sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 06/08/2014
video available at www.sundaystreams.com/go/MilanVineyard
podcast here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/VineyardChurchOfMilan
or via iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vineyard-church-of-milan/id562567379
18 years old, living in Belfast, playing basketball for Queen’s University. Going out to the pub with the team after games. Wanting them to like me, to fit in, to belong. Trying to figure out how to be. Knowing some of my teammates lived with me in this house of modern monastics. Knowing some of my housemates knew my parents back home. Wanting my housemates and my parents to approve of me, to fit in, to belong. Trying to figure out how to be. A constant tension, a push and pull, a tug of war.
Years later, I think to myself, what would that experience have been like without the energy and attention drain of that “imagined approval of others” tension?
From an early age, we learn to be different people in different settings. We act one way with mom, and another with Dad. We are one way at school with our teachers, and one way with our friends, and another way at home with our families. In part because we discover we can get certain results by being certain ways with certain people. And in part because this is just how we figure out who we are, trying on personalities like we try on clothes, seeing which ones fit and make us feel good about ourselves. This isn’t unhealthy, necessarily. It’s part of growing up and learning to navigate our world.
However, once we’ve matured, having this kind of “split-personality” experience doesn’t serve a healthy purpose anymore. It’s exhausting, wasted energy, unproductive, even counterproductive. It’s a dis-integration of our selves, and ultimately damaging both to us and those around us.
Perhaps you’ve experienced it. Being one person at work – because you know what gets the job done there, what wins people’s approval, what keeps you from taking too much flack. Being another person – or maybe a couple – at home. Someone with your spouse, someone else with your kids. Someone with your neighbors, or your teammates. Someone else at the club or the pub. If you’re a churchgoing type, maybe you add your churchgoing self, your Sunday self, to your growing collection of selves. At the end of the day, you can feel like you’re lying to everyone, even if just a little bit. And maybe you’re not even sure which self is the real you.
What if there was a way to become fully integrated, to live as one human being everywhere, the same potentially incomplete, potentially growing, but genuine person in all of those settings? What if faith – the context for so much hypocrisy – could actually be the thing that was meant to open the door to that kind of experience, to give us the kind of freedom we need to be the same person everywhere?
What if part of being Jesus’ disciple was being given what you needed to not be organizing so much of your life around the imagined approval of others? So that you could be an employee or employer or spouse or friend or parent or child or teammate or regular at Cheers (or Fenders or whatever) and simply be. Just you, exactly as you are – giftings, talents, passions, hurts, history, dreams, flaws and all – everywhere.
This is part of what the gift of the Holy Spirit poured out on planet earth on Pentecost is all about. Giving us the freedom to be our in-process selves with one another, without fear.
Because to be filled with the Holy Spirit, the divine breath that hovers over the waters of creation, the living, wild wind that blows where it pleases, the animating energy at the heart of all that we call Good, is to be filled with Love. And, as scripture and experience and research all bear out, perfect love drives out fear. Even, and especially, the fear that causes us to organize our lives around the things that we think will cause us to belong, or succeed, or give us protection from the negative judgments of others.
So we’re going to take 2 Sundays, starting today, on Pentecost, to talk about how the Holy Spirit given on Pentecost empowers us to be the same growing-in-love person everywhere, all the time.
As a reminder to all of us, and perhaps as an introduction to anyone newer, Pentecost is the day in the Christian calendar when we celebrate, remember, and reflect on the remarkable and earth changing event that took place in Jerusalem 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection. Pentecost just means 50, and it was the Greek name given to the Jewish festival of Shavuot, or Feast of Weeks. It took place 7 weeks and 1 day after the Passover (7 days X 7 weeks + 1 day = 50 days), thus “Pentecost.”
After his resurrection, Jesus told his disciples to wait in Jerusalem until his Holy Spirit came. They weren’t entirely sure what he meant by that, or what to expect, but they had enough faith to do it, to be obedient. So they waited, praying, until something extraordinary happened on Pentecost.
2 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Jerusalem is a crowded city, flooded with people from distant countries who have gathered for the Feat of Weeks, and this explosion of languages in loud praise draws attention. Some are amazed because they hear Galileans speaking in the native tongues. Some see just the weirdness and spectacle of it all and think these students of Jesus are drunk.
So Peter, one of their leaders, addresses the crowd and lets them know that they aren’t drunk, but rather that a new age has dawned, something long promised by God, where our relationships with him and one another are transformed. And he explains about how Jesus is the anointed king of this era in human history, where the kingdom of God has begun to come to earth. Thousands of people hear his message and get baptized and join with them, giving birth to the Jesus movement. And from that moment on, the Holy Spirit is everywhere in the world, changing our experience of God and one another and life in the ways we’ve been talking about these last several weeks.
So what does that have to do with freeing us to be the same in-process person everywhere, without fear? Everything.
Let’s dig into it a little bit.
It will help to begin by seeing the parallels between what happened on Pentecost and a major event in Israel’s history. Shavuot (the Hebrew name for the Feast of Weeks, Pentecost) is a festival celebrating when God gave the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. That’s significant, because God giving the Holy Spirit is the next major step after Sinai in his freedom-giving, love-drenching plan for humanity.
Israel had been enslaved for 400 years in Egypt prior to what happened on Mount Sinai. 400 years. Generation after generation after generation after generation who only knew what it meant to live as a slave. And fundamentally slavery is the denial of in-process personhood. The slave exists only to serve and contribute to the personhood of the master. Life in Egypt was entirely a fear-based response to the demanding and more powerful oppressor.
But interestingly, in the midst of their slavery, God gave a gift to the Hebrew slaves that was a sign of full freedom coming. That gift was birth unbridled. They kept having babies. More and more, despite the best efforts of the Egyptian slave masters to stop them. Slavery could not contain the freedom God intended.
After 400 years, God delivered the Hebrew slaves on the first Passover, in which they ate a meal of a slaughtered lamb while God dealt a crushing and costly blow to the Pharaoh and all of the Egyptians. A few days later, the Hebrews were liberated and crossed the Red Sea, and their pursuers were defeated. But the rag tag bunch that had been rescued had no idea what it meant to live in freedom yet. All of their habits and customs were derived from their lives as slaves. All of their actions had been dictated to them by their slave masters for the benefit of their slave masters; they had precious little experience living as free people. So 50 days after they crossed the Red Sea, they found themselves at Mount Sinai, and something dramatic happened.
And it happened on the third day as it turned morning, that there was thunder (qolot – voices) and lightning and a heavy cloud on the mountain and the sound of a ram’s horn, very strong, and all the people who were in the camp trembled…And Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the LORD had come down on it in fire, and its smoke went up like the smoke from a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. And the sound of the ram’s horn grew stronger and stronger. Moses would speak, and God would answer him with voice. And the LORD came down on Mount Sinai, to the mountaintop, and the LORD called Moses to the mountaintop, and Moses went up.
This bright and noisy birth is how it begins that the Hebrew slaves are formed into a nation, a people freed from slavery and devoted to God, spoken to directly by God, given words that teach them the way of life as free people, that are intended to keep them on the path of life and away from the path that leads back to Egypt, and to slavery, and to death. These words set them apart as God’s people. Holy words that reveal God to Israel, and are meant to shape them in ways that reveal God to the world, eventually opening the door for the whole world to the freedom that Israel is meant to enjoy.
Much in the way that parents have rules that teach kids to live in life-giving ways while they don’t yet have a well-defined sense of self or awareness of the selfhood of others. A wise parent’s intention might be that the child would grow up and become a fully-formed human being who can love herself and love others as she loves herself.
This seems to be God’s intention for Israel: for them to become a family of people aware of their unique identity as people specially beloved by the God who is Love, who can, out of their belovedness, extend that belovedness to the world.
But of course, it so happens that the nation of Israel, God’s firstborn son, makes a mess of its freedom from the outset. Israel does not allow its heart to be shaped by the gift given it on Sinai, but instead turns the law into an idol that sometimes it worships and sometimes it discards and ultimately that it uses for its own purposes, as a tool to exercise power over others. Sort of like the kid who uses his parents rules not to lead him to growing in love and freedom, but to keep his siblings in line so he can feel like he’s charge.
And so Israel missed out on the freedom giving purpose for which the law was given on Sinai, and Israel’s heart became like the stone the ten commandments were written on, and not living and active like the words themselves.
That’s why we find this prophecy in Ezekiel: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
What’s the difference between stone and flesh, after all? It’s the difference between slavery and freedom. A stone has no will or intention or selfhood, only moved from the outside by the external forces to which it is subject. Flesh is alive, free to be moved from the inside by love, by passion, by conviction, by choice. God made us to be his image-bearers, free as he is free, subject only to him, and subject only through the freely given love and devotion of one self to another.
In Israel, after the last prophet Malachi speaks, there is a 400 year period of silence from God. A silence during which the nation of Israel finds itself under the occupation of the Roman Empire. 400 years. The same amount of time Israel had been under slavery in Egypt.
Enter Jesus. The only begotten Son of God, the Word made flesh, dwelling among Israel. Filled with the Holy Spirit, living faithfully as Israel was meant to live, the freest human being on the face of the earth. Free from slavery to sin. Freely following the path of self-giving love, all the way to death. Like a lamb led to slaughter on Passover.
Jesus and his students share a meal that Passover night, but that night will not be the night the Pharaoh’s firstborn is killed. That Passover the firstborn and only begotten son of God will be killed. A sinless death that deals a crushing blow to sin and death. And then, a few days later, all of humanity is liberated from sin and death in the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb, a new exodus, a new crossing over from slavery to freedom begins.
Now 50 days later, the disciples aren’t on a mountain, but they are in an upper room. It’s time now for a people who have been enslaved to sin for every generation in human history to enter into full freedom. For the first time. Full freedom. Full of freedom.
2 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Do you see how much this is like the giving of the law on Sinai? There’s blowing and sounds and fire. And yet it’s not the same, either.
Receiving the Spirit of God is a lot different than receiving the laws of God. It’s different on some pretty profound levels, differences that change everything about the lives we lead going forward. The Spirit isn’t etchings on stone; it’s breath and energy capable of resting on and dwelling in a person. Designed to empower the kind of freedom the law could only point towards and prepare us for.
We’ll unpack the particulars more next week, but for now, just consider how different it is to live life from an internal compass and energy source vs. externally oriented motivations. Because that’s the fundamental difference between a law on tablets and being filled with the Holy Spirit.
As Jesus said, when he described what life would be like for people filled with the Spirit: “The wind blows wherever it pleases…so it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” Wherever it pleases. That’s the very epitome of freedom, isn’t it?
Let’s start with an easy to translate environment like church. Do you act like you act in church because of the rules of the church people? Because of their expectations and judgments? (for example…) Or because of who you are and what you need and what you are longing for and hoping for and how you feel led by the divine energy and breath within you? (for example…)
Well, if you act like you act in church environments because of the rules and expectations and judgments, then as soon as you’re out of the environment, you might as well be someone else. Because other environments have different rules and expectations and judgments. Places like work or your family or the club or school or the bar or your team. (for example…)
But if it’s because of who you are and what you need and what you are longing for and hoping for and how you feel led by the divine energy and breath within you, then that doesn’t change when you leave the church environment, does it? It’s exactly the same at work or in your family or at the club or at school or at the bar or on your team. Because you’re you and what the Holy Spirit is doing in you is the same thing he’s doing in you everywhere. (for example…)
And it might even be the case that not only does being filled with the Holy Spirit free you to be able to be the same person you are becoming everywhere you are, it also frees you to care about different things wherever you are. So instead of caring about the norms of the place and everyone else’s expectations and judgments, you start to instead pay attention to how the Holy Spirit – the one who is energizing and animating you – is energizing and animating the place and the people around you.
You start to notice, and you start to nudge. Because you’re free now, free like you’ve never been before. And that changes everything. The Holy Spirit changes everything.
Practical Suggestions:
1. Identify Your Egypt. Where is the one place you act least like the real person you believe God’s Spirit is energizing and animating you to be? Church? Work? Family? Etc. Ask the Spirit to help you see (remember, that’s what he does first and most often) and to help you notice when it’s happening. Freedom begins with the noticing – ask Moses about that time he saw a bush on fire.
2. Identify Your Upper Room. Where is the one place you act most like the real person you believe God’s Spirit is energizing and animating you to be? Church? Work? Family? All by yourself in the woods? In your car? Ask the Spirit to help you see that the truth about that environment that helps you be at peace enough to be most fully the person God is making you to be is actually true everywhere else, even in your Egypt. Because freedom is experienced through faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment