[Note: The Robin to whom I speak later in the sermon is getting confirmed today!]
Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen indeed, Alleluia!
Now technically we’re past that season of Easter, the fifty days have come to completion, and we’ve all graduated up a level from freedom to mission. That’s today. That’s Pentecost. Easter is all about freedom. It’s clear by the roots of that tree, the much older story of salvation from slavery to Pharoah, that Easter, falling as it does in the calendar on the same schedule as Passover, brings us out of bondage and into a wilderness wandering on our way to the promised land of milk and honey. From hiding away into living openly. From hating and hurting to hope and healing. From fear of death to full and engaged living.
Today we take the next step together. Or, rather, God takes us on the next step. In that wilderness wandering, set free from a slavery we’d gotten so used to that we hardly knew how to live without the chains and whips and brutality, set free from all of that weight that dragged us down into our dependable ruts, we didn’t know how to live in freedom. We’d been away from it for so long we’d forgotten what it meant to choose when to eat and when to play, when to sing and when to be silent, when to work and when to stretch our backs and look up at the sky. We’d lost that part of ourselves that lived in curiosity and wonder, that was open to love and forgiveness and the vulnerability that allows room for growth. So God gave us Ten Words on Mount Sinai. God gave us these commandments which were set about us like a playpen, an open field with a safety net, a wide-open safe place where we could stretch and run and grow and live secure in the knowledge that “I AM the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” would be with us.
It’s this structure which has been celebrated for aeons on Pentecost. Like a weighted blanked on an autistic kid who just needs to be held when life gets unpredictable, the Law is meant to be a comfort and a guide for healthy, life-embracing relationship. So God walks with us. And we walk away. God walks with us, and we shun God. God walks with us in the person of Jesus Christ, and we know what happens to him and to his followers: when the going gets tough the Christ gets killed and the sheep are scattered. The resurrection put a bit of a hitch in the unnatural order of things, messing up the powers that be pretty badly, and kicking off a movement even larger and stronger than the first time Jesus was alive and walking around on earth.
But then Jesus left. He ascended into heaven, was seen no more, and the only witnesses of his life, death, and resurrection could only live so long to tell the stories around meals and campfires and in temples and on street corners. Somebody had to remind them of the hope and fire that had first inspired them. Somebody had to spur them on to continue the ministry Jesus had begun among them. Somebody had to testify on behalf of Jesus.
And then, boom! Like a rush of mighty wind, the flames over their heads burned in the disciples’ hearts, and in the midst of this great Pentecost party already underway, they burst forth like Jesus from the tomb and babbled all over town about the mighty works of God. Creation, and new life, and restoration, and justice, and welcome, and feeding the five thousand, and forgiving the sinner, and loving even the Roman centurion and his slave, and water into wine, and walking on water, and healing the man born blind, and restoring Lazarus to Mary and Martha, and on and on and dying with prayers and blessings on his lips and rising again to offer even more forgiveness!
What sorts of witness will you bear, Robin, once you have confirmed your faith among us here today? What stories of God’s great works? What questions will you ask to help us grow in faith? What works of justice and mercy will you support? You will welcome the children at the Mac Hayden this summer, as Jesus welcomed them and announced the kingdom of God through them. You are not a child any more in the rites of this church, but you are not any more perfect now than the rest of us, either, which can be a struggle to learn to live with. We will continue to disappoint one another and learn to forgive each other. It’s part of how we know the Spirit is alive and active among us, no matter how difficult life can get.
Because today celebrates the free gift of God poured into our hearts, in our own languages, be those languages of art or music or hunting or baseball or auto mechanics or teaching or nursing or study. The creed confesses the Holy Spirit in the present tense. When it speaks to the work of God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, that’s all it says, all we can boil it down to, when it comes to the basics of the God we worship. When the creed speaks of Jesus Christ it points to the narrative of his eternal existence, his conception and birth, his suffering, death, burial, resurrection and ascension, as well as the future hope of his return. That’s how we know God in the person of Jesus, is that story which we tell over and over again. But the Holy Spirit, the way we know God in the here and now, we confess that Spirit revealed to us through the church, the community, the practice of forgiveness, the sacredness of the body to be resurrected, and the reality that the life everlasting includes the here and now. This is how we know and trust, how we believe in God in the present tense, in this numinous sort of mystery of the struggle of daily life in grace and the hard-won freedom that has been our inheritance. And you know I’m not talking about the hard-won U.S. freedoms we commemorate this Memorial Day weekend when we pray for fallen soldiers and their families, though many of them lived and died in that deeper, more lasting freedom, which spurred them on to more particular actions in their present moments while they lived. I’m talking about the bigger scale, the forever that includes today.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified. Who has spoken, and I believe continues to speak, through the prophets. God active and alive among us. God active and alive in you, Robin. Testifying about the love and the grace and the forgiveness of God, which render us eternally free from all threats of death, despair, and destruction. Testifying to the Truth who we call Jesus Christ. Testifying to the hope that is in us, the hope that one day we will all know freedom and peace and love and justice. For that is what we mean when we acclaim that Christ is risen, alleluia!
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