Sermon: "The Danger of Fire"

The Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
May 11, 2008

Pentecost Sunday

The Danger of Fire

Acts 2:1-21

Scripture text:      Acts 2:1-21 is read in English, with interruptions in 5 other languages (German, Spanish, Greek, French, and Polish) – first all together and overlapping, in chaos, and then gradually understanding each other.

Prayer:   Holy One, we ask that you come with power into our gathering: send your Spirit among us and renew our faith and strength; rekindle in each soul the great fire of love that burns in your passionate and compassionate heart.  Help us to hear your voice speaking to us today, and give us the courage to respond with lives of joyful and faithful service, in the name of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

 

Thank you, readers, for making that first Pentecost come alive for us today.  It was amazing, wasn’t it, how even if we couldn’t understand most (or maybe any) of the foreign words they were speaking, we could catch the gist of what they were trying to say – the spirit of meaning shines through any language, somehow.  It doesn’t always work though, right?  Mike Anastas was teasing me last week when I was asking for readers who spoke foreign languages and he said, “Doesn’t Charlene McNiff speak Southern?”  I wanted to say [in a Southern accent], “There are several of us, Mike, who speak Southern, but it needs no translation!”  But then I remembered one time when my dear, sweet little Southern mother nearly started a fist-fight at a New York deli – because people were so irritated by how long it was taking her to understand the Brooklyn accent of the man behind the counter. Poor guy was just trying to get her to pick her condiments!

Any time we open our mouths to speak, we take that risk, don’t we – that we will be misunderstood?  We take the risk we’ll be judged.  We take the risk of hurting someone’s feelings or stepping on someone’s toes.  That makes preachers (like politicians) big risk-takers.  Making and keeping peace is hard, even on a day-to-day basis.  But just think about what those ancient peoples were up against.  Bill did such a good job of reading off that long list of countries in Acts – Mesopotamia, Phrygia and Pamphylia – but we have to realize that those were more than Bible names to the people in that Pentecost crowd.  These were historic enemies of the Jews, what the Hebrew Scriptures refer to most of the time in one negative, unclean lump as “the nations.”  They were enemies.  What an astonishing thing that they were suddenly getting along!  It was a miracle.

And we need miracles like that today. Because the real problem we have with language isn’t a United Nations-level translation issue.  Our differences run much deeper than language – they’re about race and class and culture and history.  It’s hard just to speak to one another kindly and be understood in our own homes and churches and places of work, much less at high-level peace talks.  It can be dangerous to even try, so as the cartoon on my office wall says, the last thing we want to talk about in church is politics … or religion!  We fear that the fire of conflict that might get unleashed could be hard to stop.  We have to be brave to speak the truth in love to one another. 

My husband John and I were very nervous when our dads met for the first time.  John’s dad is a Southwestern Hispanic Ronald Reagan/George Bush Republican and mine is a Southern Anglo-American Jimmy Carter Democrat.  And of course, they BOTH really like to shoot off their mouths about politics, so we really weren’t looking forward to our first meal together.  So I decided to take my worries to my wise grandmother, who was then only 90, and ask for her advice.  And she, like so many wise elders before her, didn’t give me advice – she told me a story instead.  It was one her own mother had told her, one about when her mother’s father and her father’s father had to meet for the first time. 

It seems that her mother’s father, Grandpa Alexander, had fought for the North in the Civil War and Grandpa Bryant had fought for the South, which wasn’t all that unusual in Kentucky.  Still, the young couple was worried.  But family legend has it that the two men took off together for the side porch and they hit it off so well, the women had a hard time getting them to the table for dinner.  They became fast friends from the instant of their meeting.  Never would speak a word about the war to anyone else, but it was hard to separate them once they started talking to each other.  Well, it was the same for my father and my father-in-law.  They both were in the Navy during World War II, and it turns out growing up in speaking Spanish in New Mexico during the Great Depression is not so different from growing up speaking English in Appalachia during the Great Depression!  These days my dad spends more time on the phone to John’s dad than John or I do.

So what can we learn about all this – from the early church, or from our own experiences?  The first step in containing the fire of potential conflict is to look for our common ground – and in church, that common ground is Jesus Christ himself.  Jesus calls us to sit at table with our enemies, to call them not just friends but family, and to love and to forgive in radical ways unheard of in the world ever before, or ever since.  It’s a dangerous thing to do, when you stop to think about it.  It’s especially dangerous when you think not only about how we might be able to change the minds of our opponents, but about how we ourselves might be changed in the process.

Ethics professor Michael Mendiola of Pacific School of Religion (my old seminary in California) once said that true repentance arises from what he calls “dangerous listening.” All Christians, he believes, (not just preachers) are called to take the risk of practicing this “dangerous listening.”  When it happens, when people take the risk of really listening, it’s amazing – like the miracle of Pentecost.  Speaking in tongues isn’t anything special – just switch channels on TV talk shows if you want to hear people screaming all kinds of opposing messages all at once!  The real miracle comes when all those tongues flare up and divide and yet speak in such a way that those of different perspectives actually start to listen and to understand each other.  It’s rare, and it’s beautiful, but it happens and I’ve lived to see it.

I saw it happen at two churches during our “Open & Affirming” processes.  Even though there were a few who (like here, I assume) continued to differ with the majority on affirming gay and lesbian Christians, they were able to speak their truth in love and remain a part of the Body of Christ.  I saw it happen at our 2005 United Church of Christ General Synod, which was profoundly conflicted over the question of whether or not to affirm “Equal Marriage Rights for All.”  I was working with my dad in the pressroom for United Church News and shared with him the assignment of attending all the hearings on the topic, which was the most hotly contested of all the others.  And I was amazed at how well those meetings were facilitated.  Every one of those Synod hearings began with prayer and song and Bible study – and it was real, 30-40 minute Bible study, not the kind of quick devotions we have sometimes at church when we’re hurrying to get on with the business of the meeting.  Each one began with a review of the covenant ground rules for holding a difficult and “sacred conversation.”  And here’s what happened…

People did speak with love and with passion about their own viewpoints, but they trusted God to judge their opponents.  No one got into questioning the motives or the faithfulness of those who disagreed with them.  At the end, I drew the assignment of interviewing the ones on the “losing” side of the final vote, and what one of them said to me showed the humility I think we must have if we are to safely enter into “dangerous listening” with one another.  He said, “If I am wrong, may God have mercy upon my soul; and if you are wrong, may God have mercy upon yours.”  I was never prouder to be in the UCC than when we got to see the national media go away disappointed, because they couldn’t get any good footage of our church members screaming at each other like those TV talk show guests. When the Holy Spirit does its work, it is a profound miracle. 

How often do the people around you out there in “the real world” take the time to listen to someone different from themselves with truly open minds, believing and considering that they might actually be changed in the process?  And yet, that’s what we set out to do in church all the time – whether it’s listening to the preacher in the pulpit or sharing ideas with one another in Bible study or church meetings.  We know we might even offend someone and have to apologize and yet know we can come out again as friends, because we have this great practice in the church that we call “forgiveness.”  God’s “amazing grace” frees us to “speak the truth in love” to one another, and that allows us to live in a spiritual freedom the outside world never knows.

Let us have the courage to invite the prophetic fire of the Holy Spirit into our midst – as we plan to do next weekend as we enter into our “sacred conversation” about race – and let us treat one another with tenderness and care.  Let us be sure that before we open our mouths to speak we have stopped to listen to God’s voice first.   We might hear God’s “still speaking” voice in the silence of prayer, or in a flash of inspiration while reading scripture, or the newspaper, or watching TV.  Or it might even happen while we’re listening to someone else – someone with whom we thought we disagreed. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.