Sermon: Sunday, April 7, 2013: Second Sunday of Easter

Texts:  Acts 5:27-32  +  Psalm 150  +  Revelation 1:4-8  +  John 20:19-31

The preacher has some choices to make during the season of Easter, a season of 50 days, seven Sundays and then the festival of Pentecost.  You’ll have noticed that our readings are a little different than usual.  Instead of the first reading coming from Hebrew scripture, we’ve read a portion from the book of Acts, which is really an abbreviation for the book’s full name: the Acts of the Apostles.  The second reading came from the infrequently read book of Revelation; and the Gospel reading came from the Gospel of John, which doesn’t get a year to itself in our three-year cycle of readings, but instead gets read in every year during the high holidays and festival seasons.

Further, this pattern will hold throughout the season of Lent.  Each week for the next two months we’ll be reading from Acts, Revelation and the Gospel of John.  In Acts we’ll be following the story of the explosive growth of the church following the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.  From Revelation we get a message of hope and life to the struggling churches of the first century written in a kind of code that is one part poetry to one part dream.  And in John’s gospel we will hear how Jesus came to those he loved and led following his resurrection to prepare them for the power of the Holy Spirit, with flashbacks to moments from his ministry in life that pointed ahead to his expectation that it would be us, the Church, that would continue his work.

If we had an extra hour each Sunday, I could preach on all three stories, and I know some of you think I’d love to give that a try, but I promise you I won’t.  So, I’ve made a decision to focus on one set of these readings throughout the fifty days of Easter, the story of the Church’s earliest days, the Acts of the Apostles.

Clearly this morning’s story has dropped us in the middle of some intense action.

When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in his name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” (Acts 5:27-28)

Here’s what you need to know:

The book of Acts begins with Jesus alive among the disciples after his resurrection, and the promise that God will send the Holy Spirit.  The disciples stick together in Jerusalem, waiting for that moment, and select Matthias to replace Judas in their inner circle of twelve.  Then, in a familiar story that we’ll return to at the end of this fifty day season, the Holy Spirit is poured out on the disciples at the festival of Pentecost and Peter preaches his first great sermon, at the end of which the scripture says, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)  And if that pattern sounds familiar to you, it should.  It is the pattern of worship, and this is the birth of the Church.

The disciples’ worship leads directly to action, which is the source of the trouble we read about in this morning’s portion.  In those early days of the church there was a fire burning in the hearts of the people such that it says,

They were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.  And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.  And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. (Acts 2:45-47)

So one day, as they were headed to the Temple for more of this intense communal fellowship, worship, prayer and praise, Peter and John come across a man who had been lame since birth, whose lot in life was to lay just outside the doors of the temple and beg for offerings from the people coming in and out of the Temple. You know who I’m talking about, the people we pass on the way to and from church, or the office, or the gym.  The ones crippled by disability, or war wounds, or mental illness, or addiction.  Going from soup kitchen to pantry. Living off the handouts of others.  This man sees Peter and John coming to worship and asks them for money, but they have none since all that they had was now being held in common by the community of believers, so they offer that instead.  Peter tells the man,

“Look at us.  I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” And he took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. And leaping up he stood and began to walk, and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God.  And all the people saw him walking and praising God, and recognized him as the one who sat at the [door of the Temple begging]. And they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him. (Acts 3:6-10)

Recognizing that the healing this man truly needed was not a life of ongoing dependence, but instead of unconditional welcome, Peter and John heal him by raising him up and bringing him inside the walls of the Temple — no longer unclean, inconvenient, embarrassing, or irritating.  Now one of them, a member, an equal, a brother.

And Peter, who had three times denied Jesus on the night of his betrayal now just can’t stop preaching.  With everyone looking at him in awe and wonder following the healing of the man born lame, Peter says,

“[People] of Israel, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk? … the faith that is through Jesus has given this man this perfect health in the presence of you all.” (Acts 3:12,16)

And this is what gets Peter arrested (the first time).  The powers that be thought that by killing Jesus on a cross, by making a public example of him, that they would silence the power of God being unleashed in the world, a power set loose for the sake of healing and reconciliation.  But, filled with God’s spirit, the church picked up right where Jesus had left off, and the power that had been contained in one man was now multiplying — loaves and fishes.  By the time Peter was thrown in prison, the community of the Church had already grown to five thousand people.

When they bring him to stand trial the next day, they ask him by whose authority and power he has worked this miracle, the same question so often directed at Jesus, and in reply Peter says,

“If we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead — by him this man is standing before you well.” (Acts 4:9-10)

And scripture says that the priests were astonished because these were “uneducated, common men.”  As though only they, in their long robes, could act as God’s agents in the world.  But, no, here were ordinary people, moved by the power and the presence of Christ to do extraordinary things.  Here were ordinary people, no longer content to see other ordinary people begging for food at the doors of the church, the end of the off ramp, the alley behind the store, inviting them to stand up, to come inside, to be a part of this new fellowship of people who shared everything in common and who were increasing in faith and in numbers day by day.

The Temple authorities want to know by whose authority these things are being done and Peter says,

“we are doing them in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who you killed, and whom God raised.”

And this is where things must have felt crazy to those in authority, this is why I love this story and chose to preach it over all the other options, because they thought they’d taken care of their Jesus problem.  But now there seemed to be a little Jesus in everyone who had known him, and even in those who — like us — had only come to know him through the stories and actions of his disciples.  They’d hung him on a cross and buried him in the ground, but there was more Jesus in the world now than ever before, so they tell Peter and John to stop teaching and preaching and healing.  To stop using that name: Jesus!

And Peter tells them,

“Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20)

Jesus had told them, “you will be my witnesses,” and now the apostles begin to understand the meaning and the power of the resurrection.  That seed once planted in the earth had begun to sprout.  That tree on which had hung the salvation of the world had begun to flower.  And now there would be no holding back.  Life was rising up from the ground, healing for those who’d been left outside the doors of the church, a new community for a new world.

I love this next part of the story.  After Peter and John were released from prison they returned to the company of the believers and they shared their account of what had happened.  Immediately the community begins to pray with them, and the scriptures record the words of their prayer in a form that suggests an early Christian hymn, so I take it that they sang as they prayed.  They prayed,

“And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus”  And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. (Acts 4:29-31)

Don’t you know that’s why we’re hearing this morning, to pray for boldness?  Don’t you know that in the week since we last gathered, people in this room, people in our church, people throughout our city and across the world have been standing before the powers and principalities of the present moment and teaching and preaching in the name of Jesus, who is not dead but alive, in you and in me, for the sake of healing and reconciliation.  We are here this morning because we’ve all just come from one prison or another and we need to be fed with this Word, with this bread of life, not because we are so weak, but because we are so extraordinarily strong.  So strong, together, that we can hardly believe it.

God answers the community’s prayers for boldness by expanding their mission and ministry.

God answers prayers for boldness by expanding mission and ministry.

Though he’d been put in prison for preaching and teaching in Jesus’ name, and for healing one man born lame; now Peter and the disciples were performing more signs and wonders than the scriptures have space to individually record, so instead they just say,

And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, so that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them.  The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed. (Acts 5:14-16)

So Peter is put in prison again, to try to shut him up by shutting him in, but in the night the angels come and open the prison doors (though I happen to think that Peter preached to his captors and made converts of them, because when you’re filled with the power of God’s Holy Spirit, every prison becomes a place just waiting for God’s reconciliation to take hold).  The next morning, instead of finding him in his cell, they find Peter in the public square, again, preaching Jesus (because, of course, faith is public not private — which is why Peter went to the public square, and not back to his home).  And this is where we finally join up with the passage assigned for this morning.

Knowing that he has become too popular with the people, that they cannot have him taken by force, they bring Peter before the Council for questioning, reminding him that he’d been given strict orders not to teach in Jesus’ name, and Peter basically repeats what he’d already told them, that he and the community of the faithful now answer to and live their lives according to a higher authority.

People of God, we are all witnesses to what God has done.  We are all apostles with acts of our own too numerous to tell.  Baptized with water and the Holy Spirit, we are part of the great, ongoing uprising that is Christ’s insurrection — err, I mean, resurrection in, and from, and for the whole Earth.

Just outside our doors there are people begging for a little of the bread, a little of the community, a little of the life that we experience when we are together.

Why make them settle for a little?

Why not give them a lot.  A whole lot.

Why not take them by the hand in invite them to stand tall, to stand proud, to remember the dignity that is their birthright as children of God.  Why not bring them inside the temple to pray, and sing, and dance with us?

Brothers and sisters, the new life God wants for us is the new life God is creating through us.  We are here this morning to pray for boldness, because we know that God answers prayers for boldness with an ever and ever expanding mission and ministry.  We are here this morning because we know that when God’s Holy Spirit takes hold of the church, it is called to act.

Come, Holy Spirit, Come.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, March 31, 2013: Resurrection of Our Lord, Easter Day

Texts:  Acts 10:34-43  +  Psalm 118:1-2,14-24  +  1 Corinthians 15:19-26  +  Luke 24:1-12

In the name of Jesus, our life, and life abundant.

Earlier this past week I found myself downtown for a rally and a planned civil disobedience action in response to the city’s decision to close over fifty of the district’s schools.  I was part of a contingent of clergy representing many different denominations who were asked to participate in a sit-in that blocked traffic in front of City Hall long enough for the hundreds of teachers, custodians and cooks who were losing their jobs, along with the thousands of parents and students demanding that the city reconsider its decision, to be seen and heard.

As I waited on the sidewalk, obediently lined up in front of a downtown bank from which people were coming and going, carrying out their business as usual, even as the streets were packed with protestors, news vans, and mounted police officers, a reporter with a hand-held camera approached me and asked, “are you really a priest?”

“A pastor, yes,” I replied.

“Can I talk to you?” he asked, and I consented.  Part of the point of the demonstration was to get our side of the story out, and I’d come to the rally equipped with talking points I was ready to share if asked.  I was ready to tell this reporter that I’d recently learned that there are 800 disconnected youth in Logan Square and 1,600 in Humboldt Park — youth who are neither in school, nor employed.  That means that there are thousands of young people in the neighborhoods immediately around our church building this morning who are falling through the holes in the safety nets of our community.  I was ready to say that I see no point in closing schools for lack of students when we know that we are losing children to the streets.  That I am more interested in how the city plans to go after our lost and prodigal youth than in how it plans to shutter the doors and windows of the very institutions that offer them their best chance at a future different from their past.

I was ready to say all of that, but those weren’t the answers to the question he asked me.

The reporter asked me what faith I am, and I said, “I’m a Christian.”

He said, “we haven’t seen many Christians in the streets since Vietnam, and those were mostly Quakers.  Then came Occupy, and now there’s all these social justice Christians.”

I nodded, waiting for a question I could fill with my answers.

He said, “I guess I’m just cynical.  The rich just keep getting richer and the rest of us are getting screwed.  What do you say to people like me, to the cynics?”

There was the question, and it didn’t call for my talking points on public school closures.  It called for a statement of faith.  What do we say to the cynics?

I kept my eyes open, but internally I wrapped my eyelids around my heart and whispered a silent prayer, “oh Lord, help me get this right.”

I took a deep breath and said, “Cynicism is a luxury our children cannot afford. They cannot wait for us to recover hope for the future, they need our action now. History has given us more than enough evidence to support faith in the power of the people, acting together, to turn back the forces of money and power and to find for ourselves and for those who follow us a better way of sharing life together, of being a community.”

At least that’s how I’m transcribing my blurry memory.  I didn’t have much time for word-smithing.  I probably also said, “umm” once or twice.

A more reliably eloquent voice addressed this same theme on Good Friday in an article published at the Huffington Post.  The author was none other than Parker Palmer, whose name I’ve invoked from this pulpit more than once, and whose writing has fed many of you, individually or in small groups here at St. Luke’s. In his post, titled “An Upside-Down Easter Meditation,” he writes,

Years ago, I stumbled upon a little book by Julia Esquivel, the Guatemalan poet and social justice activist, titled “Threatened with Resurrection.”  Those few words had a huge impact on me.

I’d been taught that death is the great threat and resurrection the great hope.  But at the time I found Esquivel’s book, I was experiencing the death-in-life called depression.  Her title jarred me into the hard realization that figurative forms of death sometimes feel comforting — while resurrection, or the hope of new life, feels threatening.

Why? Because death-in-life can bring us a perverse sense of relief.  When I was depressed, nobody expected anything of me, nor did I expect anything of myself.  I was exempt from life’s demands and risks.  But if I were to find new life, who knows what daunting tasks I might be required to take on?

Do you know the state of being Parker Palmer calls “death-in-life?”  Have you lived with death beside you, inside you, beckoning to you with promises that everything could be easier if you would just stop believing that things will ever get better?

I know you have.

Do you know what it means to be dead-while-alive?  To be numb to the possibilities of your one, unique, singular existence?  Have you lived with defeat as your mentor, with denial as your coach, whispering to you that you’ll never be more than you are?  That you, that people like you, never get to have more than this.

I know you have.

Do you know what it means to be left-for-dead?  Not quite dead, but assumed to be headed there, and too fast for anyone to do anything to stop it.  Have you come up in one of these neighborhoods where children are funneled from classroom to street corner to prison, and left there for decades, for lifetimes?  Do you remember the human beings left for dead at Guantanamo? Have you seen, do you remember the images coming out of Haiti, out of Uganda, out of Afghanistan?

I know you have.

What do we say to the cynics?  To the ones who know the story of the empty tomb, the resurrected life, God’s “YES” to the world’s “NO,” but struggle to believe?  What do we say to the ones who still show up with their cameras, hoping for a story to reignite their hope for the world, despite all evidence to the contrary? What do we say to each other, year after year, as we take our places in the pews on this Spring morning as the earth comes back to life?

We say, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

Parker Palmer continues,

Sometimes we choose death-in-life (as in compulsive overactivity, unhealthy relationships, non-stop judgmentalism aimed at self or others, work that compromises our integrity, substance abuse, pervasive cynicism, etc.) because we’re afraid of the challenges that might come if we embraced resurrection-in-life.

Sometimes we choose death-in-life because we’re afraid of the work that comes with choosing life-in-life.  Because we know the pain and exhaustion of crawling back out of that pit of self-negation.

Sometimes we choose death-while-alive because we know that having expectations for ourselves, setting goals more daring than any we’ve yet achieved, rising above the expectation of mediocrity inherited from a culture selling the promise of quick fixes, but banking on slow failures, means working harder than we’ve ever worked before.

Sometimes we accept left-for-dead because to acknowledge life in a body, in a congregation, in a neighborhood, in a people, in a nation, in a continent, in our precious, fragile planet for God’s sake, would mean acknowledging that there is a crisis happening right now, and that we have an ethical obligation to act, because there is still life in these dry bones, in these bruised and broken bodies!

In the gospel of Luke, the women come to the tomb ready to embalm Jesus’ dead body with the spices they had brought, but they are met instead by messengers who ask them a question they were not ready to answer:

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

The planet is not yet lost to us.  The nations are not beyond all hope for peace and prosperity.  The prisoners at Guantanamo are still alive, if temporarily forgotten, and the youth in our neighborhoods are still hoping someone will see in them a brighter tomorrow than the streets have to offer.

And you, you are alive, today, now.  You are not just workers. You are not just consumers. You are not just observers.  You are not the leftover dreams of generations past.  You are not the names they called you, or the fears that drag you down from the inside.  Your heart is beating, and your lungs still fill with air enough to cry out:

“Alleluia, Christ is risen!”

Parker concludes,

“Every religious tradition is rooted in mysteries I don’t pretend to understand, including claims about what happens after we die.  But I know this for sure: as long as we’re alive, choosing resurrection is always worth the risk.  I’m grateful for the people and experiences that continue to help me embrace ‘the threat of resurrection.’  My Easter wish for everyone is the ability to say “YES!” to life.  Even when life challenges us, it’s a gift beyond all measure.”

Messengers standing amidst the graves declare, “he is not here, but has risen.”  You baptized people of God, you body of Christ in the world, you do not dwell with the dead.  You are alive.  You are rising.  You are a new creation, being made new today and every day.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, May 27, 2012 — Pentecost

“Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening,” by Vigen Guroian at Amazon.com

Texts:   Acts 2:1-21   •   Psalm 104:24-34, 35b  •   Romans 8:22-27   •   John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Well friends, I just have to begin by sharing that it’s been an odd, difficult, wonderful sort of week.  After a long Lenten season that we kicked off with the fantastic “Occupy Palm Sunday” event at the Logan Square monument, followed by a full Easter Season that culminating in our ecumenical witness for peace worship service at Kimball Avenue church before the NATO protest, I was looking forward to a week in which my calendar was looking relatively wide open.  I’d plotted out my days the way a landscaper divides and subdivides a plot of land — scheduling patches of writing next to phone calls and visits long overdue.  I was imagining a rich, relaxed week of ministry among you all leading up to this morning, Pentecost, the final Sunday of Easter and Memorial Day, the unofficial beginning of the summer season.

But then life happened.  I got a message from home that a dear family friend, a mother of the church in which I’d grown up, was ill and in the hospital.  Childhood friends were drawing close to support one another and I decided I should be at home.  The spacious days in my calendar were wiped clean and planted with a different, but still abundant, crop.

I was in the car by lunch on Wednesday, driving across western Illinois and eastern Iowa.  The fields were rippling with young stalks of corn and soybeans planted in April and May.  Cows with their calves were grazing and lazing along the hills under a partly cloudy sky, full with the promise of rain.

I pulled into Des Moines just after dinner and joined up with friends who were finishing their second or third pizza.  Nothing gets us through hard times like food, and I did a lot of eating (and drinking) this week.  I didn’t actually arrive at the family homestead until well after dark and quickly I was asleep.

When day broke the next morning, I could already tell we were moving to a different rhythm.  No rush to shower and get to the office.  Instead, a slow breakfast on the back patio looking out over my parents’ kitchen garden.  They’ve been slowly perfecting their backyard for years, my dad the landscaper, my mom the one to weed the plots and pick the vegetables.  A labyrinth of prairie grasses mown into the far backyard.  It is an impressive achievement, the gardens in my parents’ backyard, but my father is quick to remind me, “God does the heavy work, we’re just helping.”

That sort of spirituality finds a wise companion in Vigen Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox professor of theology and ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland and the author of a number of books including Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening, which I’ve been reading this spring.  Guroian writes,

“It is not the gardeners with their planting and watering who count,” writes St. Paul, “but God who makes it grow.” Indeed, we are not only ‘fellow-workers’ in God’s great garden; we ourselves are God’s garden (1 Corinthians 3:7-9).

It is a spirituality that finds its echo in the psalm for this morning, Psalm 104, with its agricultural imagery:

“These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.  When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.  When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.” (Psalm 104:27-30)

The fiftieth day of Easter, the day we call Pentecost, came to the Christian church from our Jewish elder brothers and sisters who celebrate this day by the name Shavuot.  Shavuot is a harvest festival, the day of the first fruits, marked as the fiftieth day after Passover.  In biblical time it took seven weeks to harvest the crops, beginning with the barley during Passover and ending with wheat by Shavuot.  Religiously, Shavuot commemorates the anniversary of the day God gave the law, the Torah, to the nation of Israel assembled at Mount Sinai.  As nourishing as any food from the earth, God’s law feeds and sustains us.

The early Christians did not reject the notion of God’s law, but as they grew into a new expression of the faith they found by following Jesus — who called them to new life in baptism and commissioned them to heal and transform the world — they were being fed by something else as well, not only law but also the gospel.  They were fed by the liberating good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which we begin to hear this morning in the first reading from Acts, as Peter begins his preaching ministry,

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy… Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Acts 2:17-18,21)

You can hear the good news we now call the gospel just beginning to take root in this early sermon by the church’s first pastor.  Speaking to an assembly of people from every nation, and being heard by each as if in their own language, Peter speaks by the power of God’s holy spirit, rained down on him, to tell them that each and every one of them would receive the presence of God, to dream new dreams for the world, to see new possibilities for life together, here and now.

It’s a wonderful sermon Peter gives, and it goes on quite a bit longer than what we hear in this morning’s reading, and at the end people are brought to faith and the church is born.  It would be easy to give all the credit to Peter, the one Jesus called the rock on which God’s church would be built, the one who would hold the keys to the kingdom of God.  But, like my parents’ garden, we remember that this story begins with the Holy Spirit resting on the apostles, and this work is God’s work through Peter.

I don’t know what kind of weather you had here in Chicago, but throughout the last few days in Des Moines we were graced with the most gentle rain showers I’ve seen in a long while.  The days were warm, but not hot; the air was moist, but not smotheringly humid; and two or three times a day in the late morning and mid-afternoon the skies would open up and it would rain for five to ten minutes.  It was exactly the kind of rain a gardener loves: long enough to really drench the soil, but light enough not to damage the plants.  They were beautiful rain showers — which is not an adjective I usually use for rain, but they truly were beautiful.

On Pentecost we usually focus on the image of fire, like the tongues that rested on the apostles.  But, given that it is the culmination of the Easter season, even Pentecost can’t avoid watery language, as when Peter says the Spirit will be “poured out” on all flesh.  Vigen Guroian writes,

“On Pentecost, the Spirit rained upon the church.  Every living soul upon whom the Spirit rains becomes a fruitful garden like Paradise.  In truth there have been many Pentecosts. The church’s Pentecost was foreshadowed at the creation of the world when the ‘spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’ and all life began (Genesis 1:2).  Pentecost also anticipates the last day when everything will be made new by the Holy Spirit.  The personal Pentecost of each Christian is his or her baptism and chrismation.”

That was a new idea to me, “the personal Pentecost of each Christian.”  I have always thought of Pentecost as the birthday of the church, but Guroian keeps the meaning of Pentecost tied more tightly to the sending of the Spirit which we celebrate each time a person is grafted into the life of the church by baptism.

But Pentecost is both a collective experience and a personal reality.  The apostle Paul touches on our very personal experience of the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost when he writes,

“Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8:26-27)

So many times over these last few days — sitting on the back patio, sitting by the bedside, sitting across the table over a meal, there were no words left to say, just sighs too deep for words.  And yet we could feel that God was present in those moments, in those sighs, and that they were enough.

This silence in the face of death, in the face of suffering, in the face of all that is unknown is when I am most able to tell that I am not only one of God’s fellow-gardeners, but that I am, myself, part of God’s own garden.  It is in my helplessness that I finally begin to understand that God is planting, God is watering, and God is bringing in the harvest out of the garden that is me, and you, and all of us together.

Again, Vigen Guroian, this time quoting Henry Mitchell,

“Henry Mitchell, in his book One Man’s Garden, observes, ‘it is not important for a garden to be beautiful’ in everyone’s eyes. But ‘it is extremely important for the gardener to think it is a fair substitute for Eden.’  Perhaps this is an overstatement, or perhaps it is a theological truth. It is important for the Christian gardener to see beauty in the garden of his [or her] own self.”

This, too, is a way of thinking about Pentecost that had never occurred to me.  That, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is poured out on us like rain on the fields, that it nourishes and washes and restores us to something like that first garden in paradise.  By baptism we become, like Christ, new Adams and new Eves, we enter a new paradise, and we are revealed as the beautiful creations of God that we are.  Guroian says it better than I can,

“At Pentecost the Son sends the Holy Spirit over the earth and into each one of us. Beauty makes us beautiful inside. Each of us is changed into a flower that bears the fruit of its own kind within the infinite scope of Beauty.”

Never in all my years have I experienced the blessings of Pentecost the way I have this year, blessings that are available to each and every one of us — no matter where you are in life’s journey.  Pentecost pours itself out on the infant being brought to the font for baptism and the woman lying in her hospital bed being anointed once again with oil, revealing the beauty always present in each. Pentecost rushes into us like the winds before the rains, inspiring our sighs too deep for words.  Pentecost grows within us, like the seed unfolding itself in the soil, reaching for the warmth of the sun, growing into truth we have not yet fully seen but are maturing into one season at a time, that we are all God’s children and we are all being saved.

Amen.