Here is the final reflection offered with love and gratitude to my St. John Fisher Faith Family on Pentecost a week before leaving to begin my new job at Christ the Redeemer.
If you would rather view and listen to the video, click this link. The Gospel reading begins at minute 19:10 and the reflection starts at minute 20:30: https://www.dropbox.com/s/apsht9dyb0002yi/Pentecost%20homily%20a2014%20Opening%20Song%20to%20Prayers%20of%20the%20Faithful.MPG?dl=0
From time to time we all experience big events in our lives that change things…that change everything. We might call them “Before and After” moments. They are the experiences that we refer to like “Before we had children” (that’s a big one) or “After Mom died." "Before the illness" or "after graduation." It’s a way in which we pinpoint a certain era of our lives. When I was a little kid it was always “Before and after the divorce of my parents." I’ve often heard Fr. Jerry talk about “before and after” his brother…. “Big John” died.
These moments are the game changers in our lives that make us reevaluate everything we have known up to this point through the lens of this one, new, BIG, life event.
From our readings today, I imagine the apostles talked among themselves about how much life changed not only before and after Jesus’ death, but also “before and after that really wild, weird experience in the upper room.” Before this really wild and weird experience in the upper room, we read often in the scriptures that the few remaining followers of Jesus were always hanging out together “behind locked doors”….
For the 50 days following Jesus’ death they locked themselves in remote, hard to find places and spoke in whispered tones, scared of being discovered and connected to their former rabbi and leader Jesus, who was now of course the condemned and executed criminal Jesus…and fearful of suffering a similar fate for their association with him.
After Jesus’ death, the apostles laid very low and felt very confused and frightened about the future. But After this really wild and weird upper room experience this same handful of people leave the upper room full of courage and zeal to establish what remains the most prevalent belief systems and spirituality in the world, even now over 2000 years later.
This experience of Pentecost was indeed a very big game changer. So big that all but one of the apostles leave this upper room to die martyrs deaths due to their tireless preaching of the gospel. And the preaching took hold…and that is why we call this feast day the “Birthday of the Church.” We may never be sure what actually happened in that upper room, but one thing is for sure…something very, very significant happened…..Something crucial to our being here in this place, breaking bread and talking about Jesus centuries later.
My most recent Before/After life event is what my family simply calls “the fire.” We had a defective dryer that had an electrical short that sparked a fire in our basement and in the blink of an eye we found ourselves in a hotel room two days before Christmas, smelling of smoke without a change of clothes, a toothbrush or a single wrapped gift for our girls, at the time ages 8, 5, & 1. We left our soot covered, flooded house in such haste, my Lauren had on only one boot. Our entire world was flipped upside down and we were displaced for over 8 months.
Like a mighty rushing wind you blew into my family’s life at this time of crisis and fear and gave us hope. The Christmas gifts for the kids poured in. Endless bags of clothes. All the prayers, hugs and kind words of support in the cards, emails and facebook messages were an outpouring of the Spirit that genuinely healed us. Our agape young adult community sprang into action and within 24 hours we had a decorated tree and a hotel room full of wrapped Christmas presents for the girls to open on Christmas morning.
You all did for us what no one person, no one family, could have ever done. What no insurance company could ever provide. Every word, every gift, every hug embodied God for us. Embodied love for us. For me this experience is not only Before/After the Fire….but Before/After I realized the real power and significance of being church.
It’s like your parent is a doctor or a nurse, and you know this your whole life, but then one day a real emergency happens and you see your parent do some amazing and very impressive things to save the patient. And you are simply blown away! You always knew your parent was a great doctor or nurse, but you had never seen them in action! This is how I feel about the fire and your care of my family. For me it was the “Before and After” of knowing what the church could be.
I knew in theory that we - as the body of Christ, the church - was the healing, generous, restorative presence of God…I had spoken about it right here many times, but I had never seen it in action….at least not from the receiving end. It was for me a great moment of clarity of the great power we hold and wield. My kids may not know the creed quite yet, but they will never forget that experience of church….and I thank you for that…
Pentecost lies at the intersection of mysticism and mission and the result is community. This wild, weird experience that the disciples are trying to explain in our scriptures today was certainly a mystical experience of God. Difficult to explain, but nonetheless real. (One of our great theologians Karl Rahner once said that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or nothing at all”)
In the wake of Pentecost, a community of genuine sharing was born. The early church did as a collective what no one person or one family could do and they understood that a non-negotiable, essential aspect of the gospel was insuring that everyone had enough food, clothing, and medical care….all their basic needs met.
The early disciples knew that church wasn’t set of beliefs that you talked AT people but a community of believers propelled by the vision that Jesus entrusted to us, believers in his promise that compassion can change the world and who know that our togetherness is the greatest remedy for all that fills us with fear. What brings us here each week is that we all share this vision of all that could be! Of all we can be for one another. And it propels us. It missions us. It forms us as disciples.
The heart of the good news is that we are not alone. This is the good news that everyone heard in their own language as the disciples preached it – because it is our universal human dream. The vision of a world where God is present, love wins, everyone has what they need and no one dies alone or is left out in the cold full of fear.
Ron Rolheiser writes “Community is not, first of all, nor necessarily at all, a shared roof, a shared city, a shared task, or even an explicitly shared friendship. It’s a shared spirit, a shared way of life.
Before Pentecost, the disciples were physically together under one roof, clinging to each other, but they were not living in real community. After receiving the spirit, they were never together again under one roof or in one city, but they now were in community.
Community, family, intimacy, these are constituted first of all by living in the same spirit, Christ’s spirit…charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness….When we (do our best to) live within these, we are in deep intimacy with all others who are also (striving to live) within them, irrespective of the separation that distance and time can cause.” (Rolheiser)
T.S. Eliot once said that home is where we start from. For the last 16 years, I have not just worked here….this has not been just a job, but a true home. And as I leave, I recognize that I have received infinity more than I have given.
You all prayed with us at our wedding, celebrated the birth and baptisms of each of our three daughters, fed us at this table and ministered powerfully to us in our pain. We have shared deeply, and I suspect that all the other staff members who are leaving, especially Augie and his family after 34 years of service here, sense that underneath all the smiles and hugs and lovely words of gratitude and encouragement there is, nonetheless, a sincere sadness.
Though we will all be around from time to time, we will never have THIS time again…we are saying goodbye to this shared experience….we will never be together quite like this again….
“But we also know that true community, is first and foremost a shared spirit that need not be lost when death, distance, and commitments break us apart.”
Anyone who has asked me lately how I’m feeling about going to this new job at the new place, I’ve replied that there really should be a word for feeling both elated and terrified. The feeling I’m having is what I imagine jumping out of a plane would feel like…And I imagine as the disciples left that upper room, though filled with the Spirit and sure of their mission and calling, I like to think they felt a little elated and terrified too. You all have probably had this feeling too, because all of us in some way or another is being missioned and sent from this place and leaving through the servants entrance to take the Spirit of this beautiful community with us where ever we go.
And I bet that the disciples knew as they left that upper room that though they would never share this time or space with their friends again, that they would always be church…
WE will always be church…..
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