A Sermon on the Second Anniversary of the Partnership between St. John's Episcopal Church and St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Clearwater, Florida
My first encounter with these machines happened on the highway. One day about twenty years ago, I was motoring up the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the Pocono Mountains, when I passed a convoy of extra-long trucks escorted by vehicles with flags and flashing lights. Each flatbed truck had a huge white piece of equipment on it, gleaming like a modern sculpture. What these trucks were carrying was the finished parts for a huge wind-turbine…high-tech windmills. Today, if you drive south out of Wilkes-Barre, PA, through a town called Bear Creek, you will catch a glimpse of a few rows of these huge white propellers on tall towers sitting on top of a mountain ridge slowly turning as they produce electricity. Amazing, isn’t it? That we can take the energy of the wind and turn it into electricity!
Equally
amazing are the number of homes and businesses around here that have solar
panels on their roofs turning the energy of the sun into electricity or hot
water or both. In fact, recently, driving across Florida on Route 60, I saw
rows of solar panels sitting on top of one of those mountains of trash where
the big green trucks empty their dumpsters! These panels were not only
providing electricity, but they were powering the process that was turning the
methane from all that trash we throw away into fuel that goes back to homes,
schools, hospitals, and other places, powering generators making even more
energy.
Everyone is
talking about energy…where to get it and how to use it. Whenever I fill up my
car with the gas made from the fossils of ancient plants and animals, I am made
aware that the cost of energy has gone up. But something
else occurs to me.
Just as cats
always find the sunniest spot in the room to warm themselves and plants always
lean towards the sun, humans are pretty good at harnessing energy. One of our human
ancestors took the potential energy in wood and either with help from a random
lightning strike or from learning to bang together two pieces of flint, made a
campfire for cooking. Someone first harnessed the energy of the wind to sail a
ship or used a rushing river to turn a wheel to grind grain into wheat or drive
a loom for cloth. We’ve unlocked energy
from gas and coal to make things go. Now we’ve come full circle, with these
great wind turbines that use the wind to make electricity.
Energy is all
around us. But how do we put it to work?
Our lessons
today give us three pictures of energy put to work. In one, we see potential
spiritual energy. In another we see spiritual energy put to work. And in another
we hear about the spiritual engine that makes it all go “vroom!”
In Acts, we
see the second image. The disciples along with other people from throughout the
world were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost
when “Fiery tongues appeared on them, and all of them were filled with the Holy
Spirit." The Spirit ignited a new movement and a new people. The energy of
the spirit was released and suddenly these people had power to reverse the
curse of the Tower of Babel to overcome the languages of division and
competition with a new language of God's love and Spirit. The potential energy
of the spirit was released and the church was born!
In the third
image, the Apostle Paul reminds us that everyone of us, no matter how
different, no matter our differing skills, experiences, and gifts, are brought
together of the Holy Spirit for God’s work where we live, work, study, and
pray. And when we’re in tune, this spiritual energy really goes “vroom!”
One of the
most ancient hymns of the church goes like this, "Come, Holy Spirit, our
souls inspire...and lighten with celestial fire." It’s too bad that we
generally reserve this hymn to ordinations, because it is a prayer that the energy
released on that first Pentecost day might continue to burn within the whole church.
It is a prayer that God's spirit will continue in each of us and in the whole
Body of Christ, so that we might live our faith with zest and commitment and do
the work of mission boldly and imaginatively.
The promise
of Pentecost is the potential spiritual energy that every person of faith carries
is ignited by the Spirit into a deeper, more powerful, more effective Christian
living.
One of my favorite
stories of potential spiritual energy turned to the actual work of God is of
John Wesley, a priest of the Church of England in the 18th century. (You’ll
pardon me if on a day we celebrate this partnership between Lutherans and
Episcopalians, if I talk about the founder of the Methodist movement?) Anyway,
Wesley was a faithful but cautious minister. He studied. He prayed. He wrote.
He was thoughtful and earnest. He went to Georgia to minister to English
colonists in that rough and wild colony. And you what else he was? Boring!
Not to mention stiff and judgmental. The folks in Georgia were so impressed
with his earnest, serious preaching that they took an offering... and bought him a
one-way ticket back to England!
On the ship, a
dejected Wesley, sad and perplexed that his sober, thoughtful, and very earnest
ministry had been such a flop, he remembered meeting another group on the way
to Georgia when he was coming to America. They were Moravians, and he remembered
their energy and fervor. So, on returning to London, he sought them out. And he
found them in prayer and song in a little storefront in London, on Aldersgate
Street, when something happened. As Wesley recalled, He felt his heart "…strangely
warmed...," set afire in a new way with the very Spirit of God. His faith
and imagination for the Gospel were ignited for a new beginning of ministry, a
ministry of teaching and preaching to ordinary people in the places where they
lived and worked, proclaiming a Gospel of renewal and service that extended
throughout England and abroad. This new energy brought a new reformation and
awakening throughout the cities, mill towns, and mines that had sprung up
during the industrial revolution and was changing England.
I suspect
that it was the same energy that caused Martin Luther to post his 95 theses on
the cathedral door in Wittenburg, or Thomas Cranmer (inspired by Luther!) to
turn the ancient prayers of the Church into language that ordinary folk could
use and understand. That same spiritual energy inspired revolutionaries and
reformers from Katharina von Bora (Martin Luther's spouse and a sharp theological mind in her own right) to Frances Perkins (The Episcopal lay woman who was FDR's secretary of Labor through the Depression and WW2, and the architect of the New Deal and Social Security) to the Rev. Dr. Sister Helena Barrett (first openly LGBT person to be ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church) and the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (first black woman-- and probably the first trans person-- ordained to the priesthood, an attorney, and a founder of the National Organization of Women) —women whose names
don’t usually appear in confirmation catechisms or seminary textbooks—to shake
up the church and move us forward into new Godly territory.
I don’t know
if you realize this, but we are experiencing that, too. Right now. Besides
showing us that the Holy Spirit can speak both Lutheran and Episcopalian, you
along with Christians all over the globe, are turning potential spiritual energy into
amazing acts of courage, hope, and compassion that makes a real difference in
the lives of people and communities.
You might
accuse me of hyperbole. I mean what difference can a hundred or so Christians sitting
on the border between two Florida cities possibly make in the mission of the
whole Church, let alone in our cities? Well, for starters, all of us can take
the wind and fire of the Spirit that was ignited in our faith and baptisms,
which is fed and banked as we practice the sacramental life, and put it to work.
The same Creating Spirit that brooded over creation, spoke through the
prophets, and lit up the Church still guides, inspires, nudges, directs, renews,
and advocates, re-making us into the people God meant us to be, bringing mercy and
compassion and hope to the people we encounter every day.
And that
brings us to today’s third image of Pentecost in Paul’s letter to the
Corinthian Christians. Here we learn what makes the whole thing go “vroom!” What
makes the potential energy of John’s Gospel become the spiritual work of that
first Pentecost in Acts is this turbine called the Body of Christ? “There are
varieties of gifts,” Paul teaches, “but the same Spirit; and there are
varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of
activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.” We
are the ones God uses to turn spiritual energy into holy work, and we are the
ones whom God uses to make the lights go on in people’s lives.
Look at what
happened when two different faith communities confronted by different yet
daunting issues with their buildings, not to mention working through visions
for ministry that would inevitably lead them outside the boundaries of
conventional denominational wisdom, decided to come together to experiment with
something different. Needless to say, we had to work past some skeptical
side-eyes from the folks in both our judicatory’s home offices who each proposed
more, shall we say, “time-tested” solutions.
But along the way, you’ve demonstrated that what Paul told the Christians in Corinth is true: we have a variety of gifts, activated by the same Holy Spirit, that builds up the whole body of Christ. Every day the Gospel is communicated to a hurting world in creative and new ways by two communities who are choosing to live out Christ’s love experimentally, inquisitively, and faithfully. In a world that thrives on division and is motivated by self-interest and the interest of our chosen in-group, this is a very big deal! The coming together of St. John's and St. Paul's in partnership demonstrates how the power of the Holy Spirit is unlocked and becomes new vision, new energy, and new hope.
For a long time, the task of uniting churches was mainly about bringing people in the same traditions together that for a variety of reasons has gone their separate ways. In America, traditions split over slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, or which had different ethnic or national roots even if they shared the same theological tradition, needed to be brought back together. The ELCA itself is a product of that… bringing together the descendants of a variety of nationalities, all Lutheran, into a new American church. Even so, not all Lutherans signed up for the project.
The Episcopal Church, along with Anglicans around the world, had other fish to fry. Was the church going to high or low? Urban, suburban, rural or frontier? Privileged, middle, or working class? Catholic or Evangelical? And we, like many of sister and brother traditions, needed to work out that ordained leadership did not, after all, have to be exclusively straight, white, or male.
And we weren't alone. There were other uniting projects over the last century, among them Presbyterians, Methodists, and the United Church of Christ, to name a few.
But more recently, we’ve discovered a different path: instead of building a new super-church; we've discovered the power of creating partnerships and practicing mutual recognition. We are learning that different churches from different traditions don’t have to chuck their heritages or even their denominations… the important thing is that we work together, pray together, share communion together, but to do that, we need to stop arguing about whether “our” sacraments, rituals, and ministers are more “real” than "yours."
Lutherans, in my opinion, led the way, choosing
to celebrate 500 years of Reformation by entering into communion relationships
with as many traditions as possible. Episcopalians have joined in and now count full communion
relationships with not only Lutherans, but Moravians, and (God willing)
Methodists, and are in conversations with other groups, and such as Presbyterians and other Reformed traditions. Recently, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally went to Rome to meet and pray with Pope Leo XIII. We've got a way to go, because it's long hard work to knit together a fabric that has been torn for centuries, but for the sake of mission it's work worth doing.
Along the way we are finding that instead of needing to be one big blanket church, we are like a quilt lovingly stitched together out of a variety of cloths.
The truth is that none of us can go it alone, either as individuals, congregations, or traditions. We still pray the ancient prayer of Pentecost, "Come Holy Spirit, our souls inspire and lighten with celestial fire...." We all have in us the energy, the power, of the Holy Spirit. The Risen Jesus breathed on the disciples on that first Easter and gave them and us the Holy Spirit as well as the authority and mandate to go into the world and get to work. That same spirit is given to each of us and is sealed in us at baptism.
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