‘A’   //   Day of Pentecost   //   5-11-08   //   Celebration of Worship,

Northside Presbyterian and St. Aidan’s Episcopal Churches (combined worship service)

 

Scriptures    Exodus 1:15-22    Acts of the Apostles 2:1-21    John 20:19-23

 

They loved their children.

 

Nestled them … Nursed them … Nudged them forward. Ultimately … to let them go. Lest clutching them to their breasts brought Pharaoh down on their heads.

 

These children named Hebrew.

 

These children named Exodus.

 

These children – named Liberation.

 

So go the birth pangs of struggle known intimately to these midwives named Shiphrah and Puah.

 

The birth pangs … of a people to be named Israel.

 

 

Today – a holiday, or holy day, that should rival Christmas and Easter – we wean ourselves from a midwife named Jesus to become the Body of Christ. His body, once broken for us: We become his broken body now.

 

And today – as yesterday – and as tomorrow: Pharaoh – aka Caesar – aka the spirit of violence in this world, cunning and baffling and powerful as always, comes a-calling, pounding on the doors of our lives we as Christ’s broken body have carefully locked and bolted from the world.

 

In contrast: In the gospel of John’s version of the Pentecost story today, Jesus didn’t seem to need to pound on our door to enter.

 

Jesus walks through the disciples’ locked door. Or does he push it open, or pull it open? We don’t rightly know. He “came and stood among them,” we are told. However he may have entered, I think we can rule out that he pounded the door down.

 

Listen up, Pharaoh. Hear ye, Caesar: Now that’s power.

 

The Spirit – a word frequently accompanied in our scriptures by the word power – is like that. To wit, the locked-out Jesus who mysteriously  “came” among them: “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” And then he gives them – his disciples – the power to forgive and retain sins.

 

 

In preparation for passing along the Spirit to his disciples, Jesus breathes on them – Spirit as respiration. In our Acts passage, its author Luke cuts out the middleman as the Spirit breathes in the disciples – Spirit as inspiration: “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.”

 

Respiration … Inspiration: Breathe out; breathe in. Breathe out; breathe in. Every mother knows the power of intentional breathing when giving birth.

 

Respiration … Inspiration. Breathe out; breathe in. Breathe out; breathe in. As Abraham Lincoln put in his Emancipation Proclamation: it’s “a new birth of freedom.”

 

And a new birth, the Spirit is.

 

Back to the Hebrew midwives. Breathing in with the Hebrew mothers, Shiphrah and Puah carry on in their own inspired way. And I also imagine they must have been respiring pretty heavily as they did. Defying Pharaoh can do that to a person.

 

 

A conspiring. A conspiracy. Literally: a breathing with. For ultimately, the heroes and sheroes of this day move beyond their new breathing exercises to find themselves as one, standing over and against the Pharaohs and Caesars of their day. Standing together as one, that their people may be set free.

 

 

Anyone can breathe hot air on someone, or say they have a holiness breathed in them. Witness the bellowing of a Pharoah or a Caesar or a president extolling with their pronouncements the virtues of flesh pots and freedom.

 

And yet, liberation is much more than just flesh pots or freedom. Liberation is a conspiracy – a people breathing with, then set ablaze.

 

For is it any accident that the conspiracy of the midwives is soon followed by a burning of a bush?

 

And is it any accident that the violent rush of a wind among the disciples is soon followed by tongues of fire on their heads?

 

Conspiracy. Breathing with. Liberation. “A new birth of freedom.”

 

 

Sometimes, I wonder, if North Atlantic churches such as ours settle for the latest craze of spiritual growth exercises – breathing in, breathing out – and never arrive at the conspiracies that set us apart from our dominant, imperial culture.

 

Sometimes, I wonder if we grow infatuated in speaking words about love – such as the latest buzzwords in our churches, “dedicated outreach project” – and find ourselves slow to translate these words into labors of love.

 

And sometimes, I wonder, if we are so taken with sowing our own wind, that we never sit still that we may reap God’s whirlwind.

 

Sometimes, I wonder.

 

 

And then, in my wonder, I find myself pausing to listen. Maybe those conspiracies and those labors of new birth are out there, after all. Maybe – just maybe – we can hear them, and make them our own … if we but listen.

 

Listen with me, for a moment, and see if you can hear these winds of liberation, mothering forth …

 

Listen with me, a thousand miles to our Northside south, as we hear the story of a people giving birth to a whole new community in our own United States.

 

Epiphany week last, several of our number from both congregations were granted the unique privilege to conspire in the labor of a new Pentecost people. I’m talking about the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where all types of souls are gathered around a brand new post-hurricane sanctuary called All Souls Episcopal Church. 

 

Talk about a new church development! I listened to the stories brought back to us of a conspiracy in the making amidst a neighborhood almost obliterated by what can only be called The Flood. As one participant from our church relates it, population pre-Katrina was 18,000 in the Lower Ninth Ward. The population the day after: an estimated 300.

 

Over the past two-plus years, I’m told, that holy remnant has increased approximately sevenfold. Enough so that enough children were gathered in worship on Epiphany Sunday at All Souls to ooh and aah over a large dollhouse our churches brought down the aisle to them as a gift.

 

And I am told that one Lower Ninth Ward child quickly spotted, in the living room of that dollhouse, a replica of a bucket of wood – but there was no place to put the wood. The child piped up, “If there’s a bucket of wood, then we need a fireplace!”

 

For the fireplace in the doll house had fallen off in transit, you see. And it took no time at all for a child on fire with the hope of an exodus people to give notice to that fact.

 

 

Friends, here at Northside and St. Aidan’s, we are blessed to have the buckets – buckets that overflow. And friends, we are blessed to have the wood – even in this time of recession, plenty of it.

 

On this Day of Pentecost, let us take note with the first disciples that the Firestarter has departed. And yet, let us also take note that he has left us with a most precious gift. He has left us with these two fireplaces.

 

And that’s not all. On this Day of Pentecost, he has left us with the ability to create fire.

 

Thanks be to God.

 

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