"Go Forth for God"

Yesterday I attended a conference sponsored by the diocese entitled “Toward a Full and Faithful Telling: Repairing the Breach of Slavery, Segregation and Racism.”

It was a day of listening to stories from both blacks and whites. Stories of terror and indignities. Stories of courage and selflessness.

I heard Duncan Gray, the retired Episcopal bishop of Mississippi, tell the story of his days as a young priest in the 1950s and 60s when that state was simmering with tension as the Civil Rights movement grew.

Gray forged relationships with blacks in the small Mississippi Delta town in which he served, an activity that did not go unnoticed by local authorities. The police began following the young priest around town, including the night he went to a black physician’s home to meet with Medgar Evers, the head of the local NAACP, who was later assassinated.

The police kept vigil outside during the two-hour meeting, shining their headlights into the house, then followed Gray back to his home.

The next day the police paid a call on the parish’s senior warden to deliver a warning – they had best get rid of their troublemaking priest.

The senior warden declined to take the advice.

I heard Anita George tell her story of walking several miles every day to the black middle school in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a walk that took her past the white middle school much closer to her home.

For two blocks on either side of the white school, Anita and her friends were not allowed to walk on the sidewalk. Those were reserved for the white students on their way to school. Black children were forced to walk in the street.

I heard Ruby Sales, who grew up in Columbus, Georgia, tell the story of the day she was released from a week in jail in Hayneville, Alabama, where she and others had been arrested for picketing a store.

They were released without notice, and not allowed to call anyone to come get them, literally put out on the street on a hot August afternoon. Ruby, who was 16, and three others, another black woman and two white male students who had come South for the summer to work in the movement, walked to a store to get something cool to drink on that hot afternoon.

As they approached the store, a white man appeared with a shotgun and aimed it at Ruby. Suddenly she was shoved aside and simultaneously heard the gunshot blast.

Ruby, whose great grandmother was kidnapped from the banks of a river in Africa by white men and sold into slavery, had her life saved by a white man, Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels, who was killed by the shotgun blast intended for her.

Stories of terror and indignities. Stories of courage and selflessness.

These stories were all about people who had been empowered by the Holy Spirit to work for the kingdom of God.

And as I listened to these and other stories, I could not help but remember that it was the eve of Pentecost, the day that Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit comes true.

That first Pentecost, which we celebrate today, the disciples were all together in one place. It had been 10 days since the risen Jesus left them with the promise that they “would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them.”

Surely in those 10 days they often wondered what that strange promise meant and when it would be fulfilled. How would they know when the Spirit had come upon them? What would happen?

What did happen was nothing they could have predicted.

As they were together suddenly the room was filled with a sound like the rush of a violent wind that filled the entire house. Tongues like fire appeared and rested on each of them.

And suddenly they were all filled with the Spirit.

And those disciples, who fled in fear when Jesus was arrested; who denied that they had ever known him; who huddled together in locked rooms after his death, fearful that the authorities would be after them, too, -- those same disciples were suddenly propelled from their fear-filled rooms into the streets where they boldly proclaimed the gospel of Christ and the power of God.

And all who heard them, people from every nation under heaven, could understand in their own languages the proclamation of God’s deeds of power.

This scene is so dramatic, the descriptions of it so vivid that some times I fear that when we read it we immediately relegate the Holy Spirit to that distant time and place.

After all, who among us has ever experienced anything as dramatic as that first day of Pentecost? Who has ever experienced the Spirit like the rushing of wind, like tongues of fire? Who has suddenly found themselves fluent in a language they have never before spoken?

But the Holy Spirit cannot be confined to a single time or place or way of moving. Although we may not see the Spirit move in the ways described at that first Pentecost, Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit is made to all God’s people in all times and places.

Two aspects of this story particularly struck me as I reflected this week. First, the Spirit came when the disciples were gathered together in community. And second, the Spirit propelled them into the world and gave them power to do things they never dreamed possible.

Yesterday, as I listened to the stories of Jesus’ modern-day disciples those same elements were there. Each of them talked about the importance and power of the community of faith. “Courage comes from community,” one participant noted.

And each storyteller took that courage they had received in community into the world, where they were able to do things they had never dreamed possible.

“I didn’t set out to become part of a movement,” Bishop Gray said. “I was thrust into the Civil Rights movement simply by being who I was, where I was, and when I was.”

Gray noted that the Holy Spirit was evident throughout those years of struggle. “We knew we needed the grace and power of God,” he said. “Once we are open to that grace and power anything can happen.”

Another of yesterday’s speakers was Chip Marble, also a retired bishop from Mississippi, who has spent much of his ordained life working on issues of racial justice.

“The gift of the Spirit is the gift of awareness,” he said. For him, that meant becoming aware of his own privileged status as a white male, and also becoming aware that others did not share those same privileges.

He noted that as a teenager he walked on the sidewalk to the very middle school in Vicksburg that Anita George was forced to walk by in the street.

This gift of awareness is often the first step toward justice, toward the kingdom of God that the Spirit empowers us to strive for.

New York Times’ columnist Bob Herbert noted in a recent editorial that awareness is often hard to come by. “Overload is a real problem,” he writes.

“There is a danger that even the most decent people can grow numb to the unending reports of atrocities occurring all around the globe. Mass rape. Mass murder. Torture. The institutionalized oppression of women.

“The tendency to draw an impenetrable psychic curtain across the worst that the world has to offer is understandable. But it’s a tendency that must be fought.”

Herbert’s column focused on the suffering of women in Darfur. But as holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel notes, it is easy to look away from vic tims of any age.

“It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes,” Wiesel says.

But indifference to the suffering of others “is what makes the human being inhuman,” he says. “The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.”

On this day of Pentecost we are gathered together as a community of faith, like those first disciples so many years ago. In community, we are nurtured by God’s word, by one another, and by the body and blood of the one who has promised us, too, the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our prayer book reminds us each week that this nurturing that we receive in community is not for ourselves alone, but for the good of the world.

“And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do,” our post communion prayer says.

We, each of us, have work to do – defined by who we are, where we are, and when we are. It may start with awareness of those very things. It may not be dramatic; it may not make the history books.

But each of us is charged to go forth in the power of the Spirit to work for the kingdom wherever we are.

The last verse of our last hymn today sums up the message of this Pentecost:

Go forth for God; go to the world in joy;
to serve God’s people every day and hour,
and serving Christ, our every gift employ,
rejoicing in the Holy Spirit’s power.

Amen.

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Readings

Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’”

Romans 8:22-27

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

Jesus said to his disciples, “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning. I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts. Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

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