Pentecost Sunday, June 4, 2017 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Hoping for Surprise?

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 104:24–34
1 Corinthians 12:3b–13

This is the blessing
that comes when we leave behind
our aloneness,
when we gather together,
when we turn
toward one another.

. . . when we finally listen
into the chaos,
when we breathe together
at last.

Jan Richardson, “When We Breathe Together”
Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

As you have seen and heard already this morning, today is Pentecost Sunday. We often refer to today as the birthday of the Christian church. It is a day of red—the liturgical color that symbolizes the Spirit. It is the day when we try to imagine the beautiful cacophony of noise that emerged from that early group of disciples in Jerusalem when the Spirit blew through and took up shop.

But as I prepared for worship today, I began to wonder just how seriously we actually take these texts—both the one from Acts we heard in the beginning of worship and the one I just read from 1 Corinthians 12. Do we come into worship anticipating that we don’t know what might happen as the Spirit blows about, doing what she will both in us and in the world? Do we gather on Sunday mornings, sitting straight in our pews, and expect to be surprised by the myriad of spiritual gifts that the Spirit generously gives to those gathered in Christ’s name? Do we even see the Spirit’s work anymore in each other, in the church, in our lives, or have we forgotten how to look?

As a friend of mine recently said, “I think we incorrectly assume the Spirit has mellowed with age.” Whereas the Spirit rushed into that original Pentecost group of new Jesus followers with a violent wind and divided tongues of fire (whatever that means), with us we assume the Spirit is calmer, more subtle, more dignified in her work of dispensing gifts. If the Spirit is still at work, then the Spirit is at work decently and in order. But I don’t say that as critique. Trust me, as someone who has to plan to be spontaneous, I have just always figured that the Spirit must know that some of us can handle charismatic chaos a little more easily than others, and I am not one of them. I know that many of you are not either.

And yet, as we look at this text from 1 Corinthians, do you yearn even a little bit for some of their anticipation, a taste of their experience of what the Spirit was up to in their midst? Given Paul’s response, the Spirit was up to something in that new faith community. It might not have been as dramatic as what happened on that first Pentecost with wind and fire, but the Spirit was certainly alive and at work.

Now, we do want to acknowledge that the church in Corinth was not exactly what we would call a healthy congregation. As preacher Bill Carter put it,

There were probably only fifty members in the church at Corinth, but they were [always] at one another’s throats. They were divided into political factions. They were debating sexual ethics. They were fighting about who should receive the Lord’s Supper and who should not. They were suing one another in court. They were bowing before the shrines of their culture. They were defending their actions with indefensible slogans and bumper-sticker theology. And to top it off, some of the church members insisted that they were more spiritual than some of the other members. (William Carter, www.sermonsuite.com)

God bless them, they narrated every single church fight in letter after letter to their founder, Paul. I can only imagine what he must have felt in his stomach each time another letter was delivered. Perhaps it was something akin to how I feel whenever I get an anonymous letter here at the church. You just know that whatever is in that envelope is not going to be helpful or affirming. I bet every time another letter showed up for Paul, he sighed heavily and asked, “What now.”

Yet even in all of their dysfunction and conflict, one thing was not in doubt for those Corinthians: they knew the Spirit was at work in them. They were regularly experiencing the Spirit creating new life in their midst, because they saw in themselves and in each other these gifts, these abilities to do, to say, to see far more than they could do, say, or see with their own power or initiative. They had a strong sense of the Spirit’s power actively working in their lives, and they were not afraid to talk about it with each other.

The problem, though, was that the Corinthians were not just talking about the spiritual gifts they were discovering; they were bragging about them. Not only were they bragging about them, but they were beginning to rank them in importance. They were starting to set up hierarchies in the church, beginning to institutionalize the kind of divisions they experienced in the culture, and Paul knew he had to put a stop to that before it got totally out of control.

God had not brought that Corinthian church into being in order to mirror culture. That is not why those original Spirit winds blew through that crowd in Jerusalem, creating them into a body, giving birth to the church. No, God created the church to transform culture. God created the church to be a tool for God to use to redeem culture, to bring the world more in line with God’s hope for it, more in line with the justice and mercy expressed in God’s household. God created the church for the healing, the repair of the world, for God’s shalom.

Paul knew that. So when he received the letter indicating they were fighting over who was the most spiritual, the most gifted among them, Paul wrote back, “Look, [this is a loose translation] there are varieties of gifts and to each person is given the manifestation of the Spirit . . . but those varieties of gifts are given to you as a corporate community, as one body. The Spirit is not at work in you, not giving you these gifts to build up your personal ego or to help you to establish hierarchies of power in the church. Narcissistic bragging and grasping for power are the way of empire, not the way of Christ, not the way of the Spirit. Thus while it is exciting that you, people of Corinth, are discovering the myriad of ways the Spirit is working in and through you, you must keep in mind it is not for you that the Spirit is working. It is for the health of the body, the community. All the gifts that the Spirit gives to those gathered in Christ’s name are so that all can experience the fullness of life together in God. The whole reason the Spirit gives these gifts is for the building up of the common good.”

The common good. That is not a phrase that gets a lot of press these days, is it. The common good. For example, “the common good” is certainly not emphasized very much in our political life. A story on WBEZ this week focused on our state government’s inability to meet the budget deadline for the third year in a row. The main problem, the reporter stated, is that there is a complete lack of trust on both sides. So we will hear a lot of righteous indignation from each side of the political divide, but we will probably not see much action or willingness to work together. In the meantime, we see the results of the budget uncertainty every day here Fourth Church in the Chicago Lights Elam Davies Social Service Center, around the tables at Meals Ministry’s Sunday Night Supper and in the line for their bag lunches as the number of people who need food keeps increasing and setting new records. No, we certainly don’t hear a lot of talk about building up the common good in our state political scene, at least not from those with microphones.

Our national political scene appears to be even more dire from a building-the-common-good perspective. New York Times columnist David Brooks basically came to that conclusion in his Friday opinion column. He began by quoting an article from the Wall Street Journal written by two top advisors in the administration. Here is what they said in the Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

The error, Brooks reflected, is that this kind of transactional outlook “misunderstands what drives human action. Of course people are driven by selfish motivations—for individual status, wealth, and power. But they are also motivated by another set of drives—for solidarity, love, and moral fulfillment—that are equally and sometimes more powerful” (David Brooks, “Donald Trump Poisons the World,” New York Times, 2 June 2017). Although he did not use this language, I interpreted Brooks as lamenting the very real sense that building up the common good has all but disappeared from our political lexicon. It no longer seems to be a priority, at least not in our politics.

Even as depressing as this can be for many of us, this is not a new story. Building up the common good was not Rome’s interest either. The empire of Rome spent a great deal of time and energy building up both social and economic hierarchies that would benefit those with power, giving them more power. The empire had no desire to build up a sense of common good that would link slave and free, Jew and Greek. Rather, the empire was focused on building up a sense of competition between slave and free, Jew and Greek, for the more the empire could nurture disunity between the people, making their differences into factions, cultivating their diversity into competing rivalries for fewer and fewer resources, the better for the empire, for then the people are fighting amongst themselves and no one is watching them.

That might be why Paul wanted to help those Corinthians understand that what the Spirit was up to in them and through them in their church was vitally important for the sake of Corinth, for the sake of the world. The Spirit was actively at work giving those in that small, dysfunctional church all of those different gifts—from healing to prophecy to wisdom to interpretation to faithfulness—not so they could feel important and set-apart, but so they could use those gifts to encourage each other, to lift each other up, to care for each other, to build up their small community so that God could then use them to build the common good.

Paul desired those early Christians understand that the power, the inexplicable energy they felt when they worshiped together or shared a meal together or served together was not for them alone. That power, that energy, was given to them by God’s Spirit in order that they might be a countercultural testimony of oneness, of unity, a community focused on building up the common good in a world that often prioritized more destructive, divisive, polarized ways of life.

All these Pentecosts later, this is our call too. If there ever was a time for the church to be an alternative community, a countercultural testimony of oneness, of unity, a community focused on building up the common good for the sake of the world, it is now. Yet that call implies that we, like the Corinthians, are aware of all the ways the Spirit is actively at work in us, among us. That call to use our gifts for the building up of the common good implies that we see ourselves as having gifts from the Spirit. That call pushes us into perhaps an uncomfortable space of being willing to notice in ourselves and in each other the gifts to see, to do, to say things that are clearly not of our own power or initiative but of the Spirit’s power and initiative.

Are we willing to do that? The Spirit has not mellowed with age, but perhaps our expectations of the Spirit have. Our anticipation of the Spirit has. But when we either intentionally or unintentionally close ourselves off from acknowledging the myriad of ways the Spirit continues to give the body of Christ spiritual gifts, then we miss out on being used by God for the building of the common good, for the healing of the world.

So we are going to try an experiment this morning in order to help us learn how to recognize the ways God’s Spirit is still actively at work in us, with us, even if it is more decently and in order rather than charismatically chaotic. As worship continues this day, I invite you to be a detective for the Spirit. I invite you to notice the gifts of those with whom you are worshiping this day—whether you are a church member or not, whether you know the people sitting around you or not.

Ask yourself if someone sitting near you helps you feel joy or courage, even if you cannot explain why. Does someone near you help you sing better because of their singing or call out your generosity because you notice their generosity? Did someone near you make you feel welcome or encouraged as you found your seat or looked for the hymnal? Does someone’s louder reading of the liturgy allow your voice to find its place in that communal act? As we move through the rest of worship, I challenge you to pay attention to the gifts of those around you.

And then if you are an extrovert, when worship concludes, please tell them. Tell someone their face gives you courage. Tell someone their singing lifted your spirits. Tell someone their quiet presence beside you helped you pray. Tell someone their smile transmitted a welcome. And if you are an introvert and the idea of doing that terrifies you, then pray a prayer of silent thanksgiving for them instead. We are all going to assume that if no one says something in particular to one of us, then that is because someone silently prayed a prayer of gratitude for something they noticed in us, because every single person in here has been given a manifestation of the Spirit, as Paul puts it.

Now I realize this is odd for us to do here at Fourth Church. But odd as it might be, it is also necessary, for if we cannot start redeveloping our ability to notice how the Spirit is at work here and now, in and with us, if we cannot start opening up our hearts and minds again to the vibrant ways God’s Spirit is present with us every time we come together in Christ’s name, then we are not going to be as powerful or as effective a tool for God’s transformation of our world, God’s healing of our world, God’s building up of the common good for all.

And that is who we, as a gathered faith community, have been created to be. We have all been given gifts by God’s Spirit. All of us. May we plug into those gifts and be the countercultural, alternative, beloved family of God that we were made to be. Not just for our sake. But for the sake of God’s common good. As St. Catherine of Siena once said, “Be who you were created to be, and you (we) will set the world on fire.” Amen.