RCL Year C (Proper 12) - July 25, 2010

The Rev. Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Church - Cleveland, NC

RCL Year C (Proper 12) - July 25, 2010

Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19)
Luke 11:1-13

When was it when you first learned how to pray??…

I can remember one of the first prayers I ever learned…

“Now I lay me, down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…
If I should die, before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…
God Bless (and then I inserted everyone and everything from my next door neighbors to the cat)…. Amen!”

Now, I bet those of you that were paying attention to the readings this morning thought that I was going to tell you about “the Lord’s prayer” that Jesus taught his followers…

In due time… in due time…

Like you probably did, I learned the “Now I lay me” prayer at a very young age…

I may not have totally understood what I was doing, but I knew I was praying – and that something existed that was bigger than me, bigger than my mom and dad, or even bigger than my Pop (who was the biggest guy I knew at the time).

This was my first formational experience with prayer…

You probably can remember your parents or someone significant in your life teaching you how to pray in a very similar way…

The church teaches that prayer is “responding to God – with or without words”… So our prayers are the response to our recognition of God in our lives…

I can remember, one of the things that I learned many years ago in Sunday School about prayer… Some of you probably remember this too… It’s called ACTS A – C – T – S…

A stands for Adoration (or love of God)

C for Confession (or confessing to God – and release from the guilt of sin)

T for Thanksgiving (or giving thanks to God)

And S for Supplication (or prayers that we say on behalf of someone else)

We would put these letters on our fingers A C T S --- then the thumb was always pointing back at me… Then I was supposed to remember to pray for myself…
Today, we heard the lesson, from the Gospel according to Luke, of Jesus teaching his followers what we have come to know as “The Lord’s Prayer.”

One of them said “Lord, teach us to pray…” Teach us to pray!
They were reaching out for a deeper understanding of what it meant to pray to God.

They were asking Jesus, “Teach us that connection that you have to God… Teach us how to respond to God, with or without words!”

Jesus didn’t make them put letters on their fingers, nor did he sit patiently on the edge of their bed and have them kneel there night after night.

He didn’t go through all the resource books that he acquired in seminary and pull off the one off the shelf called “Prayer for Dummies…”

But very elegantly, like so many other things Jesus did, He took the opportunity to remind them that they already knew how to respond to God…

After all, most of his followers were faithful Jews, and they had been praying to God since they could talk.

But his disciples recognized a special connection between Jesus and God and they wanted in on that secret… They thought that he was doing something different from what they had learned as children…

So Jesus reminded them, “when you pray say: Father, hallowed be your name…”

Wow… what a sentence… Within one swoop, Jesus converts a menagerie of thought and images about God and who they thought God to be into very simple and direct language…

He calls God “Abba” or Father with a familiar intimacy – teaching them that God is approachable, but yet remains set apart from the ordinary (therefore holy or hallowed)…

Jesus’ teaching continues…

Your kingdom come – Calling for immediate order to the chaos here on earth this echoes Jesus’ announcement throughout the Gospels for the coming of the kingdom of God. This statement implies an urgency for this announcement, similar to the story we heard a couple of weeks ago where we heard that we are to proclaim to others that the kingdom of God has come near…

Give us or daily bread – the vital necessities that we need to sustain our bodies…
Bread back then, as it is today, the difference for some folks between living and starving to death. If we dig deeper into the original language of the Greek text, the word doesn’t necessarily mean “give,” but quite literally translated it means, “keep on giving.”
So this portion of the prayer in today’s language could actually mean “continue sustaining us, providing for our daily needs like you did for the Israelites in the wilderness, we fully rely on You – Our GOD – to do that for us.”

He goes on…

Forgive us our sins – Jesus knows that all human kind is sinful, and that we miss the mark from time to time when living out our daily lives. He reminds us in our prayers to acknowledge our wrongfulness and ask for relief from the burdens of sin that only God can give us.

and Do not bring us to the time of trial – ask God to keep us out of the trouble of temptation and own desires that bog us down…

Jesus uses the simple rhythm of what we know as “the Lord’s Prayer” to remind us how we should pray. How to connect to God and how to respond to God with or without words…

Many folks criticize the Episcopal Church for the multitude of written prayers that we have in our prayer book. Some of them say, you don’t know how to pray – you have them all written down for you… prayer needs to be spontaneous…

I don’t know about you, but when I am confronted with this, I say… “The book is great!
Sometimes I get so caught up in trying to express myself with words that the true expression gets lost in the search for proper articulation… I am very thankful that I have learned and read some of the beautiful expressions of prayer that have lasted over the centuries.”

But the only prayer I really need is the one our savior Jesus has taught to remind his disciples, it is for me the foundational reminder of how we are to respond to God with our lives… Of how we relate to God and how we depend on God for our needs, our forgiveness and direction”

Whether we learned “the Lord’s Prayer” from our parents or from the church… We still say it every Sunday…

It is foundational and takes a central position in our liturgy… It is the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to help them remember how they should respond to God…

I know some folks with dementia or a diminished mental capacity because of a stroke or some other problem that cannot remember how to form simple sentences in a discussion. But, they still remember how to pray the Lord’s prayer…

We respond to God with or without words in prayer… and when we use words, we don’t need a bunch of flowery ones to help us talk to Our Father in heaven…

It doesn’t matter what denomination the Christian claims, most all of us know “the Lord’s prayer,” It may have not been the first one that we learned, but for those that grew up in a Christian home, it was taught to us at a very young age…

And we all know it very well… Pray it with me…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven… Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory… For ever and ever… Amen!

RCL Year C (Proper 10) - July 11, 2010

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Church
Cleveland, NC

RCL Year C (Proper 10) - July 11, 2010

Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

I would venture to guess that most of you know what a “plumb-line” is? For those of you that don’t know, a plumb-line (or plumb-bob). It is a weight, usually with a pointed tip, that can be used as a vertical reference line. It has been in use for thousands of years, even before anyone knew anything about gravity. The way it works is: The builder or craftsman, would dangle the weighted string from up above, and use it as a reference to make sure that whatever they were building was in “plumb” or truly vertical.

I built houses for many years, so this imagery from the Old Testament lesson sort of jumped out at me. But, little did the prophet Amos know that the plumb line that God was setting in the midst of God’s people, was none other than Our Lord Jesus Christ. By the virtues and witness of Christ, are we all measured by God…

Our readings today, as familiar as they may seem to us, say something very profound about who and how we should be. The Lawyer (or Scribe) that questions Jesus about eternal life made a distinct choice to frame his question trying to trick Jesus…

He asked him a question related directly to the Mosaic law (of which he is considered an expert!). Jesus answers the question with a question and the Lawyer, who is the resident expert in the law, responds with the summary of the law…

“Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and strength… and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Then the Lawyer tries to backstroke, knowing that Jesus had outsmarted him, and “justifies” himself by asking Jesus to define neighbor. Jesus, as he does though-out his ministry, chooses to use a parable to explain things…

We know the parable well, probably because it is one of the first that we learn as a child in Sunday School… The parable of the Good Samaritan.

Jesus presents his parable story, but St. Luke doesn’t explain to the reader why some of the characters involved, did what they did… Maybe because the folks Jesus was talking to already understood the roles of the characters involved, and the predicaments that they were in. But today, if we don’t understand who these characters are, it becomes pretty easy to place a lot of blame on the two guys that made the choice to ignore the injured man.

We need to step back a second and look at examine the scene more closely… to dangle a plumb-bob in their midst and measure their actions. Looking at the parable this way allows us to gain some understanding about why the characters in Jesus’ parable did some of the things they did.

Let’s look first at the priest and the Levite… we can understand why it’s pretty easy to let these guys catch all the blame… They seems pretty arrogant as they trot by on the other side of the road.

But what we sometimes overlook is that the priest and Levite rank pretty high on the purity list. According to Mosaic law, they had to remain pure, that means that they were to avoid, at all cost, ANY contact with a naked body, especially one that was bleeding and was possibly dead or dying. So contact with the naked body of the injured man on the road was not an option for them. So they decided to remain pure rather then help the man… To remain pure – true to their office and maintain their religious purity according to mosaic law – and pass by on the other side of the road, to avoid any contact with the naked bleeding body. As far as they were concerned, they had no other choice…

The Samaritan, on the other hand, didn’t even rank on the purity list… they were despised by the Jews… This particular Samaritan was traveling back and forth on the road, from Jerusalem to Jericho and carried with him oil, and wine and what seemed to be considerable funds. Some of the Biblical scholars suggest that he was probably a trader.

And a trader of goods at that time was a despised profession, because they were thought to have gotten rich at the expense of others. But this Samaritan trader decides to stop… to stop, and to help the poor man that was injured, bleeding, and lying in the road…

Using the wares that he carries with him… He cleans, anoints, and dresses the injured man’s wounds… and goes beyond the call of duty, and loads him on his own donkey and takes him to an inn.

So we have Jesus’ parable told a group of listeners that understand the characters in the story and they also understand what a “predicament” Jesus presents to the Lawyer.

And although we learned this story as a child, we may not have seen it this way… On the surface, the story seems pretty simple… but Jesus gives the lawyer a clear reference point… a “plumb-line,” from which to measure…

He puts care for a fellow human being ahead of any of the “Mosaic purity laws”… And therefore explains the true sense of the law – “to love your neighbor” without the need of worrying about who your neighbor is…

It kind of makes us mad today, that the priest and the Levite ignored the injured man… But Jesus understood the folks he was talking to… He knew that the folks wouldn’t think anything of a priest or a Levite deciding to pass by on the other side of the road.

The people understood the role of the two men and why they did what they did, as they used the “plumb-line” of the law… Jesus even knew that the group would be completely “outraged” because he used the Samaritan in the story to show mercy to the man… and be the one who became the neighbor… to be the new standard by which to act…

In our lives, and our walk as Christians, we always feel as if we are measured by this or that… trying to figure out how “in-line” we are… But, if we focus on moving forward in our daily lives and use Christ as our plumb-line then we don’t need to worry about how the world measures us. We are doing exactly what Jesus wants us to do!

As we approach the holy table this morning, and receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ… It becomes for us our food for our journey through our Christian lives… As we receive it, we are reminded of our salvation, that we have through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ…

In response to our salvation, it is our responsibility to make decisions in our life guided by the Holy Spirit… It is our call from Jesus to Go Forth and Do Likewise.

RCL Year C (2 Pentecost) - June 6, 2010

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Church
Cleveland, NC

RCL Year C (Proper 5) - June 6, 2010

1 Kings 17:8-24
Psalm 146
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17

When you have faith, and trust, and are doing the will of God, there is NO doubt that BIG and wonderful things will happen!!! I wonder who here among us has witnessed what would be considered a miracle? I mean a real, bona-fide, honest to God, miracle?

Really? Some of you have never witnessed a miracle? Why not??? Miracles happen every day! Don’t they? If they do, why do we say that we haven’t ever seen one? What do we think miracles look like? What are we waiting for to happen??

Are we waiting for a “great prophet” to rise among us to declare “God’s Favor” towards us… if it happened, would be know what a “great prophet” would sound like?

I love the story of the old man, who when asked if he had ever witnessed a miracle, he said no… and then when they asked him how did he know, he said, “I’ll know one when I see one – it’s kind of like a duck – You know, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

How will we know? Do we need a flash of light, or a voice from heaven? Do we need to have the dead brought back to life right before our eyes – here this morning during a Sunday service? And if that happened, how would we deal with it?

Would we really know it when we see it? would we be better believers – would we then learn to engage our faith in a tangible way? Would we have taken off the blinders… the blinders of our own ideas and ideals of how things should be, enough to let the miracle be recognized?

We get so caught up sometimes in looking for something specific to happen, that we sometimes miss what is happening all around us… I think it’s because miracles are always surrounded by suspicion. So, in order for us to see them to happen, we must have faith and trust completely in God…

The widow in Zarephath that Elijah is sent to by God in our Old Testament story, is down to her last jar of meal and last jug of oil during a severe drought – she even makes the comment to Elijah that she is out collecting sticks to make a fire so that she can go home and prepare it for her and her son to eat it and die.

This sounds pretty tragic. Especially for this poor widow… who in that culture was a little less than a second class citizen… She had barely anything to live on, because she has no one to provide for her. And it sounds a little selfish and even far fetched to have Elijah ask her to make him something to eat.

But Elijah told her to trust… trust that the Lord God of Israel will provide for her… trust that the jar of meal and the jug of oil would not be emptied until the rains came down. And it happened just as Elijah said.

But like so many of us, the woman didn’t rejoice in the miracle, she may have not even recognized it, because her son got sick and died. And to make matters worse, she was quick to blame God through Elijah – but she was obviously feeling pretty guilty about the life she had led – blaming his death on her recognized sin. Elijah then took her son upstairs and laid him across the bed and prayed over him “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.”

Elisha prostrated himself over the boy three times and the child revived. The woman was finally then able to recognize the miracle, and acknowledge that Elijah spoke the prophetic truth. But is THAT what it takes for us to recognize a miracle? Would we know the prophetic truth if we heard it?

Jesus and the disciples went to a town called Nain and met up with a crowd that was obviously involved in a funeral procession. The body of a man was lifted up on a bier to be carried to his grave from the city. Then, Jesus encounters his mother who was a widow (who now had less than nothing because of the death of her son and no one now to protect her).

She was obviously upset, and Jesus had compassion for her. Jesus risked the social faux pas of speaking to an unprotected widow, and went up to her and told her not to weep. Then, Jesus messes up again, making himself ritually unclean, and touched the bier where the dead body was and told the young man to rise!

The young man rose and began to speak – and Jesus gave him to his mother! The scripture says that fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying “a great prophet has risen among us” and “God has looked favorably on his people” and they spread the word throughout Judea and the surrounding country.

We know that when we have faith, and trust, and when we do God’s will, BIG and Wonderful things happen… the blind see, the lame walk, and the dead rise! And things that were wrong are always restored to right.

In the lessons this morning, two widows loose their sons. Two widows, who are on the low rung of the social ladder, loose everything that protects them from societies ills. And in the blink of a miracle, both of these women have restored to them what they have lost. In compassion God reaches out to both of them and touches them and brings them to new life.

What would it take for us to recognize a miracle? Would it take us seeing the dead rise to new life… Would it take that which was wrong being restored to right?

Every time a baby is born, it is a miracle!

Every time a flower in springtime comes back and beautifies a garden, it’s a miracle!

Every time we get to the end of our rope but somehow make it through till another day, it’s a miracle!

Every time a person that is vexed by guilt and self-hate turns to the self affirmation found in Jesus Christ and is convinced that God loves him/her, it’s a miracle!

Every time a congregation that is on the edge of self-destruction because of prolonged conflict and polarization comes to a renewed commitment to the common life in the body of Christ, it’s a miracle!

Why is it that we always seem to look for the odd and unusual acts that defy the natural order before we consider them a miracle? These are pretty BIG and Wonderful things!! And by every standard that I can think of, these would all be considered miracles!!

I think that miracles happen to us and around us all the time, we just have to have faith and trust in God in order to recognize them…

We all have the opportunity today to participate in a great miracle, the miracle of the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. You probably won’t see a flash of light or a voice from heaven, but you will witness and participate in the miracle none the less… and in this miracle, we will feel Jesus’ presence with us, and his love and compassion surround us… and when we take in and feast on the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the sacrament, we are spiritually nourished and restored to new life. And ahhh, what a miracle it is...

RCL Year C (Trinity Sunday) - May 30, 2010

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Church
Cleveland, NC

RCL Year C (Trinity Sunday) - May 30, 2010

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8 or Canticle 2 or 13
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

It is probably not a surprise to any of you… but the word “trinity” never shows up in the bible. It’s just not there. Jesus never refers to God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as “the trinity.” However, in the celebration of the life of the church, and the calendar year today is “Trinity Sunday.”

This is the Sunday that scares most preachers to death, as they stumble about trying to explain what had been discerned by the early church and revealed to us in their teachings as the mystery of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

So how did the concept of the Holy Trinity (the triune God) end up with its prominent place in Church doctrine, if it doesn’t show up in the scriptures? I for one, don’t think that they sat around one day and just dreamed this stuff up. It took nearly 350 years of prayer and discernment, arguing and struggling to articulate their faith to one another in terms that they understood. Reasoning about how God had been revealed to them, and what it all meant.

So, in effect, if we look at it, the Holy Trinity is God’s revelation to the Church, it is how we perceive God… as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is our perception of a mysterious divine relationship of the ONE true and Holy God.

The graphical representation on the front of the bulletin, originated in medieval times, but it doesn’t do the trick of giving an explanation to the unexplainable. Because that’s what God is… To our limited feeble minds… God is the unexplainable, the incomprehensible, the divine mystery… But for some folks, that’s not good enough. They need to be able to explain the mystery – so it’s not a mystery anymore, but fact!

But every explanation that we could ever come up with, only leads us to further confusion and a deeper need to pray and reflect on the mystery. To me, I like to view the mystery of the trinity as a divine relationship. There are many images that come close to describing this relationship. Most of the best ones are from the early church, and they still speak to us today...

In the 16th Century, St. John of the Cross explained it, “God is the One who loves so completely that there must be a co-equal lover to God to receive that love; and the love between the two is so dynamic and powerful that it is the third person. God is Lover, Beloved and Love.”

But, for my favorite, and probably the most profound that I have ever heard, you have to go back real early… it is the way Tertullian describes it. Tertullian was an early Church father that lived between 160 and 220 a.d. He said, "God the Father is a deep root, the Son is the shoot that breaks forth into the world, and the Spirit is that which spreads beauty and fragrance."

Tertullian’s description is definitely one way that we can try to get our head around it, but it still comes up a bit short, because we are still trying to describe the indescribable – and explain the unexplainable.

There have been some that say: The Triune God is such a mystery, that any attempt to explain it would be heresy. But the trinity for us, the Church, in its complexity of divine mystery and all things unexplainable, becomes for us the lens through which we view the world. And if we let it, it puts things in perspective so we can build the bridges for ourselves off of what we know.

We know the person of Jesus Christ, who is the word that the prophets spoke, the word that become flesh and dwelt among us. Who lived and died as a human being, yet without sin. Who while he was on this earth, he taught and healed, preached justice and peace, and casted out demons and raised the dead. Jesus died on the cross as a perfect sacrifice of sin for the whole world, to open the way of access for us to have a relationship to God.

We know that the person of Jesus Christ taught about God, and referred to him as Abba, (Father) which is probably more like “Daddy” – a term of love and endearment, a term of deep compassion and respect, a term of admiration and equality. And we know that God, Abba, Father, created everything that is – and is the source of all being.

And We know that the person of Jesus Christ spoke of the Spirit of Truth that guides into all truth… the Sophia or wisdom… called the pneumas or Ruach – the mighty breath of God or a violent rushing wind (like we heard about last week when the disciples experienced the wind at the feast of Pentecost) that guides and sustains the Church into all truth.

So we know God, by how we have experienced God… We know God as the One God who created us, and we know God as the One God who redeemed us, and we know God as the One God who sustains us – and we refer to them in terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. and referring to God in those terms gives us the words that we can use to share that wonderful story – as one of divine relationship.

God is complete in God’s self as One God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit… And I hate to break it to you… But God doesn’t need us, God doesn’t need any one of us… It is us who so desperately need God. But even though God doesn’t need us, God loves us, his created image. He loves us so much, that he desires to have a relationship with us… He desires that relationship to the point that he became one of us so that he could invite us into himself = the divine relationship.

We may not be able to completely understand it, but we trust and strive to live into that relationship on a daily basis… And as we participate in that divine relationship, we invite others to participate with us… It is our purpose in this life, and it is how we find true communion and unity with God and with each other.

RCL Year C (Pentecost) - May 23, 2010

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Church
Cleveland, NC

RCL Year C (Pentecost) - May 23, 2010

Acts 2:1-21 or Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Romans 8:14-17 or Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, (25-27)

It is the custom at many churches on the Day of Pentecost to arrange for a simultaneous reading of one or the other of today’s Scripture lessons in multiple languages. Of course, this is dependant upon the different linguistic skills of the members of the parish community… Like today, for example, we heard Acts 2:1-7 read aloud in English, Spanish, French, Latin, and German…

While most of us trust our High School and college experience, sometimes communities are actually diverse enough to have folks who can read and speak the scripture in their native tongue… The idea of course is to remind everyone that today is the Day of Pentecost, When people “from every nation under heaven” heard the disciples proclaim the Good News “in the native language of each,”

The only problem with the idea is that the net effect is sometimes more one of Babel than of Pentecost. You remember the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis: the story of humankind’s pride in trying to reach the heavens on its own power and of God’s response which left the entire world tongue-tied.

Ever since then understanding and cooperation have been hard to come by. Our world today is still tongue-tied… What CAN be misunderstood WILL and usually IS misunderstood. But Babel, the parable of the first clash of cultures and failure to communicate, is more than a mythic explanation of the differences among nations and languages. It is an accurate description of the human condition itself…

We often do not understand one another even when we speak in the same language. We all remain obstructed by our fundamental inability to accept the differences among us in how we live and in what we think and even how and what we believe.

But is it really God who has scattered us? Is it God who has made us aliens in our own land and sometimes in our own minds? Is it really the Lord who has confused our speech and turned us deaf to each other? Or is our Babel today perhaps the result of how humanity forgot the grammar of grace and the vocabulary of God?

At Babel, the people in their pride built a tower to reach God and the heavens, and the Lord scattered them. “This is only the beginning of what they will do,” predicted God in the judgment of human sin and conceit. Sadly, the people didn’t understand how unnecessary it all was. As one scholar has pointed out, God is always more willing to come down and join us here on earth than we are able to reach the heavens by our own enterprise and effort.

At Pentecost, the Spirit of God comes down upon the disciples, resting on each of them and thereby bringing them, and us, all together once again. The disciples got a crash course in the language of God. It might probably be fair to say that after Pentecost the days of Babel should be over.

The great differences among us, in communication and dialogue, in culture, sexuality, race and background, in wealth and poverty, are scattered in “the rush of a violent wind.”
As Acts tells us, the differences are burned away by tongues of fire. It does not matter NOW whether we are the Parthians and Medes of yester year, or Americans, Europeans, Africans or even Iraqis of today. Well, that is what is supposed to have happened at Pentecost.

So, how come we still fail to understand each other today? Why doesn’t everyone speak the same language? Or at least understand the world in the same way? Is the promise of Pentecost hollow and without meaning? These are all good questions.

But what happened at Pentecost IS important to who we are as followers of Christ, and the reality of Pentecost is universal for everyone. When the disciples spoke, they didn’t just speak to believers but to the peoples of the whole known world, and when they spoke, they were understood in a multitude of languages.

There is no question that what they said made sense to everyone. What they spoke was no doubt the language of peace as they had learned it from our Lord Jesus Christ himself. “Peace be with you,” he said to the disciples, as we read in today’s Gospel lesson.

These are words that can be understood by everyone. this is even how, 99.95% of the world greets each other… They greet each other with an exchange of peace: Shalom, La Paz, La Pache. Specifically, in Hebrew culture, they greeted each other with Shalom, wishing the other person completeness in God.

Perhaps the greatest phenomenon of Pentecost is that all the peoples gathered at Jerusalem on that day heard the disciples - amid the buzz of the city and even the hustle and bustle of their own lives. Everyone heard them… and each person there understood the Good News of the salvation of Jesus Christ not only in Hebrew and Greek, which were the common languages of that time and place, but in the language of the human heart. The language of God… The language of the one true and universal peace and completeness.

Now (as it was then), all nations and peoples yearn to hear words of forgiveness and peace. But we live in a world that doesn’t like to listen. Too often we hear what we want to hear and simply call it the voice of God.

So if our lives and our world are more full of babble than Bible, perhaps it is because we are not taking the time to learn and discern or stop and listen. We have not learned the language of God given to us by the Holy Spirit. Yes - We pay lip service with a few words, and speak God-talk here and there and perhaps even say our prayers together as a family or even go to church on Sunday.

But it is not the vernacular of our everyday conversations. All this God-talk or language about God is only an approximation to the actual reality of God, because we know that our human language cannot fully comprehend the divine mysteries.

No one human being today owns the truth. No one owns God. No one owns the church – No one owns THIS church, nor can they put God in a box or even a book... God is so much more than we can comprehend…

But I promise you… the more we listen, the closer we come to God. And the closer we come to God, the more there is to hear and understand of “God’s deeds of power” and God’s great love for us. And then, just when we finally think we may have all this God business figured out, God surprises us yet again and challenges us to delve deeper to love those we cannot possibly love and to forgive what we would consider unforgivable.

Paul tells us from his First Letter to the Church in Corinth, “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord. And there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.”
The Spirit, even though it is one with the Father and the Son, can never be bottled or canned. The Spirit is at work in each of us, always fresh and always new, It is the language of God waiting to be translated into the language of our own lives.

It is only in the extent of the effort we make to accept the other, to welcome and embrace the stranger no matter how different or foreign. It is then and only then that we come to understand the language of God. Then and only then is our Babel turned to Pentecost.
As the Spirit used the speech of the disciples on Pentecost to reshape and redirect the lives of those who listened to their words, so the Spirit on this Day reshapes and remolds us… But ONLY if we are willing to listen.

After all, God speaks to us all the time in the one true word that ends fear and brings everlasting peace — the Word-Made-Flesh, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Portions of this sermon were inspired by The Rev. Dr. Frank Hegedus, a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.