Spiritual, But Not Religious
May 27, 2007
Pentecost Sunday
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Romans 8:14-17; John 14:6-17, 25-27
Pentecost, the holy day that the Church celebrates today is the culmination of the Great 50 days of Easter. Most of us tend to think of Easter as a day, but the Easter season, on the church calendar, lasts for 50 days, ending with Pentecost. Pentecost is known as the birthday of the Church, and as the day that celebrates the Holy Spirit.
The feast of Pentecost is a holiday in the Jewish tradition, and it commemorates the giving of the Torah to the people at Mt. Sinai. Jewish tradition says that this holiday celebrates the giving of Torah, the books of the law, not the receiving of it, because as the sages point out, we are constantly in the process of receiving the Torah – we receive it every day. Even the word Torah, however, has many different meanings – sometimes it is understood as the Law, but it can be understood to mean all of Scripture. And so the reflection that we receive it every day is a lovely one – it affirms that we might understand Scripture differently as we grow in our relationship with God.
So that is the significance of the Jewish holiday, Pentecost, which is when the events happened that Christians remember in the Christian understanding of Pentecost, which is described in the second chapter of Acts.
The disciples were all gathered together. It was shortly after the resurrected Jesus had left them and returned to heaven. So the disciples had a profound sense of the absence of Jesus – although they had experienced the risen Christ, he had left, and they were again, alone. It was Pentecost, the Jewish holiday celebrating the gift of the Torah. Because it was an important holiday, observant Jews from all over the Middle East had gathered in Jerusalem to worship at the temple, much as they had come 50 days earlier for Passover. The Temple in Jerusalem wasn’t merely the local temple, it was The Temple, the temple built by Solomon, and then rebuilt after the Babylonian exile. And during this holy festival, while the disciples were gathered together, there was a sound like a mighty wind, and they saw something like tongues of fire on each person there, and the disciples began speaking in different languages, and rushed out into the street in the power of the Holy Spirit. The people who encountered them understood them, even though they spoke different languages. Peter called the crowd together, explained that they were filled with the power of the Spirit, and told about their experiences of Jesus. And, the Bible tells us that 3,000 came to faith that day. So we call it the birthday of the Church and the festival of the Holy Spirit because as the Holy Spirit came upon the small band of disciples, others could see the power of the Living God in them, and the church began to grow.
And so, because of this story, there is a certain muddiness to our understanding of the Holy Spirit – muddiness that is complicated by various Pentecostal churches, i.e. churches that center their practice of faith around similarly dramatic affirmations of the presence of the Holy Spirit. So sometimes even Presbyterians wonder if the Holy Spirit is supposed to be, well – flashier than what we tend to experience. Shouldn’t the Holy Spirit be shown by people speaking in tongues, or by the presence of miraculous events such as healings? And yet, why do we expect this, if we consider what Jesus and Paul had to say about the Holy Spirit in the texts we read this morning? Because what Jesus and Paul describe is not a miracle-laden, special effects kind of experience. What they describe instead is the Spirit than can ground all other experience.
What both Jesus and Paul are describing is primarily relational – and this makes perfect sense as we think about the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is quite simply how we describe our own experience of God – if God the Creator is the source of all life, the Holy One who is beyond all explanations, and if Jesus is the one who revealed God to us by being among us both fully God and fully human, then the Holy Spirit is our own present experience of God. One description I heard was: God the Creator is God-for-us, because ultimately, God is that force that animates all that is, and that tends toward us, and does so benevolently. God seeks our good. God loves us. Jesus came among us as one of us, to reveal God’s love for us. And the Holy Spirit is our continuing experience of that love and presence, assuring us that we are indeed surrounded by God’s love and care. Or, as Paul’s text describes the relationship: we are adopted by God. God chooses to be in relationship with us. God beckons us into a relationship so intimate, it is as if God had given birth to us. And the Holy Spirit – God in us – assures us of God’s love and care in our lives. But sometimes our fear of intimacy, our skepticism about anything that we can’t understand, and especially our own self-doubt create blocks to our sense of the presence of God. And no wonder we have these doubts and fears, because for most of Christian history the church has been telling people how bad they are, what sinners they are – although that certainly wasn’t the focus of the revelation of Jesus.
Remember, Jesus is fully God, and fully human – in Jesus, we finally see what being fully human looks like – we see a human who is secure in his own sense of self, who is fully grounded in God’s love and not afraid of God, a man who nonetheless spends time in prayer – which is how we can most effectively ground ourselves in that love also. But we tend to think of prayer as saying prayers rather than doing prayer – a few verses after the passage from Romans that Bob read, Paul writes: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” Or as Eugene Peterson translates this passage in The Message version: Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good. The Spirit in us, which tells us that we are God’s children, also prays through us – we don’t have to come up with words, God’s very breath prays through us! We just need to be present to it, to still our busy lives enough so that our hearts can hear the love. This is why I talk with you so often about contemplative prayer—because it is placing ourselves in a space where we can be grounded in God’s love for us. And my own experience of contemplative prayer is not of hearing any particular message by the way – often my time in silent prayer is a restless and impatient time, but I find that I am different in the rest of the day. I feel nourished. And when I am so nourished, the circumstances I find myself in do not determine the deepest reality of my life – God’s love tells me who I am, and whose I am.
St. Augustine, who wrote to God, “Our hearts are restless til they rest in Thee,” described God as the Lover, Jesus as the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit as the Love itself. Paul is telling us that this Love itself is within us, drawing us to its source, if we take the time to be present to it.
Many people in our time describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious”. They understand the yearning that we all feel for that centeredness, that grounding, that nourishment that our souls need. And yet, people can see so clearly that the Church has not always been good at helping people to hear the deep Truth that is God. The word religion comes from the Latin religere, which means to bind. And at its best, religion draws us closer to one another and to God. But all too often, people have experienced religion as binding and constricting, rather than putting us in touch with the deep spaciousness of God, that love that frees us to be who we are.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr speaks about the difference between a religion of requirements, and the knowing that comes from a contemplative spirituality, in this extended quote from a talk he gave at the Shalem Institute where I study spiritual direction.
“The saints say that the 1st half of life you fight the devil, developing self-control to pull yourself together as a morally superior person (which is always to project the evil elsewhere). In the second half you don't fight the devil, you fight God. You fight God for control, to believe that he could love you in your unworthiness, that worthiness is not the issue, that trust is the issue, that it's not a religion of requirements, as much as a religion of relationship, and it's relationship that we're afraid of, its relationship that we cannot trust, that relationship could be that good, or that substantial, or that true, or that faithful – that's what we're afraid to believe.
“So we jump back onto that pile of requirements because there we have some sense of control where even if we're wrong, at least we know – Because I want to know, I want to know where I stand rather than having to hang in that naked place of faith where I have to trust not my own goodness but his, not my faithfulness but God's.
“And this is what you always see in those holy fools, those people who've walked the journey. They're not concerned anymore with whether they're good, they know they're not. They have, as Pogo says, 'met the enemy and he is us.' And they're not wasting any time looking out there for the enemy; and they're always saying 'God is good'. 'I don't know if I've been faithful, but God is faithful. I don't know if I've been good, I don't even care – because if I am, as Joan of Arc said, it's because God has put me there.'
[So I will] let God define my goodness, let God decide my goodness, let God declare my goodness.”
And so we find ourselves at a place where the Jewish and Christian understandings of Pentecost come together, for as we listen for the Spirit, we will hear the deepest truths of Torah, God’s Word to us. Let God tell you about your own goodness, let yourself know God’s love, let the Spirit show you the Way, the Truth and the Life that is Love. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Romans 8:14-17; John 14:6-17, 25-27
Pentecost, the holy day that the Church celebrates today is the culmination of the Great 50 days of Easter. Most of us tend to think of Easter as a day, but the Easter season, on the church calendar, lasts for 50 days, ending with Pentecost. Pentecost is known as the birthday of the Church, and as the day that celebrates the Holy Spirit.
The feast of Pentecost is a holiday in the Jewish tradition, and it commemorates the giving of the Torah to the people at Mt. Sinai. Jewish tradition says that this holiday celebrates the giving of Torah, the books of the law, not the receiving of it, because as the sages point out, we are constantly in the process of receiving the Torah – we receive it every day. Even the word Torah, however, has many different meanings – sometimes it is understood as the Law, but it can be understood to mean all of Scripture. And so the reflection that we receive it every day is a lovely one – it affirms that we might understand Scripture differently as we grow in our relationship with God.
So that is the significance of the Jewish holiday, Pentecost, which is when the events happened that Christians remember in the Christian understanding of Pentecost, which is described in the second chapter of Acts.
The disciples were all gathered together. It was shortly after the resurrected Jesus had left them and returned to heaven. So the disciples had a profound sense of the absence of Jesus – although they had experienced the risen Christ, he had left, and they were again, alone. It was Pentecost, the Jewish holiday celebrating the gift of the Torah. Because it was an important holiday, observant Jews from all over the Middle East had gathered in Jerusalem to worship at the temple, much as they had come 50 days earlier for Passover. The Temple in Jerusalem wasn’t merely the local temple, it was The Temple, the temple built by Solomon, and then rebuilt after the Babylonian exile. And during this holy festival, while the disciples were gathered together, there was a sound like a mighty wind, and they saw something like tongues of fire on each person there, and the disciples began speaking in different languages, and rushed out into the street in the power of the Holy Spirit. The people who encountered them understood them, even though they spoke different languages. Peter called the crowd together, explained that they were filled with the power of the Spirit, and told about their experiences of Jesus. And, the Bible tells us that 3,000 came to faith that day. So we call it the birthday of the Church and the festival of the Holy Spirit because as the Holy Spirit came upon the small band of disciples, others could see the power of the Living God in them, and the church began to grow.
And so, because of this story, there is a certain muddiness to our understanding of the Holy Spirit – muddiness that is complicated by various Pentecostal churches, i.e. churches that center their practice of faith around similarly dramatic affirmations of the presence of the Holy Spirit. So sometimes even Presbyterians wonder if the Holy Spirit is supposed to be, well – flashier than what we tend to experience. Shouldn’t the Holy Spirit be shown by people speaking in tongues, or by the presence of miraculous events such as healings? And yet, why do we expect this, if we consider what Jesus and Paul had to say about the Holy Spirit in the texts we read this morning? Because what Jesus and Paul describe is not a miracle-laden, special effects kind of experience. What they describe instead is the Spirit than can ground all other experience.
What both Jesus and Paul are describing is primarily relational – and this makes perfect sense as we think about the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is quite simply how we describe our own experience of God – if God the Creator is the source of all life, the Holy One who is beyond all explanations, and if Jesus is the one who revealed God to us by being among us both fully God and fully human, then the Holy Spirit is our own present experience of God. One description I heard was: God the Creator is God-for-us, because ultimately, God is that force that animates all that is, and that tends toward us, and does so benevolently. God seeks our good. God loves us. Jesus came among us as one of us, to reveal God’s love for us. And the Holy Spirit is our continuing experience of that love and presence, assuring us that we are indeed surrounded by God’s love and care. Or, as Paul’s text describes the relationship: we are adopted by God. God chooses to be in relationship with us. God beckons us into a relationship so intimate, it is as if God had given birth to us. And the Holy Spirit – God in us – assures us of God’s love and care in our lives. But sometimes our fear of intimacy, our skepticism about anything that we can’t understand, and especially our own self-doubt create blocks to our sense of the presence of God. And no wonder we have these doubts and fears, because for most of Christian history the church has been telling people how bad they are, what sinners they are – although that certainly wasn’t the focus of the revelation of Jesus.
Remember, Jesus is fully God, and fully human – in Jesus, we finally see what being fully human looks like – we see a human who is secure in his own sense of self, who is fully grounded in God’s love and not afraid of God, a man who nonetheless spends time in prayer – which is how we can most effectively ground ourselves in that love also. But we tend to think of prayer as saying prayers rather than doing prayer – a few verses after the passage from Romans that Bob read, Paul writes: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” Or as Eugene Peterson translates this passage in The Message version: Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good. The Spirit in us, which tells us that we are God’s children, also prays through us – we don’t have to come up with words, God’s very breath prays through us! We just need to be present to it, to still our busy lives enough so that our hearts can hear the love. This is why I talk with you so often about contemplative prayer—because it is placing ourselves in a space where we can be grounded in God’s love for us. And my own experience of contemplative prayer is not of hearing any particular message by the way – often my time in silent prayer is a restless and impatient time, but I find that I am different in the rest of the day. I feel nourished. And when I am so nourished, the circumstances I find myself in do not determine the deepest reality of my life – God’s love tells me who I am, and whose I am.
St. Augustine, who wrote to God, “Our hearts are restless til they rest in Thee,” described God as the Lover, Jesus as the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit as the Love itself. Paul is telling us that this Love itself is within us, drawing us to its source, if we take the time to be present to it.
Many people in our time describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious”. They understand the yearning that we all feel for that centeredness, that grounding, that nourishment that our souls need. And yet, people can see so clearly that the Church has not always been good at helping people to hear the deep Truth that is God. The word religion comes from the Latin religere, which means to bind. And at its best, religion draws us closer to one another and to God. But all too often, people have experienced religion as binding and constricting, rather than putting us in touch with the deep spaciousness of God, that love that frees us to be who we are.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr speaks about the difference between a religion of requirements, and the knowing that comes from a contemplative spirituality, in this extended quote from a talk he gave at the Shalem Institute where I study spiritual direction.
“The saints say that the 1st half of life you fight the devil, developing self-control to pull yourself together as a morally superior person (which is always to project the evil elsewhere). In the second half you don't fight the devil, you fight God. You fight God for control, to believe that he could love you in your unworthiness, that worthiness is not the issue, that trust is the issue, that it's not a religion of requirements, as much as a religion of relationship, and it's relationship that we're afraid of, its relationship that we cannot trust, that relationship could be that good, or that substantial, or that true, or that faithful – that's what we're afraid to believe.
“So we jump back onto that pile of requirements because there we have some sense of control where even if we're wrong, at least we know – Because I want to know, I want to know where I stand rather than having to hang in that naked place of faith where I have to trust not my own goodness but his, not my faithfulness but God's.
“And this is what you always see in those holy fools, those people who've walked the journey. They're not concerned anymore with whether they're good, they know they're not. They have, as Pogo says, 'met the enemy and he is us.' And they're not wasting any time looking out there for the enemy; and they're always saying 'God is good'. 'I don't know if I've been faithful, but God is faithful. I don't know if I've been good, I don't even care – because if I am, as Joan of Arc said, it's because God has put me there.'
[So I will] let God define my goodness, let God decide my goodness, let God declare my goodness.”
And so we find ourselves at a place where the Jewish and Christian understandings of Pentecost come together, for as we listen for the Spirit, we will hear the deepest truths of Torah, God’s Word to us. Let God tell you about your own goodness, let yourself know God’s love, let the Spirit show you the Way, the Truth and the Life that is Love. Amen.