(Preached on Sunday, May 23, 2010)
“In the Last Days,” God says, “I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people: your sons will prophesy, also your daughters; your young men will see vision, your old men dream dreams.” -Acts 2:17
We are living in difficult and desperate times. I don’t think any of us doubts or dismisses that assessment. I begin to feel like a broken record each week reminding us of all the horrible things happening in our world. And each week offers new material to demonstrate how difficult our present is and how fearful our future appears. Unless you have assumed the posture of an ostrich, a turtle or an armadillo, curling in upon yourself to block out the rest of the world, you are well aware these are difficult and desperate times.
So, I’m not going to rehearse that any further this morning. Today I want to move immediately to the question of what do we do in the face of such difficult times? What is our response and how are we able to respond positively? After all, we must live our lives in these difficult times. More than that, though, God wants us to live fully and abundantly. Jesus came that we might have life, abundant life. Not just make it through, but fully embrace and enjoy the gift of life we receive from God. Part of living fully is the life we share in this community of faith and our participation in the work and ministry God is doing among us and through us. How do we engage in positive ministry that makes a difference in this difficult and desperate world? How can we make a financial commitment that supports that work and ministry when all the signs in the world around us suggest we should be hoarding all we can because there are no longer any guarantees for a safe and secure future for us and our families?
Answers to those questions are what we hope to discover as we read Esther’s story together in our weekly eDevotions. So far we have realized it was a difficult situation she faced: the ethnic cleansing holocaust of all her people, the Jews, living in Persia. We saw how she wanted to hide her head in the sand and trust her position in the King’s family would protect her. We saw how she struggled with a feeling of inadequacy in the face of such difficulty. And we have heard her cousin Mordecai state that he had full confidence in her ability to make a difference and that he saw this as a calling from God that she was in the right place at the right time just for this reason. What is that statement but an old man dreaming dreams?
The story of the first Christian Pentecost suggests that is exactly what is needed in such difficult times. Those first followers of Jesus were living in difficult times. They had witnessed the total destruction of all their dreams in the grotesque death of Jesus on the cross. The one they thought was going to bring freedom and liberation from Roman oppression had instead been crushed by those Romans. The one who had taught them so much about God’s love, compassion, care and healing was now gone from their midst. Even though he had given marching orders and a commission to them, to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and to the ends of the earth, he had not told them how to do that. What should they do now?
What they didn’t do was to rely on their own power and develop a church growth program. They didn’t develop a blueprint or organizational structure chart. They didn’t brainstorm ideas and prioritize a mission plan. What they did was wait on God. What they received was a powerful outpouring of God’s Spirit which transformed them and led to a rebirth for them and a renewed covenant between them and God. They received an experience that placed them in the great tradition of God’s Spirit powerfully at work in the lives of God’s servants. This same Spirit led Isaiah to envision a holy mountain for all people, and John of Patmos to witness a city with no walls and no temple and a new heaven and a new earth. This same Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism in the form of a dove with a voice from heaven saying, “You are my Son, my beloved….” The word Luke used for “voice” in that story is the same word he uses for “sound” in this story. So, this loud sound like the rush of a violent wind is really the voice of God speaking to the disciples gathered in that room. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, filled them all, and suddenly the most amazing things began to happen. For one thing, they finally got out of that room, opened up the doors and burst through them, out into the world, speaking in tongues they didn’t even know. And those people gathered in Jerusalem, from all over the world, no matter what tongue they spoke, understood every word of the good news the disciples were preaching that day, the good news about God’s love.
It is important what the disciples did: communicate the good news of God’s love for all to everyone present, regardless of language barriers. But what is most important is how the disciples did that: by waiting on God to give them the vision and power to engage in God’s work. That is important for us to remember as we struggle with the difficult questions we face in this difficult time.
While they were filled with power and passion, excitement and enthusiasm, Peter understood that this was just the beginning, not the completion of God’s work. Like the prophet Joel, whom he quoted, he was well aware that things were going to get worse before they got better. As the prophet described, there would be blood and fire and smoky mist, a dark sun and the moon in blood. Yes, things were going to get much worse before they got better. We know this to be true all too well.
But Peter didn’t speak only of things getting worse before they got better. He also spoke of a promise made by God through Joel and fulfilled in every generation by those who hear the same call, no matter the place, the date, or the language we hear it in. It is a call planted deep in our hearts and it actually gives shape to who we are. It doesn’t matter, Joel and Peter say, if we’re sons or daughters, young or old, slave or free; all flesh will be included – which sounds to me a lot like “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here. No exceptions.”
That call is to be visionaries and dreamers of ways to serve God and spread God’s message of love. Iranian mystic and author of The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, tells a story in another of his, less-well-known books, called The Madman, in which he imagines seeds in an apple talking to each other. One seed claims, “Someday I shall become a tree, and the wind will sing in my branches and the sun will dance on my leaves, and I shall be strong and beautiful through all the seasons.” But the young seed was quickly rebuked by an older seed, who said, “When I was young, I too held such views, but now that I am older and wiser, I see my hopes were vain.” Others added their comments. “I see in us nothing that promises such future greatness,” said one. “But what mockery this life would be without a greater future,” said another. And another said, “Why dispute what we shall be when we don’t even know what we are or why we are here?” Until at last, no sense could be discerned at all for the sound of many voices.
Roman Catholic author, Robert Farrar Capon once spun a parable about a clam that dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer. Of course a clam can’t be a ballet dancer. It’s even hard to imagine a clam dreaming. But that’s Capon’s point – the clam’s inability doesn’t mean that ballet dancers can’t exist. One of Shakespeare’s lines from Hamlet affirms that truth: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The fact that we can’t imagine it doesn’t make it impossible. Indeed, sometimes the main barrier to possibility is our inability – or unwillingness – to imagine. What the troubled world needs today may not be hard-headed realist, but wild-eyed dreamers. What may be the way to not only survive, but thrive, is by embracing the Spirit of God and our calling to be dreamers and visionaries of God’s way in the world.
The world may react in many ways to all that is happening around us, this “worse before it gets better” – with fear and defensiveness, greed and violence. But we have a call, a “stunning vocation,” Walter Brueggemann says, “to stand free and hope-filled in a world gone fearful…and to think, imagine, dream, vision a future that God will yet enact.” Mind you, we are not in charge, God is in charge, but we are called to imagine this future, to trust in it, and to live into it, participate in it, and to share it with all of God’s children. We might be tempted at times to give in to those same impulses we see around us – to build up our defenses, look out for ourselves, find security in our “stuff” and in our sure knowledge that we know best, but this wind of the Spirit – it blows through our lives and it turns things upside down. We may want a faith that only consoles us. Nevertheless, God challenges our assumptions, blows them over, and opens up our eyes to see things in a new way, opens our hearts to a new creation of possibility and hope. That is who we are: Called by the Spirit of God. That is the power and the gift which will enable us to live abundantly in a time such as this.