John 14:15-27; Psalm 51:10-15
Pentecost/Confirmation Sunday May 19, 2013
In a Family Sunday sermon last
September, when this year’s confirmation class process was still getting
started, I made mention of a villain from the hit film The Hunger Games by the
name of Seneca Crane. This week, the Holy
Spirit inspired me to think faithfully about that sinister schemer’s even more
obviously evil boss, President Snow.
The setting for The Hunger Games is
a truly disturbing distant future vision of American society. President
Snow is the cold-hearted and consistently calculating tyrant of it all. He’s the
perfect antagonist to Katniss Everdeen’s rebellious and really tough protagonist,
and is played with truly chilling authority by the great Canadian character
actor Donald Sutherland.
One scene captures this sinful symbol
particularly well. It’s a conversation
he is having with his chief lackey. As
they discuss the rising threat to their repressive rule, President Snow says
this –
“Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is
dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as
it’s contained.” Seneca Crane, not quite catching Snow’s drift,
responds by saying, “So …” to which his boss promptly barks, “So, contain it!”
This scene points to real life in
our present world. It points to how
the power of sin alive in individuals and entrenched in human society is
threatened by the truly greater power of hope.
It points to how sin summons us to protect and participate in its always
oppressive power plays so as to contain us.
But by the grace of God, and the
fortitude of our faith, we know exactly how to guard our hearts and minds against
colluding with sin. By “we” I mean we who
have confirmed our belief in Jesus Christ, and who keep confirming and
proclaiming our Lord’s prevailing power against sin through our daily thoughts,
words and deeds. I mean we who keep
ardently turning away from sin’s
stubborn reach, who keep our focus on living forgiven and freed in the love of
Jesus Christ, and who therefore keep going into the world to stand up to any likes
of President Snow and Seneca Crane by faithfully shouting “Pah-pah-pow!” (confirmation
class inside joke).
What
good news it is that the hope God has given us through Jesus Christ cannot be
contained!
It’s honestly human to admit,
though, that it does get challenged. It
gets challenged when horrifying things happen in the world. It gets challenged when sorrowful realities
settle into our lives and the lives of our loved ones. It gets challenged when all sorts of reasons
cause us to slip into sinful despair and self-destruction.
As such challenges come to us all, we
will always do well to revisit today’s lesson from the Gospel of John. This
word proclaims the truth promised by Jesus before he was crucified, dead and
buried. This word proclaims the truth
fulfilled and fully revealed by our Risen Lord on the very first Pentecost. This word proclaims the truth that we have
been given a divine Advocate, the Holy Spirit.
Through this indwelling power, this person of
the Holy Trinity, we are constantly being helped to live faithfully and thus to
defend against making sinful choices.
The Spirit constantly inspires us to firmly belief our Lord is alive and
well and with us. It never stops
interpreting God’s eternal desire for love and harmony across humanity and
Creation. It only takes one spark of
the Holy Spirit to get a spiritual fire going and then soon all those around
start warming up to its glowing! As it
does, it restores, sustains, cleanses and renews the joy of salvation within
everyone who has faith to receive it.
The Spirit empowers and equips us
with all kinds of spiritual gifts. These
all help reveal God’s loving presence to our family members, friends,
neighbors, strangers, and everything on this planet. Coming
to mind this morning are a few particular gifts I’ve read about in these last
few weeks of the confirmation class --- intelligence that fuels our study of God
and all life; creativity expressed through music and other cultural arts; the
ability to be loyal, honorable, gracious and a good friend; the knack for
making people laugh and sharing holy stories in a not so serious way; the
capability to enjoy and to feel empowered through athletics; the capacity to
celebrate and participate in all God’s acts of kindness.
Yes,
what good news it is that the hope God has given us through Jesus Christ cannot
be contained!
However, let us honestly confess that
there are times when we choose to limit the Holy Spirit’s influence in our
lives. It is always present, always actively
advocating for our right relationship with God and neighbor, but we often just aren’t
paying attention. We get so focused on
our particular trees that we fail to see the strong wind always blowing through
the forest. We get to feeling so
hopelessly awash in the chaotic sea of sin that we fail to see the safe
structure God has provided for us and the dove delivering the olive branch of
peace. We get so snowed under by
self-focus, we don’t notice the warming, transforming touch of God’s healing,
guiding love.
So what do we need to do in order to
stay more fully focused on the intercessions of our Advocate? To be spiritually strengthened as the Body of
our Risen Lord in this wounded and wounding world? We discussed this all throughout our
confirmation class. A good concluding summary
helpful to all of us is this -- we need to protect
our time with God, practice our faith,
and pray without ceasing.
In our final confirmation lesson, we
watched a video about how very important it is to make a habit of setting up
times and places where we can quiet our hearts and minds and really pay
attention to how the Holy Spirit is guiding us.
This is not something life ever stops for, so we need to be sure to stop
for it. We need to protect this
precious time of spiritual formation.
There are so many others things we protect the time for throughout our
lives – studying, training for sports, caring for our health, protecting our
good relationships, paying the bills, running errands, honoring the demands and
duties at work and at home. Even when interruptions and distractions come,
we protect the time for all these things and more. Yet nothing is as life-restoring and
empowering as when we protect the time to simply be still and read, listen, and
be both challenged and inspired by God’s Word through the power of the Holy
Spirit.
Protecting this God-time as part of
our regular personal routines and disciplines is a foundational part of
practicing our faith in Jesus Christ. And
it’s what motivates us to then make community
faith practices a priority. I strongly
believe this is particularly important because individualism is such a dominant
force in our culture. As Christians we
both respect this and wrestle with it.
We wrestle with it because from the biblical perspective “our
thinking and living take place in relation to God and also to one another, to
others around the world and across the centuries, and to a vast communion of
saints.”[i] Community faith practices keep us practically
connected to human needs so we will have a greater capacity to receive and to
share God’s uncontainable hope in Christ.
So let’s keep regularly attending worship, extending hospitality and
fellowship to all, growing in faith through Bible study and prayer groups, and
selflessly giving ourselves to mission work.
One final Pentecost and
confirmation celebrating thought for today -- our Advocate enables us to pray
without ceasing. This doesn’t mean we
have our hands folded in prayer, our heads bowed low, uttering only certain and
proper words 24-7, 365. It does mean
the Holy Spirit helps us always remember that God knows our hearts completely,
absolutely all the time, and that we can talk to God as naturally, as genuinely,
as honestly as talking to our closest friends and family. And in
those moments when we just don’t seem to know what to say, we can trust the
Holy Spirit is praying for us with sighs too deep for words (Rom. 8:26)
After we sing our
traditional middle hymn for this special day, we will join together in a most
sacred way to celebrate the good news that the hope God has given us through
Jesus Christ cannot be contained. We
will be sharing in the Sacrament of our Lord’s Supper.
Pentecost, you may or may not know, was
originally a Jewish feast of thanksgiving.
We share in this meal together to remember and to express how thankful
we are for the saving grace of Jesus Christ that fills us all with
uncontainable hope. By the power of the
Holy Spirit, this sacrament unites us with all our faithful brothers and sisters
today and throughout the ages and therefore truly honors Pentecost as the
promise of the Spirit given to and for community.
What a beautiful family
day this is! May it bless us all our
days! And may we always whole-heartedly
celebrate the Spirit of our Living Lord who brings about new beginnings, gives
us wisdom and guidance from God, works to “create a whole new humanity and a
whole new creation,” and that sends all of us who confirm our faith in Jesus
Christ out as the “reconciled and reconciling community called the church.”[ii] Amen!
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