Texts on Pentecost Sunday, May 15, 2005
Numbers 11: 24-30; Acts 2: 1-21
If there’s a word yet unheard in this Pentecost story after so many seasons–a word still waiting for your attention after the birthday-of-the-church kazoos and party whistles are silent, it is: God doesn’t want you to take Peter’s picture today–God wants you in the picture. God doesn’t want you remembering “that great day when three thousand thronged the church.” God wants your tongue freed from its ivory cage. God wants your voice released like a dove. God wants you up on the stage of world history, O church. That’s the word we’ve turned aside a hundred times.
When Moses was confronted by his protegé Joshua. To Eldad and Medad, Moses had apparently issued the proper permits, but they were going at it full voice, telling God’s word and will in the wrong place, without proper supervision. Joshua was appalled. They were upstaging Moses, the star of God’s show. He shouted, “My lord, stop them!” But Moses answered, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them all!” God’s servant knows that God wants all God’s people confirmed in the Spirit, telling what they hear of God’s word and God’s will.
When Peter was confronted by the cynics in the Jerusalem square. They had heard the astounding chorus of meaning-laden languages. Still they sneered, “They are filled with new wine.” Peter did not attempt to explain with mere logic the marvel of so much clear speech about God’s deeds of power. Rather, he claimed, “This is what was spoken through the prophet: ‘In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions. Your old men shall dream dreams. Even on my slaves, both men and women I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”
Moses got it. Joel saw it. Peter understood it. Have you caught it? God doesn’t want our Bible-hero worship. God wants to pour out Holy Spirit on you–and you–and you–that all might tell of God’s deeds of power. But we’re not talking. What is stopping our mouths? Has the Bible got it wrong? Did God change God’s mind? Does God no longer desire the people’s tongues freed for joy and proclamation? What’s this silence of the church about?
Recently, I returned to New Haven to celebrate with several hundred the life and ministry of Rev. William Sloane Coffin. Through the 1960’s and 1970’s, as chaplain of Yale University and then as senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, Coffin’s voice called America from its sin to its senses in terms provocative and powerful, full of a spirit of repentance and irresistible, winsome wisdom. Though slowed by the effects of a recent stroke, Bill Coffin was present for all the expressions of honor and thanks. He rose at evening’s end to address the large gathering.
“Now, you understand that I am alive . . . without doctor’s permission,” he began–always that relevant, humane good humor in place. He shared an observation of the late Arthur Miller: “I could not imagine a theater worth my time,” said the playwright, “that did not intend to change the world.” Theater? Yes! But what about the church, asked Coffin. Why have America’s once-mainline churches abandoned intention to change the world? What have we become? Managers of the status quo? Therapists? “Church people love to speak of being ‘a priesthood of all believers,'” he said. “But I believe God calls the church also to a prophet-hood of all believers.”
There it is! The Pentecost prospect! Moses and Joel and Peter would shout for joy to see it, to hear it come alive. But where in America is the fire of Pentecost felt, and hot? The greatest rush of violent wind today is Rush Limbaugh. The loudest sound heard in Christendom echoes from the halls of government and spews out over the media, as preachers and politicians rush to praise war and to bind its $300 billion burden on our children and grandchildren, while they noisily drop that very sum back into the pockets of the rich. They strap down civil liberties, lionize the goods of globalization, sell off forests and skies and airwaves to the wealthy for a song, all the while dressing themselves in cloaks of personal virtue and tarring whoever contends with them as faithless. Half of America’s churches sing the songs of the right as if God and government are one job. The rest are silent. Where is the rushing sound of the Holy Spirit filling the entire house of God? Where is the fire of God’s word and God’s will?
In the 1960’s, our nation experienced divisions even more raw and painful than those of this time. The churches were not silent then. I don’t suggest that a prophet-hood of all believers had sprung to life; all great movements are made by minorities. But consider this. All the great causes of conflict from that period were settled–to the extent they were settled–because the country heeded the voices of change, the voices of critics, the voices of the oppressed. Civil rights. Women’s rights. Peace. The ABM treaty. Clean air. Clean water. Through the 1960s and into the 1970’s, the voices of protest were joined in churches all across this land–not only in churches, to be sure, but in churches in fact. The right wing lost the battle for the hearts and the minds of Americans–first a few, then thousands, finally tens of millions. The costs were great, but churches–disciples–were on the front lines. The Pentecost prospect came alive. God poured out God’s Spirit on all kinds of children, and they received it. But not today!
Christianity has a diagnostic tool for listening to the heart of silent majorities. It is a simple test: Forgiven = free! If you are free of the burden of guilt, you speak and act freely. If you are not speaking and acting freely when injustice, greed, and raw abuse of power is rising all around you, then, Christianity proposes, guilt’s got your tongue. This is the predicament of the American church. We are silent, superficial, or complacent about the grave injustices worked out on children, on the poor, on the elderly, and on foreign nations because we are in denial about our human nature. When light dawned that the whole enterprise of attacking Iraq was based on lies and errors, the American churches yawned, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Tax cuts for the wealthy? Yawn, roll, sleep. Billions slashed from medical care for the poor? Yawn, roll, sleep. Abuse of war detainees? Yawn, roll, sleep–until the pictures from Abu Ghraib came. Last Friday, the men in our conversation at Attica were vexed by the question, why America pays so much attention to abuses of Iraqui prisoners when their own imprisoned countrymen are beaten, tortured, and killed by prison officials every day. Why do Americans–why do Christian Americans–refuse to believe that showers of illegal violence are rained down on prisoners by officials in our prisons? Christianity has a theory. Americans are silent because they are unforgiven. Not by God, but in their own unbelief.
How can that be? Right-wing Christians are the first to claim sincere confession of humble repentance on the day they felt saved. They would not accept the diagnosis, unforgiven. But when people say they don’t feel guilty, that hardly ends the inquiry into the soul’s condition. People who are guilty but don’t feel it are in the worst of spiritual crises: they are in the outermost darkness of denial. Their every action–even waging war!– springs from the inner turbulence of which they desire to know nothing. Who can get through eyes shut, ears deaf, and mouths dumb with denial? The men at Attica spent ninety minutes last Friday examining their own patterns of denial, trying to understand the fears in a nation that treats them with the tactics of terrorism–but denies and denies and denies. When did you last spend a little time reflecting on how your eyes might open to what you have denied?
The cross of Jesus Christ is unmoved by the claim of personalistic forgiveness, as if God had made a separate peace with oneself on a certain date, while holding hostile relations with all unrepentant others. The cross stands high over all humanity–God’s judgment of the evil in us all, casting a blessed shadow to show the path of forgiveness for all. Having abandoned some addling addiction at the altar rail one bright Sunday morning was a beautiful thing for many, no doubt, but it made no separate peace with God. The cross stands. It is a stake in the ground to drive up the silent worms of denial and guilt that they may meet the sun’s light. Wherever the people’s silence thunders in the face of grave injustices, somewhere within it is guilt that shuts the throat and cleaves the tongue to the teeth.
Donald Shriver, President Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in New York, has just published a book called Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds. To research his book, Shriver went to Germany, South Africa, where the face of evil and the fact of a nation’s guilt stand on the stage of history for all to see. These nations are doing something that all great nations need to study. An afternoon would not suffice to recount all the compelling stories of reconciliation Shriver records. Here are two from Germany. All across Germany since the early 1980’s, small groups have been gathering to think through together Germany’s past and future. Forty percent of citizens have taken part in this process of reflection and action. This is an astonishing social movement. To remind themselves of the Jews who are everywhere absent from their society, Germany has had sculptor Gunter Demnig pound Stolpersteine–“stumbling stones”–into the sidewalks of her great cities. Now 3,200 large brass plates catch millions of eyes with words like these: Here lived / Hermine Baron / Born Löw / Jan 8 1866 / Deported 1942 / Theresienstadt / Murdered / 22.1.1943. Shriver calls it “the most amazing collection of local testimonies of civic shame in any country on earth.” (pp. 40-41) In these ways, the German people are released from the power of shame into freedom and speech, that justice may thrive. Only the forgiven are free.
Thirty years ago, Bill Coffin made a piercing observation with the title of a popular self-help book called I’m OK, You’re OK. Coffin had no quarrel with the book’s thesis that we are often tempted to project our evil on others, saying in effect, “I’m OK, you’re not OK.” That temptation has hardly abated through the decades. To see it at work, we have only to consider that much-admired trait of President Bush, his cocksure challenge to the world that he has made no errors, that none in his administration have done any wrong, or need to be held to account for any of the grisly consequences of his policies–indeed that America does no wrong ever! Right wing America has completely abandoned the Jewish and Christian doctrine of sin–so far as it concerns themselves; evil only exists in others: “I’m OK, you’re not.” Coffin’s concern lay with the easy alternative solution flying from the liberal flagpole– I’m OK, You’re OK. “This is not the gospel of Jesus Christ!” said he. “The Christian affirmation runs this way: I’m not OK, and you’re not OK–but, thank God, that’s OK!”
O America, you cannot open your eyes, you cannot open your ears, your mouths will remain shut and you will not do justice or love mercy unless you are assured that you are forgiven in spite of grievous wrongs. And you cannot accept your forgiveness unless you bring consciousness of wrongs to mind for the sake of new being and new action. Let the stories rise up. Let the silenced voices speak. See the prisoner, hear the cries of the victims of the wars. After the decade of 1960’s, after the Viet Nam War, in large measure we Americans became unwilling to hear any more charges against this country. Instead, we elect leaders who ignorantly paper over the past. The result is that we are unforgiven. Half the populace claims there is no sin in us, and much of the rest are cowed to silence like the shamed children of an alcoholic. No wonder Pentecost is only a birthday party in the churches. Bill Coffin named this heart condition, “Why are Christians so often so joyless? It is, I think, because too often Christians have only enough religion to make themselves miserable. Guilt they know, but not forgiveness.
It is risky to become a prophet-hood of believers. It is the way of the cross, of course. But there is joy–not in heaven apart, but right there, just on the other side of cowed silence and ignorance of all God’s gifts. On Pentecost, Luke tells us, that chorus of polyglot pilgrims was filled with joy, “speaking about God’s deeds of power.” I tell you, when a goodly small number of prophets begin from the churches to call down God’s power to heal this unforgiven nation– not just the clergy calling out on a Sunday morning, but a prophet-hood of all believers from all walks on all days–then this nation will be released once more, for a generation, for freedom and justice and peace. They will call it “God’s deeds of power!” And all flesh will see it together.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, May 2005
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