MOST OF OUR HOLY DAYS have been colonized. The commercialization of Christmas and Easter is not quite evil, but it is certainly an obstacle to deepening one’s faith.
Pentecost, however, we have all to ourselves. No one has figured out how to market it, perhaps because we Christians have so deemphasized it compared to our other great feasts. The Holy Spirit has sometimes been spoken of as the “shy” person of the Trinity. She’s always pointing to Jesus. The Spirit is fine to let Jesus have all the attention.
But what a feast to have all to ourselves! One in which all nations are drawn to worship Zion’s God. This flood of peoples is long promised in Israel’s scripture and is now made good by Christ’s Spirit.
North American culture continues to wrestle with racial politics. William Barber speaks of these days as a Third Reconstruction, after prior ones that arrived with Emancipation in the 1860s and the civil rights movements in the 1960s. This Third Reconstruction era includes #BlackLivesMatter, immigration, and struggles for citizenship wrestling against the demagogic, bloviating “No!” of politicians.
In all this, Pentecost says, “Yes.” I’m tempted to say “quietly,” but this yes is not quiet. It’s a hurricane. It’s followed by a sermon all listeners can hear in their own language. Even if the disciples can’t speak all those languages, God can. God made all nations. God called Israel to be God’s light and bride. And now, through Jesus, God is drawing all God’s beloved peoples again. The church must show this in our life together.
And (don’t forget this!) those from all nations have to die to ourselves and be raised in Christ’s image. God is speaking, church! All we have to do is join in.
[May 1]
Jesus Says, 'Come'
Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10; 21:22- 22:5; John 5:1-9
One word resounds through these readings: “Come!” Paul’s vision is of a man from Macedonia saying, “Come ... help us” (Acts 16:9). Then we have the disabled man who has no one to help him, so that for 38 years he has watched others get well. To him Jesus says, “Come”—and the man, strangely, is able to do so (John 5:1-9). The prayer that punctuates Revelation is not world-disregarding or destroying but is, simply, “Come,” and the Seer sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (21:10).
We have a powerful word to say in prayer: Come. Your beautiful world has been without your presence too long. We need you anew. Come, be with us. And make all things right.
This is no quiescent word. As God’s people pray “come,” we don’t do nothing in the meantime. We roll up our sleeves and work. Paul goes to Macedonia, preaches, and a powerful merchant woman, Lydia, becomes an early church leader. She says to Paul, “come,” and he receives her hospitality, signaling the surprisingly faithful Jew-plus-Gentile communion of the church. In John’s gospel, the disabled man’s wrong answer in verse 7 to Jesus’ question doesn’t stop him from saying, “Come, be made whole.” Ever since then, the church has built hospitals and prayed for healing, and has sometimes seen it. The Seer’s stroll through the New Jerusalem in Revelation isn’t as a tourist. It’s as a pioneer who’ll lead others to see as the Seer sees. Us included.
[ May 8 ]
Freedom Wins
Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26
God is always taking the hash we creatures have made of God’s world and birthing new life, right where we have sown death.
The story in Acts 16 starts with despair: slavery and demon possession. Liberation interrupts as a girl is healed, but then evil returns (as it is wont to do). Mob violence, trumped up charges, torture, jail. Grace interrupts again with an earthquake; barred doors fly open, O freedom! Evil returns again with a move toward suicide. Then grace triumphs: salvation for a household, baptism, a meal together, the end. The story of Acts 16 could be the whole story of God with us in Israel and Christ. God is always setting captives free. Their captors will always respond with horror and more violence. But freedom will always win, eventually.
Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17 has been the inspiration behind the 20th century’s ecumenical movement. Where I live, the United Church of Canada came into being from previous communions in hopes that our “being one” might encourage the world to believe. If God is indeed stitching the universe back together through the church, we should show some stitched-togetheredness ourselves. It hasn’t always worked. But it is Jesus’ prayer, so it will.
[ May 15 ]
Dizzying Languages
Genesis 11:1-9; Psalm 104:24-35b; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17, 25-27
The best thing churches can do on the feast of Pentecost is to have folks read scripture in many languages. The very disorientation in our ear is a reminder: God speaks all these languages. God created them. Loves their speakers. Speaks to them in their languages.
Missionaries have taken a beating in mainline churches over the last century. But the minute the church stops speaking many languages, it dies. Our faith is not ours alone. It’s to be shared. Peacefully, in a way that empowers the listener and disorients the speaker. Christianity, Andrew Walls teaches, is the sort of thing that renews itself at the edges and dies in the middle. The only way to get it back is to give it away.
Merchants know this. They still build towers to the heavens, speaking other languages so they can market in them. Multinational corporations bulldoze Indigenous landholdings and cultures to market hamburgers more readily. Missionaries toil away to learn difficult languages to write the Bible in them, worship in them, pray in them, because the Spirit rejoices in them, however few still speak them.
John 14 may be our most radioactive scripture. It sounds so exclusive (“No one comes to the Father except through me,” see 14:6). But somehow, Jesus says, the Spirit of God will dwell with us and make peace. God will do in us “greater things” than in Jesus?! How unbelievable. Lord, show us it is true.
[ May 22 ]
Salvation’s Love Triangle
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
The ancient church fought over Proverbs 8:22: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work.” Does this show that Christ is a “creature” instead of one with God? But what we know is that this text isn’t about Christ at all. It’s about Wisdom. The ancients knew that God’s Wisdom, which calls to us from the streets (8:2-3), in which God delights since before creation, is God’s very nature. She is the sketch according to which God, the artist, makes all things. And she is the one according to whom God remakes all in Christ.
So yes, Wisdom is eternal. Divine. With us. Painfully refashioning us and all things.
The doctrine of the Trinity is about nothing less than salvation. The church sees Romans 5 as a description of who the Holy Spirit is: Love. The Spirit, Augustine taught, is the Love between the Father and the Son. Augustine says that any time “you see love, you see the Trinity ... the Lover, the Beloved, Love.” These are three and the Love between the Lover and Beloved is its own “thing.” It’s God all over again. Note that any relationship you’re in is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s God, working between you, creating the Love that God eternally is.
God’s Wisdom, fleshed in Christ, is God. God’s Love, poured out in the Spirit, is God. And God is not a committee (thank God). Let us adore.
[ May 29 ]
Power to Astonish
1 Kings 18:20-39; Psalm 96; Galatians 1:1-12; Luke 7:1-10
Most Bible proclamations are met in today’s world with a yawn. Non-Christians think they’ve heard it all before: Christians are closed-hearted and closed-minded bullies. Most Christians think they’ve heard it all before: Be good. God’s on our side. And pity the poor people who don’t know God.
The scriptures tell of a different reception of God’s good news: one of utter astonishment. In 1 Kings, Elijah drenches wood on an altar, then calls down fire—and it comes! Wet wood bursts into flames! Paul is astonished that the believers in Galatia have so quickly left their first love (verse 6). Jesus is astonished to see faith in a career Roman military officer. He has built the Jews a synagogue and understands that the authority he has as an officer over his troops is the same sort Jesus has over illness and death.
How do we recapture this kind of astonishment?
We could do worse than actually read the stories. Elijah talks more trash to Baal’s priests than any athlete on TV (for another sort of astonishment, look at verse 40). Jesus finds faith among those without it and faithlessness among those who claim it. Say that aloud in Bible study and wait for the astonishment that will follow. “Worship the Lord in holy splendor,” the psalm says. Our culture worships wealth and superficial beauty, but what’s actually beautiful is holiness and God and the poor neighbor. That’s not only beautiful. It’s the source of all beauty. Truly, what could be more astonishing?
Jason Byassee is pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, N.C., and a fellow in theology and leadership at Duke Divinity School. He holds the Butler chair in homiletics and biblical hermeneutics at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia.
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