Pentecost: June 12, 2011

At the Albertville Ministers Fellowship meeting this week, we began an honest, unsettling conversation. For all the many churches in this small town, participation in the Fellowship isn’t what it used to be. Some at the meeting bemoaned the Fellowship’s loss of influence. There was concern that not enough people attended the Holy Week luncheons with Bible Study at Mt. Calvary. At the first Palm Sunday community service in which I participated, back in 2009, the preacher spent most of his time complaining about all the people who weren’t coming to church in Sundays. Clearly, the pastors are worried.

And if you look at the news, they probably have reason. For years, there has been much news about the membership decline in the “mainline” denominations: Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian. But now even the Southern Baptists are having that problem. Just this week, it was announced that for the 8th time in 10 years, the number of people baptized declined in 2010.

The Albertville Ministers’ Fellowship is worried about the future. And it’s impossible to stay informed about goings-on in our own Episcopal Church -- declining attendance, declining budgets, program cuts, continuing conflict over church property in the courts – and not be concerned about our future. Do we even have a future? Will our church survive? Will our children have faith? Will our faith have children? And inside the walls of our churches are all those challenges I just mentioned. There’s not enough money. There seem to be so many divisions about right doctrine. So many arguments in which anxious people lash out in blame and scapegoating and pining for an easy answer. So many people on the outside, and here we few are on the inside. Won’t someone come and help us?

But there’s a story just like that in the Bible: a few men and women who believed that a man who had been executed only a few weeks earlier was in fact the Messiah and the Son of God. But how much more successful could they hope to be than he was? Sure he had been raised from the dead. Of that they were witnesses. But there were so few of them. And there were still thousands on the outside who had arranged and supported his execution. And when they had asked him, “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?” Jesus’ non-answer, just before he was taken away from them was “It isn’t for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has set by his own authority. Rather, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Only a few were left. They were inside a room where the doors were locked, for fear of the Jews, while everybody else was on the outside. And then it happened: rushing wind, flames all around them, roaring, and then, silence. Now it was their turn. No one came to take away their problems. Instead the Spirit came and gave them a new problem. They couldn’t stay inside. Something drove them outside. All that wind, fire and roaring was inside them, and it would have burst inside them if they didn’t rush outside and start preaching, serving, caring, teaching, witnessing, praying, inviting, and loving. They had to tell their story, or it would burst inside them.

We have strength, courage, compassion. And most of all, we have a story to tell. Our problem isn’t money, divisions or arguments. Our problem is that each of us has a story to tell and we can’t help but tell it. I’ve tried to tell my story in bits and pieces over the past two years. It’s a life story in which I learned that the love of God is far bigger than my, or anyone else’s piece of the truth. It’s a life story in which the loving Spirit of God has broken through every wall I’ve ever erected to protect myself. In my youth, it was a wall of grief and anger which God’s love broke through. In my early adulthood, it was a wall of ideological and religious certitude that God’s love broke through: my ideology had nothing on the love of God.

What walls of sin and alienation have you hidden behind, only to see them broken through by the love of God in Christ Jesus crucified? What is your story which you have to tell or else it will burst? I trust that all our stories are simply parts of one great story. It started with God and one man and woman, Abraham and Sarah. That story grew to include one nation. And now it includes all people, those inside this church, and those outside. We have a story to tell, and a story to listen to. We need to hear the stories of those on the outside. Listening to those unfamiliar stories, we may hear learn something new about our own story, as hopefully they learn something new about their stories. And then we will understand that there aren’t stories, but one great story of God’s love for all.

Jesus Christ told this story, and his failure was nailed to the cross. But that failure was not the last word. On this day of Pentecost, as on that first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit invites us to tell our story of what God is doing inside these walls. The Holy Spirit is inviting us to go outside and do our best to tell that story. Might we fail? If we follow the crucified Christ, at least some of the time we will. Read enough of the New Testament, and you will see their failures in black and white: persecution, lack of money, divisions, arguments. But the successes that followed those failures are there to see as well.

So, let us dream of what we might do here on Sand Mountain. Let us plan as best we can. Let us tell the story of God’s love. Let us learn from our successes and failures. And when we fail, let us rejoice that the Holy Spirit has blown us that much closer to success. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

This sermon was largely inspired by this video