Pentecost – The Prequel
Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon
for May 11, 2008
Read: Numbers 11:24-30
Praise for the wisdom of the good mother. She knows when to hold her children close, and when to set them free. For her spirit lives in the rhythm of the great Spirit, which is God.
Mother’s Day invites us to reflect upon our relationship with our mother – or indeed our connection with our parents, for this is also called Christian Family Sunday in many of the churches. Dads are important, too. In worship today we pray for healthy families held together by the strong leading of God’s Spirit.
But in turn that means we aspire to a maturity of spirit that fosters the health of our families. For family life presents us with paradoxes. It is, for instance, within the family that we may experience moments of the most intense intimacy and acceptance, but also times of the most aching isolation and rejection. How may we live with that paradox, how stay connected with our kin while still developing as a authentic and independent soul?
Our Christian tradition, which grows out of the Way of Jesus, can help train in us an attitude that copes with paradox. Life in Christian community can teach us to perceive the world as both black and white and to accept it, not by insisting that everything is grey, but by allowing that reality is black and white and black and white.
After all, many of our Christian symbols are paradoxical. For example, in baptism, as we shall celebrate it shortly this morning, we pour out waters that represent God’s grace. But remembering that most people in the ancient near East could not swim, baptism into the River Jordan always had the symbolic meaning of going down into death; yet the church developed baptism as a signal of life in Christ. So which is it – death or life? Both. “You must be born again”.
That is an example of how the practices that constitute being a disciple of Jesus engender in us a capacity to tolerate paradox – to live with it, to live through the conflicts it engenders, to trust that working through these dilemmas eventually will bring us to a fuller existence. We should keep in mind that line from Joni Mitchell’s song, Both Sides Now – “I’ve looked at life from both sides now...”
Here is another example of how life in Christian community presses us to learn to live with “both sides now”. Today is not only Mother’s Day and a baptism Sunday but also Pentecost Sunday, when we mark the gift to the Spirit of God to the Church, indeed the formation of the Church around that Spirit. We cannot function as the gathered people of God unless the Spirit is at work among us. But her work always carries the sweet and sour of paradox. God’s Spirit is always pushing out beyond the limits, always transgressing the barriers we place around her, always exploding out of the static forms we devise for her into new and vital blessings. And yet there is always a need to interpret the new things that happen and use them to create some new order in our lives – and before long that new order turns into rules, and routines, and structures, and finally – committees!
That’s what today’s Bible text from the book of Numbers reveals to us. The Israelite people, freed from their slavery in Egypt but now wandering in the trackless wastes of the Sinai wilderness, were understandably grumpy. Moses found them a difficult lot to lead. So God granted his request for other leaders to help him. The divine Spirit which had to that point rested entirely upon Moses was spread out onto seventy elders chosen from among the people. Now two of those leaders happened not to be gathered in the Tent of meeting with the others when that Spirit fell, but they too participated in it. They too were caught up in the same ecstatic trances as the others and able to interpret God’s leadership to the people.
This worried Moses’ second-in-command, Joshua. He viewed the eruption of God’s Spirit within Eldad and Medad back in the camp as a threat to Moses’s authority. He begged Moses to silence the two men. But Moses chided Joshua and said: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”
There you see the Spirit expanding, breaking free, and yet also needing to take some kind of form and express itself as a kind of authority. So which is it – wild or ordered? Both. The trick is to understand the balance between energy and order. Moses got the balance right.
In that respect this story from the book of Numbers is like a prequel to the Pentecost experience of the first followers of Jesus. The early Church had to wrestle with the same tension. Is the Spirit of God to be trusted only when it appears to work through properly authorized and officially recognized people in the Church – or may we find it sometimes erupting outside the limits? Which is it – disciplined or eruptive? Both.
We see the tension even within the ministry of Jesus himself. On the one hand, he was radically open to the presence of God wherever one might find it. There’s a famous encounter between Jesus and a Roman Centurion, who asked Jesus to heal his child. The man’s faith caused Jesus to praise his openness to God – and he was a Gentile, and “outsider”.
Matthew 8: 10 When Jesus heard [the Centurion], he was amazed and said to those who followed him, "Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.
He recognized God’s Spirit at work outside the limits. Yet on the other hand Jesus understood the need for order, indeed discipline, in the Spirit-based movement he was starting. When he sent his followers out to carry on his ministry he laid upon them a rigorous set of rules to follow:
Mark 6:7 He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts.
Jesus was trying to reorganize our human life around humility, not social status, focussed on faithfulness to God rather than one’s reputation. That required the energy of the Spirit to be focussed and pointed and strongly disciplined.
In any circumstance in which the Spirit of God is at work there will be this tension between energy and order. The trick is to find a balance. Moses got it right. Jesus got it right.
And by immersing ourselves in the practices of God-focussed life, following the Way of Moses and Jesus, we can get it right, in our families. We can tolerate the paradoxes of the home. Indeed we can flourish through embracing them. For example, the relationship of teenagers and their parents is thoroughly paradoxical. Teenagers push the boundaries all the time. But they also need a foundation of security, an embrace into which they can return when wounded by the sharp edges of the life they are beginning to explore. As every mother discovers, the trick is knowing when to hold them, when to let them go.
Yes, praise for the wisdom of the good mother, and the good father. Praise for the balance they strive to achieve, for our sake, between permission and constraint. Praise for the work of God’s Spirit between them and us.