Take a Breath, Church

You rarely think about breathing until you are finding it difficult. As when you have just run up three flights of stairs or been swimming underwater for several seconds. And if it gets really bad, then breathing is ALL you can think about. You gasp until your body has enough oxygen to function normally again, and little by little your breathing slows and deepens, at which point you promptly stop thinking about it again.

Yet we are always breathing. While we live, we breathe. We are never doing nothing. We breathe. The oxygen infuses our blood. Our heart carries it through our body. Life is motion. Life is breath.

For the church, the Holy Spirit is breath. There are times that we take the Spirit for granted, as we do with our breathing, rarely thinking about the Spirit ... until we struggle. Until a poor decision gets us in trouble. Until a loved one dies too soon. If it gets really bad, then we gasp for the Spirit with huge hiccups of prayer and grief and unanswerable questions of “why.” And little by little, as time goes by, our spiritual breathing eventually slows and deepens, normalizing into a new version of our inevitable new life.

We are always in the presence of the Holy Spirit. While we are the church, the Holy Spirit is with us. God is never absent from us. We pray. Love infuses our lives. Our service carries it through the body. God is Spirit.

My prayer for the church is that we would be continually mindful of the presence of the Spirit among us. Just as breathing deeply calms the mind and body, may our deep prayers serve to calm the church and focus us on God’s presence, power, and peace.

That will require us to practice intentional awareness, to develop our ability to perceive the Spirit. Of course, there are times it is the mighty wind of Pentecost Sunday, and it blows our hats off. But much of the time it is just the tiniest puff of breeze, which we may very well miss if we’re not careful.

We are always going. Always striving. Always arguing. Always making noise. Always ...

Always out of breath.

And so, stop. Sit still. And take a breath, church.

Just.

Breathe.

Prophecies, Visions, and Dreams - Oh My!

Part of the Pentecost story in Acts is the prophecies, visions, and dreams that followers of Jesus are given when the Holy Spirit comes to them. It is actually Peter, quoting the prophet Joel, who makes the allusion.

The followers of Jesus received the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit empowered them to dream.

We all dream. We all envision a future for ourselves, our families, our congregations, our communities. We know what it means to desire a different future, a better future.

But how do I know the difference between a dream that comes from the Holy Spirit and a dream that comes from within myself? How can I tell if it is God or my ego creating this picture of the future in my mind?

I mean, I could have a dream of myself driving a brand new, silver, Porsche 911 Carrera 4 GTS Cabriolet with the top down and U2 blasting out of the speakers, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come from God. But obviously not all of my dreams would be so easy to distinguish.

I have a different vision for the church than some do. And I actually think that having multiple congregational visions is healthy for the church as a whole. When it comes to congregational vitality, “one-size-fits-all” is not a good rule to follow. And I do not begrudge one person their dream for the future of the church, as long as it is not harmful.

What are our dreams for the church?
- Bigger congregations
- Smaller congregations but more of them
- More small groups within larger congregations
- Networks of simple churches meeting in living rooms
- New congregations emerging from within older congregations
- Younger congregations
- Multi-generational congregations
- Ginormous congregations with multiple locations
- Congregations without locations that gather as flash mobs in various public places
- The complete dissolution of the notion of a “congregation” and creation of a new connectional concept of church, networked somewhere in the cloud

There’s nothing wrong with multiple dreams within the church. I’d say the only thing wrong is no dream for the future, no vision, no motion forward.

Last night at rehearsal, an actor noted that in one particular scene different people in the chorus were making different choices about our respective reactions to the action on stage. The actor asked if the director wanted one uniform response from the chorus. She replied that no, the multiple reactions actually created interest and energy. The only thing that would be “wrong” is if there was no reaction at all.

It’s like that with vision for the church, too. The vision in one congregation is different from the vision in another congregation, and that’s okay as long as it first of all does no harm. What would not be okay is if a congregation claims no vision at all. The Pentecost story is all about the Holy Spirit sending prophecies, visions, and dreams to followers of Jesus, and I believe that the Holy Spirit continues to do so today.

We Didn't Start the Fire?

The fire of the Holy Spirit will always find a way to burn.

The thing is, it’s either going to burn in spite of us, or because of us.

That’s my Pentecost sermon this year. Reading the familiar Acts 2 story this year, here’s what came to mind. The Holy Spirit had a message to get to all those people, and it was going to be heard. God was not going to let a little thing like linguistic, ethnic, or national barriers get in the way.

Yes, the voice of the Holy Spirit will always find a way to be heard, and the question for us is will we be translators or inhibitors? It really doesn’t matter in the long run, of course. If God wants a message to get out, it WILL get out. I guess I’d rather choose to be a translator, if at all possible.

People are really, really good at categorizing one another, noticing our differences. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. What gets us in trouble is when we take it too far, and make judgments based only on those categories, believing one category better than another in some way. Instead, I think those differences that we notice among one another are, in fact, exactly the way God wants things to be.

I say that in part because of this remarkable Pentecost story. In Acts 2, the Holy Spirit sees the differences among the people gathered, and neither pretends they are not there nor uses them to divide. In fact, it seems to me that the Holy Spirit speaks to the crowd through their differences, as if the diversity of nation, language, and ethnicity were themselves the language the Spirit used to speak.

The voice of the Holy Spirit WILL find a way to be heard. The fire of the Holy Spirit WILL find a way to burn. That’s not the issue here.

The issue for us is, are we going to resist it or help it along?

God's Language

At the "Talking Box" last week (our Children's Sermon), I pulled out a few foreign language dictionaries to look at and asked the kids if they knew any words in another language. A few did - we had Spanish, German, Japanese. Then I asked the kids what language did they think God speaks. There were probably 25-30 kids up there, and so there were quite a few voices who all said at once, "Every language!"

We all had a chuckle, then one boy put his hand up. "Yes, Preston?" I said.

"I think God speaks God-Language," he said.

That was a pretty good answer, I thought, and close to the message that I wanted the kids to hear, so I was getting ready to go with it. However, just then I noticed a girl (happened to be Preston's sister) who had her hand up, as well. "Summer, did you have something else?" I asked, ready to get on with the God's-language-is-more-and-bigger-and-different-than-any-words-we-could-use lesson of the day.

Summer said, "Maybe God's language actually is every language."

At first, I thought Summer had said the same thing we said originally, which was that God speaks every language. But as I thought about it, I realized there is a subtle difference. It is a different thing to say "God speaks every human language" than to say "The language of God is comprised of every human language." The first makes me think of God sitting there in the heavenly language lab, slogging through word by word vocab memorization like I did with German in college. The second makes me think of the words I know as if they are gifts God has given me so that I can communicate with other people.

I like that second one better, I think. If English is a little portion of God-language that God has given me, then Spanish is a little portion God has given another person, and French, and Japanese, and Quiche, and so on and so forth. Thinking of language as a gift that God gives makes it impossible for me to insist that another person learn "my language" so that we can somehow manage to get along. Rather, each of us can figure out how to communicate, using the little bits of God-language that we share in common.

It is fascinating to me how many people are so angry about people who speak languages other than English here in the United States. I'm trying to figure out the source of that anger. Is it fear? Is it pride? Is it arrogance? Is it some strange form of patriotism? To be sure, having a common language makes it much easier to communicate with each other. But why in the world does the phrase "Please press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish" make some people so cranky?

Whatever the national, secular, "official" language issues may be, what Christians read in Acts 2 is quite clearly that the disciples spoke in many different languages, empowered by the Holy Spirit. It wasn't the other way around - the Holy Spirit did not empower all of the other people to understand one language - Aramaic, for example. I think that is because the message entrusted to disciples of Jesus is just so vitally important that disciples need to figure out how best to communicate that message, in whatever language it needs to be expressed.

That means instead of insisting non-English speakers learn English, Christians maybe should learn other languages, with the goal of communication in whatever language(s) work(s) best. Not just foreign languages either, but the lingo of different age groups, the dialects of different cultures, the media of different generations, and so forth.

Remember the Tower of Babel story - a quirky little tale that illuminates the human tendency toward homogeneity, countered by God's desire for diversity (Genesis 11:1-9). Well, Pentecost wasn't the opposite of the Tower of Babel, as I once thought. I used to think that the Tower of Babel story confused all the languages and the Pentecost story brought them all back together. But now I think rather that Pentecost reinforces Babel, emphasizing the reality that God has made people different - cultures, places, languages, ages, etc. The Holy Spirit then empowers us to connect with each other within that diversity, it does not eliminate that diversity for the sake of an artificially imposed uniformity.

Language is a human creation, but I believe that God empowers that creativity. That means, for me, that language is given by God and is therefore sacred. We then can choose how to use it - to help or to hurt, to build up or to tear down, to love or to hate, to share good news or to condemn. If language is a sacred gift, how we choose to use it would then reveal something of what we think about God. So I think Summer is right - God's language actually is all languages together. And so learning another person's language teaches us something more about God.

Understand Each Other ... Use Words if Necessary

I love Pentecost weekend, don't you? Some of it is the whole red thing - the one and only time in the Christian calendar that particular color makes an appearance. That makes it all the more striking when it comes. In Northtown, like a lot of other churches I'm sure, we're all invited to wear red to worship, to enhance that impact.

But more than the color, I love Pentecost because it's all about communication / lanugage / understanding one another / relationship. And all made real by the Holy Spirit, and recorded in the book of Acts, chapter 2.

Though the wind and fire (no earth?) are exciting, I'm more intrigued by what happens after the tongues of flame come, when the disciples start talking, and the people start understanding. Acts 2 does not record what exactly they said, only a general topic: "God's deeds of power" (NRSV) or "The wonders of God" (NIV). Yet even without the benefit of knowing their specific words, we are told that a whole lot of people understood the message, and some responded with amazement, some with perplexity, and some just cynically made fun of them.

Question: Why did God inspire the author of Acts at this point to exclude the actual words of the disciples in this story? Why weren't these words so important? Of course, we get to hear Peter's words later (vv. 14-36), but at this point all we know is that the 12 were talking, but we don't know what they were saying.

I think that maybe there's something about understanding one another that transcends the words we say. Maybe we too often get stuck on the words and never get to the actual understanding. Have you ever found yourself thinking, "I hear the words you are saying, but I have no idea what you're talking about" in the middle of a conversation? And on the flipside of that, have you ever been able to truly understand another person without them needing to say a word?

Pentecost seems to be about how people understand one another, empowered by the Holy Spirit. There is a "sighs too deep for words" quality to it. It reminds me of the well-known line, "Preach the Gospel ... use words if necessary." Words are powerful and important, and I'm a "word guy" so please don't read this as advocating complete silence all the time. That would lead to some pretty boring blog posts, for one thing.

I heard a radio story this morning about a poet who works by eliminating words from the New York times. The results, after marking out the words he doesn't need, are his poems. (click here) Maybe the key to understanding one another is figuring out what words we don't need to say?

Also posted here.