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| Balancing Passion and Wisdom |
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(Please email questions or responses) May 23, 2010 Genesis 11: 1-11; Acts : 2: 1-21 More light, more truth, are breaking from your word. More light, more truth, Holy Spirit, help us hear what needs to be heard. Amen. The people you have seen before you this morning – our graduates, our teachers – have already provided most of the sermon today simply by what they have done. How we live, after all, is really more powerful than all the words we speak. So the words I speak this morning will be relatively brief, but I hope they offer you a way of thinking about this feast of Pentecost that might have some meaning in this contentious era in which we live. Think first of that story of the people trying to build a tower up to God. At one level, they were trying to show how smart and powerful they were. At another level, they were trying to find a shortcut to the divine. And at still another level, they thought it was all up to them, that God’s love and grace simply were not enough to get them where they wanted to be. The result was chaos. They found they could no longer understand one another. Their big project screeched to a halt. Their dreams tumbled back to earth. Now fast-forward to the story of those followers of Jesus, all gathered together in Jerusalem after Jesus had left them, trying to figure just what to do next. They were not at all sure about how smart and powerful they were. They had already encountered the divine in their lives. And they understood that they needed God’s Spirit if they were going to get anywhere. Their lives had been changed irrevocably by their encounter with Jesus. As long as he was with them, they could stumble along and he would help them find the way. Now they were on their own and they were terrified on so many levels. The same people who had Jesus killed very possibly wanted to eliminate his followers as well. They knew how often when they talked with Jesus, they showed how feeble their understanding was of what he was teaching them. How could they possibly go out and tell others this message when they were pretty sure they would garble it? And then God’s Spirit blew through their midst, energizing them like they had never felt energized before. The story tells of tongues of fire coming down on them, but it might just as well have been bursts of fire underneath them, propelling them out of their chairs, out of the room, into the world with all its dangers. They went out the doors and into the complexity of the city with its wild mix of people from all over the Middle East. The Spirit had ignited their passion and now they could not wait to tell those they encountered about the message of Jesus. They would start caring for those in need, resisting governmental and religious powers that sought to oppress them, they would sing songs and break bread. It was the kind of passion that can change lives and change the world. But passion alone was not enough. When these Spirit-filled followers of Jesus burst out the door, they also needed wisdom. If the Spirit can build fires under us, the Spirit is also a font of wisdom, a font whose depths we can never totally absorb. So here we are, people who have a chance both to experience the passion, the excitement of being followers of Jesus and people in need of wisdom as we try to understand what that means. When passion overruns wisdom, we can wind up with Crusades, with witch trials, with the forced conversion of the native tribes who inhabited our land. When passion overruns wisdom, we can overrun those who disagree with us, casting them as mortal foes. This can happen among Christians just as easily as across faith lines. You know the issues that spark bitter contention – abortion, immigration, war – and you know how passionately people defend their views as the will of God. You know the acrimony in public debate, where not only the ideas are challenged, but the moral integrity of those who hold ideas that differ from our own. It is almost like we are at the tower of Babel, so sure we are on our way up to heaven that we lose our ability to understand what anyone else is saying. Consider for just a moment the landscape of cable television news. This past week, Campbell Brown announced that she was leaving CNN because there was not much of a market for a prime-time news show that tried to adhere to basic journalism. She was averaging just under 600,000 viewers in an evening, while Keith Olberman offering a liberal take on the news on MSNBC was getting a million viewers and Bill O’Reilly offering a conservative take on FOX News was averaging 3.3 million. Pentecost offers such a wonderful alternative image to both the tower of Babel and that fractured political landscape. Here people were attentive to the Spirit who filled them with passion yet whose wisdom allowed all to understand each other. In this scene, people were not only speaking; they also were listening. Last weekend, Ellen and I had the opportunity to be at our daughter’s college graduation at the University of Missouri. One of the honorary degree recipients was a woman who grew up in Wisconsin, Eugenie Carol Scott. She now heads the National Center for Science Education, which advocates for an approach to science that respects hard-earned knowledge, not simply statements of dogma. Among her bits of wisdom for the grads – “Trust your brain. Ask questions when people make claims that sound fishy to you and perhaps even more importantly, when you agree with them.” And there was another bit of wisdom – “Use your heart too.” You need passion and you need wisdom, she told the grads. So as we burst out the doors today, perhaps filled with a renewed sense of God’s Spirit in our lives, let us also carry with us that quest for wisdom. When we are sure we are right, somewhere in corner of our brains, let these words bubble up – “But I could be wrong.” Ask questions not only of those we disagree with, but of ourselves. Listen, even when at first we don’t think we could possibly understand the words of the other. Living in Pentecost is far better than living in Babel. And remember, as we saw with our grads and our teachers here this morning, what we learn, what we know, what we believe is important. But what makes a difference is how we live, how we act, how we reflect God’s Spirit as we go out into the messiness and complexity of our world. May that Spirit be with us to give us passion and to give us wisdom. Amen. |