May 31, 2009 Pentecost Sunday, Confirmation Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
I Corinthians 12-14; Acts 2:1-17
The confirmation class was exploring the Psalms in March, and we got
talking about different ways to interpret scripture. I told them that you can
look through different lenses—for instance, a historical lens that tries to see the
scriptures as reflecting the experience of a specific people in a specific time and
place; or a literary lens, that tries to see how a passage’s form shapes its
content. Where the confirmation class got into trouble, of course, was with the
hormone-tinted lens favored by seventh and eighth grade boys through which
you can see sexual innuendo everywhere.
After hearing them apply that lens to the Psalms a few times, I thought
they would be interested to know that one of the steamiest love poems ever
written is in the Bible. If you ever want to see them really blush, just open to
the Song of Solomon and start reading. I kept trying to tell them to use an
allegorical lens and see it as being about the soul’s love for God, but they kept
giggling and blushing. There used to be a rabbinical rule that no Jew under the
age of thirty was allowed to read the Song of Solomon, and now I know why.
Today we will look through another less disturbing lens that the
confirmation class used frequently: the Star Wars lens, or more specifically, the
Force lens. In one of our first sessions, the class settled on the Force as an
image for what God or the Holy Spirit means to them. The Force, according to
the gospel of Yoda, flows through the universe permeating all things and
holding all things together. The force can be a source of wisdom and power to
those who are receptive and train themselves in its ways. The force sounds
very much like what the Apostle Paul described in the responsive reading from
I Corinthians we read this morning, providing people with gifts and powers
that are characterized by love. The force also sounds like the Holy Spirit that
came upon the first church in the story from Acts. The force can enable people
to see visions, dream dreams, speak persuasively and perform miracles.
If God’s Holy Spirit is a real, live force that filled Christ and that Christ
promised to us, the question is, how can we have that force in our lives? How
can we be strong in the force and use it as our ally in the service of goodness
and love? The Holy Spirit comes to us by grace—we cannot earn it, command
it or create it—but there are three key things that can help us to be strong in
the Spirit. They are the same three things that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda
needed to be strong in the force. We need inner stillness of mind. We need a
community of tradition and support. And we need practice.
It is possible to come to church and not see the power of the Spirit’s
force that is available to us. It is possible for it to remain hidden and secret.
But it is hidden in plain sight. The biggest secret about it is prominently
displayed in a box at the top of our order of worship every week. It is the
quote from Psalm 46: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Once you look at
that statement through the lens of the Force, it no longer looks like an
invitation to quietude. You can see it for what it is. Psalm 46 begins, “God is
our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble….God makes wars
cease to the end of the earth. God breaks the bow and shatters the spear and
burns the shields with fire.” And that is when it says, “Be still, and know that
I am God.” It is not talking about being still and sleepy. It is talking about
being still in order to know God as refuge and strength and present help in
trouble, to know God as a power of nonviolence that can overcome the might
of armies.
Inner stillness opens us both to receive the gifts of the Spirit and to let
them flow through us. In the Sermon on the Mount, which the confirmation
class studied, Jesus says that our eye has to be single and focused on the light,
that we cannot serve both God and material things. But, he said, if we seek
God’s realm and God’s way of righteousness, other material things will come
to us as well. This was what Luke Skywalker learned from the Jedi masters,
Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi. They tried to get him to let go of his thoughts, let
go of his anger and fear, let go of his attachment to material things, let go of his
reliance on human powers and be still and trust in the force.
In the gospels, Jesus walks on water and invites the disciple Peter to
come out and join him. Peter starts to walk on the water, focusing on Jesus
and trusting, but then he starts thinking about what he is doing and grows
afraid of the waves, and he sinks. In Star Wars, Luke is levitating all kinds of
things in the air, but then fear sweeps into him. He loses his inner stillness, his
concentration, and everything comes tumbling down.
We can feel the difference that even a little stillness makes. We can feel
how much wiser or more peaceful or loving we are able to be. We may also
feel a strength or knowledge that seems to come from beyond us. It is possible
for a person to experience this on the first attempt to focus on the breath or the
word God for a few minutes.
But that turns out to be beginner’s luck. Anyone who tries to be still for
long knows that a host of thoughts and feelings will start to well up, including
fears and doubts, grief and rage, boredom and physical discomfort. People of
all religions who are masters of stillness would say the same thing that Obi-
Wan Kenobi said: “The most difficult task a Jedi must face is to look inside
oneself.”
That is why we need the second thing—a community of tradition and
support. The Christian church has accumulated two thousand years of
experience in the arts of stillness and working with the Holy Spirit’s power.
You have to search it out—it is not what most of us learned in our churches
growing up—but increasingly today you can find books and mentors and
groups that are passing on that ancient wisdom. In this church we have the
Prayer of the Heart that meets on Thursday afternoons, and we have the many
wise and experienced people who participate in it. We read books, we practice
the art of stillness, but we also spend a third of our time supporting one
another, because looking inside oneself is a “most difficult task,” and trying to
live out what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount engages us in a struggle
as real and dangerous as the struggle of the Jedi Knights of the Republic
against the Sith Lords of the Empire.
Not long ago in the Prayer of the Heart someone was upset, talking
about how hard it is turning out to be to change their old, distressing habits of
the heart and mind. They are practicing meditation and mindfulness and still
keep getting caught in the same patterns of anger and fear. The power of the
dark side should not be underestimated. But when they brought this to the
Prayer of the Heart, they found support in the circle that held them,
encouraged them and offered them wisdom. That kind of support is essential.
Once again, we see this illustrated in Star Wars. There is a Jedi council that is
in part a governing body, but also serves as a support group. There is also a
scene where master Yoda is giving someone spiritual direction.
The reason we need a community of tradition and support is that
stillness and becoming an instrument of the Spirit’s force take practice.
Buddhists refer to their meditation as practice, and it is a good word for it.
The life of spiritual power is something we have to practice like a sport in the
sense of doing routines over and over and over until they come naturally to us
and we learn all we can about them. But it is also a practice in the sense of the
practice of medicine—it is an activity that we apply to a variety of situations.
It is a complex activity and difficult to master. It takes discipline. It takes
sacrifice. It takes focus and patience. It takes placing our faith and trust
partly in techniques, but partly in mysteries that are beyond our control.
Luke Skywalker goes in search of Yoda to be trained to be a Jedi, but
when Luke finds him, Yoda resists the idea. He says in his distinctive Yoda
dialect, “This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked
away…to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was…what
he was doing. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these
things. You are reckless!” But Luke begs and Yoda relents and begins to train
him. Then as they begin he says, “I cannot teach him. The boy has no
patience.” Discipline, focus and patience are essential to practice.
Another time Yoda says to Luke, “You must unlearn what you have
learned.” We, too, need to take on this practice of unlearning and relearning, if
we want to be strong in the Holy Spirit’s force. If we look at the teachings of
the Apostle Paul through this lens of the force, we can see that he was trying to
help the early churches unlearn and relearn. The church in Corinth was full of
sophisticated, well-educated, gifted people. Corinth was to Rome as Boston is
to New York. It may not have been the center, but it was a major hub of the
Empire.
Paul was trying to help the people unlearn their sophisticated ways,
including their proud individualism and competitiveness. He tried to teach
them that they were all equal: “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.”
He tried to help them unlearn their selfishness: “To each is given the
manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” He tried to teach them that
they were not in control, that they had to obey the Spirit: “All these are
activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just
as the Spirit chooses.” And most of all, he tried to teach them that it was not
aggressiveness that counted, it was not violence that ruled the universe—it was
love.
Science is just beginning to discover that the human brain can do far
more than has been thought possible. At the same time, some scientists are
experimenting with the power of the Spirit and the power of love and seeing
that they are real, life-changing forces. The future is going to be exciting for
the generation of our confirmation class as science learns more about things
like telekinesis and telepathy. But we do not have to wait for science to catch
up with ancient wisdom. If we look with the right lens, and we look in the
right places, and we pursue the three essentials of inner stillness, a community
of tradition and support, and practice, practice, practice, we can begin to
discover capacities of the heart and mind and Spirit that we did not know we
had. All we need is the will to set out and the faith to endure on the path. If it
seems daunting, remember what Obi-wan Kenobi said to Luke as he headed off
on his own long and difficult path:
“The force will be with you always.”
So let us pray together in silence, because the Holy Spirit’s force is with
us always. It is here within us now. It is ready to help us in every struggle or
opportunity we face. The question is, will we trust in it? Will we seek to learn
how to work with it? Let us pray together, each looking in our heart to see if
we find the desire to pursue the Spirit’s guidance and power….
Sermon 05/31/2009