Easter 5, May 6, 2007
Acts 11: 1-18
When I was a kid my family went to St. Anne’s church in Woodstock, a little crossroads north of Memphis. I guess I was about ten when they built a whole new church building on some donated land and moved the little congregation to Millington. One of the things I remember about that change was that the pews from the old building were given to a little church out in the country that didn’t have any pews. I was surprised that a church could be so poor that it had to wait for some other church to move or decide to buy new pews before they could have any. That was an important bit of learning for me, but it wasn’t the most memorable lesson that came out of giving away our pews. What really caught my attention and stuck with me over the years was when my father told me that the people in that little church shouted and sometimes fell on the floor during their church services.
At first, I thought he was putting me on, which he did fairly often, but I finally believed him. It wasn’t long before I began to notice other references to people worshipping in strange ways. Oh I already knew that Catholics got more days off school than I did, and when I’d realized that, I had been caught between envy and wondering if the extra days were worth having to wear the white shirt and tie that those boys had to wear. I knew a kid whose family was kind of Christian, but who were against celebrating Christmas. I just felt sorry for that kid. I think I even knew a couple of Jews, but this new idea of people shouting, raising their hands, and falling on the floor kind of threw me. It seemed so.....undignified.
I mean if you think about it, no one worries about looking undignified the way a ten...eleven year old kid can. I had just hit the age where a kid begins to discover that propriety can equal invisibility. It is one thing to act out when you’re around your closest friends, or when no one’s looking, but sometimes, like when you’re in a room full of adults on Sunday morning, you just want to blend in. Heck sometimes you want to disappear. So shouting and falling on the floor and getting caught up in the Spirit--which was why, I had been told, those people did such things--seemed way outside the pale to me. That and, Oh yes, I was an Episcopalian. I knew Episcopalians didn’t fall on the floor...didn’t act funny because God got inside them.....such things were just not done.
I remembered that little church that got our pews with a mix of wonder, amusement and caution. I never went there....didn’t have to go there, but it kind of made me nervous to know that Christianity went there. I knew we were talking about my religion just practiced in a different way with a little different emphasis. My religion would forever be stained in my thinking with the lurking possibility that it’s God caused people to do and see and feel strange things that were a mystery to them and the people around them.
I began to think about that little church again in the seventies when the charismatic movement began to catch on in the Episcopal Church...and the Catholic Church and other mainline churches. We began to hear about people in our own church doing and seeing and hearing strange things.....speaking in tongues, waving their hands, having visions. The charismatic movement met with many of the same feelings I had had at ten. To some it seemed exciting, exhilarating, but to the vast majority, it seemed strange....emotional...and .......undignified. The charismatic movement bumped up against the Episcopal in-church tradition of knowing how to act in church and acting that way. Getting carried away by the Spirit just didn’t seem proper somehow. Especially for Episcopalians.
The threat behind religious practice that gets carried away...that gives itself to religious fervor is that of a God who operates outside the rubrics of our Prayer Book. Our religious practices are written down......our liturgies shape our worship. The richness of the Episcopal Church’s worship is such that other traditions have been looking at us and studying what we do for years. Our worship is a wonderful gift inherited from generations of Christian who have gone before us. It has been guarded, protected and preserved for centuries. The very fact that it is written and repeated through the years, though, can lead us to forget that the God we worship operates outside the confines of our liturgy. Our liturgy is a window through which we see and experience and enter into the God who is mystery and love and wonder....all those uncageable attributes we assign to God. Maybe what I am trying to say is that we Episcopalians who tend to like our worship neat and tidy need to remember from time to time that God, especially in the workings of the Holy Spirit can be pretty messy. Today we hear the the God we worship in our well rehearsed lines and movements also speaks to individuals in visions. The God we approach with caution sometimes approaches us boldly and gets inside us....speaks to us...marks us.
It is easy for us to talk our religion in terms of ethics and social justice. The social Gospel movement took off in the late 1800s as doubts about God became more common. Whether God really existed or not, it was clear that Jesus teachings about helping the poor made sense, so those teachings were embraced with great passion. In the early nineties when science began to teach about the psyche and about the course and patterns of development, the Church’s teachings about growth in Christ seemed cut to order for the times. There is so much we can talk about that makes sense....that seems right--is right--and good, so much we can understand, that sometimes we never get around to remembering how much of our religion is about what we cannot understand.
We have stories today about Peter and John seeing visions. Peter has a breakthrough revelation about God’s love being for all people...even those we don’t understand. John sees the great throne room of heaven and more. He sees the realm of God stretching out into the future in a new way whose beginning is marked by the risen Christ. Visions....the voice of God.....revelations from heaven. How are we prepared to hear and see and sense these messages. How willing are we to hear the voice of God who might change our lives in ways we haven’t planned or expected. When we take the bread and wine and say that we are taking Jesus into ourselves do we expect this God in us to just sit there....to come along for the ride? Or do we invite God in thinking.....hoping maybe something will happen.....maybe something not to drastic or unseemly, but something?
Amen.
JMB