Consumer or provider? Pentecost 2 Yr A

Are you simply a consumer of God’s love or are you also a provider of God’s love?

Priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor encourages us to be both. She says that, if we think coming to church once a week is our only responsibility as beloved children of God, we’re wrong. She says we must do more than come to church. She says, we must take the Church into the world.

I agree.

God wants our worship to strengthen us to be the eyes and ears, the hands and feet of God in this world. God, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t want us to come here and worship, say our prayers, offer our thanksgivings, throw some money in the collection plate, great one another in God’s name and then go out into the world, eyes and ears closed, hands and feet idle to the work God needs done. God, I think, wants us to be Providers of God’s Love.

The Holy Spirit makes us Providers of God’s Love, the Spirit is what makes us doe-ers of God’s work in the world, providers of Good, rather than mere recipients. And, while the Holy Spirit gets ignited through our worship, that flame will flicker out if we don’t tend to it outside these walls.

This teaching—that we, through the Spirit, through the strength and hope gained through worship, are to be providers of God’s love in the world, not just consumers, is evident throughout our scripture and within our tradition.

In the Gospel, Jesus tells us that everyone should be treated as if they are a child of God. Because they are. No matter what we think of them, no matter what they’ve done, they are a child of God. Treat everyone as if they’re Jesus. Treat everyone as God’s beloved. Because everyone is. By doing this, we become more than consumers, we become providers of God’s Love.

Much of St. Paul’s writings, including his letter to the Romans, address the conflict between our selfish desires (generally, different manifestations of power) and the basic rights of every human being : dignity, peace and justice. Paul wants us to overcome our individual desire and address the universal needs of the world. Does this mean we can’t have nice things and do things for our own pleasure? Absolutely not. What it means is we can’t do those things IN PLACE of caring for our fellow human beings.

Putting aside our own wants to ensure that everyone receives what they need, is being a Provider of God’s Love, not just a consumer.

As Jeremiah points out in today’s reading from Hebrew scripture, prophets who prophesy about warfare and famine, about pestilence and terror are not of God. “God sent” prophets speak of peace, not war, of dignity not humiliation, of abundance not famine. Seeking peace, demanding dignity and trusting in God-given abundance is being a Provider of God’s love, not just a consumer.

Being a provider of God’s Love means standing up for those who are unable to stand up for themselves. We do this locally and specifically through the food pantry, Friends of the Night People, the school-supply and book drives, the Elam Jewett Café, the pet food pantry, Compass House and all our outreach efforts. We reach out to help those who can’t help themselves because that is doing God’s work in the world. That’s being a Provider and not just a Consumer of God’s love.

We also do it more globally and generally, like when we donate to Episcopal Relief and Development or Habitat for Humanity.

These good works are very necessary and extremely useful and I’m proud that we do them. However, being a Provider of God’s Love demands, at times, even more from us. Our faith requires that we feed the poor, clothe the naked and house the homeless, but it also insists that when we hear of wrongdoing we speak up and we speak out. Sometimes being Providers of God’s Love means telling others that their behavior is unacceptable, that their actions are abhorrent and that we won’t stand idly by while they disrespect the dignity of another human being. The Holocaust, The Rwandan genocide, the attacks of September 11—these were all times when faithful people the world over stood up and said, as Providers of God’s Love in this world: stop, this is wrong and we will not tolerate it!

Today, is the United Nations Day in Support of Victims of Torture. A day when, as stated by UN General Sec’y Kofi Annan, “we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable” It is a day on which we remember that we are more than consumer’s of God’s Love, we are Providers.

Torture, unfortunately, isn’t a distant issue.

We have many refugees in Buffalo. People who fled their homelands after being tortured because of their religious beliefs, their political views, their sexual orientation, their gender or their ethnicity. And, as we’ve learned in the past few years, our own military and CIA may have employed torture to extract confessions from people labeled as enemy combatants.

Torture, done by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, is wrong. And we, as Christians, we, as lovers of God, must not be passive in the shadow of such injustice. As the Providers of God’s Love in the world, we must say --to anyone who disrespects the dignity of another being—whether in acts of neglect and inequality or in acts of genocide and intolerance ---“stop! In the name of God, stop this behavior. I, as a lover of God and a recipient of God’s grace will not stand for this.”

By doing that, by speaking up and reaching out, we are using the strength gained through worship to do God’s work in the world. We are taking the grace given to us and spreading it throughout the world, just as God has asked us to do. That, brothers and sisters, is being a Provider of God’s Love, not just a Consumer.

Amen.

Day of Pentecost 12 June 2011

Happy Pentecost!

You went shopping, right? Have you decorated your Pentecost tree? Oh wait, that’s Christmas isn’t it? Hmmm…ok….well how much candy did you get in your basket? Lot’s of jellybeans? You do have the perfect bonnet to wear, don’t you? Oh….right….that’s Easter isn’t it?

Pentecost isn’t a big Hallmark Day. Besides church nerds like me, Pentecost doesn’t get a lot of press. Which makes sense…I mean……tongues of fire? C’mon……we like more accessible symbols: a manger birth, a star in the East, mysterious magi traversing the countryside. We’re attracted to the drama and emotion of betrayal, suffering, death, and finally, the miracle of an empty tomb.

Pentecost? On Pentecost we get a gust of wind. And those tongues of fire.

But, everything we hold dear and celebrate fully—-Christmas, Good Friday, Easter--leads to this Day. The birth of God in the flesh, the manifestation of Jesus’ Christ-identity, the crucifixion and descent into death, the defeat of that death through resurrection, Jesus walking among us in resurrected glory, his Ascension ….all of this leads to today, when we’re given the final instrument of faith: The Holy Spirit.

But just what is this Holy Spirit? The ghost of Jesus the man? Some type of ethereal being, poised between this world and the next, a bridge transmitting our petitions to the other side, communicating God’s commands back to us? Or a fantasy conjured up by disappointed and confused followers of Jesus, people who, not unlike people today, feel unsure… uncertain about just what comes next, about what to do and how to behave. Unsure and uncertain about this faith we so boldly proclaim.

Just who or what is this Holy Spirit?

Well, it’s not easily described. I know it’s not as simple as gusts of wind or as bizarre as tongues of fire. I know that, while it can move with the subtlety of a summer breeze, it can also rage with the ferocity of a spring storm. Although it can smolder as slowly as the embers of a lingering campfire it may, just as easily, spark into a full-fledged blaze, consuming every fiber of our being with its power.

It isn’t God in the flesh like Jesus….The Holy Spirit isn’t that tangible—we can’t touch it, or see it or taste it….but, deep within us, we can feel it. Feel it filling us, consuming, enveloping, connecting and sustaining us.

The Holy Spirit is what works in and through us when things go well… [when the Strawberry Festival is over and the last table is put away and we look around and say: now that was a great day. Or when we try something new, like vesting a bunch of kids and putting them up at the altar on Easter morning, of all days, and it works beautifully. Or when you and your team at work get a project in on time and done well….]

The Holy Spirit is also what works in and through us when things aren’t going so well… when, faced with challenges beyond our imagining, we somehow, somewhere, find the strength to move through it with grace and courage. And when people remark, “I don’t know how you did it,” and you just smile, knowing that the truth is, you don’t know either, you just did.

That’s the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is with us. Forever. Just as Jesus promised in the 14th chapter of John’s Gospel: I will ask God and God will give you another advocate to be with you forever…and this Spirit will abide with you and be in you. (paraphrase of John 14: 15-17)

That’s all fine and good, right? But how do we know when it’s the Holy Spirit acting up and not just our own deluded selves---we don’t get tongues of fire, we don’t get gusts of wind. We need to discern the presence, the movement, the action of the Spirit in our lives both as individuals and as a community of faith.

Discerning is challenging. Discernment is, according to Jesuit scholar John Carroll Futrell: “sifting through our interior and exterior experiences to determine their origin.” Discernment, he goes on to say, helps us to see if an action we’re taking is moving us away from or closer to God. Discernment helps us determine if this is of the spirit or not.

But discernment of the Spirit takes guts… because, to fully engage in a discernment process, we must be willing to fail, to make mistakes, to engage in actions that feel risky and uncertain. In short, discerning the action of the spirit in our lives means living like Jesus wants us to live. You see, the Holy Spirit doesn’t come to us in one fell swoop, like we hear in our reading from Acts. No, the Spirit is activated within, between and among us as we engage in the main task Jesus has left for us: loving one another. Completely. Totally. Everyone. No exceptions.

The Holy Spirit is here right now…. but to ignite it’s fire, to catch the wave of wind with which she blows through us and among us, we must do the work we have been given to do, as individual followers of Jesus and as communities of faith, as congregations, as a diocese, a church universal. What is the Spirit telling you? What is the Spirit telling us?

Our job, from the longest tenured parishioner to our newest member, (Kendal who will be baptized into our family in a few moments) is to discern our call, to respond to that tug, to that demand, to that burning which is the Spirit calling out to us, saying Pay Attention! Notice this! Do something about this!

The spirit implores us to live as Christ lived. And that, my friends, is risky. But, and here’s the Good News, the Spirit, while demanding our attention and our action, is also supporting and sustaining us as we do the work of Christ in the world.

By doing that, by taking risks and doing the right thing, the spirit thing, we give the Holy Spirit the space to move, to grow, to spread.

So Happy Pentecost! Enjoy your gift of the Spirit. May it burn within you, within us, igniting the distinct communities of faith in Parkside and in Allentown working within us, among us, between us and around us, blowing aside doubt, pushing away fear and enveloping us in the energy needed to do all that we’ve been given to do. Alleluia. +