Losing Control
Sarah Klaassen | Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 2:00PM Let us pause to remember once again the words we just prayed. Glorious God, you blow into our lives without warning. You blow into our lives without warning. Oh God, You blow into our lives without warning. Come into this place now and touch us with your unsettling love and indefinable mystery.
Imagine it was you. Set aside your modern, rational, logical tendency toward disbelief. Set aside your skepticism. Set aside your uncertainty about the Bible’s factuality, and just imagine it was you, gathered with the other disciples of Jesus fifty days after Passover. You’re a Jew, remember, to be historically accurate. You, like the early Christians, were a devout Jew who followed Jesus. Today, you all are gathered to make a plan. Jesus has died, risen, and ascended into heaven, and you are gathered to decide what you should do next as a community of believers.
You wake up this morning. You’ve eaten breakfast and washed the dishes, and now it’s time to get down to business. It’s about 8:45 in the morning, and everyone crams into the living room of the house. And then, just when people have settled in, the door blows open and you hear a loud, even violent sound of wind rushing through the room. Before you have time to react, you see fire. Your first thought is to grab for the water bucket, but then you realize that nothing’s burning; you do not feel heat and you do not smell smoke even though flames are dancing on each person’s head. Your next thought is that this is not possible. This doesn’t make sense. You must be dreaming. Before you have time to figure it out, you hear another noise.
It starts as a dull whisper and grows louder and louder. At first it sounds like gibberish, and then you realize you are speaking too. Words are coming out of your mouth and your tongue is moving in unusual ways. What’s more, you don’t know the language you are speaking but you can understand what you are saying. Through the door you see people gathered outside, people from many different countries who are nodding with excitement. It’s clear that they understand the words that are being spoken, and then your self-consciousness kicks in, Oh my gosh, what are they going to think of us, these crazy people, flames on our heads, speaking languages we don’t know.
Finally you realize, absurd as all of this is, it must be the work of God. And you offer a prayer of thanks, praying again: “Glorious God, you blow into our lives without warning.”
If we were really in the story, let’s be honest. We probably wouldn’t be the ones praising God for the violent wind and the tongues of fire and the many languages. We’d be more like the others, the bystanders who had gathered at the edge of the crowd. We’d be more like the different ones in verse 13 who sneered and jeered and said, “Look at those crazy people. That’s not normal. They must be drunk, filled with new wine. How else would you explain such weird behavior? How else would you explain this out of control?”
You see, we are trained up to value control. We are taught to control our emotions. We are in control of our lives, and increasingly as a society, we try to control death. We are trained to manage our busy schedules, to fill them up to the brim and run like heck to get everything done. We are in charge of our money and we use it to work for us, and we are in charge of the land, consuming at will. We are also in control of our minds, what we believe.
Last fall I read a book by the famous, and in some circles infamous, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a biologist who finds the concepts in religion and the idea of faith irreconcilable with the scientific processes and rationalities that he has organized his life around and in fact the logic that many of us use to organize our own lives. His book entitled The God Delusion posits that belief in God is a delusion held foolishly in the face of contradictory evidence. In other words, rational people don’t believe in God.
Rational people explain mysterious things by saying, look they must be drunk, filled with new wine.
But when we pause, when we pay attention, life is less rational and we have less control than we are trained to believe.
Take the seniors for instance. Today we celebrate your lives and we honor your milestone achievement, graduation from high school. Alex, Amber, Ben, Dana, Elliott, Gabe, Hayley, Ian, Lindsey, and Molly, you have plans. Some of your plans are more developed, more established than others, but wrapped into your plans are questions. What will life be like a year from now? Of course we all guess and dream and hope, but so much of the new existence your march toward is a mystery. Where will you do your laundry? Who will your new friends be? How will your respond to adversity? A mystery.
So it is in the life of faith. Following Jesus is unsettling and unpredictable. We don’t know where we will be a year from now. Following Jesus involves speaking in many languages and letting the fire of God’s Spirit shine upon our heads. The life of faith asks us to follow Jesus. And following Jesus brings us here to Pentecost. And Pentecost is wild and dangerous. Pentecost scandalizes a world bent on control. When we follow Jesus we give up control of our lives and hand them to God.
Acts chapter two, after telling the story of violent wind, flaming tongues, and many languages, after telling the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit, continues with words from another follower of Jesus. Peter, the Rock, one of the original twelve disciples, stands that morning and he preaches to all who have gathered, to skeptics and believers alike, and he says (Acts chapter 2, verse 7), “This is what was spoken… 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.”
Church, here we are given our vocation. Today on Pentecost. Here we are called to scandalize a world bent on control. Two thousand years ago on Pentecost, the church was born into a world of prophecy and visions and dreams. The church was born when the Holy Spirit cracked open the space between heaven and earth and rushed toward us. This is not a logical proposition, friends. This is not a plan for control or power. It is just the opposite.
Two years ago I did a pastoral internship at an urban church in one of Seattle’s lower income neighborhoods. The church was surrounding by a community of homeless people: Greg, Phil, Josie, John, Karl, Steve… the list goes on and on. Phil in particular was a pest. He would come around intoxicated and plop down against one of the doors and start talking loudly. It was disruptive. He couldn’t be controlled. But when you listened, you’d hear him say things like, “Why does the church lock its doors? You go home to sleep and here I am, sleeping on the streets and this building stands locked and empty.” Phil was prophesying, sharing visions, dreaming dreams. Phil, anointed by the Spirit, closed the gap between the church and heaven. Two years ago the church opened a drop-in center and last year the church was active in bringing a 75 unit transitional housing complex to its neighborhood. And they continue to work for justice in deep and uncontrollable relationship with the homeless community. Not everyone likes them there in Lake City, but that’s just because their logic defies control.
The Holy Spirit asks the church, asks our church to go to places we don’t think we have time for and do things we don’t want to do. Glorious God, you blow into our lives without warning, you blow into our church without warning. May it be so.
Let us respond in song by standing and singing #164 Arise Your Light Has Come.
