Life is Short

Life is short and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love. Make haste to be kind. And the blessing of God be with you.

I had the privilege of introducing this blessing to a congregation where I was serving. They thought I was brilliant. It became Jay’s blessing, despite how many times I told them that it had been used in many churches, and that the prayer apparently was originally crafted in the 19^th century by a Swiss philosopher, poet and critic named Henri Frederic Amiel. None of that seemed convincing, and I’ve had worse things happen in church than getting credit for something I didn’t do. Regardless of source, I have been struck with how this prayer resonates with people. I have wondered why it is so engaging.

It may be the directness of its start. The older we get, the more we recognize the fleeting aspect of life. That’s hardly news, as the psalmist notes that even those who stand erect are but a puff of wind (39:5), or that our days are like a passing shadow (144:4). Accordingly, we recognize the wisdom of the collect heard yesterday in church (see above) which offers prayer that we may pass through things temporal without losing sight of things that are eternal.

Think with me about the things that are temporal. They are fleeting. Early in my ministry, in the cocky snarkiness that can mark those who have been recently ordained, I made a slightly derisive comment about someone who was only serving in an interim capacity in a church, bless their heart. The wise person who heard the comment responded: “Jay, we’re all interim.” I’ve not forgotten that. It’s useful to keep that temporal aspect in mind. It can help us through rough passages. “This too shall pass.” It can also help with some immunity to hubris. It can prevent us from giving our hearts to that which will not ultimately satisfy our hearts.

It does not mean we focus only on pie in the sky and forget about the ministry we’re given to do right now. C.S.Lewis put it this way: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.” He said: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

Think with me about the things that are eternal. In St. Paul’s famous hymn in I Corinthians 13, he concludes by saying that in the end, faith, hope and love will abide but the greatest of these is love. In some respects, faith and hope are by definition temporal. There will come a time when we no longer walk by faith, but by sight. Hope anticipates something that will come, with the implication that there will be a time when hope will not be necessary. But love does not end. Someone once posed this question about heaven: “Will everyone I love be there?” A wise person responded: “Even better. You will love everyone who is there.”

Think this week about how you might focus on the eternal. It matters. More from C.S.Lewis: “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.” Maybe that kind of eternal focus will come with a prayer for vision, maybe a repetition of this week’s collect. Maybe it will come with a prayerful act of love, unconditionally offered, expecting nothing in return. Life is indeed short, but whatever time we have is filled with opportunity to be swift to love, and to make haste to be kind. Those opportunities when met have lasting value.

-Jay Sidebotham

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RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

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It’s okay

He came pretty regularly to church, at the outset mostly for the sake of wife and kids. We had any number of conversations about why faith didn’t make sense to him. It might have been generous to call him an agnostic. He was one of the smartest people I’d met in church, a well-read philosophy major. I was no match for the intellectual sparring, but he kept coming to church.

After a while, he made an appointment to tell me that he had come to a place where faith actually did make sense. He seemed to affirm the adage that faith is more often caught than taught. Slowly, over time, after hanging around the community, he was becoming a believer, in his own way. He offered his synopsis of the gospel. He said that the gospel sounded to him like this: I’m not okay. You’re not okay. And that’s okay.

I wanted to fine-tune that. But I believed he had grasped a basic truth. Maybe without knowing it, he was underscoring the message of the collect we read in church yesterday (above).

In a nutshell, the collect says we need help. The collect says that God knows our necessities, our ignorance, our weakness, our unworthiness, our blindness. An interesting if not entirely chipper assessment of the human condition. The collect also suggests that God, the fountain of all wisdom, is not surprised by any of this. God knows all this about us. And God hangs in there with us anyway.

We’ve been reading Paul’s letter to the Romans on Sundays. One of the key points the apostle makes in that letter is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. No exceptions. But that’s not the whole story, because Paul describes in soaring language the marvel and mystery that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing, not even our deficits. We call that grace. It’s amazing.

Here’s one way to know what love is. It’s when someone in your life knows the bad or dumb things you’ve done, knows your quirks and deficits, and loves you still. Parents on a good day show that kind of love. Spouses can do that. It doesn’t happen enough in church, where contrary to the gospel, we often act like we expect people to have it all together. We are often less than gentle with other people’s failings, even if we coddle our own.

Our faith tells us about the wideness of God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea. To the extent that we’re able to grasp that, to believe that, to trust that, we have heard the gospel. We are saved from the ways in which our world makes everything conditional, the persistent ways that our world tells us we don’t measure up, tells us we’re just not good enough.

When I began my course of study at Union Seminary, we had a week of orientation. I’d been out of school for a while and I was excited about a return to serious academic work. Heady stuff. One of the speakers at orientation was James Forbes, seminary professor who went on to be Senior Pastor at Riverside Church. He said he had just one bit of advice for us students. Memorize Psalm 139. He said it would change our lives. I thought: I didn’t come to this high-falutin’place to memorize bible verses. I did that in Sunday School.

But I took him up on it. Years later, I can still recite a good amount of the chapter. Have a look at that psalm this week and think about why he recommended it. Think about how it might be transformative. The premise of the psalm, thousands of years old, says that God knows us better than ourselves. (Just a few of the verses are printed above) God knows all the ways we fall short. With all that knowledge, God still is with us and for us. On some holy level, in some divine economy, it’s all okay.

I believe that good news a fair amount of the time. Sometimes I find it hard to believe and I don’t act as if it is true. But to the extent I can embrace that good news, it provides a way to live in the world, a break from all the ways that I regard love as conditional. It means that my necessities, my weakness, ignorance, unworthiness do not define or limit me. I hope I can receive the grace to live into that truth, and to regard others with a bit of the grace that God extends to me.

-Jay Sidebotham

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RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

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Clueless

Truth be told, we wouldn’t pray yesterday’s collect (above) if we weren’t somewhat clueless. Printed below that collect, I’ve included the popular prayer about unknowing, written by Thomas Merton. I’m guessing that its popularity springs from the fact that we all know something about not knowing where we’re headed. Accordingly, we ask for help, that we might know and understand what to do, and know how to accomplish.

My first instinct is to challenge the collect. The fact is, we know what to do. It’s clear in scripture. Micah puts it this way: He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8) Very clear. Maybe not easy, but clear. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God and neighbor. Most religious traditions have some version of the Golden Rule, which is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Rabbi Hillel famously said that all the other commandments are just commentary on that one rule. We might add to that the Hippocratic Oath, which I’ve often asked Sunday School teachers to embrace: Do no harm. What we ought to do seems to be spelled out pretty clearly.

G.K.Chesterton said: The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and left untried. The Nike slogan comes to mind: Just do it. I laughed when I saw a t-shirt on a person who maybe had eaten a few too many cheeseburgers. It showed the Nike logo upside down with the words: Don’t want to.

We may know what we ought to do. But it is entirely possible we may not understand what we ought to do. The kind of life to which we are called, the kind of love we are called to show, may be beyond comprehension. Grace is truly amazing. As the hymn speaks of the wideness of God’s mercy, the hymn text says that the love of God is broader than the measure of our minds. In the course of our lives, we rarely experience the kind of unconditional love we are called to know and show. We come to life, to our relationships with mixed motives, with the underlying question: What’s in it for me? So maybe we do need help to know and understand what that love looks like.

And if we need help with that kind of understanding, we most certainly need help accomplishing it, in putting it to work. Where do we find that help? For starters, it’s worth noting that we can’t do it on our own. When we commit to the promises of the baptismal covenant (another place where it’s stated pretty clearly what we are to do. See page 304 in the Book of Common Prayer), we say that we will with God’s help. That help may come in our communities. On a good day, we can find help in the body of Christ, in the church.

I invite you to see how you can live this prayer, yesterday’s collect, in your life this week. Consider what you are being called to do. Is that clear to you? Where does the call to love God and neighbor intersect with your circumstances, with your daily rhythm? What are the opportunities to put love to work in your world? And then ask for the grace to accomplish that, to live into that call. Seek that grace from the one from whose love we can never be separated.

-Jay Sidebotham

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RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

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Standing on shoulders

Over the years, as I served as parish priest, I would chaperone lock-ins, events by which any number of rambunctious young people spend the night in the church. These events were wildly popular. Emphasis on wild. Sleep was apparently not on the agenda. I recall that each time I led one of these things, about 3am in the morning, I thought about alternative careers. Starbucks barista looked pretty good in those early morning hours. My role in this event was to make sure that everyone was safe, that no laws were broken, that the church was still standing in the morning.

In the course of these events, I made efforts to bring some spiritual component to the gathering, which sometimes was met with eye rolls from the teenagers, along with other forms of resistance. These efforts were not always successful.

One particular lock-in was held on the weekend closest to All Saints Day. I gathered the young people for a midnight eucharist. Because that was way past my bed-time, I invited the young people to offer the homily, answering this question: Who has been a saint in your life?

As we went around the circle, young people again and again cited a grandparent as a saint, a role model. The stories were sweet and powerful. I was impressed that I didn’t hear names you might expect: Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi. I mostly heard about saints who never gained fame. But they had shaped these young peoples’ lives. They had provided a foundation for these young people to grow spiritually. It made the lock-in effort totally worth it.

Spiritually speaking, we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, who have modeled for us what it means to put faith to work in the world. That goes all the way back to the characters in the Hebrew Scriptures. (For instance, Abraham has always been a teacher and guide for me.) And throughout the centuries, saints have shown us what courage looks like in the face of great opposition, resistance and persecution. Some were world famous. Others, not so much. I wonder which biblical characters, which saints throughout church history, have been that kind of guide for you.

The collect heard in church yesterday speaks of the foundation of apostles and prophets, folks who have paved the way, shown the way, lived the way of love. The collect continues to use the metaphor we noted last week, making reference to a foundation, a holy construction project. We find ourselves living our life of faith in a great communion of time, a great global communion. Yesterday’s collect asks that we’ll do so in a spirit of unity (even if it’s not a spirit of agreement or uniformity or unanimity). We’re asked to recognize how others have helped us grow in faith, how others have helped us build our faith.

Take time today to think about who those people have been in your life. On whose shoulders do you stand? Offer thanks for them. If they are still around, you might want to send a note of thanks for their help along the way. I’m certain that would be well-received. It might be a source of great encouragement.

Then think and pray about how you might be part of this building process, how you can help someone else. Who might that be in your life this week?

As I write, I’m waiting to hear about the arrival of my third grandchild. I hope and pray that I can help that person build a life of faith. I hope and pray they will have people in their life who will do that. And I hope and pray they survive any future lock-in, and that they will show mercy to their chaperones.

-Jay Sidebotham

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RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

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The architecture of your life

Jesus concludes the Sermon on the Mount with a parable, which has been turned into a Sunday School ditty you may know. (See Matthew 7:24-27) It’s about a wise person building a house on rock, set in contrast to a foolish person building a house on sand. (It’s totally irrelevant that I’m writing from a North Carolina barrier island.)

Jesus invites disciples to think about how they are building a life. What is the foundation?

How would you answer that question about your own life? On what foundation are you building? How is construction going? What does the architecture look like? How’s the supply chain? What helps you make progress? What gets in the way?

There are a variety of foundations on which we can build. Some people build lives on the foundations of their own skill or proficiency, their education, title, income, class or zip code. God may have little to do with it.

Others can have a theological foundation which suggests what kind of God they believe in. It can be a God to be feared. I refer to Gary Larson, favorite theologian and snarky cartoonist. In one cartoon, God with long white beard sits at computer. On the screen, a clueless pedestrian walks down the street. A grand piano plummets toward the sidewalk, about to crush aforementioned pedestrian. God is at the keyboard about to press the “Smite” button. If that notion of a judgmental, fearsome God is the foundation, that can lead to a life structured on fear, judgment, division, exclusion.

The collect we heard in church yesterday (see above) invites us to build on a different kind of foundation, the sure foundation of God’s loving-kindness. It suggests a life based on grace, a life built on the premise that God regards us and relates to us with loving-kindness.

What do you make of that word: loving-kindness? The kindness part indicates the way God’s love is shown. It speaks to God’s forbearance, a holy willingness to forgive, to give us a break. It speaks to God’s awareness of who we are, our strengths and weaknesses, joys and sorrows. It speaks of divine grace in action, the amazing grace that the fundamental, foundational fact about us is that we are accepted.

Speaking of foundations, in his book Shaking of the Foundations, Paul Tillich spoke of this divine loving-kindness in terms of grace. Noting challenges we face, he said:

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.

Tillich has crafted a vision of God’s loving-kindness. If we build on that foundation, the architecture of our lives will reflect that foundation. Our lives will be a holy structure, even if not perfect, shaped by the foundation on which we are built.

As we consider that God regards us with loving-kindness, accepting us as Tillich described, we then are called to build on that, thinking about how we relate to people around us with loving-kindness. It means meeting them with gentleness. It means extending forgiveness, giving other people a break. It means asking: How can I help you today? It means listening before speaking. It means honoring the other person, finding out what might be best for them. It means showing grace as it has been shown to us. It means accepting others as we have been accepted.

In my time in church, I have noted that often church people can be really unkind. Downright mean. I am struck with the way that religious folks from Eastern traditions focus on loving-kindness. Case in point, the Dalai Lama who said: My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

We could learn from that.

How might you practice that simple religion this week. If you need help, pray yesterday’s collect as it notes that God is there to help and govern us in this particular construction project.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

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Boldness/Compassion

As I reflected on the collect we heard yesterday in church (above), there were two words that stood out for me: boldness and compassion. I thought of two women who I admire greatly to help me think about these words as part of what it means to live faithfully in the world.

Starting with boldness, I thought of the brand new book written by the Rt. Rev. Marian Edgar Budde, bishop of Washington, and a leader I greatly admire, someone who has taught me a lot. Her new book is entitled How We Learn To Be Brave. It’s described as “an inspirational guide to the key junctures in life that, if navigated with faith and discernment, pave the way for us to become our most courageous selves.”

According to this book, decisive moments in life are points when we’re called on to push past fears and act with strength. Have you ever had to do that? Bishop Budde teaches us to respond with clarity and grace even in the toughest times (and being bishop in our nation’s capital means she knows something about tough times). She says that being brave is not a singular occurrence; it’s a journey that we can choose to undertake every day.

She explores the full range of decisive moments, from the most visible and dramatic (the decision to go), to the internal and personal (the decision to stay), to brave choices made with an eye toward the future (the decision to start), those born of suffering (the decision to accept that which we did not choose), and those that come unexpectedly (the decision to step up to the plate).

The boldness for which we pray involves bravery, and the related virtue of courage. Courage is a quality prayed for at the end of communion, as we ask for strength and courage to love and serve God. I’m taken with the word courage, because as it shares root with the French word for heart (coeur), it tells us that as we pray for boldness, we are also called to pray for compassion, which again is about the heart. It is about love.

Which leads me to the second word, and the wisdom of Karen Armstrong, the second hero I wish to cite. She’s a gifted scholar, and someone with great focus on interfaith conversation. She lives out her premise that compassion is the common virtue in all faith traditions. In the same way that being brave is described as a journey, Armstrong says that the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a lifelong project.

According to Armstrong, compassion derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person, to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view.”

Compassion impels us to “work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.”

It strikes me that we need both to be at work in our faithful lives. Boldness without compassion can become a steamroller. Compassion without boldness leads to timidity and complicity. Yesterday’s collect underscores that need for both. I’m wondering how you might live out your faith with boldness and compassion this week.

Where are you being called to be bold? Where can you be compassionate? How can you do both?

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog

Thought/Action

What’s on your mind these days? What occupies the real estate in your brain? Mindful that Rene Descartes said: I think therefore I am, I’m wondering how our thought processes shape our identity. The collect offered yesterday in church (see above) begins with a prayer that we be inspired to think those things that are right. I hear an echo of the various places in scripture where we are challenged to examine the interior life.

Psalm 19 asks that the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in God’s sight. In a penitential psalm (Psalm 51), we read “Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me.” Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says it’s all a matter of the heart, that the inner life is the source of either goodness or division. St. Paul said: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” Not a bad checklist. Elsewhere, St. Paul tells readers to have the mind of Christ, the mind of a servant. How would our lives unfold differently this week if we focused on having the mind of Christ?

It’s all a matter of how we are shaping our interior life. How do the books we read, the movies we watch, the social media with which we engage shape our inner life? Do resentments and envy fill our thoughts? Do those thoughts block out lovelier ones? Where do our thoughts go when we have down time? Think about what you think about this week. And take yesterday’s collect as a chance to pray for God’s grace to shape that inner life.

But it doesn’t stop there. Thoughts and prayers are not enough. That’s true not only in our response to the current epidemic of gun violence. It goes to the heart of our faith, as the letter of James says that faith (which can correspond to the interior life) without works is dead. We are meant not only to think those things that are right, but also to do those things that are right, based on the fact that what we think about shapes what we do.

So we pray for God’s merciful guidance in our actions. For some in our tradition, there has been a split between that inward journey and outward expressions of faith. I’m grateful for the ministry of people like Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr who have provided guidance in the interweaving of the contemplative life and holy action in the world. The faithful dedication to the inner life gave them strength to work for justice and peace. Richard Rohr described the connection this way: “The effect of contemplation is authentic action. If contemplation doesn’t lead to authentic action, then it remains only navel-gazing and self-preoccupation.” He founded the Center for Action and Contemplation, about which he writes: “The most important word in our Center’s name is not Action nor is it Contemplation, but the word and. We need both action and contemplation to have a whole spiritual journey. It doesn’t matter which comes first; action may lead to contemplation and contemplation may lead to action. But finally, they need and feed each other.”

Returning to the mind of Christ, I refer you to the beautiful hymn found in Philippians 2:5-11. Christ’s saving action came from his own inner life, his inner intention to offer himself to God for us. As his followers, his students, we pray for grace to have that same mind. What might that look like for you this week, to have that mindset? How will it shape your actions?

-Jay Sidebotham

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God in three persons, blessed Trinity

These days in our culture, words like doctrine and dogma don’t go over so well, as in the bumper sticker: “My karma ran over your dogma.” Associations with words like doctrinaire or dogmatic are hardly positive. They suggest to some that one had better toe the line, no questions asked. Believe it or else. A scan of definitions of dogma underscores the point.

Oxford Language describes dogma as “a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.” That’s enough to make many Episcopalians head for the door. Merriam-Webster talks about “a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds, a doctrine or a body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church.” That reminds me of how Mark Twain described faith: “Believing what any fool knows is not true.” (I deleted an expletive or two.) I kind of like the reference to the Greek translation which says that a dogma suggests something that seems to be true.

So how do we respond to a Sunday dedicated to a doctrine, a dogma of the church, the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity? The standard joke for clergy is that this is a Sunday to invite a guest preacher. No two ways about it. The doctrine is mind-bogglingly mysterious.

Yesterday in church we read the collect for Trinity Sunday, printed above. It’s a prayer that speaks of the confession of a true faith by which we acknowledge the glory of a God who is understood (by our pea brains) as both trinity and unity. It became a dogma as it was deduced from what we read in scripture, which references God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in a number of places. I’ve heard plenty of far-fetched sermons (and probably delivered some) that struggle to explain all this, or provide the perfect metaphor. I can’t recall any that totally eliminate the truly mysterious reality of the Holy One. As St. Paul said: We see through a glass darkly. We now know in part. (I Corinthians 13)

I do like what one of my teachers said about the doctrines, the dogmas of the church. He said that they are like buoy markers floating on the surface of the ocean. They indicate depths beyond our perception. They are pointers to deep truths, mysteries beyond our ken. They don’t explain everything. They are not the object of worship themselves. As Evelyn Underhill reminded clergy of her day: “God is the interesting thing about religion.”

So why bother? What truth is conveyed here, even if we can’t fully comprehend? Michael Curry reminds us that if it’s not about love, it’s not about God. The mystery of the Trinity points us to the fact that God is love. God is in God’s self a community. Augustine wrote a lot about this. In my limited understanding of his work on the subject, he presents God as lover, God as beloved, God as the love that goes between lover and beloved. A trinity. A unity. A community.

And perhaps the greatest mystery, the wonder of wonders, is that you and I are invited to participate in that community, to worship the Creator, to follow the Son as Lord and Savior, teacher and friend, to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And maybe here is the so-what factor: In that participation, we are equipped to extend that love beyond ourselves. The doctrine, the dogma, the buoy marker that is the Trinity gives us a way to move forward in this world, participating in the love that is at the center of all that is. And as Burt Bacharach wrote, as Dionne Warwick sang, that’s what the world needs now. Love, sweet love. How can you enter into the life of the Trinity by sharing that love this week?

How about that for a Monday Matters? Citing Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick, Michael Curry, Evelyn Underhill, St. Paul and St. Augustine. Time for a cup of coffee.

-Jay Sidebotham

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Come, Holy Spirit

When Jesus had his after-hours meeting with Nicodemus (Maybe the original Nick at Nite), he talked about the Spirit. Jesus said: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” (John 3:8,9).

If Nicodemus, seasoned religious expert, sounds confused, is there hope for the rest of us? He gives us all permission to recognize that the movement of the Spirit is mysterious, often difficult to pin down, and really hard to predict. So we come to know the Spirit based on the effect the Spirit has, or perhaps as St. Paul puts it, we know the Spirit by the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22,23). But how does that all happen?

The collect we heard in church yesterday (above) reminds us that all is grace. The collect tells us that the Spirit comes to us as a gift, one that is unexpectedly expansive, probably more expansive than we might expect or even want. It is human nature to want to know who is in and who is out. We want to limit the influence of the Spirit so we can explain that influence, and perhaps control the movement of the Spirit.

But the Day of Pentecost as described in the Acts of the Apostles was anything but controlled. Holy chaos broke out, in a reversal of the Tower of Babel. The good news was mysteriously proclaimed in languages of those gathered in Jerusalem. It was like a rapid spreading fire. It was like the blast of a mighty wind. It was not the frozen chosen. I can imagine that members of the religious establishment were thinking: “Wait a minute. We’ve always known how things work. We’ve known who is to be included. We need religion to be predictable.” And of course, I can imagine hearing those six words most dreaded by clergy: “We’ve never done it this way.” Maybe not unlike the parishioner who couldn’t understand why her rector talked about reaching out in the community and practicing evangelism. She said: “In this town, everyone who ought to be Episcopalian already is.”

So when we pray “Come, Holy Spirit”, or when in the eucharist we pray for the Holy Spirit to bless gifts of bread and wine, or when we echo the psalm which asks “Take not thy Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51), we’d best be ready to fasten our seat belts. We’d best be ready for the circle to widen, to broaden our vision of who can be moved by God’s Holy Spirit, to get a surprising vision of holiness.

Yesterday’s collect tells us that the work of the Spirit is for every race and nation. These days, we could really use that kind of work. On a global, national, ecclesiastical, personal level, we contend with great energy around division, about defining self by excluding someone else. We build walls to decide who is in and who is out, imagining that they solve anything. Religious folks consider that they have a corner on the truth. We are made to fear the other.

We need the gift of the work of the Spirit. As we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, pray for the Spirit to come with surprising effect in your life and in your community. Pray for the power of the Spirit to knock down walls the divide us from each other. Pray for the fire of the Spirit to burn away resentments and the pride that fuels resentments. Pray for the wind of the Spirit to breathe new life into relationships that have gotten stuck or stale, our relationship with neighbors, maybe our relationship with God. Pray that your own circle be widened to extend the love of God in some new way, maybe in some way you hadn’t even expected. What might that look like in your week?

-Jay Sidebotham

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