small talk. He asked Fred what he did for a living. When he heard that Fred taught preachers, the man replied “well, I’ve got a story I want to tell you,” and pulled up a chair and sat with Fred and his wife. Craddock groaned inwardly.

The man stuck out his hand. “I’m Ben Hooper. I was born not far from here across the mountains. My mother wasn’t married when I was born so I had a hard time. When I started to school my classmates had a name for me, and it wasn’t a very nice name. I used to go off by myself at recess and during lunchtime because the taunts of my playmates [hurt so much]. When I’d walk around town, I could feel people staring at me, wondering just who my father was.”

Hooper went on to describe in some detail how he felt like an outcast in his own town, and even in his own church. When he was 12, a new preacher came. One day, leaving the church, he felt a big hand on his shoulder. It was the preacher.

He looked right at Ben and said “Who are you, son? Whose boy are you?’

Hooper explained, “I felt the old weight come on me. It was like a big black cloud. Even the preacher was putting me down.”

“But as he looked down at me, studying my face, he began to smile a big smile of recognition. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I know who you are. I see the family resemblance. You are a son of God.”

With that he slapped Ben across the [back] and said, “Boy you’ve got a great inheritance. Go and claim it.”

The old man looked across the table at Fred Craddock and said, “That was the most important single sentence ever said to me.” With that he smiled, shook the hands of Craddock and his wife, and moved on to another table to greet old friends.

Then Craddock remembered. On two occasions the people of Tennessee had elected a fatherless man to be their governor. One of them was Ben Hooper.

In the simple act of this anonymous old Tennessee preacher, we see the power of the Holy Spirit at work. It is the power of God opening us up so that we are more than what we do or what we have done or what has been done to us. We are set free and empowered to become whom God intends us to be; to be radically realigned; to realize ourselves as beloved children of God. Amen.

* I’m not sure where I first heard this story, but it’s not original to me.
** As in a previous sermon on Ephesians, I am not completely staked to the critical position that Paul was the author of this letter, although I think it’s likely. But these critical judgements, in the context of a sermon, seem rather beside the point, because they call attention to peripheral detail. If someone other than Paul wrote it, it doesn’t change the teaching on theft.
*** Jamie Buckingham told the story in his book, Power for Living, and I found it online at sermonillustrations.com

Kings and Queens

A sermon preached on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (tr.)

At St. Paul's Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, MI

O Lord, be present in my speaking and in our hearing to your glory. Amen.

What an awful lot of violence in the readings for today!

In the first reading, Saul is persecuting Christians: throwing them in jail, having them punished in the synagogues, voting for them to be put to death, even chasing them to other cities to bring them down. One imagines Saul with all the self-assurance of Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts: “Off with their heads!”

Into this scene of violence and persecution comes Jesus. Well, not necessarily Jesus as we see him in the gospels, but we know it’s the Lord. There is a bright light from heaven which, oddly enough, speaks Hebrew. Saul and his companions fall to the ground, but it is not from being hit or pushed: perhaps it is out of awe or reverence. At any rate, Saul hears the Lord addressing him, and in that address, he is changed: changed from persecutor to persecuted, changed from one who harasses the church to its greatest missionary, changed from Saul to Paul.

In this transformation, Paul gave up what he had held dear so that he could embrace what was of ultimate worth, new life in Christ. And being changed like that, he knew he would no longer live as a bully, as a man of violence. He also knew – or soon found out – that this change would make him a target of others.

In the gospel reading, Jesus tells his disciples that they go out defenseless, like sheep among wolves. Our testimony about Jesus and our changed lives will make us different, and will make us targets, and will not necessarily make us loved or appreciated.

But again, as Paul found out, our “defense” if you want to call it that, is not superior firepower or better tactics and strategy. Rather, our defense is to be defenseless. As Christians we do not embrace a life of violence, even if it might mean a personal cost for us.

Of course we have not always been very good at that. Historically there have been times when we seemed more like wolves among sheep, or even worse, wolves in sheeps’ clothing. We have been persecutors as much as we have been persecuted, and being on the side of the empire, whether under Constantine, Victoria, or our present regime, makes adhering to this pretty difficult.

I’m not sure it has to be that way, and at any rate, Jesus calls us to something much more. He calls us to a nonviolent witness, one which clings to Jesus’ own example, and dares to live differently. He calls us to be willing to suffer violence and persecution, rather than inflicting it on others. He calls us to proclaim, by word and deed, a kingdom of both wisdom and innocence, which has the power to change us for the better, one in which God is, as Paul himself discovered, the King of our hearts. Amen.