Holy Spirit — Andy James

Unscattered and Unscrambled

May 15, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21
preached on Pentecost, May 15, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

One of my less-well-known and newer hobbies is crossword puzzles. Many nights, as I lay on the couch catching up on the latest episodes of my favorite TV shows or watching a soccer match, I pull up a crossword puzzle on my iPad and do my best to complete the grid based on the pithy clues. At this point, a couple years into this new hobby, I’ve gotten reasonably proficient at the New York Times’ Monday and Tuesday puzzles. I struggle a bit but usually try and occasionally finish a Wednesday puzzle, but I gave up even trying Thursday through Sunday when I could only fill in one or two blanks on a good day! I suspect I’ll never be a really amazing crossword puzzle solver, but I find it strangely relaxing and a great brain exercise to spend some time unscrambling the letters and words that make up our language in this way.

On this Pentecost Sunday, as we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit in power upon the disciples in Jerusalem fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, we get two visions of scrambled and unscrambled words that speak to a whole different kind of approach to language and words in our world. First we hear from Genesis about how everything got scrambled in the first place, of the strange city and tower that were under construction on a plain in the land of Shinar, where desire for human achievement clashed with the depth and breadth of divine sovereignty. On this plain, the people realized that they could build “a tower with its top in the heavens,” a monument to what they could pull off as human beings and a link connecting them to one another that would survive any attempt to scatter and separate them.

With each new level of bricks added, God became more concerned. Their intentions at the beginning were small, limited to one tower in one town on one obscure plain, but God felt that they would have little difficulty taking up an even greater creative project because it was so easy to communicate with each other. “Look… this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” So God decided to confuse their language and scatter them away from this great city. Unable to communicate effectively with one another, they were forced to abandon the tower that they had set out to build. They called the place Babel, recognizing the “babble” of languages that had come as God had scrambled their language and scattered them across the face of the earth.

The scattering and scrambling begun at Babel persisted for generations. The story of God’s people throughout the ages was built upon the confusion first created at Babel. Not only were God’s people spread all around the world with different languages from this initial time of scattering and scrambling, the people of Israel had been further dispersed by the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to Assyria, sending them all around the Mediterranean region and giving them many different local languages even as they shared a common religious tradition.

So on that first Pentecost morning, after the disciples had gathered “together in one place,” the Holy Spirit came upon them in “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” as “divided tongues, as of fire… rested on each of them.” In this moment, they began “to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” Now this was perfect timing—not only was this fifty days after Jesus had risen from the dead, but there was a festival going on in Jerusalem fifty days after Passover, bringing some of those scattered, faithful Jews from all around the world to join in the celebration and pilgrimage. On that first Pentecost, though, these faithful Jews suddenly heard not Hebrew or Greek but their own native languages, spoken not by linguists or educated translators but by a bunch of country bumpkins from Galilee, the backwater of the backwaters of the empire.

Even before they started to make sense of any of the words, the message to these scattered and scrambled people of God was clear: God was ready to unscramble everything that had been scrambled so many generations before at Babel. Slowly but surely, as faithful Jews from all around the world heard the proclamation of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection in their own language and as Peter reminded them of the words of the prophet Joel that claimed that something new would be coming in the last days, the deeper message became clear to everyone: God was up to something new, and everyone was invited to join in. In Jesus, God unscrambled everything that had been scrambled before and brought together everyone that had been so scattered for so long.

Now things still seem scattered and scrambled a lot of the time. The various different versions of English that we hear in our daily lives, marked with the inflections of our homelands and first languages, are only the beginning! Even when we can understand each other’s words in shared language, there are so many other things that so easily scatter and scramble us. We struggle to recognize the differences of life and station that separate us simply because we have been born in different times and places. We intentionally and unintentionally affirm the privileges that come with our power and position along the way, dividing God’s people based on these very human things. We separate ourselves from those who appear to be different from us by the color of their skin, their ethnic or national origin, their understanding of gender and sexuality, or any number of countless other factors. And we scatter and scramble God’s intentions for our life together as those who lead us pursue policies and strategies that drive us apart from one another and even deny the image of God in some members of our human family.

But by the power of the Holy Spirit seen in such glory on Pentecost, God unscatters and unscrambles us along the way to show us that all things can and will be made new by the power of God in Jesus Christ. God works in ways beyond our comprehension to unite us across our differences and transform our lives so that we recognize the many things we share in our humanity. God shows us that the greatest service we can offer to God and humanity comes as we reach out to those in greatest need, speaking up for those who are victims of systems of greed and privilege, insisting that division on these very human grounds is unacceptable at every turn, and linking our future to the lives of those who have been scattered and scrambled by the difficulty and challenge of this world. And God comes to us in Jesus Christ to bridge the gaps that we create with one another and with God when we go astray from what God intends.

The gift of the Holy Spirit shows us that we can participate in God’s work of transformation in this world, that we are not left alone to face the challenges that confront us along the way, that we can only be divided from one another by the many assumptions of our world or the boundaries of this age. Just as the Holy Spirit breathed on the disciples on the first day of Pentecost, so the Spirit still blows in our midst. The Spirit opens us to new ways of living with one another that recognize the value in each and every human being and enable us to speak up amid the systems and structures of our world that try to deny this value over and over again. The Spirit helps us to recognize our complicity in the pain and struggle of the poor and suffering of our world so that we might live in ways that show hope and dismantle the systems and structures that get in the way of justice and peace. And the Spirit empowers us to be a part of God’s new creation taking hold in our world, sharing good news in our words and even more in our deeds so that the wonder of new life might take hold ever more deeply around us.

So as we celebrate this Pentecost day, may the Holy Spirit unscramble and unscatter us anew, guiding us beyond our assumptions to listen and act for the good of the whole creation as we walk together into the new life that emerges in the new things that God is doing in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Resurrection, Continued

May 24, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Ezekiel 37:1-14
preached on Pentecost, May 24, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Over the years, I’ve gotten to be a big fan of Easter. As a child, it was all about the Easter bunny, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a deeper appreciation of the need to celebrate the resurrection. This strange and wonderful event, after all, is the reason why we Christians exist at all. The death of Jesus was certainly important, but that death would have meant nothing were it not for his resurrection. It made the power of God to bring new life clear once and for all, brought a change in the day of worship from the Saturday sabbath of Judaism to Sunday, the day of resurrection, and reminds us of the new life that has been promised to us and is already coming into being around us.

Today’s reading from the prophet Ezekiel is a perfect bridge between the joys of celebrating the resurrection in the Easter season and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This story is one of the great resurrection stories, perhaps as appropriate for Easter as for Pentecost, because it has as much to do with new life as it does with the Spirit.

The prophet Ezekiel, writing from the confines of exile in Babylon, tells of a strange vision where death shifts to life by the power of the Spirit of God. God takes him to a strange valley, filled with bones. There were a lot of bones there, and they were very dry. Upon his arrival there, God questioned him quickly: “Mortal, can these bones live?” In that time and place, life seemed utterly impossible. The valley was dry and barren, and the bones were just as dry and just as barren—dead as a doornail, we might say. Those bones were like everything around Ezekiel—bearing hopelessness, mired in darkness and despair, dried up and withering away, decaying beyond belief.

But Ezekiel knew better than to assume that God could not work beyond human visions of death. Soon God was instructing him to prophesy to the bones, to proclaim that they could be alive again, to insist that they were something more than dead, dry bones, to call forth sinews and flesh and skin to cover these bones so that they might live. When Ezekiel did this, he heard a great rattling as the bones came together, “bone to its bone.” As the scattered bones became assembled skeletons, muscles and flesh and skin came upon them, and what once had been a barren valley of lifeless bones was now filled with lifeless bodies.

This first word had put things back together, but it was not enough to bring new life. So Ezekiel turned again to hear God’s voice commanding him, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain,
that they may live.” When he offered this second word as God commanded, breath came upon the lifeless bodies of that deserted valley. What had once been a lifeless valley was now filled with an eager multitude. What had once been a pile of dry bones was now a crowd of standing bodies awaiting new possibilities ahead. What had once been the most certain sign of death was now most definitely very much alive.

After this new life became clear to Ezekiel, God finally explained what it all meant in one final word of proclamation and prophecy. God instructed Ezekiel to follow up his words to the bones of the valley with one more proclamation to the exiled people of Israel, promising them that new life would emerge for them from their graves, that they would return to their homeland, and that they would be filled with the spirit of God and so live in fullness of life.

All the new life in those dry bones came about because of the spirit of God. The great Hebrew word used here is ruach. It’s one of those words you can’t help but love to say, and when you learn everything that it means, it feels even better to say it. Like many words in Hebrew, ruach does not have an exact equivalent in English. Depending on the original context, we can translate ruach as “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit”—the same three words that we so often use to describe the Holy Spirit. Whether it be breath, wind, or spirit, this ruach always comes from God, and even before anyone ever understood it, this ruach was showing us the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit.

God’s ruach brings life to the lifeless, blows through our world to restore all that is broken, and inspires the church to join in God’s work of bringing new life. This ruach is not our own breath, not the wind created by a fan, not the spirit of a departed loved one. This ruach is the Spirit of God, the wind that blew upon the chaotic waters at creation to begin the creation of new life, the breath placed in each of us as we take our first breath outside our mother’s womb, the fiery presence that filled Jesus’ disciples on that first day of Pentecost and helped them to be heard as they spoke to those who gathered in Jerusalem, the spirit that fills our world with the presence of God and guides us the continuing work of resurrection in that valley of dry bones and beyond. God’s ruach blows where it will, guiding us in bringing new life to our world that seems to be ruled by death, bringing the dead to life when we might least expect it, and showing us that we can live in ways that we never imagined we could live before.

As we celebrate this Pentecost, as we look at the myriad ways that God is at work to bring new life into our world, as we see how God can transform the brokenness of our world in bringing together the dry bones of Ezekiel’s valley and the diaspora gathered in Jerusalem, as we join the multitude who rose up in that valley and who responded to the words of the disciples in Jerusalem, we continue the work of the resurrection begun by God on that first Easter that has continued for two millennia. In coming in power on that first Pentecost, in restoring life to those dry bones, in inspiring us for the work of new creation each and every day, the Holy Spirit is the presence of God at work in our world. The Holy Spirit guides our reading and interpretation of scripture, helping us to understand what these ancient words mean to us as God’s people in our world. The Holy Spirit shows us how God wills us to work and to live in hope and new life, encouraging us to set aside the ways of death where we feel led out into valleys of dry bones ourselves so that we can know that power of God to bring new life. And the Holy Spirit breathes new life into us, showing us that we are not the lifeless people of the past, not those dead and dry bones, and not some temporary flicker of a momentary flame but rather reminding us that we are the people of God, inspired for new life each and every day so that God might be glorified through the transformation of our world.

So as the resurrection power of God continues in our world, may we be filled with the breath of God that gives us life, the wind of God that blows us into places we never expected might give us hope, and the Spirit of God that shows us how to walk in newness of life as we are filled with the Holy Spirit this Pentecost and every day until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Be Careful What You Pray For

June 8, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 2:1-21
preached on Pentecost, June 8, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As I mentioned last Sunday, I spent three days last month with about 500 Lutherans from all across downstate New York, serving as the parliamentarian for their Synod Assembly. The theme for the three-day gathering was “Come Holy Spirit,” which seemed quite appropriate at so many levels. It was only a week before Pentecost, after all, and some of the business was also the sort of thing when you might want the Holy Spirit to be present. At the assembly, they were continuing to live into their Strategic Plan that was adopted last year, and this year they were electing a bishop for a six-year term.

In many ways, the Spirit cooperated perfectly, as the basic business of ministry and operations went off without a hitch, and the strategic plan presentation was great, but when it got to the election of a bishop, the Holy Spirit’s work started to get a little weird. Thankfully they had invested in an electronic voting system to make votes go more quickly, but the first ballot had to be done on paper, and the counters reported that there were 425 ballots cast—when the report from registration showed only 420 voting members! In the end, after an evening of rethinking voting processes and recounting registration sheets, the repeat of the ballot the next morning went off without a hitch, but it was very clear that their prayers of “Come Holy Spirit” were being answered in ways that they didn’t quite expect, and they learned one of the most important lessons about the Holy Spirit: be careful what you pray for!

The first Pentecost as told in our reading this morning from Acts had its own surprising and unexpected turns, too. The disciples had been spending time together in Jerusalem after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, waiting and watching for whatever would come next, praying for the Holy Spirit to come as Jesus had promised them. However, I doubt that they expected the Spirit to show up quite like it did, with a rush of wind blowing through the room, divided tongues of fire settling on each of them, and the strange gift of speaking and being understood in the languages of the world coming up the disciples just in time to speak to faithful Jews from around the world who had gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival now known as Shavuot.

Once again, the Spirit had shown up, and things got weird. Everyone in the city was astonished, for they could tell that the people who were speaking in these languages were ordinary folks from Galilee—a region that everyone considered to be the backwater of the backwaters of the Roman empire. But it wasn’t just that—the message was strange and surprising too, describing the good news of God’s deeds of power and mercy in this man named Jesus.

Everyone was trying to figure out what was going on. Some were genuinely curious, others a touch perplexed, and still others completely dismissive, fully convinced that the only thing special going on here was an abundant serving of wine with breakfast! But the Spirit had shown up in ways beyond their expectations, offering an amazing and surprising appearance of power on that first day of Pentecost and inspiring the first disciples to expand their community as they welcomed the first group of newcomers to join their circle after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. But the Spirit’s surprising power made it clear that they had to be careful what they prayed for.

The Holy Spirit whose coming we celebrate today is a strange and unexpected presence in our lives and our world, and as these stories show, we too have to be careful what we pray for when we pray “Come Holy Spirit.” This Spirit comes in unexpected times and places, challenging our assumptions about what God is up to in our world, insisting that we think again about the plans we have laid out for ourselves, demanding that we open our hearts to something other than the status quo or the easiest and most comfortable and familiar option. This Spirit comes and challenges our assumptions, popping into our lives with surprising displays of power and presence that often raise as many questions as answers, suggesting that we might need to look for God at work in new and different ways, and defeating all our attempts at controlling its power in our world. And this Spirit comes with a presence that sometimes looks nothing less than weird, upsetting our our attempts at good process, surprising us with unexpected outcomes, and guiding us into a new and different way. Yet through it all, the Holy Spirit is among us, coming into our lives in amazing and wonderful ways to show us the presence of God each and every day.

My friends, there are two places where I think we need to be on the lookout for this strange and amazing Spirit in the coming days, especially praying “Come Holy Spirit” in our lives and our world. First, I hope that you will join me in praying for the Spirit’s presence at our Presbyterian General Assembly that begins next Saturday in Detroit. There, about 700 ruling and teaching elders from across the country will gather to discern the call of the Holy Spirit in the life of our national church. I’ll be going myself in my role as Stated Clerk of the Presbytery of New York City, though I’m there to support and advise our four commissioners and won’t be able to speak or vote. This 221st gathering of our national church will be working to discern the Spirit’s call among us on issues ranging from procedural changes in our Book of Order to divestment from companies that profit from the use of fossil fuels or non-peaceful pursuits in Israeli-occupied territories to same-gender marriage in our church and everything in between.

While I suspect a lot of the voting commissioners will go to Detroit with ideas and thoughts about the issues before the assembly, our common understanding as Presbyterians is that they gather with that prayer of “Come Holy Spirit,” not representing the view of the people in the pews or the pulpits but coming together by the power of the Spirit for this one week to discern God’s call to the church in these days. While this simple prayer of “Come Holy Spirit” may not embody our clear expectations and wishes for particular outcomes in these deliberations, I believe that this simple prayer is the best thing we can offer this important gathering as we trust that God’s presence will inspire these faithful women and men as they find and seek the will of God together, even if it makes us wish we had been more careful about what we prayed for!

The second place where today we will pray “Come Holy Spirit” is a little closer to home. Today as we welcome our confirmation class into membership of this congregation and two of them receive the sacrament of baptism, this my prayer for each of them, that the Holy Spirit might be present with Nicholas, Avayana, Chris, and Christine as they continue to grow in their faith in this place and beyond. Again, we don’t know exactly what that prayer will bring them, but we offer it anyway, trusting that the gift of the Holy Spirit—even if it ends up being a bit weird!—will be enough to sustain them as they walk the road ahead and join us in the journey of following Jesus each and every day.

So while we may wish that we had been more careful about what we prayed for when we pray “Come Holy Spirit,” may we always trust that the Spirit will come and surprise us and astonish us and challenge us whether we want it or not, inspiring us to pray with all the more confidence and hope, “Come Holy Spirit,” so that we all might be filled with the power and wonder of this amazing gift on this day of Pentecost and every day of this journey of faith together. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Good for Nothing, Good for Something

May 27, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Ezekiel 37:1-14 for Pentecost Sunday
preached on May 27, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What do you do with dry bones? There seems to be so little purpose in them – while living bones are an integral part of our human bodies, giving shape and form to our being and holding us up so that we are more than just a pile of muscle and skin on the ground, dry bones are no good to anyone. They just sit there, waiting for their end to come, decaying into nothingness, taking what that which was once very much alive and making it very clearly and very permanently dead. Dry bones are good for nothing.

So when Ezekiel found himself in a valley of dry bones, there was not much more to do than to listen to what God was up to. There weren’t just a few bones there, there were bones all around – and the bones weren’t just dry, they were very dry. But God was up to something with these bones. “Mortal, can these bones live?” God asked Ezekiel. Ezekiel couldn’t have been inspired by this question. Of course these bones couldn’t live! These were just pieces of deadness, dry bones in a dry valley decaying into nothingness, just waiting for the day when they would simply disappear. After all, dry bones are good for nothing.

Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by dry bones – the now-lifeless pieces of things that once felt very much alive, the remnant of a past that seems so far away, the scattered and disconnected pieces of life that just don’t seem to fit together when you need them to actually make sense for once. I feel like we’ve been there together, too, wandering around that valley of dry bones – trying to sort out how even the best pieces of who we are as a community of faith sometimes just don’t fit together as well as we’d like, longing for some new life to emerge in our midst and set aside the worn-out ways of the past and the deep frustrations of the present, wondering where God is in the midst of this dark valley and all these dry bones. Sure, the building blocks of life may be out here in this valley, but it sure seems like something is missing, and there is no clear way to find it. You see, dry bones are good for nothing.

But God asked Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” and Ezekiel couldn’t say no to God, right? So he suppressed his snarky attitude and questioning spirit and responded to God’s question with the best possible human answer in a moment like this: “O Lord God, you know.” Yes, God did know. God was up to something with these bones. So God instructed Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, to call out to them so that they would live:

O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.

Well, maybe dry bones are good for something?

What Ezekiel saw proved that God was right. When he offered God’s words to the bones, there was a great rattling sound, the noise of death emerging into something new, a cacophony of sound in that dry, desolate, once-silent valley as “the bones came together, bone to its bone.” But the wonder of the moment didn’t stop there. Suddenly the bones were more than bones – they took on tendons and ligaments and muscles and flesh and skin. Yet something was missing. These bodies were standing still, not moving, not breathing, not fully alive, waiting for something more to happen. The bones may have become something more – the dry bones were good for something! – but something was still missing.

I’m in the midst of one of those strange moments in life where everything seems to be coming together just like those dry bones out in the valley. After what seems like years of waiting and planning and preparing, my dry bones seem to be coming together. This week, I’m moving into a new apartment. Within the next month, hopefully, I’ll be moving into a new office. In just five weeks, I’ll be leaving on a two-month sabbatical. And dry bones seem to be coming together in our church life, too. Over a year of work in preparing to sell the manse will hopefully come to an end sometime in July. My sabbatical time, our new office, and my new housing arrangement are the fruits of much common labor over the past year. And after many years of wondering about the presence of children in our life together, we will be talking with our parents in a couple weeks about how to expand our programs with them because there is something happening here. It feels like so many things are coming together, like something new and different might be happening – but because we’re still on this side of it, because the breath of the Spirit is still blowing life into them, there’s still something missing. Even our dry bones are good for something – but God is up to something more.

God had one more word for Ezekiel to prophesy in the valley of dry bones:

Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

The breath came upon them as God instructed, and there was new life in the whole multitude of the dry bones of the valley. They began to live and walk and breathe and move because God gave them new life. They took inspiration from the wind of the Spirit, just as the early church was energized and empowered by their experiences on the day of Pentecost. Those dry bones were good for something after all.

So on this day of Pentecost, when we remember the wonderful wind of the Holy Spirit blowing among the disciples and the pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, when we think of all the times and places and ways that the Spirit has shaped and formed and led and moved and even drug our church and our world into being more like what God intends for us, and when we celebrate the continued renewal of the Spirit among us now, on this day of Pentecost we can hope and pray that our dry bones will be good for something, too, by the power of that same Holy Spirit.

The work we are doing, the plans we have made, even the plans God still has for us will come into being as the Spirit breathes on us. Just as Ezekiel saw the bones coming together in that valley, so the bones of our lives and our world will come together as we trust God to lead us in these days. Just as the breath of God blew new life into those lifeless bodies in the valley of dry bones, God can and will blow new life into us. And just as Jesus Christ rose to new life on that resurrection morning, so we too can be made new by the power of God working in us and through us and even in spite of us.

So on this Pentecost day, we remember and we pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit once again, to fully bring the pieces together and to make new life real and whole and complete as the Spirit breathes life upon us once again to make us the good and faithful people God intends for us to be. The dry bones that were good for nothing will be good for something by the power of the Holy Spirit. May it be so for us and our church and our world.

Thanks be to God. Amen.