Month: May 2021

I want to start today with a story written by Judy Parker from New Zealand and is titled simply, “The Hat.”

A minister looked up from the Bible on the lectern, cast his eyes over all the hats bowed before him: feathered, frilled, felt hats in rows like faces.  But there was one head at the end of the row that was different. What was she thinking, a head without hat?  It was like a cat without fur. Or a bird without wings. 

That won’t fly here, not in the church. The voices danced in song with the colors of the windows.  Red light played along the aisle, blue light over the white corsage of Missus Dewsbury, green on the pages of the Bible, reflecting up on the face of the minister. He spoke to the young lady afterwards:  “You must wear a hat and gloves in the House of God. It is not seemly otherwise.”

The lady flushed, raised her chin, and strode out. “That’s the last we’ll see of her,” said the usher.

Later, another day:  The organ rang out; the minister raised his eyes to the rose window.  He didn’t see the woman in hat and gloves advancing down the aisle as though she were a bride. The hat, enormous, such as one might wear to the races. Gloves, black lace, such as one might wear to meet a duchess.  Shoes, high-heeled, such as one might wear on a catwalk in Paris.    And nothing else.

What do you think about that story?  I have two questions: Is it true?  And Did it happen? I would say that this story is absolutely true!  But I doubt it really happened.  The power of a story resides in the ability of its metaphor to convey truth. Metaphor literally means:  beyond words. The story’s metaphor points beyond itself to truth.  In this case “The Hat” points us to buck-naked truths about church traditions, worldly power, and how the church just gets it wrong sometimes.  It doesn’t matter whether or not it actually happened. What matters is what we can learn about ourselves and our life from the story. The heroine in The Hat shows up in a way that guarantees she will be seen. The metaphor asks: How important is a hat and gloves, or any other tradition that divides and excludes? Her walk down that aisle puts the tight little religious boxes of any time or place on display, declaring boldly that the Spirit of God is out of the box and wearing a hat.  

The story of Pentecost should be just as provocative as the story, The Hat.  But often we manage to domesticate it by literalizing it and insisting that it actually happened, just as it is described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. 

What makes something true? Truth is as elusive as it is blatantly obvious and yet we continue to try to deny the paradox of truth. Truth is as colorful as the rainbows that stretch across the sky and yet we continue to try to limit the truth to the simplicity of black and white. All too often truth’s refusal to fit into our neat little boxes causes us to favor a domesticated truth of our own making.

The story of Pentecost is a case in point. For decades historians, New Testament Scholars, and theologians have been telling us that the story of Pentecost is not history. Like all sorts of stories about the origins of things, the story of the church’s birthday is shrouded in myth and legend. That doesn’t make the story of the church’s beginning at Pentecost any less true, it just means that it isn’t history. 

A few years ago I was reading a piece written by William Willimon, a professor from Duke University, when I learned that the long list of nationalities represented on that first Pentecost is not only a very diverse ethnic gathering—Medes, Persians, Elamites, Cappadocians, Phrygians—but it is also a historically impossible gathering. 

The Medes would have had a tough time getting to Jerusalem from Mesopotmia, not just because they would have had to travel a few hundred miles, but because they would have had to travel a few hundred years as well.  You see, the Ancient Median Empire entered into a political alliance with Babylon way back during the Exile.  The Medes were absorbed within the Babylonian culture.  They had been extinct, long gone from the face of the earth, for over five hundred years. 

And those Elamites, they were mentioned back in Ezra 2.  But they were also lost in the past, wiped out by the Assyrians, in 640 BC.  We are told the story of a gathering of people not only from the north and the south and from all over, but also from the past and the present, from the living and the dead, from all times. 

If we were to put Acts 2 into today’s language, we would say something like, “You should have been there with us on Pentecost.  The church was packed.  Some were from Montana, others from Georgia.  There were people from Mexico, and from Nova Scotia, not to mention a whole longboat of Vikings, a couple of Pilgrims, and a nice little Aboriginal couple who asked to be baptized.” 

This strange, playful story is a way of saying that, when God’s Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, it was poured out not just on a few but on all… to people of every century and place.  The story of Pentecost breaks apart divisions caused by ethnic identity and weakens sectarianism and separation. The vision of God’s inclusive realm goes way beyond nationalities and even beyond time. The Spirit’s rush was greater than any had expected. Peter proclaimed it: God’s Spirit shall be poured out upon all flesh and everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. It is a universal vision of restoration for all people from all places and times.

The story of Pentecost points to the truth. Jesus had radical ideas about a loving God.  The early followers had a new understanding of faith. Empowered by the way Jesus fully embodied love, they felt compelled to share their experience. Faith did not have to be lived out in fear and isolation, even in the face of death. Being faithful was not about being exclusive or tribal, for love knows no boundaries. It wasn’t even about religion or about purity.  It was about compassion, healing, justice and an awareness that all of creation is an interconnected web.

The Judaism of the first century was full of boundaries, order, and uniformity. The faithful were encouraged to live within strict rules. Religion defined who was friend and who was foe. It played on their fear of those who were not like them and firmly grounded those fears and their exclusiveness in righteousness. Religion gave people an illusion of living in an orderly and predictable world.

That’s not so different from modern expressions of religion, is it?  Has there ever, in all of history, been a time when religious differences haven’t been the cause of wars?  What’s been happening in the Middle East right now? Our own nation is as fractured as it has ever been, politically, racially, economically, religiously. We are divided in so many ways. Listening and understanding seem in very short supply.

It’s not the wind or the fire that amazes me about that first Pentecost.  It’s the understanding that captures my attention. Those who were gathered together that day were able to speak and listen clearly, across barriers and differences.  If there is a lesson for us today in this text that must be it.  The Spirit can empower us to set aside our tight little boxes and come together, listen and speak our truth and seek to understand. 

The story of Pentecost displays the Spirit of God at work. The followers of Jesus were calling their communities out of the constraints of the religious practices of their day.  The Pentecost story reflected the early Christian understanding of Jesus as a leader who didn’t just address the Chosen People but who engaged the Syrophoenician woman, the Centurion, and the Samaritan leper alike.  Jesus had inspired a religion that included the poor and the powerless. Christianity was as radical, provocative and outrageous as a woman who wore a hat, gloves, shoes but nothing else. 

Pentecost challenges us to welcome the Spirit of God that doesn’t conform to our expectations.  Pentecost invites us to see beyond the boxes we make.  The Pentecost story reminded those first Christians of Jesus’ call to diversity. The early church was challenged to think beyond tribalism, to dream dreams and see visions. 

We are called to a similar awakening.  

I think it’s ironically beautiful that we are here today, freed from some of the constraints we have been under since the Pandemic began. We are cautiously singing together again.  The fears of this past year are receding.  There’s a new wind blowing, finally!  What a shame it would be if we just tried to go back to the old ways, fit back into our old boxes.  God is continually calling the Church to new things. The Spirit always blows forward not back. 

So, what is this wild, provocative God of ours calling us to do?  Imagine a Pentecost where we begin to listen to those who we’ve failed to understand before.  Imagine having the courage to strip ourselves of the trappings of what has always been, of preconceived expectations and venture out into the world free of the taboos of tradition. 

I’m excited to be a part of this congregation and to see where the Spirit is leading this community of faith next.  There will be an annual planning process in June.  You’ll be getting an invitation to respond with your ideas and visions in writing or in person.  I can’t wait to see where we go, what we can accomplish and who we’re going to meet and understand along the way.  The Spirit is ready to blow through us here.  That’s the promise of Pentecost. 

Let us pray:  Come Holy Spirit—fill us with your love, empower us to listen and to understand.  Show us the needs around and within us so that, filled with your loving presence, we can be your body in this world.  Amen.

What is to Prevent Me?  May 1, 2021; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; Acts 8: 26-40;

In Acts chapter 8 it was still early days for the Christians.  Peter was preaching. The Holy Spirit had filled the people at Pentecost. There had been imprisonments and releases. Conversions were happening left and right. The believers were being baptized and they were pooling their resources to live communally, sharing as each had need.  Leaders were being designated. Stephen had just been martyred. Saul was persecuting the church.

One day Philip was led by the Spirit to a wilderness road.  There he encountered a man of position, an Ethiopian eunuch, a member of Queen Candace’s court and entrusted with charge of all her treasury. When Philip approached the man’s chariot he heard the man reading from the prophet Isaiah, indicating not only the wealth of the man but also his higher learning.  The eunuch invites Philip to sit beside him and begins to explain the passage:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.  Who can describe this generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.

He asks, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” 

The Ethiopian is an outsider in many ways, even with all his power and wealth.  As a eunuch this man was not allowed to participate in the religious life of the Jewish people.  Debie Thomas puts it this way,

He is a man interested enough in Israel’s God to make a pilgrimage from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, but according to Hebrew law, he is not free to practice his faith in the Temple (Deuteronomy 23:1).  It’s possible that he is a Jew, but in Philip’s eyes, he is a foreigner, a Black man from Africa.  He is a man of rank and privilege, a royal official in charge of his queen’s treasury, but he is also a powerless outsider — a queer man who doesn’t fit into the social and sexual paradigms of his time and place.  He is wealthy enough to possess a scroll of Isaiah, and literate enough to read it, but he lacks the knowledge, context, and experience to understand what he’s reading.

In other words, the unnamed eunuch occupies an in-between space, a liminal space, a space of reversal and surprise that stubbornly resists our tidy categories of belonging and non-belonging.  What kind of person, after all, earnestly seeks after a God whose laws prohibit his bodily presence in the Temple?  What kind of wealthy, high-ranking official humbly asks a stranger on the road for help with his spiritual life?  What kind of long-rejected religious outcast sees a body of water and stops in his tracks because he recognizes first — before Philip, the supposed Christian “expert” — that God is issuing him a gorgeous, unconditional, and irresistible invitation?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Philip finds the eunuch reading Isaiah’s description of a silent, suffering lamb.  The Word, after all, finds us where we are.  It resonates in the deepest, most authentic, and most tender places in our lives.  The eunuch lingers over the story of a sheep who is led to slaughter, a lamb who is silent before its shearer, a creature who is humiliated and denied justice as “his life is taken away from the earth.”  Perhaps this story calls to him precisely because it describes something of the complexities of his own life, his own religious, sexual, and racial difference, his own vulnerability.  What I respect most about Philip in this moment is not that he “evangelizes” the eunuch in some programmatic way — it is that he meets the eunuch exactly where he is, and gently, with the guidance of the Spirit, shows him how his story of silence and resilience, suffering and rejection, belongs squarely within the Story of Jesus.     https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=2995

Until I read Debie’s column this week, I had seen Philip as the key actor in this story and the Ethiopian eunuch as the target of his proselytizing.  But after careful examination it seems that both Philip and the Ethiopian man are changed in this story.  The man is active in his search for God.  It is he, after all, who suggests the baptism that takes place.

 “’Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?’ He commanded the chariot to stop and both of them, Philip and the Eunuch, went down into the water.” 

Again from Debie Thomas’ blog, Journey with Jesus:

Yes, the Ethiopian eunuch hears the good news of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and decides to become a follower of Christ.  That is true and it is wonderful.  But consider for a moment the amazing question he asks Philip in return: “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  Sit with this for a while as a real question — as a zinger of a question.  Ponder it as a dilemma Philip must grapple with as strenuously and as seriously as the eunuch grapples with the life-altering implications of the Gospel.

“What is to prevent me?”  What is to prevent me from belonging to the family of God?  What is to prevent me from being welcomed as Christ’s own?  What is to prevent me from full participation in the risen life and community of Jesus?  What is to prevent me from breaking down the entrenched barriers, fences, walls, and obstacles that have kept me at an agonizing arm’s length from the God I yearn for?  What is to prevent me from becoming, not merely a hearer of the Good News, but an integral part of the Good News of resurrection?

I love the resounding silence that follows the eunuch’s question.  Because the silence speaks what words cannot.  The silence is thundering, and gorgeous, and seismic, and right.  Because the answer to the question is silence.  The answer — the only answer — is “nothing.”  In the post-resurrection world, in the world where the Spirit of God moves where and how she will, drawing all of creation to herself, in the world where the Word lives to defeat death, alienation, isolation, and fear, there is nothing to prevent a beloved image-bearer of God from entering into the fullness of Christ’s salvation.  Nothing whatsoever. 

Jesus welcomed all, without partiality.  The early church was radical in its inclusiveness.  In fact, much of the book of Acts has to do with how the early believers had to struggle with the social and class and race distinctions of their day.  The response of the religious establishment was critical of their open boundaries. 

Hymn 641 in the Evangelical Lutheran Worship Hymnal proclaims it beautifully:

Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live, a place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive. Built of hopes and dreams and visions, rock of faith and vault of grace; here the love of Christ shall end divisions: All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.

Let us build a house where all are named, their songs and visions heard and loved and treasured, taught and claimed as words within the Word. Built of tears and cries and laughter, prayers of faith and songs of grace, let this house proclaim from floor to rafter: All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.

May it be so!