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Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:25-35, 37, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 20:19-23
A couple years ago I told you that before I could retire, I had to do three things. I had to lead you back into the sanctuary, I had to help you get used to the sanctuary, and we had to bring the public back into the sanctuary. Which all we did. But then a virus came. And now you’re going to have to do all three all over again.
So it’s like my legacy is cancelled—that is, if you’re one of those who have said that the return to the sanctuary is my legacy. But I don’t think it ever was my legacy. It’s the legacy of Jenn Cribbs and her team. She and they deserve the credit, not me. And even now their work is not in vain. You will get back in there, and the public too, I have no doubt, in less than seven years!
I admit that it’s premature to be speaking about my legacy, and I had not dared to think about it, until a consistory member brought it up this week. We were having coffee, six feet apart, my first live meet-up with a consistory member, in the flesh, since Lent. Remember Lent? She told me that my legacy was not the sanctuary, but something else. She said that what I gave you was “a vision of the kingdom of heaven.” Well, I was gratified. And I do think Jenn Cribbs would agree that the sanctuary is an expression of that vision, if you use it that way, which you will do.
I want you to see the kingdom of heaven as something big and over-arching and spacious and welcoming, and all the way down to the ground. I want you to see it as rich and colorful and vibrant and vital, right now, not just for when you die, but for now so that you can engage it and rejoice in it. And I want you also to see it as tiny and fragile and vulnerable and hidden and patient and generous.
I want you to see it as embracing you but not controlled by you, and enriching you but also beyond you. I want you to see it as both dependable and constantly surprising—because it is of God. I want you see it for the sake of God. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of God, the realm of God, the reign of God, the rule of God, the dominion of God, the sovereignty of God. It’s about a sovereign God and it’s for the glory of God.
But it’s also for you, and for your salvation and your flourishing. It was for you that God did all these things in history that we’ve been celebrating since Lent, from the Passion to Pentecost. The death of the Lord Jesus and his resurrection—he did that for you. His ascension in his body and his gift of the Holy Spirit—he did that for you. The Kingdom of Heaven does not belong to you but it is for you. We don’t build it, it is not ours to build, its builder and maker is God, but you receive it because God gives it to you. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to God but it is for your flourishing.
And that’s partly why a human being is in charge it. Last Sunday when I preached about the Ascension, I said that it was hard to believe that an embodied human being, an earthling, should now be seated in heaven at God’s right hand. Well, it gets further complicated today, at Pentecost, when that earthling is in charge of pouring down the Spirit of God, God’s inner self. And that’s what the Holy Spirit is—not just a third of God but God’s inner self, God’s very soul. And poured out by an earthling!
A human being in heaven sends God down to earth! All this up and down, all these exchanges. The Son of Man goes up to inhabit God, and the Soul of God comes down to inhabit you people. It’s all quite hard to believe, but I invite you to believe it for the praise and glory of God, and also for your good and for the good of the world.
How do you feel this Spirit within yourself? What are the signs of this Spirit within you? Fire on your head? Speaking in tongues? Ecstatic prophecies, the thrill of healing? Something supernatural or inexplicable? People do look for that—impressive manifestations sharply contrasting to ordinary experience. “Oh yes, I felt it, and there is no other explaining it.” They want the Spirit to draw attention to itself, to prove the Spirit’s presence in them.
But the Spirit does not like to draw attention to herself. She likes to be hidden within the baptismal water, and hidden within the broken bread and poured out wine. She prefers to be known for doing such wonders as the forgiveness of sins.
What kind of signs you want for the wonder of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you depends, I guess, on how deep and wide and all-encompassing your vision of the kingdom of heaven is. Both how all-pervasive the Holy Spirit is and yet how hidden, not drawing attention to herself but to her work.
So let me return to my conversation with that consistory member. I said that the legacy I had always wanted was a strong consistory, not only competent and capable but also spiritually strong. I learned that from my dad, and what he did with his consistory in Bedford-Stuyvesant. That consistory was the joy of his ministry. Our Old First consistory is a joy to me as well, and full of the Holy Spirit.
And then we talked about our zoom worship services. I compared them to those of my pastor colleagues. Their services are broadcast from their sanctuaries, and because of social distancing it’s always the same two or three professionals who do everything. But in our service we have half a dozen different leaders every week, and you read and you pray and you sing and you testify and you set your table and break your bread each in your own creative ways. I said that I’d like that for my legacy, that I’ve left a congregation that does all this.
And she said, Well, that’s because you support us.
And I said, Thanks, but actually I’m the most privileged pastor I know, when I consider the power of the people I serve.
That’s you! In your power hides the power of the Holy Spirit, whenever you exercise your power in the name of Jesus Christ and you experiment for the kingdom of heaven.
The legacy of the Lord Jesus was the Holy Spirit. Notice that Our Lord had to leave for heaven for the Spirit to come down. If the risen Lord Jesus had remained among us, he could be in only one place at a time, though any place he chose, and we’d be tempted away from the expansion that the Holy Spirit loves.
The wonder of the Holy Spirit is the sheer multiplicity of her actions and investments. She likes manifold pluriformity. Many languages. Many cultures and many creatures. She likes to come down on physical things like water and oil and the human body and she likes to ride the column of your breathing down into your soul. She likes your mind and she loves your creativity. She likes experiments. It was right for the Lord Jesus to be perfect, but the Spirit does not mind passing ventures and only momentary monuments as the results of your experiments.
In both Judaism and Islam, the authentic Word of God is confined to just one book in just one language. But if you love someone, you want to speak their language, and so at Pentecost the Holy Spirit expressed God’s love for the many nations and cultures of the world. We Christians too have just one book, but in any language it’s just as much God’s Word. And even our preaching from that book in many languages becomes the passing and experimental Word of God again each week. The churchly gift of tongues is a sign of the Spirit.
And prophecy is a sign of the Spirit, because she likes your minds when you use them. And she likes physical things, so physical healing is a sign of her, even when done with ordinary medicine. But she’s just not into being impressive or spectacular. She isn’t into proving God, and so she’s hiding in plain sight. You will see no sign of her unless you seek her with a humble and repentant heart. So you look for her from out of the forgiveness of sins.
She loves to give the forgiveness of sins. That’s a real sign of the Holy Spirit, and she delights in peace and the giving of peace, as when Our Lord gave it to his disciples and breathed on them. You don’t win peace, you give it, as a gift of the Holy Spirit. And you give understanding, as a work of the Spirit, and you cultivate wisdom, yet another sign of the Holy Spirit.
But as you knew I’d eventually come to, the greatest sign of the Holy Spirit is love, the miracle and wonder of God’s love. The energy of God is love, passing between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God’s inner self is love, for God is love. So when you see a miracle of love, that’s a sign of the Spirit. When you just try to practice that love, you signal yourselves as experiments by the Spirit. You know that fire upon the heads of the disciples? That fire is the heat and passion of God’s love.
Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
Acts 1:6-14, Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36, 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11, John 17:1-11
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
For the nineteen years I’ve been with you I’ve been firm on having us repeat the Creed every week. Usually the Apostles Creed and during the Easter Season the Nicene Creed. You could say I’ve been rigid.
Many Protestant churches don’t repeat the Creed. Or they make up their own, or borrow one, which usually is easier for modern people to believe. But the real Creed is full of things that are hard to believe. And that’s the point. If something’s not hard to believe, it’s not worth having in a Creed. A Creed is a challenge as much as a comfort. And it reminds us that truth is a gift to us, and not our own. Designer religion is one reason I’ve been rigid about the Creed. But soon that all will be up to you.
The Ascension of Jesus is in both Creeds, and that tells us that it’s one of the essentials, and that we are expected to believe it, and that it’s hard to believe. The disciples who watched it were totally surprised. The Epistles claim it but never explain it. It’s not in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and St. Luke is the only one who depicts it. At the end of his Gospel he does so briefly, and he does it more fully at the beginning of The Acts. My sister-in-law suggested to me that St. Luke wants to make sure that we know that the Lord Jesus ascended not just as a spirit but in his body, and that even in heaven he remains in his body, his resurrected body, still with skin and bones and muscles.
His Ascension does not undo his Incarnation, although in a way it is the opposite. For thirty-three years he walked with us as the infinite God contained within a human being. And now, with this, he is a human being with the infinity of God. A human being now unconstrained by time and space. Still about five foot six or so, still ten fingers and ten toes, and how can this be true? Why should I invite you to believe such a thing? Why not a purely spiritual God, philosophically more sensible, no conflict with science or physics or biology, much easier to believe?
Touch your forehead. Feel your body. Skin and bone. There’s a body like yours in heaven. Touch your head where you were baptized. There’s a baptized person on the throne of God. Your body will die someday. There is a person who died at the center of the future of all things. Is this only metaphor? How literally do you want to take it? Well, how valuable is the physical reality of the world? How important should it be to God, with our plague and pandemic and suffering? Our world of skin and bone and muscle and blood?
How far shall we push the story by St. Luke? Did Jesus float up like Mary Poppins, minus the umbrella and a hat? How high up did he go? Up to the clouds, or did a cloud come down? How far away is heaven? Does heaven come down, or is it all around us, but closed to us, unless it opens up? This is a specialty of St. Luke. He says that on the night of Jesus’ birth, an angel stood among the shepherds and their flocks, and the glory of God shone around them. He says that at Our Lord’s baptism “the heaven opened.” He says that at the Transfiguration Jesus lit up with glory and a cloud enveloped them, in which God spoke. So did heaven come down or was it just opened, or both?
You see it already in the Exodus, at Mount Sinai, when God spoke to the people from the cloud on the mountain. And God led the people in the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire right up there in front of them. It’s technically called the Glory-cloud, capital G-Glory, with the Glory that belongs to God alone. The cloud both hides God and reveals God’s presence. But isn’t God everywhere? Well, yes, but the God who can be everywhere can also focus and concentrate particularly here or there—like in Jesus. Just so, heaven is immense and high and all around us, and when God wants it to, it opens up.
When Jesus is lifted up and enters the cloud, that is the sign of his enthronement. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.” He is seated at the right hand of God the Father. But hadn’t he always been there with his Father before all worlds? Well, yes, but this is new, now he’s also a skin-and-bones human being, one of us, and seated at the right hand of God of the Father.
The Bible doesn’t explain this theoretically, because probably it can’t, as it’s such a mystery and wonder, but it’s offered to us as being very good for human beings.
It means that someone with first-hand knowledge of being human is there with God to intercede for us.
And it means that he governs all things in the world for our good, which he knows first hand about.
And it means that he limits God’s unlimited power in order to do only the sort of things a self-sacrificial human being would do, so no more plagues, for example, as punishment, or to teach a lesson.
And it means that a human as God is always with us, as one of our Deacons passionately reminded us on Monday night. Not just the general presence of a spiritual God, but the spiritual presence of an embodied God, the son of Mary, who is always with us.
Now, what about the two men in the story, robed in white? St. Luke calls them “men,” not angels, like the two men who just forty days earlier had met the women at the empty tomb and told them Christ had risen. I take these two as humans like us, but from the other side of death, and sent back from our future as messengers, as emissaries of the Life of the World to Come, when Jesus will come again, in glory.
This glory is ahead for us to share with Christ, as St. Peter says in his Epistle, which is to encourage us during the fiery trials that we suffer today. Apart from that I have only a vague idea about what it means for us to share that glory.
You know, in nineteen years I’ve never preached about Glory, even though it’s a big deal in the Bible. It’s hard to relate to in our lives, unless we’re watching the Olympics. But in church our language is full of it. By the end of our service today you’ll have used the word “glory” twenty times. We hardly notice it when we’re saying it. It’s abstract and disconnected. We might have things in our lives that are somewhat glorious, but the actual, singular, capital-G Glory of God is not in our experience, not like for people in the Bible. So we relegate it to a distant mystery, like a wonder to believe in but a wonder that’s far off from us.
So St. John makes this move in his Gospel. He reports the Lord Jesus saying that he will be glorified when he is lifted up—on the cross! For St. John, the cross was already Our Lord’s ascension. The Lord Jesus made his crucifixion his enthronement. From his shame he made his majesty, his curse his holiness, and his humiliation his glory. In the injustice against him he justified the world, the hatred against him he turned to love, and the malice around him he filled with grace.
So I think it’s grace that is your sign of glory. Glory is the wonder, and grace is the sign—the capital-G Grace that you live by, the grace that you practice, the grace that you extend. As Jonathan Edwards said, “Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.” The wonder and the sign.
Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected. That’s how the Lord Jesus, upon his throne, is now signifying glory—by grace. That’s the only glory the church has the right to, that we are held by grace. That’s the glory of your community of Jesus, that you are so gracious to each other and to the world. In God’s eyes you are robed in grace. Look it you. Did you know that you are like those two men, that just by your graciousness you are ambassadors of the Life of the World to Come!
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:7-18, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
St. Paul is the intellect, St. Peter is courageous, and St. John is the lover. St. Paul is the Scarecrow, St. Peter is the Cowardly Lion, and St. John is the Tin Man. Yes, I know, that’s a out of order.
St. Paul is the Scarecrow who did have a brain. He loved philosophy. He was educated in both Greek and Hebrew literature. He was trained in rhetoric and argument. So when he gets to Athens he makes his case to the intellectual elite. He appeals to their religion and he quotes their authors. But the Book of Acts reports that his speech was unproductive.
Not that he shouldn’t have done it. We should “always be ready to make our defense to anyone who demands from us an accounting,” and the intellectual coherence of the Gospel deserves demonstration in the court of public opinion. But intellectual argument doesn’t win people over.
The Gospel did not compel the urban elites. The early church grew in the ghettos and villages among wives and servants and soldiers. And not by evangelistic crusades. The sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that the church grew slowly, one by one, by treating women better than their neighbors did, by rescuing unwanted babies who were thrown out on the rocks, and, during plagues, by taking in the sick whom their neighbors abandoned. They modeled a new kind of humanity, caring and compassionate. And gradually, over 200 yeas, their numbers were finally exponential. Against the power of the Empire they demonstrated the long, slow power of love, even during persecutions.
Imperial systems of power resist the rule of love. The persecutions were mild when St. Peter wrote his First Epistle, but already they were suffering. If you love, you will suffer. You suffer from doing wrong, and you suffer from doing right. They suffered from social dislocation and cultural exclusion. Maybe like gay folks have to endure, or a black man in a white suburb. Always the potential for exclusion or for harm.
So St. Peter’s question that opens our second lesson is not rhetorical but real. Let me translate it literally: “Now who is the one who will be harming you if you are zealous for the good?” Because you will be harmed. History is full of examples of those who do good getting harmed by the prevailing powers that preserve their power by doing harm.
St. Peter tells them, “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated.” Well, he should know. St. Peter is the Cowardly Lion who did have c’ourage. After Easter and Pentecost he was the fearless leader of the church. And earlier, when the police arrested Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, it was Peter who said, “Lemme at-em, lemme at-em,” and Jesus had to tell him to put his sword down.
But! Only hours later, he denied his Savior three times, from being intimidated by a serving-girl and fear for his own skin. And every Good Friday thereafter he’d have to remember his cowardice. He knows whereof he writes: “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimated.”
Are you afraid of the world right now? I am. Do current events intimidate you? They do me. I’ve got abiding fear right now. Not just for my health, but whether I’m not up to this, that I’m afraid to do the good I should do. For other people, like the early church did. I could say that I’m over 65, with a history of asthma, so I should protect myself.
But my conscience says, “Really?” And what about you? What is your conscience asking you? About anything good you might be doing better?
The issue of conscience is what leads St. Peter to that strange passage that careens through some obscure Jewish mythology about spirits in prison in the time of Noah. In the legend these were the offspring of angels that had intercourse with human women. What St. Peter means by this, no one knows any more. He is mixing metaphors and jamming thoughts in the fluid and pulsing rabbinic style that you can still hear in synagogues in Brooklyn. But his main point is clear, which is to put you on the ark with Noah, with the Flood as your baptism, and your baptism is for your conscience.
Your baptism is your appeal to God for a good conscience when your conscience accuses you of not doing enough good, or having compromised. It’s for the Christian wife of a Roman husband, who had to compromise her faith. For the Christian slave of a pagan master, who had to do wrong things. For the Christian soldier in the Roman army, who had to break the Ten Commandments. For the parents protecting their babies during a plague and not taking in a dying pagan. Your conscience accuses you, but you can appeal to God on the merits of your baptism. Your baptism is your certificate, your birth certificate of being born again, your passport, your ticket for passage on the ark, even when you are an unclean animal.
Which brings us to St. John. He reports that Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” What the Greek actually means is this: “If you love me, you will be keeping my commandments.” Jesus says it for your comfort, he is your Advocate, your Comforter. It’s a confidence-builder, it’s a conscience-clearer. Oh St. John, you’re the Tin Man, but you certainly have a heart.
St. John is the lover, the one whom Jesus loved, Our Lord’s best friend. All four gospels speak of love, but love is largest by far in St. John. And love is largest in the Christian faith among the world’s religions. In the novel The Life of Pi, the author says that compared to the real virtues of Hinduism and Islam, what Christianity offers is the bottomless love of Jesus. On Good Friday at our St. John’s Bluegrass Passion I noticed that those old gospel hymns are love songs. “What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul.”
“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.” You keep his commandments just by loving him. “And those who love me will be loved by my Father.” You love Jesus just by being loved by his Father. “And I will love them, and reveal myself to them.” You just be open to God’s revelation of love in Jesus, and trust that love, and you’ll be loving God back, and doing God’s commandments, with your conscience clear. Does that sound too passive? But the Holy Spirit of God is doing the acting within you, and is your Advocate and Comforter.
That’s the sign, the community of love, like you, the sign for the world around you watching and needing and doubting. The sign of the resurrection is your community practicing the love of God as best you can in small and gradual terms on matters right in front of you, supporting each other and bearing each other in your inevitable compromises and even denials, but of which your conscience can be clear. It is not sentimental love, not hippy-dippy love, but God’s love, God’s divine and sovereign and sacrificial love among you. Your community of love is the sign of the wonder of God’s love among you and within you.
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14
You are a people. Once you were individuals, but now you are a people. You were always persons, and you belonged to other people, and you still do, but now you are a people. You are more than members of a church, you are more than adherents of an institution, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people.
And you know the way. You are a people who know the way. You know the way to the truth, and you know the way to the life. You are a people who know where to go for truth and where to get your life. You know his name, who is the way. The life in him is God’s life, and the truth in him is God’s faithfulness. You know him to be the way, and not a wall around the life and truth. His way has no walls along it, and his life and his truth spread out from his way, and all across the world.
You know the way to God the Father. There are many ways to God. Jews and Muslims know the same God we do, they pray to the same God we do. I have prayed in synagogues with Jews more times than I can count, and I can sing Avinu Malkeinu with gusto, but only occasionally do they call God “Father,” as one of many metaphors. I have prayed in mosques with Muslims, and I have felt their matchless devotion to the same God I pray to, but they never, ever call God “Father.” They have 99 names for God, and “Father” is not one of them.
But you know the way to God as Father, because you go the way there with God’s Son, God’s only son. And only because of him is God a Father. The God of Jesus is not some general father of mankind or some uber-father of the world. The Romantics had it wrong, Schiller and Beethoven had it beautifully wrong, Michelangelo had it gloriously wrong; that way leads to all kinds of dangers, not least were World War 1, and then Fascism. That way is not to the truth of God the Father. To get to the truth and the life of God as Father you have go there in the way of Jesus.
In the way of Jesus it’s about intimacy, the intimacy of a little child with a parent, and of a parent with her child. It’s about safety and security, like you’re in your mother’s arms. It’s about God feeding you with God’s own life, like a mother nursing you with “pure spiritual milk,” as St. Peter dares you to imagine. It’s about the truth of God as faithfulness, like the passionate loyalty of a mother, and God’s care for you like the unshakable protection of a father. That’s the kind of God as Father that Jesus is the way to, and he takes you with him deep inside the intimate, inner life of God.
You are a people who know the way. And you know the way God comes to you. You know that God comes to you as your shepherd in the valley of the shadow of death. You know God comes to you in the oil on your head and in the breaking of the bread. In the mark of the nails in his hands you meet your Lord and God. You know these ways, and later this month, on Pentecost, you will remember how God comes to you in the Holy Spirit, and how the Spirit stays and dwells inside you.
You are God’s house. And in God’s house are many dwelling places, many rooms. How many rooms do you have today? How many of you have logged in? In your house for God are many rooms. There were rooms in the Temple in Jerusalem. Each rebuilding of the temple made more rooms. In those rooms you sat and ate your sacrifice with God. In the glorious and final temple of the vision of Ezekiel, there were 120 rooms, where even the Gentiles could come and eat with God. That’s what Jesus means, that the communion of his people is God’s new temple for all the world.
In the days of St. Peter’s First Epistle the only buildings the Christians had were their own homes. Their only altars were the tables they ate on. They had no images, no shrines, no priesthood, and the Romans condemned them as atheists, because they could see no signs of any gods among them. The Jews at least had a temple and a priesthood, and the Romans tolerated them as long as they kept their God to their own people. But these Christians were welcoming everybody in without regard, and all withdrawing from the service of the Roman gods, which put them in danger of the Empire.
How to deal with that danger is all through First Peter, but in our lesson for today St. Peter rises to affirmation. His rhetoric is unschooled and his metaphors mashed, but with power he tells them who they are: you are a people, you are a priesthood, you are a temple, you are a dwelling place for God, a house for God built of yourselves as living stones. Stones that live. An awkward metaphor.
Unless you are a structural engineer. Take our church building for example. Do you know much is going on within the stones of our building? With its arches and pinnacles and flying buttresses? Those stones are not just sitting there—they carry great forces of tension and compression.
The stones in our flying buttresses are living stones indeed. An engineer told me that if we took the pinnacles off the corners of the roof, the whole vaulting beneath them would eventually collapse! Those stones in our building are working stones, and you might call them stones that live.
You are a people, you are the living stones, and the wonder is that God dwells in you, that’s the wonder, and you are the sign. You are a sign for the world. The other signs we’ve looked at these last few weeks are signs for you, and for your faith and hope and comfort. But for the world the sign is you (as I said two weeks ago).
No, you are not the proof! There is no proof of God for the world, but the best sign to the world of the life and truth of God is nothing other than vital communities of believers, like you, quietly building each other up, and opening yourselves in welcome and service, to exhibit to the world God’s love. You are the sign, and God's presence in you is the wonder.
You know the way. You know the way from the world to God, and you are the way from God to the world. You are God’s way and you are God’s people. God loves you.
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
