May 11, 2008 - The Frightening Freedom of the Spirit - Frank Alton

John 3:5-8, John 7:37-39, Acts 2:1-13



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I remember that I used to take Jonathan and his friends to Knott’s Berry Farm for his birthday. One year there was a fast new ride that he really wanted me to go on with him. I don’t remember what it was called, but he told me that the thrill was that the little car you sat in went from 0-60 mph in about three seconds. Now I am one who loves roller coasters, so this sounded fun. But as I sat in the seat before it took off, not knowing exactly when it would, I started to feel anxious. What would my body experience accelerating so much in such a short amount of time? Suddenly, without warning, the cars lunged forward at a speed that felt like it left my body back at the gate. After a short horizontal path it shot straight up, and then proceeded to loop around at frightening speeds until it finally came to rest.

I think Pentecost was a little like that for the disciples. As Jesus was ascending before their very eyes a few days earlier, an angel had scolded them for looking up at heaven, as if they could have done anything else as their friend was lifted up in a cloud as they watched. As soon as they regained enough composure to travel, they returned to Jerusalem and waited. They didn’t know what they were waiting for, but they didn’t have anything else to do. Jesus tells us that the Spirit is like that – you never know where she is going to come from or where she is going. Then when she hits, you get swept off your feet and don’t know what is happening. You are out of control in a way that is much more frightening than a roller coaster ride.

Some would call what Jesus’ followers experienced at Pentecost a profound initiation. In her book Reinventing Eve, Kim Chernin describes initiation in language that evokes images of a very long roller coaster ride. “Initiation is not a predictable process. It moves forward fitfully, through moments of clear seeing, dramatic episodes of feeling, subtle intuitions, vague contemplative states. Dreams arrive, bringing guidance we frequently cannot accept. Years pass, during which we know that we are involved in something that cannot easily be named. We wake to a sense of confusion, know that we are in dangerous conflict, cannot define the nature of what troubles us. All change is like this. It circles around, leads us on a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the first place. Then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door, discovers a threshold, shoves us across.”

That describes experiences I’ve had more times than I like to remember. It feels all too familiar even now. The disciples on the roller coaster ride of Pentecost knew we can’t always plan our moments of initiation, but that didn’t mean they liked it. We cannot control how God is going to beckon us or, perhaps, fling us across some new threshold. What we can do is work to make ourselves available when it happens; but we don’t usually get to choose our initiations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that each person is a “bard (or poet) of the Holy Ghost.” In order to write the poetry that is our life, it helps to, in the words of Frederick Buechner, “listen to our lives,” and, in response, we are challenged, in the words of Parker Palmer, to “let our lives speak.” And it helps to do that in community where we can each affirm that “God is inspiring me and I am gifted,” and then say the same thing to everyone we meet, “God is inspiring you and you are gifted.” But none of that ought to give us a false sense of being in control. It is simply the part where we strap ourselves into the seat of the roller coaster and pray we survive the ride.

A life lived in the Spirit is more dramatic than a worship service. But this morning a lot of pieces come together to open us to experience the drama. Today, as only rarely in the cycle of years, Pentecost and Mother’s Day occur on the same day. At Immanuel we also celebrate the Sacrament of Baptism on this day. The Scriptures offer us images for these events. Jesus said we must be born anew – us an image of the Spirit as a mother giving birth. The child has no control over what happens as it goes through the birth canal. Pentecost itself offers the disconcerting image of the Spirit as wind and fire whose impact is open to different interpretations – drunken excess or fulfillment of promise. Finally, we hear Jesus saying that out of our hearts shall flow rivers of living water: an image connecting baptism as an initiation into community to the promise of Spirit.

These three images offer us handles we can hang onto during the frightening roller coaster ride of freedom that is life in the Spirit. In the image of the Spirit as a mother giving birth, Jesus emphasizes that the moment of birth reveals the basic truth about life: that we don’t control it. We’re socialized into thinking that from the moment of birth we are growing into mature adults who do control life. But at the end of his Gospel, John reminds us that both the beginning and the end of life reveal a different truth. Remember Jesus’ words to Peter after asking him three times if he loved him? He said, “When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt & go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (21:18-19)

Jesus is using either the image of a prisoner on death row being taken to the gallows, or of a blind person being led down unseen paths. In either case, it is a frightening thing not to know where you are being led. It is also the very essence of freedom. For 23 years Judy and I have taken Fridays as our Sabbath. For many years I wanted to have a plan for the day to make sure we got the most out of it. Judy always said that for her the best thing about a day off was having the freedom to make it up as it went along. I confess that made me anxious for quite a few years, but I’ve come to experience it more as freedom than as anxiety. I sometimes resent it when I allow some prior commitment to impinge on my freedom that day. But I am coming to see that even those can be part of the freedom.

I believe that in his ministry, Jesus tried to use the institution of the Sabbath to move the structures of society toward this very freedom. The religious authorities had grasped the reins of control so tightly that they couldn’t even answer a simple question like, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath?” In that world, Jesus couldn’t just heal on the Sabbath when there was no other alternative. He had to actively choose to heal on the Sabbath in order to wrest their hands from the reins of control – both for their own sake and for the sake of the people. Where are you hanging onto the reins of your life so tightly that you have lost your own freedom, and may be restricting the freedom of others? Open yourself to the frightening experience of being born of the Spirit from above on this Pentecost.

The second image is that of Pentecost itself. After the wind and fire had calmed down and people who spoke different languages understood each other, those who had watched from the sidelines had different reactions to what had happened. Some expressed confusion: “What does this mean?” Others sneered, “They are filled with new wine.” The apostle Peter, one of those on whom the Spirit had fallen offered a different view: “this is what was promised through the prophet Joel.” Years later the Apostle Paul put this in perspective. He wrote that the risen Christ is now known as Spirit; that apart from the Spirit there is a veil that covers the mind to keep it from realizing that the old ways of knowing are no longer operative; that there is a new kind of knowing available through the Spirit. The veil is removed by the Spirit, who sets us on a path of transformation into the image of Christ (2 Cor 3:15-16).

The power to unveil was let loose with the tearing of the Temple curtain at the moment of Jesus’ death. The Spirit has continued the work of unveiling ever since. 2000 years later, many people inside and outside the church now clearly see and experience that the old ways no longer work. A key aspect of that old way is the violent aspect of religion itself. The origins of religion are rooted in the need to not have community collapse under the chaos of escalating violence. Religion was born to save human communities from disintegrating through the spirals of violence. But religion accomplished that by substituting lower doses of sacred violence to minimize the threat of all-consuming profane violence. So religions engaged in Holy Wars and created theologies of sacrifice and substitutionary atonement. The cross of Jesus continues to be interpreted that way by many Christians.

Yet the Spirit now seems to have unveiled for many the insight that religious violence is still violence. In former ages religion has been reasonably successful in veiling sacred rituals of sacrificial as simply that, i.e., sacred rituals of sacrificial violence. Today people will not tolerate that rationalization. And that is for the better. So why the change? Why has the sacredness of this violence been unveiled such that we simply see it now as violence? Could it be that the Spirit has been doing her work all these years? The work of the Spirit Pentecost has been to reveal that the real story of the Tower of Babel was not that God had scattered the people of Babel, but had broken up the false foundation on which they had been basing their lives, namely an order based on envy rather than community. They had even projected envy onto God as they put words into God’s mouth: “See, Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now might reach out a hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” The real message of Pentecost is that Christ is that tree of life and that there is no banishment. All the foundations of human society are futile exercises in the production of a fragile order. The only real foundation is the one given in Christ's gathering.

The final image emerges from the last: out of our hearts shall flow rivers of living water. Baptism as an initiation into community connects the promise of the Spirit to the new community established at Pentecost. John 7 tells how Jesus issued the most astounding invitation imaginable on the 7th and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles when Israel commemorated the time that Moses was out in the wilderness, struck a rock and water came gushing out of it. For seven days, the priest would go out into the center of Jerusalem to a large spring called the pool of Siloam. The water was bubbling up out of this rock and the priest would dip a pitcher of water from the spring, and carry it to the temple where he would pour it. On that particular seventh day the priests were pouring water from golden pitchers and the choir was singing the words of Isaiah 12:3, "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." Suddenly Jesus cries out to all those gathered, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me!"

In the midst of the alleged abundance of water offered in the official celebration of the Feast, Jesus offers an alternative source. When the Holy Spirit comes and lives in you, you will know it because out of your heart shall flow rivers of living water. There has been no human being who embraced his soul and his full humanity more fully than Jesus. There is nothing magical or passive about this invitation. It requires a response. The text does not say, “If anyone is thirsty, I will give them water.” It says, “If anyone is thirsty, come to me and drink.” Then, as a natural consequence, rivers of living water will flow out of that trusting person’s heart.

But the world is never fully ready for a person who allows her or his soul to express itself. The soul is always ahead of history. The consequence is opposition, and that’s what Jesus’ invitation led to: “Some of them wanted to arrest him.” But the promise of God is life for whoever allows their souls to express themselves. Souls don’t obey the laws of today. They respond to the Spirit moment by moment. That drives those who control today’s laws crazy. It takes great courage to allow our souls to express themselves in this unwelcoming world. The most significant and visibly lasting impact of Pentecost was precisely that: an increased boldness in the disciples of Jesus. They found the courage to be themselves and to proclaim their message that had eluded them before. But they only overcame their fear by embracing or being embraced by something frightening itself: the freedom of the Spirit. The message of Pentecost is that in order to discover the freedom of the Spirit we must overcome our fear of that very freedom. And in order to overcome our fear we must face fear.

How is God calling out your soul to obey the Spirit in ways that might evoke opposition from the world around you?