Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 5, 2017 (Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA, as part five of a seven-week preaching series on baptism and the Baptismal Covenant.
Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:1-9a, Matthew 5:13:20, Baptismal Covenant Question #1
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17)
Today’s scripture readings raise questions about what it means to keep tradition. Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount about not coming to abolish the law but to fulfill it may sound surprising to some Christians, who tend to think the Jewish law is irrelevant for us. The early church decided that Gentile converts to the faith did not have to keep the entirety of the Jewish law, and many Reformation-era theologians wrote volumes on how the law was a prison from which Jesus released us, drawing mostly on Paul’s thought. But Jesus himself kept the Jewish law and observed Jewish traditions. He criticized those who focused on the letter of the law at the expense of the spirit behind the law; those who were so concerned about not breaking a commandment that they wouldn’t help someone in need because doing work was forbidden on the Sabbath, for instance. But he never advocated for entirely throwing out the traditions and law of his religion.
“I have come not to abolish but to fulfill,” he says, “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17-18)
Our reading from the Hebrew scriptures today also speaks to the question of what it means to keep tradition. The people are questioning why God is not responding to their fasting:
“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” (Isaiah 58:3a)
And God’s answer, coming through the prophet Isaiah, is that the people may be keeping the letter of the law, going through the motions of the correct rituals, but their behavior is not in line with God’s ethical commandments:
"Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high…
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:3b-4, 6)
Now, God has previously commanded them to do just the things they were doing: to “lie in sackcloth and ashes” and to humble themselves. So when he dismisses their actions, saying that is not the fast he chooses, that the fast he chooses is to “loose the bonds of injustice,” he’s not saying that he doesn’t want them to ever observe ritual fasting. He’s not saying lying in sackcloth and ashes and humbling oneself is a BAD thing – he’s just saying that without the ethical behavior it is intended to bring about, it’s worthless. If ALL you do is lie in sackcloth and ashes and don’t help your brothers and sisters in need, your fasting is worthless and God’s not going to take your piety seriously – because you’ve shown by your actions that you don’t really get it.
As we enter week five of this preaching series on baptism, these themes in our readings today invite us to consider the first question of our Baptismal Covenant:
“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?”
At its core, this question is about keeping tradition, about “following the law,” to the extent that Christians have a concept of religious law. Will you keep teaching what the apostles taught, keep meeting together as the apostles met, keep breaking bread together in the holy meal of the Eucharist as the apostles did, and keep praying as the apostles prayed?
This vow actually comes directly from Scripture – the Book of Acts tells us that after the Gentiles received the Spirit of God at Pentecost and Peter preached to them explaining the significance of all they had heard and seen, about three thousand people were baptized. Acts 2:42 says of these new converts, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
It is significant that this call to keep tradition comes directly from the description of what the earliest converts to Christianity did right after they were baptized. Even the words used to ask this question are part of church tradition!
So what is it exactly that we’re being asked to keep and pass along? What is “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers?”
The “apostles teaching” refers to the message about Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection that we talked about a few weeks ago, that “good news of God in Christ” that we are called to proclaim: that Jesus is raised from the dead and has defeated death. It is summarized in the Creeds, and the church has continued to expand upon these foundational beliefs through its doctrine and teaching throughout the centuries. When we vow to “continue in the apostles’ teaching,” we are vowing to study the church’s teaching, both what it has taught historically and the way that is taking shape in our own day, and to pass that teaching on to a new generation. When you come to Bible study, when you instruct children in the faith, when you read scripture or books about Christian history or theology, you are “continuing in the apostles’ teaching.”
What about the “apostles’ fellowship”? The church has always been clear that you cannot be a Christian by yourself. Fellowship, community, connection with other Christians is of utmost importance. The apostles came together on a regular basis to encourage one another in their faith and to worship together, and Christians have continued to do that throughout the ages. Even monastics who choose a cloistered life, away from “the world,” have shared the community of other monks or nuns, with only very few choosing a life of solitary hermitage, and even those who did choose that life were connected in some way to a larger praying community. Fellowship is critical. We cannot do this faith thing alone. We need each other.
“The breaking of the bread” is the celebration of the Eucharist – the ceremonial meal that Jesus commanded us to continue “in remembrance of him” until he comes again. It is the central act of worship of the church, and when we are baptized we make a vow to continue in that tradition, to regularly attend and receive Eucharist.
And finally, “the prayers” are the prayers the church has taught us – the Lord’s Prayer, the various litanies and liturgies that the church has passed down to us – as well as individual, personal prayers offered up to God spontaneously from our hearts. We vow to maintain an active prayer life as part of our commitment at our baptism.
This vow – to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers – this vow to preserve and pass on the rituals and traditions of the Christian faith – is foundational to what we vow to do when we are baptized. It is the first question we are asked after we recite the Creed. But it does not stand alone. It is grouped with the other four baptismal vows to show that observing ritual and “maintaining tradition” alone are not enough. This affirms the message of Jesus and the prophets: that ritual observance without proper ethical behavior is meaningless. We can teach the doctrines of the church and come to Eucharist all day long and say all the right prayers, but if we’re not also “seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves,” and “striving for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being,” then we’ve entirely missed the point.
Unfortunately, much of our society has seen too much of the ritual observance and too little of the ethical behavior from the church and has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, assuming that the only important thing is the ethical behavior piece. “What has ritual behavior done for anyone except make them hypocrites? Just ‘strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being’ and you’ve pretty much got it covered.”
But from the church’s perspective, it’s not a question of either/or, but of both/and. It’s not ritual observance OR ethical behavior, it’s ritual observance AND ethical behavior. We can do ethical behavior without ritual observance, sure, but it’s a lot more likely to lead to burnout if we do. Because the ritual observances of the church are there to feed us, to guide us, to sustain us as we do that ethical behavior we’re called to do. We come to Eucharist not just for the sake of coming to Eucharist, not just to blindly obey a rule of the church, but to be renewed and recharged for the work God calls us to do in the world. We read the scripture and church theology not because the church gave us a homework assignment, but because the teachings of the church inspire and motivate us to work for justice and peace, and connect us with the saints who have gone before us, who have walked this path before, who know something about standing up against injustice. In our current day, the voices of Christians who have stood up against injustice in the past: from the earliest apostles who said to the Roman courts, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29) to the modern-day prophets like Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1930s Germany, who challenged his church’s complicity in the Nazis’ rise to power, can inform our own struggles in this new era of American history, providing us with a sense that we are not alone in this work.
We gather in community with other Christians, we receive the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, and we study the teachings of Christians who have gone before us to support and facilitate the hard work of ethical living and advocating for justice that God calls us to in our own day. Because if ALL we do is come to church and receive Eucharist and study scripture and we don’t offer sanctuary to refugees or feed the hungry or advocate for just governance in our land, our tradition is worthless and God’s not going to take our piety seriously – because we will have shown by our actions that we don’t really get it.
Showing posts with label tradition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tradition. Show all posts
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Who are we to hinder God -- even when God breaks tradition?
Sermon delivered Sunday, April 24, 2016 (5th Sunday of Easter, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
(Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
We use that phrase to conclude the reading of the Scriptures in public worship at St. Cuthbert’s. This phrase comes from a liturgical resource called “Enriching Our Worship,” which was made available to the Episcopal Church in 1998 as a supplement to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It offers alternative phrases and imagery to the more traditional wording in the prayer book.
The traditional phrase used after the reading of Scripture in the prayer book is, “The Word of the Lord.” But I much prefer “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” for several reasons.
Although I do believe our scriptures to be “The Word of the Lord,” I think using that phrase so casually and without clarification can lead to a misunderstanding of how we are to engage with them. To me, when I hear “THE WORD OF THE LORD,” I imagine some big booming voice of authority sending down a message from on high. To me, that phrase has a sense of absolutism that does not encourage inquiry and exploration. This is the truth, the whole truth, the undeniable, indisputable truth, so help us God!
But “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” has an entirely different ring, at least to my ears. Rather than telling us to be passive recipients of something coming down from heaven, it invites us to discern what God is saying to us now in and through this text. It doesn’t imply that there is one meaning and all we have to do is accept it. When we are invited to “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” we must do something in response to the scripture. We have to use our own faculties, our own God-given gifts for discernment, to figure out what God is saying to our church, to our community, to our country, to our world, through this passage of scripture.
This semantic distinction is important, I think, because it reminds us that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, not static. While maintaining and preserving tradition and passing it on to the next generation is important, if we focus only on that part of religion, we can end up knowing more about what God said to the ancient people than what God is saying to us today.
The letter to the Hebrews says that “the Word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ remind us that “God is still speaking,” which has been their official slogan since 2004. Despite the fact that the scriptures include stories of God encouraging change in individuals and within communities, and of God saying outright, “I am doing a new thing!” – whether through the ancient prophet Isaiah or the futuristic book of Revelation – many people still tend to think of God – and therefore religion – as unchanging, unchangeable, set in stone, and church can be a place where “innovation” can be a dirty word.
But our scriptures on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, in this season of change and renewal, put innovation right up front and center. Beyond John’s vision of the heavenly king proclaiming “I am making all things new” in the passage from Revelation and Jesus giving a “new commandment” to the disciples in the passage from John, perhaps the most striking example of innovation is in our passage from Acts, when Peter receives a revelation from God that leads him to abandon the dietary laws that were central to Jewish tradition.
Now, it’s perhaps not possible to overstate how significant this change was for Peter and for the followers of Jesus. Although there is a common misperception that Jesus rejected Jewish tradition and ritual because of the many times he broke the Sabbath or challenged the authorities, Jesus actually was not really a religious innovator. He followed the traditional Jewish practices and he observed all the Jewish festivals. He told his followers, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill.” In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, he has this to say about Jewish law:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-19)
Now, given that context, Peter’s vision telling him to “get up, kill and eat” animals that were forbidden by Jewish law to be eaten is extraordinarily radical! Peter immediately protests, saying, “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” He probably thought this vision was a test, to see if he’d do the right thing, to see if he’d be tempted to eat any of the “forbidden fruits” he was being shown on this sheet coming down from heaven. I imagine Peter might have been remembering Jesus’s words: “Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” “No way am I going to break the dietary laws,” Peter’s thinking, “I’ve already screwed up enough times; I’m not going to screw it up again! I know the right answer to this one – ‘By no means, Lord, I wouldn’t DREAM of disobeying the law!’”
But in the vision, God insists that he do so! “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says the voice from heaven.
I spent some time in evangelical non-denominational churches in college, and I remember a key part of their teaching was that no revelation could ever contradict scripture. So if you thought you had a vision from God, you had to go back and read the scriptures and see what they said, and if what you felt God was telling you to do was contrary to what the scripture said, it couldn’t be an authentic message from God. This line of reasoning was often used to explain to women who felt a call to ordained ministry why that couldn’t be an authentic message from God. Since women leading congregations would contradict scriptures that said, “Women should be silent in church,” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” then obviously the woman must be confused or misunderstand what she’s really being called to do. God would never call a woman to ordained ministry, because that would contradict scripture!
But by that line of reasoning, Peter’s revelation in today’s passage from Acts would also be invalid! I’m sure some of the believers in Jerusalem rejected Peter’s message for the same reason: “What do you mean, God told you to eat unclean animals? That contradicts the scriptures! God would never tell you to do something that contradicts scripture!”
And yet, Christian tradition has held up this story as an example of how the Spirit moved among the believers in the early church, and the church would look very different today had Peter’s vision not been taken seriously – we would all still be keeping kosher and all the other commandments of the Jewish law as well. We would have essentially been required to convert to Judaism in order to become a follower of Jesus. But Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation acknowledged that God was bringing in the Gentiles even without their conversion to Judaism. Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation was central to the birth of the church and what it would become, and therefore central to our identity as Christians today. We now regard this example of breaking tradition as scripture!
The revelation Peter received wasn’t just a new interpretation of an old way of being; it was literally rejecting something that had been sacrosanct and endorsing something that had been forbidden! If this was possible, how could the church ever know for sure that they were following the right path? How could they be sure they were following God’s will, if God’s will could change with the next revelation to come along?
We still continue to struggle with these questions today. The debate over women’s ordination that raged in the 20th century in Protestant churches and of course continues today in the Roman Catholic Church, and the debate over same-sex marriage that has become the “hot button issue” of the 21st century, are just two obvious, high profile examples of the church wrestling with whether God can move us in a direction that “contradicts tradition” or “contradicts scripture,” but we can see this dynamic at play in any number of situations in the church, in issues large and small, any time we feel ourselves being called to move in a direction that somehow seems to be contrary to what is taught in the Bible or church tradition, and yet, we feel this call so strongly that we cannot deny that it is of God.
And although he valued the religious tradition of his birth and upheld it, Jesus himself also taught his followers that the action of God in this world is not always so easy to pin down. He compared the work of the Spirit to the wind. In John chapter 3, he answers Nicodemus’s inquiry about how to enter the kingdom of heaven by saying, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit moves where it will, and our job is to be still long enough to listen for it and hear where it is moving, and to acknowledge it wherever we find it, even if it contradicts everything we’ve always known.
After the believers in Jerusalem hear about Peter’s vision showing that all foods had been made clean and then his story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish followers of Jesus had, they acknowledge that it is possible that God is moving even in this unconventional way. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter asks, as he explains why he’s allowed Gentiles to join the community without keeping the Jewish law, and why he’s eaten with them despite their lack of adherence to the Jewish dietary laws. His listeners are silenced, for what satisfactory answer is there to that question? Who are we to hinder God? If God’s Spirit is behind something, good luck trying to stop it.
At another point in the book of Acts, the teacher Gamaliel, a wise elder on the Jewish council, defends the leaders of the church against calls for their execution by reasoning with his fellow councilmembers in this way:
“So in the present case,” Gamaliel says, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’” (Acts 5:38-39)
As we begin the work of discernment about the future this congregation over the next weeks and months to come, let me remind you again about the key role of LISTENING in discernment. We are being invited to “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” at St. Cuthbert’s and in this part of Oakland. Our job is to listen for where God is already at work in the world around us, and to join in, to become his partners in creation, in bringing forth that “new thing” in our midst. Our job is to be open to the Spirit’s promptings and to follow them wherever they lead – even if they lead us to break tradition! Even if they lead us to do things that might contradict what we always thought we knew, or what we always thought we wanted for this church and for this community. Because no matter how noble and compassionate our ideas are, no matter how exciting or fun or promising they might seem, and no matter how much effort we put in to fulfilling them, they will never come to fruition if they are not in line with where God’s Spirit is already moving in the world. We can’t FORCE something to happen of our own will if it is not already of God.
So as we discern together, we must continue to ask ourselves “is this plan or this undertaking of human origin, or is it of God?” And we must be willing to accept the answer we receive, for if it is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, we will not be able to stop it, because who are we to hinder God?
(Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
We use that phrase to conclude the reading of the Scriptures in public worship at St. Cuthbert’s. This phrase comes from a liturgical resource called “Enriching Our Worship,” which was made available to the Episcopal Church in 1998 as a supplement to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It offers alternative phrases and imagery to the more traditional wording in the prayer book.
The traditional phrase used after the reading of Scripture in the prayer book is, “The Word of the Lord.” But I much prefer “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” for several reasons.
Although I do believe our scriptures to be “The Word of the Lord,” I think using that phrase so casually and without clarification can lead to a misunderstanding of how we are to engage with them. To me, when I hear “THE WORD OF THE LORD,” I imagine some big booming voice of authority sending down a message from on high. To me, that phrase has a sense of absolutism that does not encourage inquiry and exploration. This is the truth, the whole truth, the undeniable, indisputable truth, so help us God!
But “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” has an entirely different ring, at least to my ears. Rather than telling us to be passive recipients of something coming down from heaven, it invites us to discern what God is saying to us now in and through this text. It doesn’t imply that there is one meaning and all we have to do is accept it. When we are invited to “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” we must do something in response to the scripture. We have to use our own faculties, our own God-given gifts for discernment, to figure out what God is saying to our church, to our community, to our country, to our world, through this passage of scripture.
This semantic distinction is important, I think, because it reminds us that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, not static. While maintaining and preserving tradition and passing it on to the next generation is important, if we focus only on that part of religion, we can end up knowing more about what God said to the ancient people than what God is saying to us today.
The letter to the Hebrews says that “the Word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ remind us that “God is still speaking,” which has been their official slogan since 2004. Despite the fact that the scriptures include stories of God encouraging change in individuals and within communities, and of God saying outright, “I am doing a new thing!” – whether through the ancient prophet Isaiah or the futuristic book of Revelation – many people still tend to think of God – and therefore religion – as unchanging, unchangeable, set in stone, and church can be a place where “innovation” can be a dirty word.
But our scriptures on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, in this season of change and renewal, put innovation right up front and center. Beyond John’s vision of the heavenly king proclaiming “I am making all things new” in the passage from Revelation and Jesus giving a “new commandment” to the disciples in the passage from John, perhaps the most striking example of innovation is in our passage from Acts, when Peter receives a revelation from God that leads him to abandon the dietary laws that were central to Jewish tradition.
Now, it’s perhaps not possible to overstate how significant this change was for Peter and for the followers of Jesus. Although there is a common misperception that Jesus rejected Jewish tradition and ritual because of the many times he broke the Sabbath or challenged the authorities, Jesus actually was not really a religious innovator. He followed the traditional Jewish practices and he observed all the Jewish festivals. He told his followers, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill.” In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, he has this to say about Jewish law:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-19)
Now, given that context, Peter’s vision telling him to “get up, kill and eat” animals that were forbidden by Jewish law to be eaten is extraordinarily radical! Peter immediately protests, saying, “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” He probably thought this vision was a test, to see if he’d do the right thing, to see if he’d be tempted to eat any of the “forbidden fruits” he was being shown on this sheet coming down from heaven. I imagine Peter might have been remembering Jesus’s words: “Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” “No way am I going to break the dietary laws,” Peter’s thinking, “I’ve already screwed up enough times; I’m not going to screw it up again! I know the right answer to this one – ‘By no means, Lord, I wouldn’t DREAM of disobeying the law!’”
But in the vision, God insists that he do so! “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says the voice from heaven.
I spent some time in evangelical non-denominational churches in college, and I remember a key part of their teaching was that no revelation could ever contradict scripture. So if you thought you had a vision from God, you had to go back and read the scriptures and see what they said, and if what you felt God was telling you to do was contrary to what the scripture said, it couldn’t be an authentic message from God. This line of reasoning was often used to explain to women who felt a call to ordained ministry why that couldn’t be an authentic message from God. Since women leading congregations would contradict scriptures that said, “Women should be silent in church,” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” then obviously the woman must be confused or misunderstand what she’s really being called to do. God would never call a woman to ordained ministry, because that would contradict scripture!
But by that line of reasoning, Peter’s revelation in today’s passage from Acts would also be invalid! I’m sure some of the believers in Jerusalem rejected Peter’s message for the same reason: “What do you mean, God told you to eat unclean animals? That contradicts the scriptures! God would never tell you to do something that contradicts scripture!”
And yet, Christian tradition has held up this story as an example of how the Spirit moved among the believers in the early church, and the church would look very different today had Peter’s vision not been taken seriously – we would all still be keeping kosher and all the other commandments of the Jewish law as well. We would have essentially been required to convert to Judaism in order to become a follower of Jesus. But Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation acknowledged that God was bringing in the Gentiles even without their conversion to Judaism. Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation was central to the birth of the church and what it would become, and therefore central to our identity as Christians today. We now regard this example of breaking tradition as scripture!
The revelation Peter received wasn’t just a new interpretation of an old way of being; it was literally rejecting something that had been sacrosanct and endorsing something that had been forbidden! If this was possible, how could the church ever know for sure that they were following the right path? How could they be sure they were following God’s will, if God’s will could change with the next revelation to come along?
We still continue to struggle with these questions today. The debate over women’s ordination that raged in the 20th century in Protestant churches and of course continues today in the Roman Catholic Church, and the debate over same-sex marriage that has become the “hot button issue” of the 21st century, are just two obvious, high profile examples of the church wrestling with whether God can move us in a direction that “contradicts tradition” or “contradicts scripture,” but we can see this dynamic at play in any number of situations in the church, in issues large and small, any time we feel ourselves being called to move in a direction that somehow seems to be contrary to what is taught in the Bible or church tradition, and yet, we feel this call so strongly that we cannot deny that it is of God.
And although he valued the religious tradition of his birth and upheld it, Jesus himself also taught his followers that the action of God in this world is not always so easy to pin down. He compared the work of the Spirit to the wind. In John chapter 3, he answers Nicodemus’s inquiry about how to enter the kingdom of heaven by saying, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit moves where it will, and our job is to be still long enough to listen for it and hear where it is moving, and to acknowledge it wherever we find it, even if it contradicts everything we’ve always known.
After the believers in Jerusalem hear about Peter’s vision showing that all foods had been made clean and then his story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish followers of Jesus had, they acknowledge that it is possible that God is moving even in this unconventional way. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter asks, as he explains why he’s allowed Gentiles to join the community without keeping the Jewish law, and why he’s eaten with them despite their lack of adherence to the Jewish dietary laws. His listeners are silenced, for what satisfactory answer is there to that question? Who are we to hinder God? If God’s Spirit is behind something, good luck trying to stop it.
At another point in the book of Acts, the teacher Gamaliel, a wise elder on the Jewish council, defends the leaders of the church against calls for their execution by reasoning with his fellow councilmembers in this way:
“So in the present case,” Gamaliel says, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’” (Acts 5:38-39)
As we begin the work of discernment about the future this congregation over the next weeks and months to come, let me remind you again about the key role of LISTENING in discernment. We are being invited to “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” at St. Cuthbert’s and in this part of Oakland. Our job is to listen for where God is already at work in the world around us, and to join in, to become his partners in creation, in bringing forth that “new thing” in our midst. Our job is to be open to the Spirit’s promptings and to follow them wherever they lead – even if they lead us to break tradition! Even if they lead us to do things that might contradict what we always thought we knew, or what we always thought we wanted for this church and for this community. Because no matter how noble and compassionate our ideas are, no matter how exciting or fun or promising they might seem, and no matter how much effort we put in to fulfilling them, they will never come to fruition if they are not in line with where God’s Spirit is already moving in the world. We can’t FORCE something to happen of our own will if it is not already of God.
So as we discern together, we must continue to ask ourselves “is this plan or this undertaking of human origin, or is it of God?” And we must be willing to accept the answer we receive, for if it is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, we will not be able to stop it, because who are we to hinder God?
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