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? He 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 to Frances Perkins to the Rev. Sister Helena Barrett—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
and 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 in the very likeness of God, bringing mercy and
compassion and hope to God’s people we meet 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. This is how the real power of
the Holy Spirit is unlocked and becomes new vision, new energy, and new hope.
For a long
time, the big work, ecumenically, was in creating newer, better denominations.
The ELCA itself is a product of that… bringing together the descendants of a
variety of nationalities, all Lutheran, into a new American church. But not all
Lutherans signed up for the project.
The Episcopal
Church, along with Anglicans around the world, tried their hand at this, but
the truth is that we said that certain things are not negotiable, not quite "my way or the highway," but close enough, so we missed
out on the Lutheran project, and the uniting projects among Presbyterians,
Methodists, and the United Church of Christ, and others.
But more
recently, we’ve discovered a different path: not a new super-church, but partnerships
and recognition. Different churches from different traditions don’t have to
chuck their heritages and traditions or even their denominations… the important
thing is to 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 now count full communion
relationships with not only Lutherans, but Moravians, and (God willing)
Methodists, various other groups, and even (gasp!) Presbyterians.
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