Don’t Take Your Guns to Church, Luke 22.35-38 - Northside Baptist Church, Victoria TX November 8, 2015

Collect

God of Hosts, You call us to serve the Prince of Peace in a world that worships the god of war. Grant us today wisdom to discern the dark sayings of Our Lord, grace to hear the hard words of Our Lord, and courage to obey the clear commands of Our Lord, that we might begin to live now in the Kingdom of Heaven where we will one day live forever through the saving grace of Your Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ in whose name we pray, Amen.

Right Panel: The Church in the World

An old Johnny Cash ballad tells the tale of Billy Joe, a good-hearted but restless young cowboy who rides off in search of excitement. As he leaves, his mother pleads with him:

Don't take your guns to town son.

Leave your guns at home Bill.

Don't take your guns to town.

Of course he rejects his mother’s advice - what kind of country/western song would it be otherwise? - and dies in a showdown at the local saloon.

As of midnight, December 31, Texas House Bill 910 becomes law and properly licensed citizens have the right to display their guns in a shoulder or belt holster in public. We commonly refer to this as “open-carry.” Businesses, schools, and other institutions may opt out of this rule by posting a bill which warns that they are a gun-free zone.

On Wednesday, September 16, 1999, Larry Ashbrook strode into the Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth and unloaded three magazines of bullets from a nine-millimeter semi-automatic handgun before turning the weapon on himself. Three teenagers and three adults were killed at the church and a fourth teenager died later at the hospital. Seven others were treated at area hospitals.

On Sunday, December 9, 2007, a gunman appeared in the parking lot of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs as Sunday services were wrapping up. He killed two people and wounded three others before an armed security guard drew her weapon and shot him to death.

On June 17 of this year, Dylan Roof attended the Wednesday night prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and sat quietly through the service before opening fire and killing nine worshipers, including the pastor.

Taken together, these two facts - tragic murders taking place during church services and a law allowing Texans to carry sidearms - raise the obvious question: Should Christians go to church packing heat? Or does Our Lord cry out to us as we whiten our sepulchres and head off to Northside, “Don’t take your guns to church!”?

Of course, as Baptists, that question leads us to one source: What does the Bible say? But that question can be harder to answer than it might seem at first. Before we can declare the truth of the sacred text of Scripture, we have to wrestle with the question of how we are going to interpret the Bible. Do we simply pull out a passage that seems to speak to the issue and declare, “This is what the Bible says”? This is known as a “flat” reading, the idea that whatever the Bible says anywhere is what the Bible says everywhere.

But this can lead to problems.

Proverbs 26.4 says, “ Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself.” So “the Bible says” not to respond to dumb remarks. However, Proverbs 26.5 says, “Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes.” So “the Bible says” respond to dumb remarks.

Clearly in a case like this the Bible speaks situationally; depending on the circumstances, one response or the other might be better, and we must fan out across the entire landscape of revelation in search of biblical landmarks that will allow us to choose a particular course of action in a given set of circumstances. Everybody has a plan, a theory, a method of reading and interpreting the Bible. Let me give you mine.

I take it from the Baptist Faith & Message, the 1963 version, which says, under the section entitled “The Scriptures,” that “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.” This means that since Jesus declared himself to be the focal point and ultimate meaning of all of the Bible (Jo 5.39, Lk 24.27), I read any particular passage in the full light of Jesus’ own words and deeds. To paraphrase the timeless children’s hymn, “The Bible says it, this I know, because Jesus tells me so.” Therefore, I want to bring our question, “Should we bring guns to church?” to the feet of Jesus. I think the text we have read this morning provides our best opportunity to find an answer.

Central Panel: The Text

We can give this passage a “flat” reading: Jesus says to buy a sword; that must mean Christians should take up weapons to defend themselves from persecution. Some even point to the word “now,” as if Jesus says, “Poverty and non-violence worked fine before, but the rules are about to change.” There are problems with this, however - problems looking backward and problems looking forward.

Looking backward, such an interpretation would undo most of Jesus’ teaching. He admonishes his followers to turn the other cheek to violence. (Lk 6.29) He tells his followers to take up their crosses daily, not to kill their crucifiers. (Lk 9.23) He rebukes James and John when they counsel violent retribution. (Lk 9.54-55) A few hours after this saying, he will tell Pilate that his kingdom isn’t the kind that involves war. (Jo 18.36) If we want to say that Jesus’ ideas about non-violence applied only during his earthly ministry, we have to ask what point there is in reading anything in the Gospels prior to the crucifixion, since all of it would now be out of date.

Looking forward, such an interpretation would mean that the early Christians completely rejected Jesus’ command. Yes, one disciple draws a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane (v.49-50), but that is the last time in all of Scripture that we see a sword in the hand of a saint! The book of Acts records multiple persecutions but not one case of armed resistance. When Herod beheads James and imprisons Peter, Christians do not fight; they pray. (Acts 12.5) Paul rejects Roman weaponry in favor of the armor of the Holy Spirit. (Eph 6) History reports that when the Romans attacked Jerusalem to put down the Jewish rebellion, the Christians obeyed Jesus’ teaching to flee. (Lk 21.21) They ran to Pella, a village across the Jordan river, and survived. The disciples seem eager to obey this command: they immediately show Jesus that they are, in fact, packing heat (v.39), they beg Jesus to punch in the nuclear code (v.49), and at least one of them is quick on the draw when the moment arrives (v.50). Why would they never again obey the one command of Jesus that made sense to them?

What then? I believe the best understanding of this passage is that Jesus prepares his disciples to join him in a dramatic enacting of prophecy. This kind of thing is common among Hebrew prophets. When Isaiah wants to enact the defeat and exile of those who trust Egypt instead of God for salvation from Assyria, he goes naked and barefoot for three years, living like one destitute on the refugee trail. (Isa 20) When Jeremiah wants to show that any nation resisting Babylon will be conquered, he straps a yoke to his shoulders and appears as someone who has been enslaved and forced to bear burdens. (Jer 27) When Ezekiel wants to predict the final conquest of Jerusalem, he eats unclean bread mixed from different kinds of grain and baked over a fire using dung for fuel; he literally lives like those we see today fleeing to Europe from Syria, starving pilgrims who cannot be too choosy about what they eat in order to survive. (Ez 4)

Jesus has already acted out two important prophecies in Luke 19 at the beginning of this same week. The Triumphal Entry isn’t a spontaneous parade; it’s more of a flash-mob that Jesus sets up. He chooses a donkey to ride to act out Zec 9.9. He selects the same route that the great Jewish conqueror Judas Maccabbeus had taken when he liberated Jerusalem from the Syrians a century earlier. He gives his disciples the talking point to feed the media: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” a slogan ripped right out of the Psalm 118 which predicts the coming of the Messiah.

He does the same thing when he enters the temple and ceremonially destroys it. Prophecy said the Messiah would rebuild the temple to make it a truly Godly place. (Mal 3.1) Later Jesus predicts that the temple will be destroyed (Lk 21), and he says in a similar context that he will be the new temple (Jo 2.19). So Jesus enacts a miniature Roman attack on the temple as a way of saying it will be destroyed and he will replace it with himself as the way to meet God.

I think he does the same thing here. The key comes in v.37 where Jesus interprets his own action: “For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless'; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’" Jesus quotes Isaiah 53.12 and basically says, “All right, that’s our script. They’ve been looking for an excuse to arrest me as a dangerous revolutionary. Well, we’re going to give them probable cause.” That’s the only possible reason he could say that two swords wielded by fishermen were “enough” to face down an entire detachment of highly-trained and well-equipped Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Now look what actually happens: The disciple strikes his blow (v.50). Jesus says, “No more of this!” (v.51; The New Revised translation is very good here.) Then he heals the only wound ever inflicted in the only holy war ever fought. In fact in Matthew’s account (26.52), Jesus orders them to holster their sidearms because, he says, more swords only mean more corpses, not ultimate peace. Then Jesus goes willingly to a death he could have prevented with no help from the disciples’ blades. Again in Matthew’s account, we have that famous reference to calling “twelve legions of angels.” (Mt 26.53) You may have heard the old song, “He could have called ten thousand angels/To destroy the world and set him free.” That’s a good song but bad math: A Roman legion at full strength mustered six thousand men; I make that seventy-two thousand angels and Jesus actually said, “more than twelve legions.” If he’d wanted to settle matters militarily, he could have called in the shock-and-awe. He didn’t. The first and last act of Christian violence sanctioned by Christ took place two thousand years ago.

Right Panel: The Church in the Text

So back to our question: Should Christians go to church carrying guns as a defense against armed intruders? Some very well-intended people say we should.

I’ve heard people say that our world has become hostile to Christians, that we face violent attacks, and that this requires us to defend ourselves. There are two problems with that argument. The first is that it implies this is a new situation; but Jesus warned us all along that this was part of the deal. The early Christians died in droves but never took up arms against their persecutors. The other problem is that it implies we only take Jesus seriously as long as it doesn’t cost us anything, but that when things get real, we jettison Jesus and live by worldly “common sense.”

Which, by the way, is very common, but doesn’t make much actual sense.

For instance, we’ve all heard the famous slogan coined by Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” But let’s do the math on that. First century Jewish patriots thought the only way to stop a bad Roman with a sword was a good Jew with a sword. Result: No Israel for nearly two millennia and still no temple. Jesus said the only way to stop a bad Roman with a cross was a good guy willing to die on a cross. Early Christians actually took him seriously. Result: No more crosses, lots of Christians.

I think Jesus’ answer is clear: No, Christians should not come to worship the Prince of Peace bearing the weapons of the god of war.

Do not misunderstand me: I do not mean that if we lay down our arms Jesus will protect Northside and no one will ever enter this sanctuary and kill people. Jesus makes no promises of that kind; in fact, he promises us prison and stoning and exile and crosses and even says that there will be times when the people who kill us think they’re doing God a favor. (Jo 16.2) What I do mean is that in a world grown increasingly violent the Gospel of Jesus Christ challenges us to lead the way by living the Kingdom of Heaven before that Kingdom has fully come. We have the opportunity to lead the world out of violence, not follow it into more violence. We have the chance to show the world Jesus, not just tell the world about Jesus. We may - it isn’t really very likely, is it? - but we may have the occasion to resist to the shedding of blood (Heb 12.4) without being the ones who shed blood ourselves.

Conclusion

That’s the challenge: To live in a kingdom that isn’t yet here, because that is the only way for the kingdom to come here.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put this in an interesting way. A great student of science, he noted that when the larva of the horned fly spins its cocoon, it leaves two tiny cavities for the antennae that it does not yet possess! Now, if the little pest could reason, it might say, “Why go to all the trouble of making room for what isn’t there? You show me those antennae and then I’ll make a place for them.” Of course, if it did this, it would never develop antennae because, when they tried to grow, they would find no room!

It is the same with the Kingdom of Heaven: We live in the pupal stage, if you will: Neither we nor our world is anything like being fully formed in Christ. Yet we are no longer what we were; like the insect in a cocoon, the Christian in Christ has entered a new and irrevocable stage of life. And Jesus challenges us to leave room now for the Kingdom that has yet to come! To live between the “now” and the “not yet” as though the “not yet” had already arrived. To feel the potential Kingdom work in us, even as the actual world works on us!

We can say, “Show me a safe world where I never fear anything at church, and then I’ll come to church unarmed.” But if we demand to see that world before we agree to live in that world, that world will never come!

I think the word of Our Lord to us is as clear as that old Johnny Cash song: Don’t take your guns to church.

Invitation

There are a range of responses someone might have to today’s message. Members of this church, I invite you to respond, not by agreeing with me, necessarily, but at least by pledging that you will, like those noble Bereans of Acts 17.11, search the Scriptures daily to discern the truth of this message. Dig deep into God’s Word instead of surfing the shallow whitecaps of the cable news networks and listen to Christ instead of the culture. Break free from the talking heads of television to discern the voice of Christ who is the Head of the Church.

Christians who are not members here, you need a church home and God may be calling you to Northside. No one will ask you to sign a pledge stating that you will never bring a gun to church. But you know now that this is a congregation unafraid to wrestle with the difficult teachings of Jesus as they apply to our own real lives. If that is the kind of church where you want to serve Christ, you are welcome to present yourself for membership.

To anyone who has not trusted Christ as savior, I will say this: Whether or not I have read the Bible correctly on the subject of guns, I have at least made it clear that Jesus calls his followers to a difficult and sometimes dangerous life: no false advertising today about prosperity, with all the hard stuff left in the fine print. But Jesus does not call us to suffering for suffering’s sake; he calls us to eternal salvation that makes everything - even suffering - work to our ultimate good and God’s ultimate glory. So if you’re willing to follow a Savior who not only predicted persecution but suffered it himself on our behalf, you are welcome to come and declare yourself his disciple.

Benediction

If there must be violence, may the Lord make us

Those who endure it,

And not those who inflict it.

Those who end it,

And not those who begin it.

Those who redeem it

And not those who return it.

If there must be violence, may we suffer it

In Christ

And With Christ

And as Christ,

That in us the world might see Christ,

And in seeing Christ might see God,

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

One God now and forever,

Amen.

Working Out Some Thorny Theology: A Review of Charles Williams' "Chapel of the Thorn": Edited with an Introduction by Sørina Higgins

The Chapel of the Thorn by Charles Williams, ed. Sørina Higgins
Berkley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2014.
ISBN 9781940671536
$16.95

And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head. - Mark 15.17


In his 1543 "Treatise on Relics," the reformer John Calvin complains that, "With regard to the crown of thorns, one must believe that the slips of which it was plaited had been planted, and had produced an abundaut growth, for otherwise it is impossible to understand how it could have increased so much." Of course, to Charles Williams, a writer whose church history omits the entire East/West split of the Catholic church, such historical details matter little. What counts is the test that a genuine hallow would set to those who encounter it.

In editing and publishing Williams' long-lost verse play, The Chapel of the Thorn, Sørina Higgins gives the world a very early work which bears witness to the consistency of Williams' more mature thought and themes, provides insights into his influence over his good friend C. S. Lewis, and, most importantly, delights and challenges the reader who may or may not care about the former matters.

The play contains the classic themes that readers will discover in Williams' later series of "spiritual thrillers," to use T. S. Eliot's term: a hyper-real object reveals the hearts of various characters by their reaction to it - characters who are more nearly roles than individuals. The plot unfolds simply: In an obscure chapel in pre-Arthurian England rests the original crown of thorns placed on the head of Christ at his crucifixion. Joachim, its hermit guardian, wishes to keep it there. Innocent, the powerful abbot of a local monastery, feels that the three rules of the relic business are location, location, and location, and wants to transport the artifact to his monastery for easier access and increased influence and revenue. Constantine, the nominally Christian king, wants to avoid trouble with Rome. Amael, the sole surviving priest of an ancient pagan cult, cares only about power and sees no point in a relic of defeat. Gregory, the headman of the village, only wants access to the chapel itself because the Christians built it over the legendary burial place of Druhild, a pagan porto-arthur figure whom the villagers believe will return to life one day.

So there it is: free-range mysticism, practical churchmanship, political opportunism, outright pagan opposition, and pragmatic syncretism. What the crown is matters less than what one wants, or does not want, to do with it. It is the untested touchstone that tests all other stones, as Christ is the uncut cornerstone that judges all other stones. Follow this patterning and be ready to read Williams anywhere with some comprehension.

One who comes to Williams, as so many do, by way of Lewis, will find much to savor. If Lewis' That Hideous Strength is "a Charles Williams novel written by C. S. Lewis," The Chapel of the Thorn is Lewis' theology of the "good dreams" of paganism written by Charles Williams long before the two men met. When Gregory objects to Innocent that, "none among our fathers knew (Christ's) name," the abbot asks him if his people had "no tales for drinking time?" Then he declares,

     And therein was a torch lit, though it threw
     But red light, dime with smoke and blown with wind,
     Where the wise pagans lit their vestal lamps,
     Wherewith the candles on our altars burn.

But at bottom, "the play's the thing." Williams could find no takers for his drama in his own lifetime, and the work is obscure and at times unpolished, but it contains much that delights and even more that haunts. Those who adhere to a more apophatic and mystical Christianity will identify with Joachim, yet find that Williams gives the bureaucratic Innocent some very good arguments about the need for structure. Those who like to quote Paul's dictum to the Corinthians about "decently and in order" will feel affirmed until the abbot, after a heated exchange with his opponent, admits to his prior, "Knowest thou there goes a greater man than we?" Pastors who tend to lament the lack of fervor among their flocks might profitably spend a little time pondering Gregory's blunt catechism:

     But wheresoever we bow down or no,
     Yea, thought we bow don or we bow not down,
     Still are we hungered when the harvest fails,
     Thirsty with labour, sun-burn, chill with rain.
     God's change, and we: yet little is to change.

When Joachim rebukes Gregory for valuing the small things of this present life over eternity, the canny peasant responds,

     Small! it is that we know we have - a hut,
     Talk with our kinsmen, wife or chamber-maid
     To keep the hut, a sleeping-place, and foot.
     Small! it is that we have.

Pastoral ministry that scorns these things as unworthy of Christ's attention should instead learn to pay attention to them in the name of Christ. Even Amael, the pagan Bob Dylan of the piece, gets some good lines; in fact, his speeches contain more allusions to Scripture than either of the two priests. When he seeks to seduce Michael, Joachim's acolyte, with offers of worldly power and adventure set against the promised conquests of interior spirituality, the honest reader feels more than a tug of response.

But all of this is too much and too little. Journal articles and, entire books, and - one hopes - sermons will explore the depths of this drama at length and still leave much unsaid. One final word: Higgins' Introduction is worth the price of the volume, not only as a learned exposition of the play's history and themes, but as an introduction to Williams' entire oeuvre. With this brief essay she establishes herself as a voice which anyone interested in Williams must hear. Take, as a widow's two mites plucked from heaps of golden coins, these lines.

"In many of (Williams') books, resolution is achieved by the subordination of the person to the symbol, the piece to the pattern, and the soul to God." The thoughtful Christian who strives to find standing ground in the current debates on, say, Caitlyn Jenner, will find sufficient divinity here to be getting on with.

"The Thorn reveals each person's spiritual condition by their responses to it and their subsequent treatment of each other." Those who, to refer to the issue just named, believe they have found not only standing ground but shouting ground, would do well to ask whether the test of truth is in argument or in how it leads us to treat others.

Three Things That Do Not Surprise Me About the Tragedy at Mother Emanuel

On Wednesday, June 17, Dylan Roof murdered nine people in a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Three things do not surprise me about this tragedy.

1. It does not surprise me that Dylan Roof committed these killings. The weed of racism thrives in the rotting soil of sin. An invasive species with no natural enemy, it overruns the ecosystem of every human heart like leafy spurge on the western plains. It grows in the North as well as the South. Some of us are better landscapers than Dylan Roof, that's all.

2. It does not surprise me that Dylan Roof had the chance to commit these killings. The people of Emanuel welcomed the young white man who showed up at their midweek prayer meeting. He admitted to the police that he nearly gave up his plan because he received such hospitable treatment. This does not surprise me because I have received the same generous welcome at African American churches. African American Christians across all denominations forged their church community by smelting the ore of faith over the fires of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and bigotry. If you show up at a black church, the congregation immediately gives you full access to all of that history, all of that pain, and all of that power. I have repeatedly been awed at such acts of Christian hospitality. It is like saying, "Here is the bunker we built from the stones you threw at us. Come in and take shelter." Visit an African-American church this Sunday - this Sunday - and you will experience the same thing.

3. It does not surprise me that the families of the victims forgave Dylan Roof. He shot them because they were black. They forgave him because they are Christians. I do not say what they did was easy. I do not say I would do the same. I do not say I would criticize those people if they withheld their forgiveness or needed more time to offer it. I say that this is what our Teacher tells us to do and it should not surprise us that Christians obey Christ.

Dylan Roof wanted to start a race war. What he may have accomplished is the removal of the Confederate battle flag from every state-owned venue in the South. What the people of Mother Emanuel accomplished is to set a shining city on a high hill and call us to the Kingdom where Our Lord promises to wipe every tear from our eyes.

When I Die, Please Hold My Funeral in a Church

When I die, please hold my funeral in a church:

Not some camera obscura where the spotlight stabs the stage,

And some upside-down celebrity reflects it from his teeth,

And the people sit in darkness as the mysteries unfold,

And sip sacramental lattes and the doughnut flesh of Christ,

And they rock in movie-plush seats to an "awesome" "worship band,"

And they scroll the iPhone NIV while texting to their friends.

But a church, please hold my funeral in a church:

In a cinder block Shekinah where the pulpit's made of pine,

And the chunky stained-glass windows turn the sun to seraphim,

And a preacher in a blue suit pounds the pulpit with a fist,

And the deacons serve out Welch's and the teeth of Pharisees,

And the pews creak as folks fidget as the choir sweats through their robes,

And they thumb through King James Bibles with those little index tabs.

Yes, a church - and please invite me to attend:

Do not eighty-six me somewhere else; I won't embarrass God,

And make people face a corpse and double-dare them to believe,

And proclaim that Jesus rose and that I'm no more dead than he,

And His mighty resurrection is the only hope I had,

And that I will be forgotten if the Lord waits long enough,

But that He'll remember me all right, however long He waits.

In a church: Please hold my funeral in a church.

 

An Embarrassment of Riches: Acts 2.1-21, A Sermon in Tryptich; First Christian Church of Portland, Texas, Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2015

Collect

Heavenly Father, on the Sixth Day of Creation Your Spirit breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of humanity and Adam’s body became a living soul; and on the Day of Pentecost Your Spirit breathed the breath of life into the first disciples, and Your Body became a living Church. Today let your Spirit breathe into us the unpredictable breath of the wind that blows where it will, that we might proclaim a greater Gospel than we ourselves can ever  understand, and welcome a wider world than we ourselves have ever envisioned. This we pray in the Name of the One who promises to send us the Spirit, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

Left Panel: The Church

Well, this is embarrassing, isn’t it? I mean, here we are, all modern, educated, twenty-first century Christians, and we have to face this text full of wind and fire and speaking in tongues! Well, if it helps at all, we aren’t the first to blush over Pentecost.

John Calvin, the great Reformer, actually theologized the whole thing away, arguing that the Age of Miracles ended with the close of the New Testament era. Healing the sick and raising the dead, let alone miraculous utterances - all that was just to get Christianity going, like start-up money from a venture capitalist. But we’re well established now, showing a profit, and no longer in need of that sort of thing.

Another dodge is to point out that the “tongues” here aren’t some kind of private prayer language. That may be what Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians, but this is clearly a matter of known earthly languages that the speaker has never learned. But I’m not sure how that helps, since it just shows more clearly than ever that we do not share this experience.

If you’re a Baptist, like me, there’s an even easier solution to a passage like this: Just ignore it. As my friend Dr. Dana Moore, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Corpus Christi says, as Baptists we believe in the Holy Spirit - we just have issues with Him! Sure, we believe in the Trinity, but we like to think of the Third Member as a kind of silent partner.

But even that won’t work for you, because here it is, right in the Lectionary. Worse still, you use the liturgical calendar, which sets aside an entire Sunday to commemorate this event, on the actual anniversary of the day that Luke describes here.

Even my Pentecostal friends are - or should be - more embarrassed than proud of this passage. I mean, after all, as I said before, this isn’t just ecstatic utterance; this is unlearned earthly languages, as if I suddenly began preaching in perfect Mandarin. I’m not saying that those who claim to speak in tongues are faking it, but it is easier for a purely emotional experience to result in babbling than for a work of the Spirit to produce fluency in Portuguese. And anyway, the real miracle is three thousand souls saved and baptized and nobody’s seeing that on a regular basis.

It’s just embarrassing. The liturgical color for this day in the church calendar is red, presumably to commemorate the tongues of flame that flickered above the apostles’ heads. I wonder, however, if it might not also be to commemorate the color we turn as we blush at the reading of this primitive passage which we think we’ve outgrown but in fact have never really grown into.

Central Panel: The Text

But let’s set the language business aside for a minute. That is the literal part of the passage, the thing that actually happens. Let’s look instead for a moment at the images involved. There are three, by my count: wind, fire, and drunkenness. Notice the language of the text: Verse 2 says “there was a noise like a violent rushing wind.” Verse 3 tells us there were  “tongues as of fire.” In verse 13 the bystanders think the apostles have had a few too many, but Peter effectively refutes that charge in verse 15. Now, I’m not denying that there was a literal wind or literal fire but what seems to interest Luke is the image of these things. This is what a movement of the Holy Spirit over the church looks and feels like. So what’s the point?

I think the common element in all of these is the idea of being out of control. A violent, rushing wind? We had tornado warnings all over South Texas a week or so ago. A funnel cloud actually touched down in Gregory a week ago Friday and turned over a toolshed. Witnesses said that whirling vortex snatched up golf carts and even a forklift and tossed them around like a child’s toys! In other words, big, heavy objects whipped through the air and no one could control their movement.

What about tongues of fire? When a forest fire breaks out, it’s the lack of control that terrifies us.  Back in 2011 over thirty thousand fires ripped through four million acres in Central Texas and wiped out nearly three thousand homes - two thousand of them over a single Labor Day weekend! And what did they say on every newscast? “The fires are now X percent under control.” And of course we wanted to see that number increase. We fear fire that rampages out of control.

Then, of course, there is drunkenness, which may be the very definition of being out of control. A drunk person loses control of his body, of her speech, of his behavior - the whole of her person. I remember in high school when friends would ask why I didn’t drink, I’d often reply, “I’ve done some incredibly stupid things when I was in full possession of myself. I’d hate to think what kind of idiocy I could perpetrate if I was out of control!”

And not only do we have imagery of things being out of control, but it turns out that these images only serve as warning signs of what is actually about to happen. Just take verse 17, for example: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” In case you missed that, Peter hammers at it again in verse 18: “Even on my bondslaves, both men and women, I will in those days pour forth my Spirit. And they shall prophesy.”

Now, that doesn’t bother good Disciples like yourselves, but it slings a meat-axe sideways through the delicate machinery of my Baptist culture. Peter says that Joel says that GOD SAYS women will preach! And he sandwiches this between all kinds of apocalyptic language: This will occur “in the last days” (v.17) when “the sun (is) turned into darkness and the moon into blood” (v.20). I know people who think that women in the pulpit would be the end of the world. . .and they’re right! Women in the pulpit is just one more sign that the old world, the world of oppression and privilege, has received its death sentence and the new world of the Kingdom of Heaven, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Christ, has come about!

But don’t get cocky.

All of those doing the preaching were Jews, and all of those listening were Jews, but in the first century world there were Jews and Jews. Here’s what I mean: Some Jews grew up in what was then called Palestine, in the Promised Land. They spoke Hebrew, or at least Aramaic, and read the Scriptures in Hebrew, and lived near enough to Jerusalem to go to the temple for the great festivals on a regular basis. Their ancestors had returned to Judea from the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC. Other Jews lived in the Dispersion, in the Gentile territories. They spoke Greek and read the Scriptures in a Greek translation and might make it to Jerusalem once in a lifetime to celebrate the Passover. Their ancestors had stayed behind after the captivity. Well, Palestinian Jews sort of looked down on Dispersion Jews; that’s the whole trouble with food distribution to widows in Acts 6. But here God makes these good Palestinian Jews preach the gospel, not in pure, godly Hebrew, but in the various native languages of those Dispersion Jews.

And of course it gets worse: In Acts 8.14 God sends people to preach to Samaritans (who were half-breed Jews). They receive this same exact gift of tongues, which Peter finds so hard t stomach that he has to come down himself from corporate to check it out. A little later, God sends Peter in person even to witness this gift given to pure Gentiles without a drop of Jewish blood. This grosses Peter out so bad that God has to send him a vision and repeat it three times just to convince him! (Acts 10)

My point is that once the Holy Spirit gets involved in the church, things quickly spin out of our control! The Spirit whips us up in the swirling vortex of God’s love and we just have to wait and see where we land! The Spirit ignites our familiar and fruitful soil and leaves it so scorched that we have to hot-foot it elsewhere without the time to figure out our destination in advance! The Spirit hits our bloodstream until we blow a .25 Jesus-level on the Bible breath-a-lyzer, legally drunk on the love of God and apt to stagger into places we’d never normally go and throw our arms around people we’d not usually speak to! Criminals, rabble-rousers, bikers, Republicans - there’s no telling and no stopping once the Spirit takes over. In fact, we probably are not living out Pentecost until we catch ourselves saying, “If I do that, it’ll be the end of the world!” In fact, until things are out of control, we have not come into Pentecost.

I like what the great Christian thinker G. K. Chesterton said about this: “While Christianity establishes a rule and order, the chief aim of that order (is) to give room for good things to run wild.” Pentecost celebrates the controlled rampaging of the good things of the Kingdom of God - things like mercy, forgiveness, grace, and radical community.

It’s an interesting thing about Pentecost: It undoes one of the great deeds of human history. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it re-does one of the great undoings of human history. In Genesis 11 we read about the Tower of Babel when, after the flood, the human race all spoke one language, and they said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth." (Gn 11.4)

Do you hear the theme there? “A tower whose top will reach into heaven” - the idea is probably some form of astrology. This was to be a tower from which men could observe the movement of the stars and planets and thus control their destiny. Why? So they would not “be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” In other words, so they could control where they went. They made a grab for unity and permanence on their own terms. And what was the result? God confused their speech and scattered their community.

Do you see it? The effort at control resulted in chaos. The effort at purity resulted in dispersion. Now, at Pentecost, God sends the chaos of the Spirit to establish control. God brings in the dispersed so there can be true unity. The real miracle and message of Pentecost is that when we give up control we find peace, and when we embrace diversity we find unity, and when we turn loose we finally find a place to hold onto.

Right Panel: The World

The other day the the NPR program "All Things Considered" aired a piece about a robot. Some really brilliant scientists at the University of California at Berkeley invented it. They call it BRETT: "Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks." Well, one task: BRETT can fold towels. Well, BRETT can fold one towel. . .in twenty minutes. See, the problem is that robots are only good at repetitive patterns, while each pile of laundry contains lots of different items - socks, shorts, shirts, pants - and each pile of laundry jumbles these items in different piles and layers. All that variety - all that chaos - confuses BRETT terribly. He can’t find any corners, and until he knows where the corners are - where the boundaries are - he’s stumped.

We’re all worried these days about whether robots are going to take our jobs. And not just factory assembly line jobs, either: In his book The Rise of the Robots author Martin Ford theorizes that the automatons could even steal white collar jobs. It turns out, though, that in a robot-controlled world, chaos may be the key to continued human thriving. The NPR report said, “Machines need clear rules. One of the ways to figure out if a robot is going to take your job is to ask yourself: What are the rules here? Is my job a series decisions based on an orderly pattern? Or is my job really more like a giant pile of messy laundry?”

So it’s important to remember, when we want to push back against the great Godly higgledy-piggledy of our ongoing Pentecost, that the Third Member of the Trinity is not the Holy Algorithm but the Holy Spirit! He does not download God onto us; He breathes God into us. What we need is not a program but Pentecost. There may not be clear-cut corners with neat ninety-degree angles and clean edges. According to the story of today’s text, the Church is not about rules, but is more like a giant pile of messy laundry, all of which, though scarlet with sin, will be as white as snow, and though red like crimson shall be like wool (Isa 1.18).

Benediction

May the wind of the Holy Spirit

Rush unresisted through the rooms of your heart.

May the flame of the Holy Spirit

Blaze unbound above the thoughts of your head.

May the wine of the Holy Spirit

Leap unleashed from the language of your tongue.

In the Name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

One God now and forever,

Amen.