May 11, 2008 Vance L. Toivonen
READING Numbers 11:24-29
So Moses went out and told the people what God had said. He called together seventy of the leaders and had them stand around the Tent. God came down in a cloud and spoke to Moses and took some of the Spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy leaders. When the Spirit rested on them they prophesied. But they didn't continue; it was a onetime event. Meanwhile two men, Eldad and Medad, had stayed in the camp. They were listed as leaders but they didn't leave camp to go to the Tent. Still, the Spirit also rested on them and they prophesied in the camp. A young man ran and told Moses, "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp!" Joshua son of Nun, who had been Moses' right-hand man since his youth, said, "Moses, master! Stop them!" But Moses said, "Are you jealous for me? Would that all God's people were prophets. Would that God would put his Spirit on all of them."
READING Carlton Pearson, The Gospel of Inclusion
It is as impossible to reject God or the Christ Principle as it is to reject the air that we breathe. No one has to preach air or proclaim its existence. Yet every living thing requires it. It is everywhere, invisible and essential. If we began packaging air and branding it culturally, religiously, or ethnically, would some people refuse to breath a brand of air that wasn’t theirs?...The unconditional love of God is as spiritually ubiquitous and necessary as air. But spiritual air and religious air are completely different. Religious gods can always be rejected, but the God who is Spirit cannot be (rejected), even by the atheist.
SERMON
When I was still a young man, in my later teens, that Spirit that is spoken of in both readings today seemed to take a special interest in me. I divorced myself from the heady, doctrinaire world of orthodox Lutheranism, Missouri Synod Lutheranism, the religion of my parents, and married myself to Neo-Pentecostalism, referred to at the time as The Charismatic Movement.
I met with others who had also come from mainline churches, predominantly Lutherans, who had come to experience God’s Spirit in ways that were traditionally reserved for Pentecostal Christians. There was prophecy, and teaching, and long, angst-ridden prayer sessions. There was a sharing together. And there was the phenomenon academically referred to as glossolalia, a.k.a. speaking in tongues.
In the Pentecostal world, you see, it is not enough to just accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. One must demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit by engaging in this practice of multi-syllabic utterances purported to be generated by the Holy Spirit of God. Speaking in tongues means giving one’s self over ecstatically to the Holy Spirit, letting go of control, being taken over. And, to make a long story short, I had a very difficult time doing that. I believe now that my intrapersonal development, or lack thereof, may have indeed been a factor in that difficulty, but that is a sermon for another day.
The roots of this exclusive access to the Holy Spirit run deep into Old Testament lore. In today’s first lesson we hear the story of Medad and Eldad, The seventy elders had traveled to the tabernacle outside the encampment of the Israelites to get closer to God, and to engage in prophetic activity. The tabernacle was the house of God, the place where Moses and the priests went to meet with God, the place where sacrifices were made to God. It made sense that they would have better access to God’s Spirit in closer proximity to God himself. But Medad and Eldad remained in the encampment, and they prophesied there. A kid ran and tattled on them to Moses, and Moses’ reply is the core of our meditation on this Pluralism Sunday.
There is a link on our website to The Center for Progressive Christianity. They have encouraged that this Sunday be designated as Pluralism Sunday, the Sunday when all participating Christian churches pronounce loud and clear that God does not have an exclusive relationship with Christianity. Which is why I chose that second reading for today. Some of you who have been around Hope for years and years might say having one Sunday at Hope Church to celebrate pluralism is like having one day a year to celebrate being human. But we must always remember that there are folks in our community who are on the cusp of living the question about the depth, height, width, and length of God’s Spirit and Presence. It is for the sake of living that question that I believe God called Hope Church to be the unique presence that it is.
Let’s first return to Moses’ reply. “Would that all God's people were prophets. Would that God would put his Spirit on all of them." Remember, these words were spoken by the great prophet Moses in a time when the presence of God’s Spirit was understood as exclusive to certain individuals. The idea that God’s Spirit would be poured out upon everyone was foreign. I’m sure that kid must have thought Moses was a little off that day. But there it is in ancient Hebrew literature, the precursor to Pentecost. And today is, by the way, the Day of Pentecost in the Church, the day when the second chapter of Acts is pervasively read in worship. I encourage you to read it this week and recall this phenomenal story from the first century.
Universalism, the concept that God’s Spirit is everyone’s Spirit, that all of Creation has been redeemed and sanctified and is loved unconditionally by the God of the Universe, was prevalent, we are told by Carlton Pearson, until the year 394, when a controversy broke out between the early church father Origen and his detractors. And by 553, the Fifth General Council in Constantinople (The Eastern Orthodox version of the Vatican in the West), officially condemned Universalism. In the nearly 1500 years since, the divisions both within and outside of Christianity have made religions of all stripes and colors one of the most significant sources of dissension on this planet.
Those facts are delineated in Carlton Pearson’s book, leading up to the passage quoted as our second reading today. This man is a Pentecostal Fundamentalist Bishop who has come to the conclusion that for much of his ministry he was, simply put, wrong. He has come out with this book to speak of his journey from exclusion to inclusion, from an “us” vs. “them” way of approaching the world to a “there is only an us” way of living. Needless to say, Pearson has been ostracized by many of his Fundamentalist sisters and brothers, in the same way that John Shelby Spong has been ostracized by folks in the mainline churches, including many of my colleagues in ministry.
Something is happening. God’s Spirit, this air that we cannot live without, the breathe that was breathed into the dust in the beginning, this Spirit is rising above all of the distinctions human beings want to draw between one another, this Spirit is working in the hearts of human beings, this Spirit is living in the questions, and this Spirit will circumvent institutions and powers and authorities because the good news, the gospel Jesus preached and taught, must live in us if humankind is to survive as God’s grand experiment on this planet.
Something is happening that will bring Christians on the right and Christians on the left together. Something is happening that will break down the walls of religious institutions in the same way that the wall that once separated Germans one from the other fell in the 80s. Something is happening that we cannot stop. We can resist its flow for a time. We can refrain from breathing for a time, avoiding the air of God’s Spirit. But eventually, we will gasp for that air, breathe it in deeply, and find the new life, the reconciliation, the hope, the peace, the freedom and the unbridled joy that it has to offer. Something is happening. And we have an opportunity to be a part of it.
Something is happening that will join Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and Atheists in a celebration of the Spirit of a God we cannot avoid or deny, a God we need not deny because this God is the giver of all of life, the Creator of all that exists, and the loving Parent who could never in a million years disown a single child. Something is happening that will lead us to a day when it will no longer be necessary anywhere on this planet to designate a Sunday as Pluralism Sunday. Something is happening in and among us. We can feel it. That is God’s Spirit moving, the Wind blowing, the Breathe breathing, the Air renewing. Something is happening.
So what can we do? We can open ourselves to this air. Take deeper breathes by breathing in the wisdom to which God’s Spirit has given birth. As Christians, predominantly, but not exclusively, in this place, we can breathe in the life and teachings of Jesus. But we can also sample the lighter air in the Tibetan mountains that supports the energy of Buddhism. We can nibble on the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah, and chew on the divine multi-verse of Hinduism. We can respect the teaching of Mohammed and even find the God behind the alleged godlessness of the Atheist. After all, this is what religious pluralism invites.
But first and foremost, we must breathe the air that immediately surrounds us. For me, and for most of you, I suspect, that air is the air generated by the life and teachings of Jesus, air that has been both encouraged and contaminated by the institutional religion we call Christianity. This is where we begin our breathing, deeply and consistently, adding ever so carefully the air of other traditions. But the most important thing is to just breathe, breathe as deeply as we can, and renew our lives in the process. Today we thank God who is our Breathe, our Life, our Hope, and our Source of unconditional, relentless love for us, and for the whole world. So, let’s stand and sing together, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.