A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

June 8, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Can We Talk?

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Acts 2:1–13
Romans 8:22–27

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness;
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

Romans 8:26 (NRSV)

Prepare our hearts, O God, to receive your word.
Silence in us any voice but your own,
that hearing we may also obey your will,
through Christ our Lord. Amen.

There is a new movie out this summer entitled Bruce Almighty. I have not seen it, I must confess, but I do know the plot, which involves a television newsman who is given an assorted set of divine powers. He can perform miracles, in fact. Just by looking at a bowl of tomato soup, he can divide it right down the middle as Moses divided the Red Sea. (I am not saying this is a sophisticated movie!) When God wants to communicate with Bruce, a telephone number appears on Bruce’s pager, and Bruce calls back when he has a moment.

On Pentecost, when God wanted to communicate with those who would become the bearers of Christ’s message to the world, God used neither a pager nor a callback system. From the four corners of the earth, the people were gathered in Jerusalem when the Spirit of God descended upon them unexpected and unsummoned. The Spirit of God breathed life into the newborn church of Jesus Christ.

It has often been remarked that the Holy Spirit is the least understood of the three persons of the Trinity. I remember the comment made by a potential convert to Christianity from Asia, as he reflected on the meaning of the image of the dove representing the Holy Spirit. He said, “Honorable Creator, I understand, Honorable Son, I understand, Honorable Bird I do not understand at all.” (1)

The story of Pentecost makes clear at least one crucial aspect of the Holy Spirit. Think of the Holy Spirit as “God’s supreme act of self-communication.” (2) God communicates within the reality that is the Holy Trinity by means of the Holy Spirit, God’s supreme act of communication. God also speaks to us through the Holy Spirit.

We spoke a moment ago about Elam Davies, the distinguished pastor emeritus of Fourth Presbyterian Church. One who knew him well told me last Friday that when Dr. Davies ascended this pulpit on Sunday morning, the first thing he would do without fail would be to wait. He waited for the bulletins to stop rustling. He waited for the cough drops to be unwrapped. He waited for people to be still, and then he would say the four words for which he is famous, “Listen, men and women.” Why would he say that? Because he knew that God was about to speak to the people. It was a moment unlike any other moment in the week. God would speak through the Word read and proclaimed, and Dr. Davies did not want any of his people to miss the message from God.

When you and I gather here for worship on Sunday, we gather under the promise that “our God speaks.” (3) Not only did God speak long ago through the prophets and the apostles, but God continues to speak. We ought to be respectful enough to listen to what God is saying. Every time we acknowledge that we have come into the presence of God, we are giving lie to any notion that God is off somewhere in the far distant galaxies keeping [God’s] own counsel, leaving us with only the sounds of our own voices. Deus absconditus—that is what the philosophers call it, that idea of divine silence and inaccessibility. (4) To use the language of common parlance, Pentecost tells us that God wants to be in touch with us. It is God’s very nature. Why? The most obvious reason you can imagine: love. (5) Think about human love as an analogy, which is an inadequate one, but a useful one. If you think about that drive within yourself to be connected in communication some way, somehow with people who mean something to you, then you begin to understand how much deeper that desire must be lodged within God’s inner being.

It’s been a long time since I have dated anyone. The last person I dated was my husband, Al. I can remember how every weekday evening we would go to the library in college. We would study for about fifteen minutes. Then we would go out to the front steps of the library and talk for twenty or thirty minutes. We would then go back inside and study for another fifteen minutes, and then go outside and talk some more. When the library closed, he would walk me back to the dormitory, and we would talk all the way. We would say goodnight, and I would go inside and wait for him to call me as soon as he got back to the fraternity house. Why? So we could talk to one another. If it is the nature of human love to want to communicate, think of how much more it is with divine love.

The first miracle of Pentecost is that God speaks; God bridges the gap between time and eternity. There is nothing mortals can do or must do to open that communication process; it is all God’s doing. The second miracle is the possibility that human beings, because of God’s action, are able to communicate with one another in unexpected and unprecedented ways. Wherever you find people you would imagine would not have anything in common with one another, would not be able to understand a single word the other one says, anytime you see bridges built, the barriers of misunderstanding torn down, you can be sure that the Holy Spirit is at work. This, to my mind, is the most dazzling aspect of the Pentecost story. Not the tongues of fire, not the mighty rush of wind, but the possibility that authentic human community among people who are vastly and inherently different from one another.

As President Bush returned to the United States after his trip to the Middle East last week, we were once again reminded of how peace, if it ever comes in that region or anywhere that long-standing conflict and violence are found, will be because peace talks have finally borne fruit. To approach the argument from the other end, every bomb that is dropped is a consequence of talk that has failed. The promise of Pentecost, the miracle of Pentecost is that in a deeply divided world it is still possible for barriers to be torn down and for people to come to some sort of understanding.

I think of how it is in our families and how this second miracle, the ability of people to communicate with one another, is one that comes home to us in our daily lives. Ironically, sometimes we are least able to communicate with those we know the best and love the most.

“How was your day?”
“Fine.”
“Please pass the salt.”
“Hey, what happened at school today?”
“Nothing. Why do you always ask me that?”

These kinds of things have already started with our two-year-old granddaughter. Her dad told us recently that he came in one day to find Virginia sitting in her high chair. He said, “Hi, Virginia! What did you do today?”

Virginia looked at him, cut her eyes, and said, “Somethin’.”

Sometimes our inability to build a bridge over which we can walk toward one another gets the best of us. “Haven’t I told you a thousand times?” we ask in anger and frustration.

I don’t know how it is in your family, but in our family the sure sign that the brokenness is running deep is when it seems that Aunt Betty is no longer speaking to Uncle Bert.

Poet Adrienne Rich writes, “No one lives in this room without the dream of a common language.” (6) What room is the poet speaking of? The room of reality—any place, any situation where people can no longer be heard or understood. (7)

If that is your dream too, that someone will understand you, that some rift will be repaired, I hope you will take home with you the promise that if God is up to anything in the world, God is in the business of building bridges. The Spirit blows where it chooses, the Scriptures say, which means there is no broken place anywhere that is off limits to the reconciling power of God.

The first miracle of Pentecost is that God speaks. The second is that God enables us to talk and to listen to one another. The third miracle is a third kind of communication that God makes possible. The Apostle Paul writes, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” Don’t you love the raw honesty of this statement? “We do not know how to pray as we ought.” No matter how we long to build a bridge to God, we cannot build it ourselves, try as we might. As Kierkegaard once said, “There is an infinite, qualitative difference between time and eternity.” If we just knew the right words to say, if we were only more disciplined and sat down and had our quiet time, if we just knew the right password, then couldn’t we access the Almighty’s website?

I remember the moment I first became a citizen of the technological age. A wonderful volunteer at the church who had worked for IBM gave me my first computer password. “Your password is MT1525,” Dick said. I dutifully wrote it down and began using it. After a few weeks I said to Dick, “That is an odd set of letters and numbers. How did you come up with it?” He answered, “It stands for Matthew 15:25,” a verse that reads, “And she came and knelt before the Lord crying, ‘Lord, please help me!’”

The Bible gives us some rules about praying. If you look at Jesus’ teachings, aside from the Lord’s Prayer you could sum up what he had to say about petitioning God into three simple rules. First, Keep it secret. When you pray, go into your room and shut the door (Matthew 6:6). Second, Keep it uninflated. Don’t heap up empty phrases, one on top of the other (Matthew 6:7). And third, Keep at it. Pray always and don’t lose heart (Luke 18:1). (8) In Romans, Paul adds the indispensable fourth dynamic to prayer: Keep trusting that God is at work even in your most feeble attempts. The Spirit will help you in your weakness. Even when all you can do is sit in a puddle of frustration, sure that your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling and shattering on the floor around you, the Spirit is working deeper down in a place that you can neither sense nor feel. In other words, being convinced that you cannot pray does not mean that you cannot pray.

God’s act of self-communication is interceding for you because of God’s own will to do it, which will not be thwarted but will persist until the mortal creature that is you and the Divine Almighty that is God are on the same wavelength. God speaks. If God had never said anything else but what God said the afternoon that Christ died, that cross still tells us plenty. It tells us that there is no situation of loss or pain or need from which God is absent.

The story is told of a rabbi who was brought into the presence of God in the high heavenly courts. When he arrived, he walked right up to the throne and called on God to justify God’s silence in the face of so much human suffering. “Lord, we have prayed night and day, and yet your people have continued to suffer. You have heard our moans. You have seen our tears. Where have you been?”

God replied, “I am surprised that you did not recognize me. I was your tears. I was your moaning. I was your calling out to heaven.”(9)

“The Spirit intercedes for us with sighs that are too deep for words.”

The great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner once prayed a prayer that has been helpful to me, and as I close, I invite you to bow your heads and let us pray together:

O Lord, the prayer that you require of me
must be ultimately just a patient waiting for you,
a silent standing by until you,
who are ever present in the inmost center of my being,
open the gate to me from within. Amen. (10)

Notes

1. As told by Robert McAfee Brown, “Thinking about God,” Christianity and Crisis, 27 May 27 1991.
2. A wonderful idea of William H. Willimon’s in “The Conversation,” Pulpit Resource, 8 June 2003.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. As quoted by Patrick Willson in a sermon entitled “The Dream of a Common Language,” 18 May 1986. (Origins and History Consciousness, Poems 1974-1977.)
7. Ibid., Willson.
8. Ronald Goetz, “Lord, Teach Us to Pray,” The Christian Century, 5 November 1986.
9. Ibid., Willson.
10. Prayers for a Lifetime.