Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
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Found beer in seminary.

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Reputation

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a sermon on Luke 7:36-8:3 for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
preached on June 16, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Jesus had a bit of a reputation. He had started out as just another teacher wandering around Galilee to offer an interpretation of the scriptures, following in the footsteps of his cousin John the Baptist and proclaiming a new way of life for the people of Israel, but he had quickly moved on to start healing people from seemingly incurable illness and had even revived a man whom everyone else thought was dead.

As his reputation grew, one of the religious leaders decided to invite him over for dinner—even they had to take notice of him. As this Pharisee, a man named Simon, saw it, he was doing Jesus a favor, giving him a nice meal in a nice house, surrounding him with the right kind of people, offering him the audience he needed to get his words into the right ears. Of course, it didn’t hurt Simon to be seen with Jesus, either—the people had warmed to Jesus’ message and clamored for him to come into their villages to tell a parable or heal the sick, so anyone who could be seen as offering him hospitality would get an extra benefit! But when Jesus arrived at Simon’s house, he was ushered right into the dining room to sit down for dinner, almost as if the host was as anxious to have Jesus leave as he seemed to have him come. His reputation preceded him, after all.

As they settled in for dinner, an unexpected guest wandered into the house. Like Jesus, she had a bit of a reputation, too, but hers was very clear. Everyone in town knew that she was a sinner, though Luke does not tell us exactly what sin she was known for. As dinner went on, she made her way to the table where Jesus was and began to weep as she stood behind him. She collected her tears and began to wash his feet, then she dried them with her hair and anointed them with the ointment that she had brought along with her.

It was a scandalous moment. The most notorious woman in town, known as a sinner to seemingly everyone, was washing the feet of this special guest who claimed to be a teacher and a prophet. Simon the Pharisee and host was astounded, although he did not utter a word. Still, he was not happy that his house would be scandalized in this way, and he just wanted Jesus to see her for what she was, condemn her, and send her away.

But Jesus’ reputation was also very clear—he was just the kind of guy who would eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners. He could tell that his host did not want this sinner-woman crashing his party, but he would not be the one to send her away. So rather than confronting or engaging, Jesus asked his host the Pharisee about forgiving debts. If two men had both had their debts forgiven but one had debt ten times larger than the other, would both men show equal love for this generous act? Simon responded that the larger debt would inspire greater love, but then Jesus pointed out that this woman was just like that man. While Simon had offered Jesus nothing more than an invitation to dinner, this woman had made him feel welcome, washing his feet and showing him true hospitality. She was truly thankful for what Jesus was and offered him a deep and wondrous gift.

So Jesus lifted up this sinner-woman as a model of faithfulness to this pious religious-man, for she had shown Jesus great love and welcome in someone else’s house simply because he offered her a place to find the fullness of new life. Her sins were forgiven, and Jesus sent her on her way: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” She had a new reputation now.

Christians these days don’t have such a good reputation in dealing with those named as “sinners”—if anything, we usually are the ones calling the names, not the ones extending grace. In the world’s eyes, at least, we seem to be much more like Simon the Pharisee than Jesus: singling out groups for special hatred or lower status because of their gender, sexuality, life circumstance, or religious persuasion; complaining about our mistreatment as Christians mostly because we aren’t as dominant in society anymore or those of other faiths demand the treatment once reserved for us; claiming that God’s favor is upon us and us alone, to the exclusion of those who are different; and struggling to extend the grace that we have known to anyone other than ourselves. We seem to be far more about controlling our religion than about following Jesus.

But Jesus’ dinner at Simon’s house tells us that we should have a different kind of reputation—a reputation of welcome, generosity, and grace. As commentator Justo González puts it,

Even though Jesus is a religious teacher, his teaching is not about religion. It is not about how to be more religious. It is not about how to gain God’s acceptance. It is about a God whose acceptance of sinners the religious find jarring. It is about a God whose love cannot be bought even by great acts of praise or mighty deeds of justice. It is about sinners who rejoice at the great forgiveness they have received, [as opposed to] religious people who wish God were more religious [like them]—more amenable to being mollified by acts of worship, piety, and devotion… [Ultimately,] the sinful woman is able to receive and accept grace in a way that the religious Pharisee cannot. (Luke, p. 102)

So in this encounter with the woman, Jesus insists that our reputation needs to be different, that our life in the world must be marked with the amazing grace that we ourselves have come to know and love, that our actions toward others must demonstrate the same kind of welcome that Jesus himself offered to this woman and everyone he met, and that our generosity must be not about holding on to what we have or even perpetuating a faithful way of the past but rather about using our gifts to extend God’s welcome to anyone and everyone.This is ultimately our greatest call as people of faith: to show God’s love to those who seem all but unlovable, to extend God’s welcome even to those we would rather keep away, and to embody God’s priceless grace in a world where the focus is all too often on counting the cost. We should have a reputation for these things, for faith, hope, and love beyond measure, without cost, shared with anyone and everyone, a reputation for being like Jesus.

We don’t build this reputation by joining the church, putting a little extra in the offering plate, or even being honored or remembered in a gift made by others. Instead, this kind of reputation comes as we follow Jesus in our individual lives and in our common life. We can go with him to proclaim and bring the good news of the kingdom of God to people who are used to hearing nothing but bad news. We can tell others what we have seen, what we have heard, and what we have experienced as we have walked with Jesus along the way in hopes that they might join us on the journey too. We can offer strange and surprising acts of hospitality to those who come into our midst as this unnamed woman did with Jesus, setting aside our fears and trusting that God is somehow working among us beyond our understanding. And we can provide for the needs of this community and the whole witness of the household of God just as these faithful folks, named and unnamed here, did with Jesus. In these and countless other ways we can embody Jesus’ welcome of all people, show God’s love for all creation, and receive and pass on God’s amazing grace in the world.

So may we get a reputation of mercy, grace, and love because we offer God’s deep welcome to anyone and everyone in our life together, because we show our deepest care and concern for others, and because we join in God’s transformation of our world begun for all in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

A Widow’s Welcome

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a sermon on 1 Kings 17:8-16 for the 10th Sunday of Ordinary Time
preached on June 9, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Hospitality has always been one of the great marks of the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone. When I first came here eight years ago, I quickly learned how you make outsiders feel welcome. We have spent some time together over the years working to improve the welcome we offer to one another and our community, and by all the reports I hear, even adjusted for the inherent bias in many of them and the work we still have to do, we are still quite a welcoming church! Yet we can still be challenged by scripture readings like this one this morning that give us a glimpse into the power of hospitality.

In the midst of a drought, God had commanded Elijah to travel from Israel to a neighboring land and promised that a widow would feed him and take care of him. When Elijah arrived there, he saw a widow on the outskirts of town, collecting sticks for a fire, so he asked her for some water to quench his thirst at the end of a long journey. Before she could get completely out of earshot, he called out to her again: “I’m hungry too, so bring me some bread while you’re at it.” It was the kind of request that would seem somewhat normal under most circumstances—I’ve done it before, and I suspect you have too!—but here it was anything but normal.

Elijah’s request stopped her in her tracks. She clearly wanted to help him—she was willing to get him some water, after all—but this was more than she could offer. The breadbox was empty. The cupboard was bare. Her oil was almost gone. Water was hard enough to come by in the drought, but bread was just too much even for her, let alone a guest. She turned to him and explained her predicament: “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” Not only had Elijah asked for a gift out of her poverty—he had asked her to give him what would be her very last meal!

It was a strange moment of hospitality. Even though she couldn’t give him the bread he wanted, she offered her guest a strange bit of honesty about her situation and explained why she could not deepen her generosity. So Elijah shifted from being a demanding and exhausted traveler to a gentle and kind prophet. He directed her to set aside her fears and share a bit of meal with him, for God would provide for all of them: “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” If she would join him in a show of confidence for God’s presence, together they would witness a miracle.

Somehow, some way, they pulled it off—they, of course, being mostly God. Beginning with this simple act of a widow’s welcome, first offering the prophet a drink of water, then granting him her confidence and finally a place to stay, as she turned from her fear of not having enough to a new confidence that God would provide, they received everything that they needed to get through the challenges of the drought. And in the end, God offered this widow a lot more: when her son later became sick and died, God revived him amidst Elijah’s prayers, and she was all the more grateful for the prophet’s presence and gift to her amidst her hospitality.

Hospitality like what this widow showed to Elijah can be truly transformative even now. We don’t ever know when a simple act like offering someone a glass of water will bring us more than  a simple thank you. We don’t know who might show up and what might happen when we throw open the doors of the church and invite everyone in. And we don’t know what God has in store for us when we reach out in unexpected ways to the world around us. But ultimately this hospitality requires something of us. It certainly requires a little bit of work to get everything in place, to make sure that we can offer an extra measure of what we have to all who come our way, and to prepare a warm and welcoming space for those who will join us.

But it also requires us to listen to Elijah’s first words to the widow: “Do not be afraid.” True hospitality requires us to step outside of our comfort zone, to set aside our hopes and our fears about the other and the new, and to open ourselves to the change that inevitably comes when we stop being only who we have been. Most of all, it requires us to trust that God will provide—not so much that God will magically make things happen if we don’t try or extend our resources beyond what is reasonable but rather that God will turn what we think is nothing into something far beyond our imagination.

As the widow at Zarephath demonstrated when she offered Elijah a cup of water, God’s welcome is bound to surprise us. It will look different in every time and place, yet it extends to all people in unexpected ways, not because we expect something unusual to happen but because we trust that God works beyond our means and our understanding to extend our welcome beyond these walls. We make this welcome real every Sunday as we open our doors and give space for anyone and everyone to join us here, but the ultimate sign and seal of God’s welcome to us comes whenever we gather at this font. As we make our way here today to celebrate this sacrament and officially welcome Drew to the family of faith, we get the best possible glimpse of the strange and wonderful things that God can do in us and through us when we embody God’s grace and show God’s love.

So may the witness of this faithful widow inspire us as we extend God’s welcome to all who look for a stop on their spiritual journey, whether just for water or for something far more, as we walk together on the road of new life. Thanks be to God. Amen.

A New Song, for Us

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a sermon on Psalm 96
preached on June 2, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As a musician and music lover, I have long been fascinated by the gift of the psalms. Most of these ancient poems likely began as songs, though the original tunes have been lost for centuries and the lyricism and beauty of the Hebrew poetry doesn’t always translate well into other languages. But beyond this musical history, I’m also quite a fan of what the psalms have to say about music.

There are two wonderful recurring phrases about song in the psalms. First, there’s the great phrase “make a joyful noise to the Lord.” This one shows up in some form or another in four different psalms, but I especially appreciate the character of its exhortation. As I frequently point out to people who say that they can’t sing, the psalms do not say “sing a pretty song with a beautiful voice” to God but rather “make a joyful noise!” While I certainly appreciate beautiful music as much as the next person, when it comes to praising God, the thing that matters is not the beauty of the sound but the attitude that goes into it!

The second great phrase about music in the psalms is the one that opens our psalm for today: “Sing to the Lord a new song!” This one shows up in five different psalms, and commentator Robert Alter (The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary) notes that it is often intended to be the composer’s self-affirmation of his work, for if God is truly so great, God should be praised not with something from the usual repertoire, not with old familiar songs but rather with something fresh and new.

This second phrase is so very critical to our psalm today, as it sets the tone for all the praise that the psalmist wishes to offer God. Strangely enough, though, Robert Alter points out that much of what follows in Psalm 96 has actually been woven together from phrases and lines that appear elsewhere. Yet I think there is still something new amidst this conglomeration of tried and true phrases of praise to God that creates the wonderful and rich harmonies of a new song to give deep and true praise to the Lord.

First, this call to praise is for everyone.

Sing to the Lord, all the earth…
Declare [God’s] glory among the nations
[and God’s] marvelous works among all the peoples.

This praise cannot be limited or restricted by the standards of the world, and everyone should hear this invitation to praise God and raise their voices to proclaim a new song.

Beyond this call to praise for all humanity, the psalmist suggests a deeper meaning of the greatness of God. God is not just great because of some inherent greatness but because “the Lord made the heavens” and all other gods are nothing more than idols.
The psalmist acknowledges that we don’t have an automatic inner sense that there is some sort of divine presence in our world, and God’s greatness cannot be assumed as true for everyone simply because we know it. Instead, we see the depth and breadth of God’s amazing love through the wonders of creation and all the other marks of God’s greatness that the psalm describes. So with our eyes opened to the wonder of God’s glory, we can begin to ascribe glory and strength to God rather than to our own accomplishment.

But ultimately the psalmist makes it clear that this new song requires our own words and acts of praise and thanksgiving. The psalmist gives us some surprising images of what this might look like. The heavens will be glad, and the earth itself will rejoice. The sea will roar, and all that fills it will join in. The field will cry out, and everything in it will rise up with praise. And even all the trees of the forest will sing for joy. Our opening hymn today (“Earth and All Stars”) gave us some more modern images of the things that might sing a new song to the Lord: not just “earth and all stars” but also “steel and machines… limestone and beams,” “classrooms and labs, loud boiling test tubes,” even “knowledge and truth, loud sounding wisdom” should cry out with a new song.

Joining all the elements of creation, new and old, using these songs as our model, we are called to sing a new song of praise for our own time and place, echoing the rejoicing of the past while offering our own new song that speaks to our own experience of God’s wonder in our world and the real joy that we find from God. It picks up on the voices of the centuries to share a new word for this time and place. It approaches the strangeness and wonder of our changing times with honesty and hope. And it gives others a space to join in and offer their own words of praise.

This call to sing a new song rings more loudly in my ears than usual today. After worship this morning, following some snacks and birthday celebrations, we will hear a report from our congregational consultant Bill Weisenbach. After three months of research into our neighborhood, conversations with us, and prayerful consideration, Bill will tell us a bit about what he has learned. I’ll leave the major points to him, but I will go ahead and tell you that after reading his report and talking about it with Bill and the Session, I am more convinced than ever that we must heed the psalmist’s call to sing a new song in our life together here. Now I’m not at all suggesting that the solution to all our ills will come with a change in the music for our worship—in fact, I’m pretty confident that our music and style of worship is the least of our problems! When I say that we must sing a new song, I mean that I am deeply convinced that we must find a new way to live out and give voice to the life we share in this place that is sustainable for the long term and has meaning in 2013 and beyond. We need a new song for this new time.

Like Psalm 96, the new song for the days ahead will certainly lift up pieces of what we have sung before. We do many things well in our life together, and we can find much inspiration for our new song in the practices that we already share, in our Reformed and Presbyterian heritage, in our broad and deep Christian roots, and in our universal life of faith. Yet our new song also must speak to these new times, to the declining resources in our midst, to our changing and increasingly diverse neighborhood where Protestantism is rare, to our own aging congregation, to all the challenges of life in 2013 that pull all of us in so many different directions, and most of all to the reality that people simply don’t think about religion and faith and spirituality in the same way that they did 142 years ago when this congregation first gathered to sing a new song to the Lord.

This new song will likely not be a single magic solution, a simple song sung in unison—like so much good music, it will have different parts, with some taking the lead and others adding rich harmonies to make it all the more beautiful. But learning a new song is not easy. As I’ve started singing in a choir regularly again over the past year, I’ve been reminded of how much time goes into preparing for a performance—and even into getting ready for the rehearsals! There will be a lot of steps involved in finding and learning this new song, and as you’ll hear later, I’m grateful that Bill and the Session both are committed to the process along the way. There will be some interesting explorations to help us find the right song to sing, some clashing chords and wrong notes as we learn it, and some challenging rehearsals as we work together to make it beautiful and sing it well. Even so, I am confident that this new song for us can be just as faithful if not more as the one that we know so well—and that we can find it and sing it more beautifully than we ever imagined.

So over the coming days I ask you to think about your new song. What new song of praise will you sing in the days ahead? What does our new song for this congregation need to look and sound like? What can you offer to this new song as we prepare to find it and start singing it together?

As we go into the days ahead, may God open our hearts and minds to the new song emerging among us, may God guide us as we learn its words and explore its new harmonies, and may God strengthen our voices for these new ways of praise as we journey through the days ahead until we sing a new song to the Lord forever and ever. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Path of Wisdom

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a sermon on Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 for Trinity Sunday
preached on May 26, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Wisdom seems to be a fading gift in our world. In recent years, the volume of knowledge around us has increased exponentially, and we can now quickly Google whatever we want to know from the palm of our hands and have the answer in a matter of moments, no matter where we are.

Yet with all this new information at our fingertips, our ability to process all this knowledge has not increased at quite the same speed. I for one think this is related to the great dearth of wisdom in our world. We just haven’t honed our abilities to sort out all the information that comes our way. Every day, we find new and different options for handling a particular situation and bringing about change, yet we seem to resist it more than ever before, perhaps in large part because we can’t quite process how life might be different if we were think about it differently. Even though there are plenty more people who carry plenty more knowledge around with them, the share of people who possess the wisdom to figure out what to do with that knowledge has not increased quite so quickly.

And yet we hear from Proverbs today:

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?

This voice of Woman Wisdom cries out from the hills, shouts from the crossroads, and clamors at the gates of the city for all people to heed her voice. This is good news in these days. We need someone stepping up and crying out, offering us a word of warning and hope when are overwhelmed with uncertain messages. We need a new way through the challenges of today. We need wisdom now more than ever before, so it is good to see her stepping up to offer her voice amidst the crowd.

Woman Wisdom then turns to establish her credentials for this kind of incredible action in the world. She doesn’t seem to exactly and directly be God, but it is clear that she is inseparable from God, perhaps embodying and living out an important part of how God interacts with the world or helping us to connect our lives with God’s ways. She has been around since the very beginning, created by God “at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.”

Before all the other stuff came along, before everything that makes life complicated started getting in the way, even before creation began and things started coming together, Wisdom was there. Wisdom was there, waiting for the moment to raise her voice, watching for all the things going on in the world, taking it all in so that she could gain understanding to share with us. As everything took shape and God gave the world its form, Wisdom was there, “beside him, like a master worker,” learning about the world and preparing to share her guidance and understanding as the journey continued. She took delight in what God was doing and rejoiced in the depth and breadth and true wonder of all creation.

But where is she now? Where is Wisdom when we are so overwhelmed with information that we have no idea what to do with it all? Where is Wisdom amidst all the pain and sorrow in our world? Just this week we heard of incredible destruction and loss of life after a tornado in Oklahoma, a violent and gruesome murder in broad daylight on the streets of London designed to bring the terror of war closer to home, and the rise of violence against gay men on the streets of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All this strange news threatens us with what some have termed “compassion fatigue,” for the more we know about the pain and sorrow in our world, the less that we feel we can do about it. Amidst all this, Wisdom seems to be far, far away, silently watching from the wings, not close at hand, not giving us guidance and wisdom for how to live in these strange times.

Yet if we listen closely, I think we can hear Wisdom crying out in these days. If she has been around since the beginning, Wisdom has seen it all before and can help us sort out what to do. If she has been a part of the creation of everything, Wisdom can give us new insight into how we can work to renew and restore it. If she walks and works beside God, Wisdom can help us join in the things that God is doing to transform our creation.

While it is always a comfort to learn that we are not alone as we try to sort out how to live in this world, this is nonetheless a challenging word for us. If we take Wisdom seriously here, we must let go of our search for truth and knowledge and instead take up the path of wisdom. This path of wisdom steps back from the sensationalism of our world, turning off a news cycle that makes everything “breaking news” and chatters incessantly about nothingness rather than recognizing that silence might be the best response to tragedy or that we may have to a wait a bit before we know the real and true consequences of this moment.

This path of wisdom leads us to encounter people right where they are, listening carefully to their stories, sharing their suffering, and acting with them to bring change to their lives and our world. This path of wisdom shows us that knowledge is not everything but rather than knowledge invites us to a new way of life rooted and grounded in wisdom to sustain us and support us and upbuild all of creation. And this path of wisdom gives us opportunities to cry out with Wisdom’s voice “on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads…, at the entrance of the portals,” to invite others to join us in this way that points to deep peace in our lives and in our world as we set aside the path of anxiety and take up the road of hope.

Wisdom challenges us to put our knowledge and experience together in context so that we can share a new and different way of life and living with our world, not bound by any the expectations of the past or the institutions of the present but unbound to imagine a new and different way, to discern what God is doing and open ourselves to the creative possibilities of God’s voice of wisdom here and now. Ultimately, Wisdom is one of the great gifts of the triune God we celebrate today, a gift that comes from all three persons, initiated by our Divine Parent, lived out in our world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and fulfilled in power and glory again and again in our lives and in our world by the power of the Holy Spirit. So Wisdom invites us to join in deep and great rejoicing, celebrating the depth and breadth of what God has created, delighting in the wonder of the whole world which God has redeemed, and giving thanks and praise to the one source of all good things, of all wisdom, which sustains every day.

So may wisdom’s path unfold before us, showing us the fullness of God’s gifts, opening us to the abundance of God’s grace, and helping us to rejoice anew in the gifts of our Triune God, now and always. Alleluia! Amen.

Scrambled

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a sermon on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21 for Pentecost
preached on May 19, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It was quite an accomplishment, really—all the people of the world coming together, working to show off their best architectural and engineering skills, coordinating their labors in new ways to build a great city centered around a single monument, to “make a name for” themselves. As the bricks were made out of mud, as the stones were laid upon stones, the accomplishment became clear—humans could do anything they wanted to do if they put their minds to it. Divine limits meant nothing. The result was stunning—a great city, with a tower reaching high into the sky, showing off the greatest possibilities of human coordination and consultation, making it clear that humans could do anything and God didn’t have to get involved.

But then a slightly jealous God took a closer look at what was going on. The people shared common roots and a common language, and there were few limits on their communication and relationships. God saw this city under construction, the great tower as a monument to human possibility and ingenuity, and most of all their pride at what they had accomplished. God was not happy:

This is only the beginning of what they will do;
nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

So God took action to preserve God’s role in the order of things. God scrambled their words and confused their language, forcing them to scatter from the city and abandon their great work of human ingenuity and creativity. So the people called the place Babel, a nonsense word signifying confusion and misunderstanding even to this day, for in this place everything that they understood about themselves and one another was scrambled once and for all.

In a world where our human accomplishment goes far beyond the wonder of Babel, where communication even across language barriers is nearly immediate, where we build towers reaching 1776 feet into the sky, where human pride for the world we have created for ourselves reaches far beyond the bounds of a small city in Mesopotamia, the scrambled world of Babel seems deeply distant from our experience. But when we look a little more closely, we know that the scrambledness of Babel is still very much with us. Even though we may be able to talk with those who use a different language, the cultural differences among different peoples still make it difficult to really understand one another. Even though we may be able to build skyscrapers that tower over this vertical city of ours, we can’t manage to relate to one another without resorting to violence and animosity. Even though we may be more mobile than ever before, more communicative than ever before, more a global village than we ever could have imagined, we don’t always recognize the byproducts of our accomplishment in the climate change and overpopulation that ultimately threaten our very existence as the human race.

Now I don’t imagine God looking down at us in quite the same way as we hear in this story of Babel. The sort of direct divine interaction described in this reading from Genesis just hasn’t been sustained over the course of the Bible, let alone in the days since. But I do suspect that there is nonetheless some divine disappointment with the way we have managed to unscramble ourselves since the days of Babel and yet scramble things up all the more.

Amidst all our best attempts to unscramble things for ourselves, the ultimate unscrambling of Babel came by the power of the Holy Spirit on a strange morning in Jerusalem fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus. That first Pentecost day, as the disciples of Jesus gathered to pray, a strange rushing wind blew over them, and divided tongues rested on them, then they began to speak in other languages—just in time to talk about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus with Jews from all around the world who had gathered in Jerusalem for a festival. It was a strange sight—uneducated country folk from Galilee speaking the languages of the nations of the world, sharing a strange story about a teacher who had been condemned for blasphemy, insisting that God was doing amazing new things to unscramble the mess that humanity had made of the world.

Some people seriously wondered what it was all about, but others just assumed that the disciples were drunk. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, though! Peter, for one, insisted that this strange event was God’s unscrambling finally at work, that God was pouring out the Spirit upon all flesh, to bring prophesies, visions, and dreams into the light, to draw attention to God’s presence and work, and to bring people back together in understanding and hope. In a moment when the disciples still didn’t quite understand life without Jesus, when things felt very much scrambled and the future still uncertain, God stepped in to unscramble it all in ways beyond their wildest dreams.

The gift of Pentecost today is that we too can experience God’s gift of understanding that unscrambles our world and our lives. While the languages that have historically divided us can be bridged both through technology and understanding; while the cultural differences that make it difficult to live and work with people who come from different backgrounds can be overcome through careful listening, respectful action, and openness to new ways of thinking and being; while even our great insistence upon the depth and breadth of our human accomplishment can be tempered by new recognition of our limitations and the need to care for the full breadth of creation; we ultimately need the Holy Spirit to step in and act if we are truly to be unscrambled. We need God’s transformative Spirit in our midst to show us how to live together in peace and harmony. We need God’s powerful Spirit to overcome our insistence on our own well-being at the expense of others. And we need God’s renewing Spirit to help us through all the moments of transition that come as we are unscrambled into the new creation that God intends for us.

So on this Pentecost Sunday, as we wait and watch and pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon us, as we look for signs of maybe a little less power but no less spirit as on that first Pentecost, as we look for renewal and rebirth in our lives and in our church, may we see the scrambled mess of our lives and our world more clearly, may we set aside all that keeps us from God’s presence and all that encourages us to think that we are responsible for the gifts surrounding us, and may the Holy Spirit step into our midst to unscramble us anew, now and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.