Faithful Presence: Let Flow Rivers of Living Water
6th Sunday Pentecost June 30, 2024
The texts for this sermon are Ezekiel 40:1-4, 47:1-12 and Acts 2:14-21
This 6th Sunday of Pentecost concludes the series on what it means for God’s people to be a Faithful Presence in the world. We began by considering what it means to Refute Fear, then how to Keep a Burning Heart, what doing The Work means, why we are called to Testify and to hold forth Hope. Today we consider the ramifications of all of this: what it looks like when God’s people really do seriously commit to being a Faithful Presence. What the Living waters of a Faithful Presence nourishes and Who helps us live in this reviving way.
Living Water
Ezekiel shares some remarkable visions during his prophetic life. Most of us are familiar with his vision of seeing God raise dry bones into fleshed and breathing life. Today we heard the vision God gave him of rivers of water flowing from God’s Temple in Mt Zion. He saw how teaming and abundant life emerged wherever this river flowed and along both of its banks. God’s Temple nourishing the earth with fresh flowing water.
Ezekiel was to share this vision with Israel, calling her to be that river.
Today, we heard Peter’s words as he preached that first Pentecost sermon, telling everyone within hearing that this day was the day God spoke of long ago through the prophet Joel:
I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon slaves, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit
and they shall prophesy.
In my mind, these two prophetic images belong together. Water and Spirit
While Ezekiel’s vision aligns with what can be expected when rivers flow: abundance and fruitfulness; Joel’s vision of what God’s Spirit does turns so many things upside down and sideways. But both awaken life.
Joel says God’s Spirit will be party to everyone -- not just the Chosen, the unseasoned young will prophesy: they will proclaim God’s truth. The young will see visions, the old will dream dreams. It’s usually just the opposite; it’s the young who ponder the future and dream dreams. It’s the old, mellowed by years, who have visions. I always think of wizened shamans. And slaves? including women slaves? will be blessed with God’s Spirit and they too will proclaim God’s truth: these who have no position, no voice, no power, no influence. How contradictory all this is!
God’s Spirit cannot be contained. God’s Spirit is not predictable. God’s Spirit has no regard for dogma or this or that worship style, or social conventions and political constructs.
But what God’s Spirit does do is endow us with spiritual power
In a piece he titled Electric Chimes and Ram’s Horns, the poet-theologian Amos Wilder writes:
The world is molten and hearts are sifted,
The altar is like a third rail that spatters sparks.
The sanctuary is like the chamber net to an atomic oven.
There are invisible rays and you leave your watch outside.
Annie Dillard, in her essay, “Polar Expedition” (Teaching a Stone to Talk) writes
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? . . .It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. (p52)
We often speak of the Spirit’s quiet voice in our inner ear, or think of the whisper of breath that met Elijah in the cave, but the Spirit can bring fire from heaven, part the waters of the sea, cause praise to reverberate from the rafters and push our hands to clapping or cause us to pull off the highway to clear the tears of an unexpected blessed moment or make us shout “OK! already, I’ll do it.”
Jana Childers, of San Francisco Theological Seminary, says that Acts 2 shows a big God with a big word at work expanding out into a big world [a Spirit who can make believers] madly expressive
I’d love to hear from some madly expressive believers. So often the way of congregations is to wait until the pastor or a committee chairperson raises an idea and then each person decides if they want to sign on or not. No, the way of a holy congregation is for each believer to pray to be used--to implore God to inspire them with a holy passion--to seek Holy Spirit fire.
What God’s Spirit does is unite us in common purpose
Consider the unlikely alliance of Jesus’ disciples -- enabled to work through their petty jealousies and flatten out their social disparities. Consider those in that upper room: bringing together the likes of Levi the tax collector with Nicodemus the Pharisee to table fellowship and prayer. Consider the great ethnically diverse crowd who, at first confused and suspicious, repents in mass and joins them in worship.
Again from Childers: The Spirit-baptized are drawn together, this time in the Spirit’s power for the purposes of extending the realm of God: for the purpose of being a Faithful, Nourishing, God-infused Presence.
When we let God’s Spirit do God’s work in us, our personal priorities and agendas dissipate and we see visions and dream dreams that capture our imaginations and catapult our passion.
What God’s Spirit does is empower us
Not only does God’s Spirit ignite our spiritual vitality and realign our priorities and draw us into common purpose, but God’s Spirit imbues us with power. It isn’t a power like the world thinks of power. It isn’t like an armored tank or a billionaire in an Armani suit. It’s like a frail grandmother walking down the street to face down a gang member. It’s like a child making an observation of such profound truth that we’re taken to our knees. It’s like a youth stepping alongside one being bullied.
In reading Childers I was caught be a reference she makes to New Testament scholar Herman Waetjen’s thoughts on the divided tongues of fire. Rather than link that image to the burning bush or the reference in Isaiah of tongues of fire licking up straw he links it to the image on the Roman Coin that depicted divided flames above the head of Caesar, a sign of royalty, divinity even. This coin’s image declared Caesar to be the Son of God to the Roman world.
The Holy Spirit challenged the power Caesar claimed, empire power, by conferring God’s power on a motley crew of nobodies; as common as slaves both male and female.
The promise Jesus made a year or so before his ascension saying Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water was fulfilled; and remember, he’d introduced the idea of living water to a poor, marginalized woman from the wrong side of the tracks who then did what? ran to share that same living water with her community.
That promise Jesus made: out of the believer’s heat shall flow rivers of living water was fulfilled when God’s Spirit unleashed on the world a spiritually ignited, united, empowered cluster of believers who refuted fear, nurtured burning hearts, did the work of revealing the Light of Christ, told their story boldly but with gentleness and reverence and embodied a hope that could not be squelched. The Spirit-ignited living water that flowed then can be the Spirit-igniting, living water that flows today.
Rev William Barber, President of Repairers of the Breach, in an interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker Radio Hour, said:
It is our time to stand up and be the moral dissenters, the moral defibrillators, and moral dreamers to make it through this moment and use it to change the course of history, to change America, and in some ways, if we work together, to change the world. (Episode 85, 6/3/17)
Some of you may be familiar with the Oregon writer Brian Doyle who died far too young. His friend and colleague, David Duncan, compiled a collection of Brian’s short essays and in David’s introduction he describes how Brian approached constructing sentences:
When [Brian] intuited the approaching roar of a whitewater rapid in his imagination, he paddled steady on, refusing to portage round even the wildest water. The prose that resulted made timid readers feel as though they’d been thrown into a kayak and sent careering down a literary equivalent of Idaho’s Payette River during spring runoff. (The Introduction, One Long River of Song, pp xvi-xvii)
I think that’s the journey the Holy Spirit longs to treat us to.
L. Quanstrom