Bishop's Column
Posted Friday, June 01, 2007
On Being a Truly Pentecostal Church
June 2007
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Acts 1:8)
When their houses burn down, most people immediately think of rebuilding them just as they were. Not the evangelist Luke, author of both the gospel that bears his name and the Acts.
It is true that, when in 70 C.E. the Roman Army burned Jerusalem and slaughtered some 6,000 of its inhabitants, many fled to Jamnia in the north, where as a survival tactic they endeavored in literalist fashion to nail down the exact wording of their scriptures, and others escaped to Masada, where they signed a suicide pact to take up arms to fight the Romans to the death, Luke’s counsel, by contrast, was to “stay in the city” (Luke 24:49).
But you are to stay in the city, Luke insisted, not to replicate its past, but to be “clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49) when on Pentecost you “receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” – meaning Rome, itself (Acts 1:8). Luke alone among the evangelists has Jesus ascend from somewhere, not to fashion for us celestial habitations, but that we might find him everywhere across the inhabited earth. Luke would not have us nailed down in one place.
Nor would he have us stuck in one period of time. Alone among the evangelists, he has the angels in the tomb on Easter tell the frightened women, “Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again” And, Luke adds, “They remembered” (Luke 24:6-7). Because times change, and yesterday and today are different, yet causally connected, it is critical to “remember.”
What connects all times and seasons, and all places, with one another, Luke contends, is the Holy Spirit. He sides with Eastern Orthodox Christians, who hold to the original reading of the Nicene Creed (“We believe in the Holy Spirit… who proceeds from the Father”), in contrast to that of Western Christians, who add the filioque clause (filioque meaning “and [from] the son” in Latin), amending the original (“We believe in the Holy Spirit… who proceeds from the Father and the Son”). Architecturally, he would prefer the all-encompassing inverted-saucer-shaped dome of an Orthodox church to the singular pointedness of a Western church’s spire. For him, the Spirit’s reach is broad, if not boundless.
Luke wants to flatten, horizonilize, historicize, contemporize, and universalize our underatanding of the work of the Spirit. The same forgiving, healing, and empowering Spirit that was at work in Jesus of Nazareth was at work before him in Abraham and Moses and Isaiah, and after him, in Peter and Stephen and Paul and Barnabas. And – here is his important point – it is now at work in you and me wherever we are, be it Philadelphia or Chester or Bryn Mawr or Solebury or far further afield.
Luke was thus the first catholic theologian – from kata holos, Greek for “according to the whole.” He was also the first ecumenical theologican – from oikeumene, Greek for “the whole inhabited earth.” As we read Luke’s gospel in the upcoming summer Sundays after Pentecost, let us do so through a catholic and ecumnical lens. Let us be alert to the ways in which the Spirit, working in and through not only us, but also others – Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddists, and, yes, even indifferent secularists, professed atheists, confused agnostics – is fashioning a catholic and ecumenical reality for our world.
The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner is famous for reminding us that there are in the world what he called “anonymous Christians” – people who, he wrote, “live in the state of Christ’s grace through faith, love, and hope, and yet who have no explicit knowledge of the fract that their lives are oriented in grace-given salvation to Jesus Christ.” Aware that this notion itself can lead to a sense of Christian superiority, Rahner liked to tell the story about how once in the Far East for a lecture he was introduced as an “anonymous Buddhist.”
This summer let us be far more interested in the health of the world than of the church. As David Sheppard, the charismatic Bishop of Liverpool, thinking-spacially, urged, we should point our cameras not at church, but at the world, if we want to see God. And what with insouciant summer upon us, let’s relax and, in the words of Oscar Romero, the martyred Archbishop of El Salvador, take the long view temporally, too:
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals or objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about;
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promises.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning;
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen