Year C, Easter 6, John 14.23-29, If you love me

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.  Amen

The Third Article of the Apostle’s Creed reads:

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

What is this? or What does this mean?

In Luther’s Small Catechism he offers the following explanation:

 I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith. Daily in this Christian church the Holy Spirit abundantly forgives all sins—mine and those of all believers. On the last day the Holy Spirit will raise me and all the dead and will give to me and all believers in Christ eternal life.

This is most certainly true.

Last week I was privileged to be able to attend our Synod’s Assembly in Boise.

Bishop Kristin opened the Assembly with a sermon in which she focused on the Assembly theme,
“We walk together.”

We live in a time and in a world where there are all sorts of things that would divide us and tear us apart.

But over and against all of those things that would divide us is the work of the Holy Spirit that unites us.

“We walk together, or we do not walk at all.”

“We walk together, or we do not walk at all.”

The Creeds of the Christian Church teach us that to believe in the Holy Spirit, is to believe in the “holy catholic church, the communion of saints, and the forgiveness of sins.”

This declaration of our faith means that we do not believe alone, we do not act alone, we do not stand alone.

It is always side by side with our brothers and sisters in Christ that “we live and move and have our being.”

The faith we hold is not our own.

Luther states “that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him.”

We are not here because we are such good people.

We are not here because we are in some ways morally superior to all others.

We are not here because we are smarter or stronger that other people.

We are here because of the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel.

The Holy Spirit has enlightened me with his gifts.

The Holy Spirit has made me holy.

The Holy Spirit has kept me in the true faith.

And then comes perhaps the most important words of all in Luther’s explanation:

“Just as”.

“Just as”.

“.  .  .  just as the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith.”

We are here, in this Church, because of the work of the Holy Spirit.

And so also, our brothers and sisters in Christ are here, in this Church, because of the work of the same Holy Spirit.

And this is the thing, Bishop Kristin pointed out.

We do not get to decide who belongs to the Church.

We do not get to decide who our brothers and sisters in Christ are.

That decision is far above our pay grade.

That decision is the Holy Spirit’s, and the Holy Spirit’s alone.

We walk together or we do not walk at all.

One of the beautiful signs of our unity in Christ at the Assembly was the worship, where we were led by a group called “Glocal”, who shared with us a broad range of music from around the world.

Also, present throughout the Assembly were our partners from the Lutheran Church in Tanzania.

It was a wonderful reminder that this faith we share is not our own, but rather the work of the Holy Spirit throughout the world.

We live in highly divisive times, yet it is the Holy Spirit that unites us in the one true faith and calls us to loving service for the sake of the world.

For me one of the most moving parts of the whole assembly was a presentation offered by a representative of the “Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services”.

I think what was most moving about that is that in the face of one of the most divisive issues in our time, the Spirit is working to bring healing and hope.

As you all know there is a struggle in Latin America and as a result, at our southern border.

Wave after wave of people have come to our border seeking asylum from the conflicts that have endangered them in their homelands.

One of the most controversial things that our Administration has done in response to this influx of immigrants seeking refuge, is to separate the children from their parents while they are held in detention centers at the border.

This has created a problem for the Federal Government.

Thousands upon thousands of children are in custody, and there was not in place a well thought out plan about how to reunite the children with their parents when the time came.

So you know what the Administration has done?

They have turned to us.

Specifically they have called in Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services to help reunite these families, help them through this time of transition, and assist them in getting settled while they await the outcome of their legal proceedings.

They turned to us because of our expertise.

I quote from their website:

 For almost 80 years, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service has been a champion for migrants and refugees from around the globe. Our legacy of courageous and compassionate service has made a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who have sought safety and hope in America’s communities. Our history reflects American Lutherans’ deep immigrant roots and passionate commitment to welcoming newcomers, especially those who are most in need. In partnership with community-based legal and social service providers nationwide, LIRS has helped over 500,000 migrants and refugees rebuild their lives in America.

Informed by our Lutheran faith and decades of experience with migrants and refugees, we have responded to people caught in conflict and facing persecution. We have developed new service programs, birthed new service organizations, and influenced public policy in the best interests of those we serve.

Imagine for a moment, that you’re a child separated from your family, in a completely new country, surrounded by people who are speaking a language you can’t understand. At LIRS, we see the courage and resilience of children who are faced with this situation every day — and we work diligently to protect these children and reunite them with loved ones as quickly as possible.

Through our network of trusted community partners, LIRS provides assistance to the U.S. government to identify family members in the country and ensure that children in our care are safely released to loved ones who are well-equipped to care for them. After families have been reunified, we provide extended support to particularly vulnerable families as they adjust to life together and navigate the immigration system. 

That’s one of the things many people don’t know about the Lutheran Church.

Quietly, we have served our neighbor by welcoming the stranger and giving them a hope for a new tomorrow.

Refugees from the world wars of the last century.

A massive resettlement program during the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

And now, assisting the Trump Administration to reunite and resettle the immigrants that have come to us seeking refuge.

This is the work of our Church.

Guided by the Holy Spirit, and enlisted by our Federal Government, we seek to provide a welcome to the stranger and hope to the hopeless. 

And this we do in the name of Christ and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

We walk together, or we do not walk at all.

Amen

Year A, Proper 12, Romans 8:26-39, Sighs to deep for words

The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

One of my seminary professors told us about his father's prayers.  He had a way of praying as though God was standing in the next room, so conversational and natural were his intercessions.  The professor went on to relate how one day they had taken his father out to Charlies Cafe in downtown Minneapolis, an upscale restaurant there.  His dad said grace. before their meal.  When they lifted up their heads and looked around they noticed that everyone within earshot had been moved to pause in their meals, and bow their heads as well.  Such were the prayers of this faithful servant of God.

I've always envied those people who can pray that way.  It's not that I don't pray.  I'm paid to pray.  It's part of my vocation as a pastor.  Prayers of the Church during worship- which I'm comfortable doing spontaneously, or using prepared prayers.  And then of course there are all those occasions when one is called upon to pray for ones parishioners.  In our home we routinely offer prayers before meals.

But often, away from the demands of my profession, words escape me in my prayers.  Sighs seem to be the norm.  Deep groans from my inmost being.  Sometimes the moaning of one's soul as though gasping for air.  

I find myself drawn into a life of prayer without words.  Bypassing the head, and communicating with God directly from the heart.  This is deeply private for me.  It is a sacred place that I have never been able to let others into.  Holy Ground.  A soul singing, often  in lament.  I'd speak more specifically about this, except there is a fear, a vulnerability, a risk that I am unwilling to take.  If someone knew, and critiqued this practice, or worse, derided it, it would be a violation.  And I'm not willing to risk it.

The Spirit intercedes for us.  To put it differently, prayer is a two way conversation and sometimes it is God that not only takes the lead, but draws us into a holy conversation that we cannot enter by ourselves.  

There is another side to this prayer without words.  Whenever I get too verbal in my prayers I cannot help but ask God to answer my prayers in very specific ways.  God has often not taken my advice. In the end, when the dust has settled, I am aware that though the course of my life was not as I had charted, it was an answer to those prayers.  God had a better idea.  

Often too, are the occasions when the circumstances that compel me into prayer are simply beyond words.  Some of that comes from shear exasperation.  The events in Washington this last week surrounding health care legislation are a prime example.  Sigh!  Be careful what you ask for. . .

And then there are the times when I simply do not know what to ask for.  I pray a lot for my children.  And speak very few words.  My hopes, my dreams, my concerns for them all pale in comparison to my love for them.  This I hope is reflected in those prayers without words.  Sigh.  

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nestled in a divine embrace we coo like babies at their mother's breast.  A soft and gentle murmuring of our souls in the arms of God as we are fed from her very being.  All that we need for life is there, a mother's gift of herself to us.  Those arms are an extension of the womb's embrace that never lets go.  

This is my body, this is my blood, given, shed, for you.  It is our umbilical chord, never cut, always the source of our life.  Love divine, all loves excelling.  And from this there is no letting go.  Sigh!

I believe that I cannot believe. . .

"And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"  Luke 18:8

"I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith. Daily in this Christian church the Holy Spirit abundantly forgives all sins—mine and those of all believers. On the last day the Holy Spirit will raise me and all the dead and will give to me and all believers in Christ eternal life. This is most certainly true."  (Luther's Small Catechism, Augsburg Fortress)

Apart from the Spirit, faith is simply not possible.  Apart from the Spirit, Jesus is nothing to us.

"Christ Alone" was one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation.  As a corrective, there is some truth to it, but on its own, it is blatantly false.

Christ never stands alone, but always within the community of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This is particularly important because faith in Christ is impossible apart from the gift of the Holy Spirit.

We have too frequently focused solely on Christ, and not acknowledged the Spirit's essential role in the faith we share.

I struggle.  When I started my ministry some 30 years ago it was with great hope and expectation.  What I didn't expect was the degree to which our world has moved toward secularization during that time.  I didn't expect the indifference with which the world now views Christianity.  I didn't expect that congregations across the land would be in decline.  And I didn't expect how difficult it would be to bear an effective witness to Christ in a world in which deafness to the Gospel message seems to be the norm.

And I can't help but feel that I personally have failed.

And yet faith is not a work performed by  humans, nor a consequence of anything we may do.  It is only by the call of the Holy Spirit that faith is possible.  And part of the mystery surrounding the Spirit's work is that there are particular ripe moments in time, kairos, when we will see the manifestation of the Spirit's activity.  At other times, it is as though the seeds of faith are lying dormant under the ground, waiting for the right moment to sprout and spring forth with new life.

I serve a small congregation.  Attrition is taking its toll.  It's hard not to sound the alarm that if current trends continue the future of that particular community of faith is not long.  And my response is to continually ask myself what can I do to change things, and specifically to attract new members.

Wait.  Wait patiently for the Lord.  And believe.  Believe that even though the ground seems barren and lifeless, underneath the surface lie the seeds of faith that are even now being nurtured by the Spirit of God.

We have a limited responsibility.  We bear witness to what we have seen and heard, yet it is the Spirit that produces faith.

There is a mystery surrounding the Spirit's work.  And that mystery is wrapped up in the concept of kairos, the ripe moment in time when the harvest will be plentiful.

I knew a wheat farmer who was always chomping at the bit to get out into the fields to harvest the crops.  But you have to wait until the crops have ripened.  There is no rushing nature.  And so he developed a discipline that just when it seemed like the time for harvest was imminent, he would go fishing for a week.  And then, when he returned, the fields would be ripe for harvest and the work could begin.

Perhaps we need some of that wisdom.  Impatient with the Spirit's own timing, we need to just go fishing.  When the Spirit has completed his work, then, and only then, can the harvest begin.  The time will surely come though, and  yes, in the end the Son of Man will find faith on earth.

Year A, Pentecost Sunday, Acts 2.1-21 “The Rush of a Violent Wind”

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.  Amen

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”

Wind makes me uneasy, unsettled, and downright anxious.

It’s not often around here that we experience a great wind.  But it happens from time to time.

My experiences of the wind come from my time on the Great Plains, now there they have some wind.

My mother-in-law reminded us what the wind was like in North Dakota following one of her last trips back there.  She was watching the kids running around on the farm, and what she noticed was that when they ran around the corner of the house they would instinctively lean into the wind. 

The wind on the prairie can be oh so persistent, and howling, enough so as to drive one crazy.  Karla used to imagine those early prairie settlers hunkered down in their soddy shanties listening to that howling wind all winter. 

But the most unsettling of winds, were not the steady constant winds of everyday, but the violent winds that accompanied major weather fronts, winds so pronounced that you could see them coming.

With the sound of such a mighty wind you knew that change was in the air.

Great Falls, Montana, holds the record for the greatest single variation in temperature for a given day.

On that particular day, they woke up to the bone chilling temperatures of thirty below zero, and then the Chinook winds began to blow out of the South, and by 3:30 in the afternoon it was 75 degrees outside. 

The rush of a violent wind.

Anxiety.

When major weather fronts moved through the plains there was much to fear.

Hail could wipe out a crop in a flash.

Brush fires set off by the lightening would rush across the prairie and consume everything in its path.

The then there was the ever present reality of the greatest of all winds, the tornadoes.  There is the epitome of “the rush of a violent wind”.  Entire towns leveled.  Houses thrown about as though they were but a piece of paper in the wind.  And in one of the strangest of phenomena, single pieces of straw, straw!, blown so hard and so fast that they will penetrate fence posts.

Wind makes me uneasy, unsettled, and downright anxious.

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”

Change was literally, in the air.

Ruach is the Hebrew word.

It means “Breath, Wind, and Spirit”

It was this mighty Ruach, this great wind that was at one and the same time the Breath of God, and the Spirit of God, that blew over the watery chaos and signaled the beginning of Creation.

“1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

Imagine the sound of that great Wind from God, blowing over the face of the waters stirring up the waves with such a force that life itself was stimulated from that primordial sea.

And then, that same Ruach was breathed into a lump of clay, bringing life to that which was lifeless, and Adam awakened.

With every breath we take the Spirit, the Ruach of God, fills us with life.

And then at the last, there is one more great rush of wind as we exhale that last time, giving up the Spirit of God that is within us, and dying.

“Into your hands I commend my Spirit”, the Ruach, and with those words, Jesus died.

For the disciples, this meant a return to the chaos of the beginning.  Darkness covered them as in the beginning.  There was a formless void left in their lives in that place that Jesus once filled.

But then the wind started blowing.

Easter morning there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, a wind so powerful it rolled back the stone that had sealed tight the tomb where Jesus laid.

And then, that very wind, breathed life back into the lifeless corpse as Jesus’ arose.

For almost fifty days the disciples experienced the presence of the risen Christ, until finally yet another wind blew, and Jesus was caught up as in a whirlwind and ascended into the heavens.

On Pentecost, the disciples gathered together again.

It began like the calm before the storm.

All was still, and yet there was uneasiness in the air.

Then, the wind began to blow.  The same Spirit of God that moved over the face of the deep in the beginning, now filled the house in which they gathered.

And with the Wind, came fire igniting within them a deep passion for the Gospel, and for all God’s children.

They could contain themselves no more.

And in the power of the Spirit, they began to speak.

Hearts were changed.

Belief was born.

Three thousand were baptized that day, and yet it was just the beginning.

Wind is a powerful thing.

It can signal the end of life as we know it.

And it can give birth to the future of God.

Nearly two thousand years have passed since that first Pentecost.  Two thousand years during which the Word of God was shared and people received the gifts of the Spirit throughout the earth.  Faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

But for all of that, we stand at a crossroads in our country.

The Winds of change are blowing all around us.

We don’t know what to make of it.

It’s hard to discern, from the howling of the wind, whether it will bring new life, or destruction.

And so we are anxious.  I am anxious.

There are places in the world where the Wind that is blowing is clearly the Spirit of God at work.

Africa.  Long a mission field for our work.  Now, it is in Africa that some of the most vibrant Churches are growing.

I served as a hospital chaplain with a priest from Africa, Jacob Yali, who had come from Nigeria.

He told of his congregation.

25,000 people were part of his parish. 

A typical confirmation Sunday might see 300 to 350 new believers affirm their faith.

The same thing is happening in China.

But the Winds of change in our country are not so promising.

Small congregations like ours dot the landscape, and too often the sound of the Wind that we hear, sounds much more like a last gasp for life, than the beginning of new life.

I have a friend, a frequent visitor to our congregation in Sandpoint, Julie.  Julie is a charismatic Lutheran, and is quite unique to have in worship.  One Sunday, I looked over and saw her lying on the floor.  Two of our members were doctors and rushed to her side.  I stopped them.  Julie was simply overcome by the Spirit.  She would get that way whenever she received the bread and the  wine. 

Well, Julie is convinced that the Spirit is going to start blowing once again in this country.  Like a farmer watching the weather on the horizon, Julie perceives that the great Wind of God is going to start blowing through our land.

I hope Julie is right.

Not only that, I hope that we will hear the Spirit’s presence like the rush of a mighty Wind.

During our Lenten services this year I was delighted to see a Dove outside our window, looking in on us.  “The Spirit descending on us like a dove”-- is what I thought, gentle and lovely.

I think that is what we’d prefer.

We’d prefer that the Spirit come to us, gentle and lovely, like a dove.  Comforting.

And yet on Pentecost, the Spirit was anything but “gentle and lovely”. 

The rush of a might wind.

I think we are beyond what a gentle Dove can fix. . .

What we need is that mighty Wind that called forth life from the watery chaos.

What we need is that Breath of God, breathing once again into our lifeless corpses, raising us up to new life in Christ.

This is what we need.

But it’s not something we can do.

Only God’s Spirit can work such wonders in our midst.

Only the Spirit can give us faith.

Only the Spirit can give us hope.

Only the Spirit can teach us to love as we have been loved.

And so I’m praying these days.  Fervently praying.

“Come Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove, Might Wind, Breath of God.

“Fill our hearts with your Love, and our lives with your power.”

Amen.