The world is all abuzz with the incredible sermon that Presiding Bishop Michael Curry gave at the royal wedding on Saturday. Episcopalians are getting some attention out there, and surprisingly enough, it’s for actually sharing the message of Jesus:
Love is all there is. Love is the way. There is power in love.
But closer to home, our world is also humming with anger, grief and sorrow as another school shooting claims too many lives.
It’s hard, to preach on a holiday between such a high and a low—to rejoice in the message of Jesus being so genuine and present and real to people, and yet also to lament and be enraged by an epidemic we refuse to treat.
Surely, such hope and joy and love do not belong alongside such pain and anger and lament—but perhaps that is a part of who we are as Christians; people who remain in the story of love and hope and promise, even as we yet again stand and face this pain and suffering, people who love so deeply that they can indeed look and see and witness to injustice, sorrow, and violence.
When the followers of Jesus are sent out from the upper room on Pentecost, they too are sent out into a paradox—to proclaim the love of God, the deeds of great power that God has done in love—but they are sent into a broken and confused world, a world to which that message sounds like crazy-talk.
We know the Pentecost story well–tongues of fire, new languages, an exodus from the upper room. The disciples have seen their God—dead, alive, and now made somehow incorporeal, no longer a body, and yet they have been promised that an Advocate will come to them–some other way that their teacher has promised to be there, and yet not there; be there in a new way.
The Pentecost story is about the beginning of the church, about how Jesus’s disciples became apostles, and began not to wait expectantly for the Kingdom of David to return, but began letting the Spirit build the Kingdom of God through them.
Half of the Christian year is the season after Pentecost—it began on Sunday will continue until Advent. And that reminds us that, though we look to Jesus as our guide, though we follow the Way of Jesus–at least half of that following is making room for God and the Spirit to make heaven on earth right here and right now.
The church begins with a sending out, the church begins an urgency to tell stories—stories of God’s deeds of power told in the native tongues of an incredibly diverse world.
And what are these stories that they tell?
We don’t know, but maybe it’s something like:
Jesus, our Lord, through the power of the One God, has healed me, and her, and him, and made each of us beloved children of the Almighty One.
That same God that made something from nothing at the beginning of time loves you as a father, and protects you as a mother, and brings us all together around one practice of beloved community.
Love can conquer death—love is all there is, love is the only true reality.
The kingdom of heaven has come to the here and now, and not even crucifying the son of God can’t stop it from taking over.
But of course, this sounds insane—and not everyone speaks Arabic or Median, and so they sound like they’re babbling to some—drunk, even—but as Peter so kindly points out for us—that’s not possible, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.
(Peter has obviously never experienced St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago.)
Now we laugh, because it’s funny—but I think there’s also something important happening here.
And that is–that it doesn’t matter how well they’ve mastered words—even when given perfect command of words, by God–the stories of God’s deeds of power cannot be contained in those words.
God’s actions, God’s love, God’s promise, God’s presence—these things cannot be known only through words, and they cannot be spoken in just one language, or two, or three—or a thousand.
In the church, we try to tell these stories in our own kind of language, one with ritual, liturgy, with practice, a container that includes words, but goes beyond them—mysteries like the Trinity; one being in relationship with itself, or communion—bread and wine and yet the body and blood of an of God made flesh. Song, scripture, prayer and silence. They are our own language, one that shapes us into beings that listen for God, beings of worship.
But even this language is not big enough.
The Spirit is at work, whispering to us the stories of God’s deeds of power in languages we never thought that she would use.
I want you to think, for a second, about how many languages you speak in one day—but not just English or Tagalog or Swahili. What are the other, little languages, that you barely even know you’re speaking? What languages do you speak that don’t have words?
At work are their corporate phrases, or particular kinds of jargon for your field?
Do you speak another language on your phone, communicating in photos, emojis, abbreviations, filters—public comments and private messages?
And there’s music, and math—what communicates a beautiful equation? What can be said through a song that has no words?
What is the language of fatherhood, motherhood? What is the language of being a child? What does our body language communicate?
Each part of our lives have these micro-languages that we’re using all the time that are native only to those particular places; those particular mediums. What would it be like to suddenly be able to tell the stories of God’s deeds of power in those languages?
Does the tree in your back yard, the one that flowered so rapidly, and dropped its petals like snow—does that tell a story of God?
What does the good news sound and look like in the language of your workplace? Perhaps it isn’t talk of The Holy Spirit, but talk of trust, abundance, collaboration, generosity—or just perseverance in love from within a toxic system.
What changes in your body language when you believe that you—and others—are beloved children of God?
How does your child tell you about God? What can you learn from her abundance of wonder, and paradoxically, also the intensely concrete thinking?
The very first thing that the infant church is called to do is to tell stories, and to tell stories in the languages that are native to the world out there—beyond the first community of disciples.
Ever since, the church has been called to be translating and retranslating itself in order to communicate a truth greater than words—a love greater than death—a promise greater than any concept we can cognitively master.
The spirit never lets us rest just with what we already know—the Holy Spirit takes us and makes us tellers of stories in ways we could never imagine.
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This is a sermon delivered at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church on Sunday, May 20. You can listen to the sermon here. You can read the texts here.
We used the Romans lesson, not the Ezekiel lesson this year.
