Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

June 12, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Spirited

Lucy Forster-Smith
Senior Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
John 16:12–15

I think if I could have chosen a profession for myself it would have been astronomy. Yes, even as a very young child the stars and the wonder of how vast the sky is held me enthralled. And so, when I read the psalm for today, when King David or one of the court liturgists bursts on the scene with the words “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens,” my heart brims with the sheer magnificence of the universe’s reach. Yes, as David writes Psalm 8, he saw one-one-thousandth percent of 100 billion stars in our Milky Way. And we know now that our galaxy alone is a 100,000-lightyear expanse and one among millions in the universe.

Quite frankly, I did not have the mathematical muscle to be an astronomer. But in many ways my life as a pastor is not that far from an astronomer’s. There are days when I find myself hugging the universe, and on those same days, I find myself gazing into the vast mystery of human life. It is the dual focus that I think led the psalmist to sing out, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human being that you are mindful them, mortals that you care for them?” Yes, as a pastor, as one who finds myself stunned by the vastness, I also wonder what our true vocation as humans is in a world that has been entrusted to mere mortals by God.

I have to admit that there are times when I think the human community has lost a sense of our place in the universe. I don’t hear many of our religious or political or social leaders asking the question that arises in the psalm: Who are we as a human community? What is our purpose on this planet? Nor do I get a sense that we are challenging a new generation of leaders who can have as their core value stewardship of our life on this planet. That is what arises in this psalm. Yes, first—Wow, O God . . . wow. You are a creator that has flung the universe. You are the one who dwells in the far reaches of the planet. You are the God whose mere utterance opened the way for light, for mystery of molecular renderings, for stardust that is our makeup, for the mystery of the quantum entanglement. Wow! God’s action renders us quite small, quite insignificant, really. But it doesn’t stop there. God comes quite close, and our given life’s purpose is to be stewards of this created order. That is, to be totally here, totally doing no harm, totally given over to a larger project than simply actualizing our own life, our own purpose, our own survival. The order of life is radical communion with God. The wow factor is the first step.

But is God a creator who set the whole project in motion and leaves it to us to tend and care for it? If that is true, I think we are proving that we are not very good at it. Indeed, if our true purpose is one of stewardship—that is, tending the global garden as it tends us—then we need all the help we can muster. And that is where the Spirit of God, that is the Holy Spirit and its gifts, arrives just in the nick of time. In our Gospel lesson for today, I wonder if we realize what it was that Jesus was promising to the disciples. It is Jesus’ farewell address. It is the last part of the farewell. It is the so-long, farewell in which Jesus says, “I am going away, and it is a lot to bear, not only that I am leaving, but also it may be a very long way.” Jesus knew it was not going to be easy. And he also knew that there was much more to say, much more to come, and it would be hard to bear. But he doesn’t stop there. No. He makes an astonishing promise that when the Spirit of truth comes, that Spirit will guide us into all truth. Yep, that is the word, that is Jesus’ promise. And my question is Do we trust Jesus’ promise? Do we really, really believe that we have access to such a Spirit?

I hear these words of Jesus as a radical promise—that we are equipped with his Spirit, the holiest of Spirit, in a radical connection that is perhaps something like what genius physicists on the scale of Einstein talk about as spooky action at a distance! This intricate relationship between us and others and the Spirit that Jesus was promising may have been what was going on in a lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Yes, Albert Einstein and his colleagues made a shocking discovery: They realized that “two particles fly apart—one of them heading around the dark side of the moon while the other lingers in the laboratory above the nimbus of Einstein’s hair. If Einstein could nab that one and reverse its spin, he theorized, then the other particle would have to reverse itself too—even if it were lightyears away” (Barbara Brown Taylor, “Physics and Faith: The Luminous Web,” Christian Century, 2–9 June 1999). Quantum entanglement: no matter how far apart, they behave in a complementary way. Maybe the Spirit of God takes us to this quantum entanglement. Whether or not this is the same thing, Jesus’ promise and the arrival of the Spirit at Pentecost brings a power to be a community of unlimited potential deeply connected and an on-the-ground awakening force for these very difficult times. Do we trust it? Can we find our way through rough moments in our personal and global life by opening the way for such power to arrive through our utterance of “Help, O God?”

I do not need to enumerate the vast number of issues that are afoot in our life together in this world. You know them as well as I do. But almost in an emblematic way the one that stunned me this week was the drying up of the Great Salt Lake. What a complicated environmental disaster! There is no good solution to the impact of a dry basin, with arsenic emanating from its floor, and were the mountain waters drained into it, the booming city of Salt Lake would not have its necessary water. Help! And is it such an environmental disaster that the Holy Spirit’s leading of us into truth seems simply laughable? Is it too late?

Jesus is right, there is a lot to bear. We know the vastness of the challenges—suffering among our kin and global community, suffering of a poisoned environment and extinctions, terminal illness, work demands and fears of illness, war, political divisiveness. And our cry is indeed Help!

When I hear the promise of Jesus that the Spirit will guide you into all truth, I think of the prophets of old. Take Isaiah, who spoke of the people being given the bread of adversity and the water of affliction but the teacher would not hide from them. Rather, the prophet says, “when you are walking and turn left or right, your ears will hear the word behind you and you will hear, ‘Turn this way, turn that way . . . walk in it.’” John draws on prophetic utterances in our connection with God—the Spirit of God is the conduit for the word of God for the community—guiding us into truth and pointing to the future.

Friends in Christ, do we believe this? Do we bank our very life on it? We stand in a time in history and in our life on this planet that this message may be the deal-breaker for our life together. The interconnected body of Christ is not just a metaphor, but it is the very substance of our life together as humans and the powerful capacity of humans to understand our place in this vast and reaching universe.

So, back to the question the psalmist posed: What are humans that you are mindful of us, mortals that you care for us, O God? This is a question that gives us perspective. We aren’t the center of the universe. No, this psalm reminds us that humans at the center of the whole project has never been the functioning assumption. But what is beginning to show up today is that the power of the Spirit, or spirituality, is awakening us to a much-needed robust truth.

Suppose we can step out of the very small vision for what we can be and dare to dream large dreams. Suppose we put into motion the inner urges that arise from glimpses of God’s truth and we step out with deep and unrelenting trust in the One, Jesus, who had such trust in the disciples that he gave them the remarkable, trustworthy gift of the Spirit to guide them into all truth. This trust, this real trust, keeps our eyes on Jesus, the sender of the Spirit of the living God. This trust in God’s truth leads us not to the tempter’s hour, delivers us from evil and brings new life, new hope, new ways out of the mired and tired ways. I saw it yesterday.

The Session and other leaders in the Fourth Church community gathered to consider the way that we might shape our life together in our engagement with young adults, which is one the church’s strategic directions. Each of the councils and committees from adult education, to caring ministries, spiritual formation to youth and trustees, watched, listened, and learned about the world that is emerging with a new generation. We heard from a psychologist who studies the brain about how spirituality is a physical resource for abating depression, addiction, despair. And we stopped to realize thatwe are living in times when the old order is coming to an end, and we stand on a threshold glimpsing what might be coming as the hinges are opening and closing. We heard about a New Copernican way, where the generation who came of age when the twenty-first century emerged from the twentieth is ushering in a new age. And this squares with what one person suggests: “We are currently living in the pregnant pause between the flash of insight by New Copernicans [young adults who are ushering in new perspectives on the world and our place in it] and the thunder of adjusting to its emerging social reality” (John Seel, “Think Different: The Rise of the New Copernicans,” christiansforsocialaction.org, 22 July 2016).

Jesus’ last words to his disciples were that the Spirit would guide them into all truth, and perhaps one of those truths is that we are here on this planet, gazing out of our small lives into the vastness of the universe, with all that we need. Yes, believe it or not, you have every capacity to engage with others by the power of the Holy Spirit, and we have this remarkable community of believers to take up this work together, in concert with the Spirit. And I am very convinced that we have just begun. Though we may feel exhausted by the toll the pandemic took on our lives, our community, our globe; though we may be worried that inflation will keep the next generation from securing even a small morsel of what the boomers may have had; though we may see the escalation of incivility and inhumane treatment of others, including violence at the end of a gun, through God’s gift in Christ of the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit, we can live as grace-filled disciples, taking up our work for whatever time we have, in whatever form the Spirit calls us. And for that we can say with the psalmist, O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Amen.