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Playing Jesus versus Being Jesus
In Jonathan Roumie’s commencement address last weekend at the Catholic University of America, he shared this observation with the graduates: “You don’t need to play Jesus for the world in order to be Jesus to the world… I’ve realized that just because I play Jesus on a TV show doesn’t mean I can or I should stop being Christ to everyone I know when the cameras turn off, and neither should you [and] Just because you’re not an actor playing Jesus or a priest or a nun doesn’t mean you’re not meant to represent him at all times, wherever you go.”...Sermon Starters (Pentecost)(B)(2024)
One year, the week before Pentecost, I was volunteering with an interfaith food pantry, hosted by a Christian congregation. Twice, my fellow volunteers — both Jewish — asked about the change in the sanctuary decor and so I had the opportunity to talk with them about Pentecost. I mentioned how all the Jews were gathered in Jerusalem at the time. They nodded knowingly and said, “they were there for Shavuot.” And I replied, “No. For Pentecost.” And they replied, “No. Shavuot.” And I went, “ooooh.” Because I had never really thought about why they were all there to begin with. Why were all of those Jews — from all around the known world: Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Asia, Egypt, Libya, Rome — gathered in Jerusalem? I supposed I had always assumed they were there so the Holy Spirit could come and they could become Christian and start the church. In fact, the Jews were gathered in Jerusalem then — just as many Jews today still gather 50 days after Passover — to celebrate Shavuot. Shavuot is the festival of weeks, the celebration of the Harvest but also (and here’s where it gets interesting) the commemoration of the giving of the law, the Torah, to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In fact, the name of our season of Pentecost comes from that 50 day period between Passover and Shavout, which (of course) align roughly to Jesus death/resurrection and our celebration of Ascension and … Pentecost. These two holidays are inextricably linked by the calendar and, it turns out, their themes. Whereas one holiday commemorates the giving of the law, the other holiday celebrates the giving of the Spirit. In Christian Scripture, these two are often held together. Sometimes they are held up in comparison or as a challenge to one another. Sometimes they seem to complement and build off each other...Pentecost (B)(2024)
An old beggar lay on his deathbed. His last words were to his young son who had been his constant companion during his begging trips. “Dear son,” he said, “I have nothing to give you except a cotton bag and a dirty bronze bowl which I got in my younger days from the junk yard of a rich lady.” After his father’s death, the boy continued begging, using the bowl his father had given him. One day a gold merchant dropped a coin in the boy’s bowl and he was surprised to hear a familiar ring. “Let me check your bowl,” the merchant said. To his great surprise, he found that the beggar’s bowl was made of pure gold. “My dear young man,” he said, “why do you waste your time begging? You are a rich man. That bowl of yours is worth at least thirty thousand dollars.” — We Christians are often like this beggar boy who failed to recognize and appreciate the value of his bowl. We fail to appreciate the infinite worth of the Holy Spirit living within us, making each of us His Temple and sharing His gifts, fruits, and charisms with us. On this major feast day, we are invited to experience and appreciate the transforming, sanctifying, and strengthening presence of the Holy Spirit within us. This is also a day for us to renew our promises made to God during our Baptism and Confirmation, to profess our Faith, and to practice it...
Recommended Resources
Pentecost (A)(2014)
("When I was a young teenager; Mama and Daddy went to work in the Cotton Mill to supplement the family income. Up until then we got by on just the tobacco crop. They still raised tobacco, they did it after work and on weekends, and expected a lot of help from their children. They would leave for the mill around 6:30 AM. They would put a list of things to get done in the middle of the table for the children to see when we got up, some to be done around the house, most in the fields..." funny personal story!)*Come, O Holy Spirit
("Sheen tells of visiting a leper colony in Africa on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. He brought with him enough small crucifixes to give to each of the 500 lepers living in the camp. The first leper to meet him had only a stump of his left arm. His right arm and hand were covered with the white open sores of leprosy..." and other illustrations)Ask Not
A few years ago, my wife and I watched the movie version of "The Full Monty". For those who haven't seen it, it is about a group of men who have lost their jobs at the steel mills in England and who can't find any other jobs to support their families. They band together and decide to put on a show for the women like the Chippandales, only taken to the next level, if you catch my drift. One of the most touching scenes for me, and there were many, was towards the end of the movie when one of the wives of one of the men finds his thong that they use in their act.The Big Picture
Is it morning already? I rub my eyes and get up to ready myself for just another day. It's just another day...I look out my window to see the sun beaming down, caressing the Earth with its golden rays. Above, white clouds float in the brilliant blue sky. I hear a cardinal singing to his mate as he perches upon my back fence. And a bed of crocus open their purple heads to the heavens in joyful thankfulness. It's just another day. My small daughter bursts into the room, her giggle ringing through the house as she hugs my neck tightly. Her small hand fits into mine as she pulls me to the kitchen to show me the card she has made. A stick figure with curly brown hair waves from the paper and beneath it, written in purple crayon are the words, "I love you, Mommy."The Church, The People of God/Service
There is a story about a field mouse who once asked a wise old owl what was the weight of a single snowflake. "Why nothing more than nothing," the owl answered. Well, the mouse went on to tell the owl about a time when he was resting on a branch in a fir tree, counting each snowflake that came to rest on the branch until the number was 3,471,952. Then with the settling of the very next flake -- crack. The branch suddenly snapped, tumbling the mouse and the snow to the ground. "That was surely a whole lot of nothing," observed the mouse.The Gift of Fortitude
In 1981, Pastor Chen was arrested for his part in delivering more than one million Bibles to Swatow, on the south China coast. Two investigators were flown in from Beijing, but still Pastor Chen refused to release the names of those who met in a secret house church or those who helped deliver Bibles under the code name "Project Pearl." Exasperated, the investigators took Chen into a courtyard in the prison and made him stand on a tall wooden box. A rope was put around his neck and tightened. The rope was fixed on a wooden beam above him. The box he was standing on was about four feet high, and very narrow. Angrily, the first investigator said, "We have given up on you. The moment you sway, or when your legs collapse from exhaustion, you will hang yourself. That is the penalty for your stubbornness!"In Fear and Trembling
It was early one Sunday morning and a mother hurries into her son's room. "Come on, son," she says as she rustles the covers on his bed. "Time to get up for church." "But I don't want to go to church!", comes the response from under the covers. "What do you mean, 'You don't want to go to church?' Why that's ridiculous! Now get up, get dressed and let's go to church!" "But I told you that I don't want to go!" "Why not?", his mother asks. "Because they don't like me there." "Well I never heard such nonsense. Now you just have to go, that's all there is to it! After all, you're fifty-one years old. And besides, you're their pastor."The Spirit Within and Beyond
("But suffer a second lesson, about the Spirit beyond us. It's drawn from a contemporary novel of the First World War, Sebastian Faulks'1993 Birdsong. The story's hero, a wounded Stephen Wraysfold, is recuperating in a medical ward near the front...")*A Mighty Wind
("As I travel down the back roads, of this home I love so much, Every carpenter and cowboy, every lame many on a crutch.. They're all talking about a feeling, or a taste that's in the air, They're all talking about this mighty wind, that's blowing everywhere...")Pentecost (C)(2013)
["Five little bunnies, about six days old, were attacked by a dog and orphaned. Of the five bunnies, two did not survive; and the three left were not doing very well. The bunnies were cared for and carefully kept in a cage for their safety. Near the cage was Noah. (Noah was a pure white dove.) Noah kept going over to the bunny cage and looking in; even sleeping in front of the door of the cage..." and several other quotes]The Rabbi's Gift
a monastery had fallen upon hard times. Once a great order, as a result of waves of antimonastic persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth, all its branch houses were lost and it had become decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house: the abbot and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly it was a dying order...Voices of God
("From the tongue of Maya Angelou, molested child, shuttled between her grandmother and her mother, then an unwed mother at 18, trolley car conductor, nightclub singer, pimp, prostitute, and thanks to mentors like Langston Hughes, author, professor, US poet laureate, a Presidential Medal of Freedom awardee, comes this prayer..." additional poems from Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver and Hildegard of Bingen)Open Wide the Doors
Andrew Forsthoefel was 23 years old when he decided to try walking across the Continental United States from his home in Philadelphia all the way to the Pacific Coast. No rides. No smart phone. He carried a backpack containing camping equipment, a camera, a food bag stocked with jerky, tuna fish and PB&J, and a sign hanging off the pack that said, "Walking to listen." He also carried a voice recorder that he used to collect the stories of those he met along the way, asking them the question, "If you could go back, what would you tell yourself at 23?" The question yielded some remarkable answers, which Andrew curated into a radio show which appeared on This American Life in 2013.The Firebird and the Hawk
("There had been a vision forty years before. During an Aurora Borealis on an Island in Maine, a dark form had appeared in the midst of a pulsing and vibrating vault of fire and gold. The darkness at the center took the shape of small bird. And then the bird expanded towards me, swooped at unfathomable speed and as I stood transfixed and rooted to the ground, the bird passed over,almost as if great wind had passed. Then it burst in a flash of golden light and fire, a fire that did not consume...")*Illustrations, Quotes and Lectionary Reflections (Pentecost)
"A schoolmaster in France was discouraged with one of his students. He wrote in his roll book concerning this student: 'He is the smallest, the meekest, the most unpromising boy in my class.' Half a century later, an election was held in France to select the greatest Frenchman. By popular vote, that meekest, smallest, most unpromising boy was chosen. His name? Louis Pasteur, the founder of modern medicine. At age seventy-three, a national holiday was declared in his honor..." and many more illustrations
Illustrated Resources from 2021 to 2023
The Spirit of Enniskillen
One thing that many of the political analysts have noticed is that, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to look back and see clearly that there was one really critical moment in the recent history of Northern Ireland when everything changed and the level of violence finally started to decline. That moment happened on the 8th of November 1987 when a bomb exploded at a Remembrance Day parade in Enniskillen, a small town of about 10,000 people. Eleven people were killed and many more were injured. Among those who were killed was a young woman named Marie Wilson. That evening, an interview with her father, Gordon Wilson, who was a shopkeeper and Methodist minister in the town and who had also been injured in the bomb, was shown on the news. The interview had been recorded about an hour after the bomb exploded and just a few minutes after he had been told of his daughter’s death. With all the tact and sensitivity one might expect of a professional journalist speaking with a grieving father, the interviewer asked her father what he felt about the people who had just killed his daughter on her 21st birthday. I really cannot imagine what words went through the man’s mind, but without a moment’s hesitation, he described his last conversation with his dying daughter as they both lay buried in the rubble. These were his words. (I have them memorised, but I have written them out to make sure that I get them exactly correct): "She held my hand tightly and gripped me as hard as she could. She said, ‘Daddy, I love you very much.’ Those were her exact words to me, and those were the last words I ever heard her say. But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. She was great wee lassie. She loved her profession. She was a pet. She’s dead. She’s in heaven and we shall meet again. I will pray for these men tonight and every night." It was a moment which touched the nation. He only spoke softly but his words echoed around the country. There was something in his voice which told you that he meant it just like he said it. What many people admired the most was the use of the words "I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge." As if there was no real alternative. As if turning the other cheek was the only possible response to hatred & violence. Since that moment the momentum towards peace in Northern Ireland has been unstoppable...Pentecost Sunday (B)(2021)
Week after week the ship lay there in the still waters with not a hint of a breeze. The crew was dying of thirst. And then, on the far horizon, a steamship appeared, headed directly toward the stranded ship. As it drew near, the captain called out, "We need water! Give us water!" The steamship replied, "Lower your buckets where you are." The captain was furious at this response and called out again, "Please, give us water." But the steamer gave the same reply, "Lower your buckets where you are!" And with that the steam ship sailed away! The captain of the sailing ship was filled with despair, and he went below deck. A little later, when no one was looking, a yeoman lowered a bucket into the sea and then tasted what he brought up: It was perfectly fresh water! For you see, the ship was just outside of the mouth of the Amazon. And for all those weeks they had been sitting right on top of all the fresh water they needed!...Freedom
There’s probably nothing more important to Americans – there’s probably nothing more than all humans desire or long for, or fight for than freedom. For us individually, “Freedom” impacts our decisions, our responsibilities, our pursuits. Communally, think of all the arguments that cause so much tension in our public square – everything from abortion, immigration, poverty, education… they are all connected to this question of Freedom and a person’s definition and interpretation of it. In the last 90 days, (40 days of Lent, 50 days of Easter) we as Catholic Christians have been on a journey not only recounting the true source of freedom for humanity but reflecting on our own personal journey as well...Help Me Find My Way
a somewhat non-traditional individual came to mind as an example and witness to the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives. He was an actor from the last century who was not as notable or famous for his movies or television shows as some of his contemporaries like Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, or Dean Martin. In fact, it took so long for his early career to take off that he tried something very bold and unique for those in the entertainment industry, he went to a Catholic Mass. One day, in particular, he had a lot on his mind apart from not being able to actually work in this creative field that he felt so passionate about: His wife was about to deliver their firstborn. So there he was at Mass, and as he got caught up in prayer, he put the last of the cash he had to his name, $7 in the collection basket. Realizing what he had done, rather than trying to tackle the usher down, he simply prayed for a way to take care of his family. The next day, he was offered a role that paid 10 times the amount he had given (and back then, $70 did more than just fill up a tank of gas). It was one of the most powerful experiences of prayer that the actor had ever had. A few years later, thankful for the moderate success but still far from really “making it”- he found himself praying again -looking for clarity, and direction. He went to his local Catholic Church, and was in front of a statue of one of the apostles, and read about this Saint’s life and his intercession where he made the promise “help me find my way in life and I will build you a shrine.” Soon after, his career began to flourish. He moved his family and things continued to take off with different opportunities coming his way. He never forgot his prayer and promise to honor the Saint who helped him find his way. What or how would he do this? It was then in the early 1950s that Danny Thomas started talking with friends and family about how he could fulfill this pledge to St. Jude, the Saint whose statue he had prayed in front of, who is the apostle known as the patron for hopeless causes...Footprints on the Earth
Several years ago, a young woman – I’ll call her Susan – had an opportunity to spend a summer in Calcutta, India, where she worked in the homes of Mother Teresa. Susan had prepared for months, with so much leading up to this moment when she would work alongside Mother Teresa, one of her idols, maybe holding the hands of those who were nearing the end or running programs for children that would help them to know that they were the beloved of God. Only when she arrived, Mother Teresa wasn't there. Susan learned that her idol would be spending those months on an international tour. And then when she reported for work her first day, she was placed in the kitchen, washing pots. And then the next day in the laundry, washing sheets. This went on for weeks and she was frustrated. So, she asked one of her supervisors, "Hey, I've been spending all of my time washing pots and cleaning sheets and folding bandages. I came here to work with Mother Teresa. What does Mother Teresa do when she's here?" And the supervisor said, "Well, when she's here, Mother Teresa cleans sheets, she folds bandages, and she washes pots."...God's (Tiny) Deeds of Power
Kristen was only 32 years old when she died. She was a single mom, a talented pianist, and a registered nurse. I’m told she had a wicked sense of humor. She was also anorexic, and, in spite of the best help her parents and medical science could give her, the demons got the better of her. She starved herself to death. A year after I officiated her funeral service, I got a call from the funeral director, my pal Dana, who asked if I’d be available again for Kristen’s family. They were requesting that I do a short committal liturgy. They were ready to bury Kristen’s cremated remains. It was a hot July day at the cemetery. Dana set up a small white pillar and placed Kristen’s urn on top. The family, Kristen’s parents, sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew, and grandparents, arrived and gathered around the pillar. Kristen’s mom wore two colorful brooches in the shapes of butterflies. “These are for my two daughters,” she explained. I read the short liturgy from the Lutheran Occasional Services. When I finished, Dana shared some words of comfort with the family. As she spoke, her back to the pillar, the most enormous blue-winged butterfly I’ve ever seen floated down and landed on Kristen’s urn. It flapped its brilliant wings briefly, and then floated off again. I don’t pretend to be an expert on butterflies, but I’ve researched this. Butterflies of this particular size and color are not native to the Philadelphia area. In fact, they’re not even native to the east coast of the United States. Was the appearance of this creature a mere coincidence, or was it—possibly?—a small manifestation of the Holy Spirit? Was God speaking a message of peace and comfort in a moment of tragedy?...Sermon Starters (Pentecost)(A)(2023)
A colleague in ministry named George VanderVelde once penned some words on the Holy Spirit that I find quite lovely and are worthy of reflection especially at Pentecost: “It’s not easy to imagine the person of the Holy Spirit. Try to visualize the ‘face’ of the Holy Spirit–you draw a blank. And what about that name? Holy Spirit seems a rather generic term. It’s hardly a personal name. The Hebrew and Greek terms for ‘spirit’ mean breath, wind, or breeze, or perhaps life-energy. Adding the word ‘holy’ doesn’t help a great deal. Who has seen the Wind? Look in the mirror. Watch the Spirit brush a sister’s face; see the Counselor transform a brother more and more into the image of Christ. Hear the Intercessor turn our groans into prayers. Sense the Spirit setting up housekeeping with the Father and the Son in the household of the Creator and Redeemer’s companions. Ask them, and they’ll tell you – ‘The Spirit is a holy gem.’”God’s Great Reversal
Bruce Harding is a United Church musician who lives in New Westminster BC. Fair skinned and balding, the hair he has left used to be red. One day, a number of years ago, he called for a cab and on the way to the airport, asked the cab driver where he was from. “Nigeria”, came the answer. He was probably used to the question! “What tribe,” asked Harding. Surprised, perhaps, that a white Canadian would know or care that much about his homeland, he replied, “Yoruba.” Then Harding began to sing, in the Yoruba language. The hymn might have been “Alelya Y’m Oluwa” or “Wa Wa Wa Emimimo.” Harding says that the man’s head turned almost completely around, surprised to hear his own language, raised in a song of praise, from the lips of this white guy. They spent the rest of the ride singing hymns. On that day the gospel was proclaimed and the great divide of language was crossed. The Spirit was at work...Pentecost Sunday (C)(2022)
Neil T. Anderson, in his book Victory over Darkness, tells a thrilling story about a little girl born with major health problems which left her crippled. She had a large, wonderful Christian family. Her mother used to tell her. “If you believe, God will make it happen. You will be able to run around like your brothers and sisters.” She took her mother’s counsel to heart and began to believe that God could heal her. She practiced walking without her braces with the aid of her brothers and sisters. On her twelfth birthday, she surprised her parents and her doctors by removing her braces and walking around the doctor’s office unassisted. She never wore the braces again. Her next goal was to play basketball. The coach only agreed to let her play as a means of getting her older sister on the team. One day she approached the coach and promised him if he would give her an extra 10 minutes of coaching each day, she would give him a world-class athlete. He laughed, but seeing she was serious, half-heartedly agreed. Before long her determination paid off. She was one of the team’s best players. Her team went to the state basketball championships. One of the referees noticed her exceptional ability. He asked if she had ever run track. She hadn’t. He encouraged her to try it. So after the basketball season she went out for track. She began winning races and earned a berth in the state championships. At the age of 16, she was one of the best young runners in the country. She went to the Olympics in Australia and won a bronze medal for anchoring the 400meter relay team. Four years later in Rome she won the 100-meter dash, the 200meter dash and anchored the winning 400-meter relay team “all in world-record times.” Wilma Rudolph capped the year by receiving the prestigious Sullivan Award as the most outstanding amateur athlete in America. Her faith and hard work had paid off...The Holy Spirit Is the Artist Who Fashions Our Humanity
In her newest novel Payback (2020), Mary Gordon does not draw a picture of the Holy Spirit, but there is a passage that might indeed circumscribe the Spirit. While living for many years in Italy, Agnes Vaughan becomes a licensed restorer of artistic masterpieces. When an entire country is one large treasure chest, it is an essential profession. Agnes prefers working on medieval statues: “The objects to be repaired nearly always sacred...nearly always the object of prayer...the sense that they contained in them the urgencies and needs of people year after year, asking for help.” Those are the contours of the Holy Spirit, the place where the human—our cares and concerns—reaches up to the divine...We Hear!
About eight years ago, I started traveling to Cuba each year with a group from Atlanta to visit a congregation in the tiny, dirt-road town of Perico. Going to Cuba is a bit like going back in time and as you move from the city out into rural areas, you pass from paved roads and 1950s cars to dirt tracks and horses and buggies. The tiny Iglesia Presbiteriano in Perico is on one of the main dirt roads in that little town. And while its membership is maybe 80 people, many others come there all the time because the church houses the only water filtration system for the whole town. Tap water isn’t safe for drinking there, so an organization called Living Waters for the World helped get a system in place to provide clean water to the residents of Perico. The water system is in a squat cement building behind the little church. It has a couple of huge tanks, filters, and a wall of six spigots that look just like the ones you use to connect your garden hose. Twice each week, the whole town lines up to get water. People come from as far as they have to, on bikes and on foot, sometimes with a wheelbarrow. They have buckets and jugs and poles to balance their water and get it home without spilling it. It takes a long time for the crowd to fill their containers at those little faucets. So, while they’re gathered, people talk. The pastor of the little church checks in with them. She uses that time to encourage them and invite them back. She has a stash of other things they might need – reading glasses and ibuprofen and Tums that can’t be purchased in stores in Cuba. She has crayons and lined handwriting paper for the kids who run to the church after school. People come for the water, but the scene is a true picture of church. When I saw this in action, I was moved. There isn’t an equivalent for those of us who don’t have to go somewhere and wait for something as necessary as water. So, the first time I was invited to preach at that church, I had to talk about the witness of this twice weekly gathering to get water. But my Spanish is meager, so I needed to preach with the help of a translator at that little church the following Sunday...Sermon Starters (Pentecost)(B)(2021)
William Kent Krueger has recently written a wonderful novel entitled, This Tender Land. It’s billed as cross between Grapes of Wrath and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Set in the Great Depression, it follows the adventures of 4 children—two white boys, a teenaged Sioux Indian, and a little girl. The boys were residents of an abusive residential school for Indians in Minnesota, while the girl was the daughter of one of their teachers. Subject to horrible abuse, the boys are delighted when the little girl’s mother offers to take them in. Their world is about to get immeasurably better, when a giant tornado roars across the prairie and destroys the farm of that good woman, kills her in the process, and scatters the boys’ hope to the four corners of the earth. The youngest boy is devastated and angry. So, as the little band of four begins its escape from the horror of that school and that tornadic destruction, he climbs to the top of the water tower at the school and leaves his testimony. In huge black letters, he writes, “God is a tornado.”...Inviting the Holy Spirit
Bronwyn Yocum tells the story of an incident that occurred when she was a little girl growing up on the shores of Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. One night their neighborhood was hit by a terrible storm. Her father happened to be out of town, so Bronwyn and her mother were alone in the house and Bronwyn was terrified. As the storm raged outside, the power was cut to the house while thunder was booming all around. Bronwyn’s mother lit some candles and held her daughter tightly, trying to comfort the trembling child. The mother had no fear at all, so she worked hard to convey her sense of calm to Bronwyn. When the storm had passed, they heard voices out in the street. The mother peeked through the curtains and laughed. “What a bunch of [worry warts],” she exclaimed. “Out with their flashlights checking out the storm. You’d think the neighborhood fell down or something.” With that, she took Bronwyn’s my hand and led her upstairs to bed. The next morning, when they came downstairs for breakfast, the mother let out a scream as they passed the doorway to the porch. So Bronwyn turned to look out the porch door to see what had caused her to yell, and instead of seeing the porch, she saw nothing. The porch was gone, the furniture gone; there was nothing but yard beyond the porch doors. It turned out a tornado had come down their street during the storm. It came straight down the backyards on their side of the street, sheering away the porches on the backs of the houses. No one lost their home, just their porches and patios. But there was nothing left of those — only twisted and torn pieces of wood. While that was happening, Bronwyn and her mother had been cuddling on the sofa, blissfully unaware of the raw power tearing through their yard. Thinking back on that night, Bronwyn writes, “Too often, we’re like my mother, oblivious to the power of the Spirit at work in our lives, unaware of what God is doing and inviting us to do. “We go about our daily lives heedless of the presence of the divine as it points to the needs around us, clueless about the ways God is trying to work through us to redeem the creation. Like my mother, we ignore the wind that’s blowing, we may even like her make fun of those who seem to be concerned and attentive to the wind’s effects. We just keep living in the dark and ignoring the Spirit’s work. “But I wonder, what would happen if we opened ourselves to that power? What might God be able to accomplish through us if we stopped hiding away from the Holy Spirit and instead invited the Spirit to fill our lives? What could this congregation and others do if we said, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, Come. Fill us and use us?’”...Waiting for the Wind
the wind of Pentecost was not the destructive whirling wind of a tornado or hurricane (we get those, too, where I live). It was a wind that did something - that blew the disciples' minds. That blew them out of the house where they had been hiding and into the street where they told the story of Jesus Christ. It was a wind that did something. It demonstrated God's power by empowering believers to be witnesses. What does wind do in our world? It turns turbines that create power. It cools off a sultry summer day. There was a time when it was wind, in combination with the sun, that dried clothes hung on the line. It was hard to find clean water for washing and almost impossible to find a breeze that would dry the clothes inside the people-packed buildings. Clotheslines were stretched between buildings, clean laundry was clipped on, and then it was the wind - even as a small breeze - that, along with the sun, helped dry the laundry by moving the fabric to aid in evaporation. The wind had a purpose - it caused a change to the thing it touched...We Talk, the Spirit Speaks
I want to begin with a quick summary of That Hideous Strength, the third book in C.S. Lewis’ science fiction trilogy. The National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E., had pretty well taken over Edgestow, a college town in England. N.I.C.E. was determined to expand its influence to dominate not only the country, but eventually the world. N.I.C.E. offered untold wealth all through the advancement of science and technology. People were willing to make numerous sacrifices to be part of N.I.C.E., including their dignity, their faith, and their God. You see, although outwardly polite and scientifically efficient, deep in the bowels of the N.I.C.E. headquarters was the evil one, seen as a disembodied head who was the head of all their operations. And so C. S. Lewis presents the villains of That Hideous Strength, the third book of his science fiction trilogy. The hero and heroine, Mark and Jane Studdock slowly come to realize the evil that has domineered their world, Jane through her dreams and Mark by being forced to take a position writing propaganda for the company. They, Edgestow, England and the world appeared to be powerless before the evil. Everyone was either under its spell or was suddenly missing. N.I.C.E. continued to grow, continued to win over the opinions of mankind. Jane and Mark sought help beyond that which man can provide. All seemed lost until the Banquet at Belbury provided by N.I.C.E. to celebrate its victories. A prophet appeared and cursed N.I.C.E. with the curse of the Tower of Babel. When Jules, the public head of N.I.C.E. got up to speak, he spoke gibberish. No one could make out what he was saying. Others arose to speak, but no one could understand them either. Then they turned on each other. A riot ensued, during which wild animals that had been caged for later experiments were released. The leaders of N.I.C.E. were killed, most killing each other. Evil died off and order was restored...Deeper Language
A year ago, outside of Guatemala City, Lorenzo Rosebaugh, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate, was shot to death as he was driving with a number of his fellow missionaries to a community meeting. The real motive behind his killing may never be known. On the surface, it appeared to be nothing more than a violent robbery, but given the circumstances of Lorenzo's life and his life-long fight for justice for the poor, everyone—myself no exception—wants to believe that his shooting was more than a question of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Too much suggests that this was more than an accident. If nothing else, his death by gunshot is somehow symbolic: Lorenzo wasn't meant to die of old age in a comfortable bed. I first met Lorenzo at our mother-house at Aix-en-Provence in France ten years ago. He had just returned from a long missionary stint in Latin America where, among other things, he had lived on the streets of Recife with its poor, without roof or fixed address, for several years. A serious illness drove him back to the USA and his Oblate community sent him on a sabbatical to France. He arrived there unable to speak any French whatsoever. Yet, when I met him there, less than a month after his arrival, he was sitting on the steps of the church which is attached to our community residence with a dozen street-people gathered round him. They were sharing food and cigarettes and some kind of conversation. It looked like a picnic in the park. There is nothing exceptional about this except that Lorenzo couldn't speak a word of French and the people gathered round him couldn't speak English, Portuguese, or Spanish (his languages)...Pentecost (A)
In many different books over his long and fertile career, Jacques Derrida described the push/pull in which we are caught between the general and the particular, settled and unsettled, the “Babel and anti-Babel,” the religious and the irreligious, the Christian West and the non-Christian, as the dynamic that permanently opens what he called a “future messianicity,” which is a permanent openness to future justice and a permanent dissatisfaction with the status quo. The things of God are always coming to pass, never settled, never captured in one place or one time or in one language. The final word is never said. That is our bane and our blessing.The New Babel and the New Pentecost
“Tidies and fugleman – I sheel foor that we all – er – most steeply rebut the defensible, though, I trust, lavatory, Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving. It would – ah – be shark, very shark, from anyone’s debenture.” That was the Deputy Director’s attempt to save the dinner from complete disaster. He had hoped to redeem the previous speaker’s completely unintelligible words and restore some order to the event. But now he discovered that his words too, although eminently lucid to him, were complete gibberish to the gathered guests. So goes the climactic banquet scene in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The words of all the assembled experts, technocrats, and policy wonks are reduced to complete babble and their gathering to chaos. The banqueters become like animals. Incapable of intelligible speech, they can only make noises at each other. As everything unravels and panic ensues, the magician Merlin cries out the book’s greatest line: “Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis – They who have despised the Word of God, from them even the word of man shall be taken away.” It is the curse of Babel cast upon them....Fighting Fire with Fire
As we know so well from the fires that typically begin to plague us in the summer, fire can be destructive and deadly. That’s one of the reasons pop singer Billy Joel used fire as a metaphor for chaos, crime, and war in his 1989 song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” He got the idea for the song from a conversation he’d had with a young man. Joel had just turned 40 years old, and the young man told him that the world was in an “unfixable mess.” When Joel tried to console him by saying, “I thought the same thing when I was your age,” the young man replied, “Yeah, but you grew up in the fifties, and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.” Joel was taken aback by this and replied, “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of Korea, the Hungarian freedom fighters, or the Suez Crisis?” Those events then became the origin of the song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Throughout the course of the song, Joel sings a litany of headlines from 1949 to 1989: North and South Korea, Joseph Stalin, the Thalidomide children, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Watergate, AIDS. And as Joel rattles off headline after headline, the chorus pounds out: We didn’t start the fire It was always burning Since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire No we didn’t light it But we tried to fight it...The Miracle of Pentecost
“When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them... I see you as a human being.” [Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2016), pg. 148] Those words are from the memoir, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by comedian Trevor Noah. There are eleven official languages in the nation of South Africa, and Noah talked a lot in his book about the challenges and gifts of language in his childhood, growing up as a bi-racial boy in the days of apartheid. At home, the Noah family spoke Xhosa, a native South African tongue. When it came time to pray though, they always prayed in English. Trevor’s grandmother asked him to pray, because his English was the best. “The Bible is in English,” she told him, “so English prayers get answered first.” [Born a Crime, pg. 148] That line is funny - Trevor Noah is a comedian after all - but I can imagine how his grandmother came to that conclusion even if no one ever explicitly said it...Noticed, Named and Known
Recent research about Gen Z from the Springtide Research Institute suggests that a combination of three things leads to young people, aged 13-25, feeling like they belong in school: being noticed, named, and known by a community. Paying attention to someone, noticing rather than ignoring them, increases that person’s sense of connectedness. Greeting someone, holding the door for them, blessing them after a sneeze—all are simple ways to notice. Naming someone accurately, as well as using the pronouns they’ve asked you to use, deepens that connection. Think of the way that positive nicknames function to increase community. In sports, people called me “Tuck,” short for my last name. My grandfather affectionately called me “Drewser.” These namings showed me I was not just noticed, but appreciated...The Advocate
The Wizard of Oz is a classic movie that was released in 1939. For years, it was presented as an annual television event, so many people have seen the film more than once. For those who have no connection to the Land of Oz, the basic premise is that a tornado touches down in Kansas and the main character, Dorothy, gets trapped in her house while the family takes cover in the basement. The house is knocked off its foundation and ends up in the mythical land of Oz. The young girl’s only desire is to find her way back home to her family. Her search for a solution leads her to make three new friends: The Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman. Their adventures lead them to the Emerald City, in search of a wizard who will grant them their wishes. The lion is seeking courage, the scarecrow wants a brain, and the woodman is pleading for a heart. It is a fantastical tale with a very important message: Sometimes, you already possess the very things for which you are searching...
Illustrated Resources from 2020
All Together Now
My mother and I were never close; I think she’d secretly hoped to have daughters and having three sons was a kind of joke on her. But as the one set of friends who knew us both said, she always worked to make sure I had what I needed. One day when Jacquelyn and May and I were having a casual dinner, I got a rushed phone call from my brother: mom was in hospice, not expected to live long, I should come quickly. So I did: off to Florida, a quick trip to her hospice, where I sat with her for two days while her presence in this life gradually faded, alternating between consciousness and sleep. But before you wonder why I’m telling a sad story, let me say it wasn’t sad: it was glorious. Because in those times she was awake, for the first time, my mother told me about her life, her real life, growing up in the depression, having other family members come to live with them when they lost their own homes, going to college and working at a time when it wasn’t usual for women to have careers. My mother became present to me as a real person, a whole person, for the first time. When she died, she wasn’t absent; she was more present than she had ever been...Sermon Starters (Pentecost)(A)(2020)
The church today often looks like a mirror image of the early church. Instead spilling out into the world speaking the Gospel in many languages so that people from all over the world are gathered into one body, various segments of the church are speaking to each other in closed little groups, each with its own secret, coded, special interest, politically charged language. No wonder the western church isn’t growing. No wonder the number of people who identify as “none” is now nearly a quarter of the population in the US. There’s not awe and wonder at the miracles happening in the church as people of all stripes love each other with abandon and sacrifice. Instead there’s scorn and ridicule at the church’s hypocrisy and division. If ever we needed a bomb cyclone, a tornado, a hurricane of the Spirit, it is now. Let us pray.Something Promised This Way Comes
Jyoti Sahi draws the stories together in the painting above. In the middle of the flame-like colors of Pentecost and under a descending dove is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary appears to be seated. Where you would expect to see her midsection clothed in white, however, is a mandorla. Mandorla is the Italian word for almond, which describes that seed-like shape. The shape is also called a vesica piscis. In images of the Visitation, Mary's belly is often defined by a shape that is at least reminiscent of the mandorla...Prepare to Burn the Ships
The poet Herman Melville in his poem The Enthusiast uses this metaphor to urge that burning one’s own ship, as Julius Caesar is reported to have done, is better than conforming to the lying material world and its values. Caesar burned his ships so that his foes could not use them, nevertheless Melville saw a moral lesson in turning away. There is no turning back if the ships are burned. Corrupting influences were therefore removed. Another example of this metaphor is found in the drama “Cortez and the Conquest of Mexico”, by James Robinson Planche, who describes how the conquistador Cortes commanded his crew to burn the ships which had made their voyage to Mexico from Cuba possible. By burning the ships, retreat was rendered impossible and the crew forced to take a stand where they were. Cortez thus succeed in conquering the Aztecs where others had been unsuccessful for six centuries. His men had no choice to flee when the ships were gone. They had to succeed or die. These past months we along with the whole world have been on a journey from our familiar places to an uncertain future. At some unknown time in the future, we will find ourselves on a new shore...Language of the Spirit
I first met Lorenzo at our mother-house at Aix-en-Provence in France years ago. He had just returned from a long missionary stint in Latin America where, among other things, he had lived on the streets of Recife with its poor for several years, without roof or fixed address. A serious illness drove him back to the USA and his Oblate community sent him on a sabbatical to France. He arrived there unable to speak any French whatsoever. Yet, when I met him, less than a month after his arrival, he was sitting on the steps of the church which is attached to our community residence with a dozen street-people gathered round him. They were sharing food and cigarettes and some kind of conversation. It looked like a picnic in the park. There is nothing exceptional about this except that Lorenzo couldn’t speak a word of French and the people gathered round him couldn’t speak English, Portuguese, or Spanish (his languages). Yet they clearly seemed to be communicating with each other, and deeply, in a way that would trigger envy to an outsider, and Lorenzo was their focal point...
Illustrated Resources from 2019
Unified Diversity
this week I read an article in the Jerusalem Post about a Pentecost moment for these same people. Here’s the headline: Holy Sepulchre Plans First Renovation in Generations The Article reads: “Various groups connected to the historic Jerusalem church, fraught with long-standing conflict, have agreed that renovations are necessary at the site where many believe Jesus was buried. There has been a stalemate on renovations that has lasted for over 250 years. The various sects that maintain chapels in the historic structure have been fearful of allowing any other group to make changes, lest it tip the delicate status quo. Now, after several hundred years, renovations may finally take place after an agreement was signed between the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic churches.”...At What Cost?
The headline seemed to come from the worst of conspiracy theorists. You know the ones saying that “they” (whoever “they” are) already have a cure for cancer, diabetes or countless other diseases—but they’re hiding it because Big Pharmaceutical companies would lose massive profits. But there it was in the Washington Post earlier this week: “Pfizer had clues that its blockbuster drug could prevent Alzheimer’s. Why didn’t it tell the world?” The article printed out to over 10 pages, offering speculation, sharing statistics, explaining the theories that researchers have come to in the decades they have tried to combat this disease. But in short, there is a drug that the company produces called Enbrel, which is used to treat a completely different chronic illness. But four years ago, a team of researchers claimed that this pill could reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s by 64%, stating they were convinced that the drug could “safely prevent, treat and slow progression of Alzheimer’s disease.” After you got past the official public relations statements from the company disputing that claim—and read further explanations about patents and competition between drug companies—there was this anonymous quote that the reporter attributed to a former Pfizer executive. Why didn’t they share this information? He says “I think the financial case is they won’t be making any money off of it.”...From the Particular to the Universal
At a church conference, I noticed a young man who listened attentively to the lectures. I wondered who he was. I took the opportunity to speak to him. He told me he was from Nepal, the tiny country on whose border with Tibet sits Mount Everest. He once was a Hindu and believed in many gods. While he was attending college, a student gave him a tract about Jesus. He was so intrigued reading about Jesus that he got a Bible to read more about Jesus. Soon, he encountered the living Christ and became a Christian.Close Encounters of a Spirit-Filled Kind
The most famous such experience is perhaps that of Thomas Merton, on the corner of Walnut Street in Louisville, KY, which he describes in Confessions of a Guilty Bystander (Sheldon Press, 1977): “I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs . . . it was like waking from a dream of separateness . . . to take your place as a member of the human race. I had the immense joy of being man, a member of the race in which God himself had become incarnate. If only everybody could realise this. But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”...Pentecost (C)(2019)
Dr. Margaret Mead, the noted anthropologist, told about a custom she had discovered among primitive people. These people did not know how to make fire, even though their lives depended on fire. Were the fire that had come to them through a stroke of lightning to die out, their culture would also die out, for without fire they had no light, no heat, no means of cooking, no means of living. Because of the importance of keeping this fire going, members of the community were appointed as “keepers of the fire.” Their job was to make sure that neither wind nor rain nor carelessness nor lack of fuel would cause the fire to die. So important was this responsibility, Dr. Mead reported, that should the fire die, that “keeper of the fire” could also face death. Dear friends in Christ, you and I are the keepers of the fire...On Pentecost, Jesus Gives Us a Love That Never Dies
Many years ago, I visited an old widower several weeks after the death of his wife. He said something that I have never forgotten: “Father, I’ve been with her for so many years. I no longer know how to be me without her.” Decades have passed since that conversation. I am still stirred to compassion remembering what he said, and I am still in awe of the profoundly beautiful way that he described his loss. The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of very disparate writings, assembled first by the ancient Israelites and then by the church. As Christians, we see its unity in Christ. But from Genesis to Revelation, there is a clear teaching that human beings were not made to be alone. Each of us was created to go outside of ourselves toward our own completion in others...Sermon Starters (Pentecost)(C)(2019)
I’ve kept this illustration for years, so it may be too dated. I share it because it gives you a powerful picture. ”Ever since September 11, John Vigiano has visited the 70 foot deep crater that was the World Trade Center almost every day. He wants to be there when the workers make a discovery. You see, John Vigiano lost two sons in the terrorist attack. In October, a search and rescue dog found his son Joseph, a New York City police officer. But Vigiano is still waiting for someone to find his son John II, a New York City firefighter...What the Spirit Makes Possible
I passed out copies of Brian Doyle’s short essay “Leap,” along with a trigger warning that it is a difficult piece to read about the tragedy of September 11. In the essay, Doyle focuses on a couple who leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. About this scene, Doyle writes: Their hands reaching and joining is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here...Pentecost (C)(2019)
Donald Juel tells a story that gets at this strange and wondrous good news. Juel was a New Testament scholar who taught at Princeton before he passed away. He was also a faithful churchman who taught regularly at his local Lutheran parish. One time he was teaching a confirmation class, and he was talking about the story of Jesus’ baptism when the heavens were torn open and the Spirit descended upon Jesus. Being a biblical scholar, he explained the meaning of the Greek term for the heavens being torn open and all the different places in the Gospels where this Greek word was used. One of the teenagers interrupted and said to get to the point. The point, Juel said, was that “When Jesus was baptized the heavens that separate us from God were ripped open so that now we can get to God. Because of Jesus, we have access to God—we can get close to him.” However, the young man interrupted again and said, “That ain’t what it means.” “What?” Professor Juel said, startled. The teenager repeated, “I said that ain’t what that means. It means that the heavens were ripped open so that now God can get at us anytime he wants. Ain’t nobody safe now!”...Pentecost (C)(2019)
Some of you are probably already familiar with this famous poem from writer Marianne Williamson, from her book A Return to Love. It’s called “Our Deepest Fear,” and I’ve been thinking about it as a sort of antithesis to those times we let Imposter Syndrome undermine our discipleship. She writes, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness That most frightens us. We ask ourselves Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small Does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking So that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, As children do. We were born to make manifest The glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; It's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, Our presence automatically liberates others.”...
Illustrated Resources from 2018
Like a Rhizome
One commentary I used had an intriguing comparison for the work of the Holy Spirit.* It compared him to a rhizome. Gardeners know about rhizomes but it was a new word for me. A rhizome is a continuously growing underground stem that sends up shoots at different points. Bamboo and ginger are rhizomes as are hops. The main part grows below the soil. Above ground we see the sprouts with their fruit. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus inaugurates a new age by sending his Holy Spirit on the Apostles. Hearing their testimony people repent of their sins and receive the Holy Spirit by baptism. When the apostles place hands on new disciples the Holy Spirit fill them and impels them to reach out to others. Disciples emerge like sprouts but the reality below is the Holy Spirit - just like single rhizome can produce multiple bamboo trees...Pentecost (B)(2018)
If you’ve ever tried to communicate with someone whose language you didn’t speak or understand, you know how hard it is to converse with that person. When my family visited Europe when I was growing up, we managed to communicate with most people by speaking either English or German with which at least some of us were familiar. Most Belgians, however, wanted to speak only French. Since my grandfather was the only person who claimed to know some French, we let him do our speaking in Belgium. However, it was all quite comical because his French was pretty elementary. After all, what almost naturally happens when people can’t understand each other? We tend to just speak louder and louder, hoping our sheer volume will somehow shatter the language barrier. So it was with my dear grandfather and the Belgians with whom he tried to communicate.A Commission to Forgive, Restrain Evil and to Bring Life
This is a commentary written by a middle school child, published in the Santa Maria Times. This is after the Parkland massacre three months ago. This young man, Sean Fina, wrote a commentary that appeared in the local paper. Here's what he said and it's a challenge to us: "We Americans need to ask ourselves a simple question. What do we value more: our communities and schools, or our beloved guns? ... As a junior high student, even though the probability is low, the thought of a shooter coming into my school's campus is always in the back of my mind." Should any child have to go to school with that fear every day? Can't we push away that evil?...This Sacred Discontinuity
A resource for our creative cooperation with the Holy Spirit is the vision offered by Thomas Berry. In his nineties when he died in 2009, Berry was an eminent cultural historian, an historian of religion, and a Christian, specifically a Roman Catholic priest of the Passionist Order. The Great Work and other books he wrote late in life have become popular and influential, and Berry has sometimes been called “the leading spokesperson for the Earth.” Berry believed that humanity in our time faces a moment of grace regarding the future of life on this planet...What Can Ghost Stories Teach Us About the Holy Spirit?
In my first year of priesthood, I was called to the scene of a young woman’s suicide. It felt strange to drive into a group of parked police cars rather than to steer around them. A policeman met me as I exited my car. In my ordination pictures, I appear to be 14. So I would have looked, perhaps, 14-and-a-half to this cop. “Father, if I understand correctly, your sacramental duties are limited to those who are alive.” I answered, “Or, if we aren’t sure of death.” “Father, we’re sure of death. Her body was found half a day after her she asphyxiated herself with carbon dioxide in the garage. You don’t need to see it. Your time would be much better spent with her mother in the house.” I took his advice, and it was indeed important to her mother, Ethel White, a daily Massgoer, that I was there. She shared with me that her daughter Lisa had been living with her since her divorce. She had been so terribly depressed. A few days later, I celebrated the funeral Mass of Lisa Sinclair. (I have changed all the names.) Several months later, I was brunching after Mass with a husband and wife, who were parishioners. The wife mentioned that she had recently had a very unusual experience with her teenage son and a foreign exchange student, who was living with them. Down in the family basement, the boys had decided to try out an Ouija board, promising each other with all adolescent earnestness that they would not fool around, would not begin to move the device in order to produce funny answers. Evidently, they had sought out the mother because they had terrified themselves. The board was producing answers that neither of them could claim. When they asked who was communicating with them, they were told “Mary Sinclair.” “What do you want?” They asked. “Prayers,” the board answered.Holy Spirit: Superhero, Superpower
You are driving in a car at a constant speed. On your left side is a valley and on your right side is a fire engine traveling at the same speed as you. In front of you is a galloping pig which is the same size as your car and you cannot overtake it. Behind you is a helicopter flying at ground level. Both the giant pig and the helicopter are also traveling at the same speed as you. What must you do to safely get out of this highly dangerous situation? Get off the children’s carousel and, next time, don’t drink so much. Yes, those “spirits” that come in bottles can make one do outrageous things. That’s how those gathered in Jerusalem on that Day of Pentecost more than two thousand years ago thought had happened to the disciples of Jesus—that they had a good jag on. They were gathered together in Jerusalem deep in prayer and, all of a sudden, all holy hell broke loose...Pentecost Possibilities
In Tracy Kidder’s biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, he shares the story of one of the world’s truly remarkable persons, a doctor who had every single reason in the world to enjoy a profitable and meaningful medical practice in the United States yet who was so convicted by the need to address the world’s most intractable infectious diseases that he has spent his life in remote parts of the world striving to bring a measure of health to the globe’s poorest citizens that most of the world considered impossible. Laboring in Haiti, Peru, Cuba, Russia, and more, Dr. Farmer has often been hailed as a “wonder worker.” But the truth is that he simply did not give up but persisted, always seeing after some measure of success another challenge and possibility. And so when Kidder titled his book, he chose a Haitian proverb that has guided Farmer and captures the wisdom that, in this life and world, when you solve one problem, there is always another one waiting for you. The book is called Mountains Beyond Mountains...Danger: People at Worship
Several years ago now, when Tony Campolo was a young pastor, he was asked to be a counselor at a junior-high camp. He joked about the experience, “Everyone should be a counselor at a junior-high camp— ONCE! For any Roman Catholics,” he said, “I have to say that I now believe there is a Purgatory. I have been there. It’s junior-high camp!” He went on to say that junior-high boys have a strange and often cruel sense of humor. There’s a strong tendency for them to pick on some unfortunate, offbeat kid & ridicule him, making him the brunt of their jokes. This was certainly the case during that particular week of summer camp. They picked on a 13-year-old kid named Billy, who couldn’t walk right or talk right. He dragged his body across the campground in erratic and spasmodic fashions, and when he spoke his words were markedly slurred. The boys at the camp would often mimic his gestures, and they thought that was funny. One day Tony heard him asking for directions. He said, even now I can hear his almost indiscernible, painfully spoken words: “Which . . . way . . . is . . . the craft shop?” The boy he asked, mocking his slurred speech and using convoluted hand language said, “It’s over—there . . . Billy boy.” But the cruelest thing they did was on a Thursday morning. Billy’s cabin had been assigned to lead morning devotions, and his cabin mates all voted for him to be the speaker. They wanted to get him up there in front of everybody so they could be entertained by his struggling attempts to say anything at all. When Campolo found out about it, he was furious, but there was nothing he could do. It did not seem to bother Billy! Somehow, he dragged himself up to the rostrum as waves of snickers flowed over the audience. It took Billy almost half a minute to say, “Je—sus . . . loves . . . me . . . & . . . I . . . love Je—sus.” When he finished, there was stunned silence. When Campolo looked over his shoulder and he saw that all over the place there were junior-high boys with tears streaming down their cheeks. Some of them had their heads bowed. A revival broke out!Pentecost (B)(2018)
A few weeks ago, in one of our poverty-stricken black townships, someone was scratching around in a rubbish-dump looking for food. Instead, she came across the body of a little baby, dumped there like household trash. In deep shock, she ran to a nearby clinic, where Johanna Kistner, a psychologist and a Christian, worked. A little group of women went to the place. In the midst of their shock, they broke out in agonized prayer. Then Johanna took the little body in her arms and baptized her. They named her “Innocent.” They collected some money to persuade a local undertaker to handle the funeral. They decided to hold the service at the rubbish dump, before burying the child in the graveyard. They had mentioned the funeral to about 40 friends, but on the day, a remarkable thing happened. At least 400 people came to the funeral. Taxis offered free rides to bring them there. Johanna described the funeral as a turning point for the community, bringing together warring political factions, health workers, and divided clergy. Because of a dead baby they never knew, but who now had a name — “Innocent,” a brutalized community wanted suddenly to be different...The Joy of Pentecost
I dread Pentecost. There, I've said it. Oh, at one time, it was one of my favourite Sundays. I loved inviting people to wear red (even the first time I did that, taking off my traditional black preaching robe to reveal a bright red one). I liked using the balloons, and loved the processionals, and coming up with news ways to represent this day. But not anymore. See, now I find Pentecost to be one massive guilt trip. After all, I've never preached a sermon that made 3 people, much less 3000 want to be baptized. I've never gotten folks so excited about the good news that they suddenly wanting to share it. I've never (fortunately, I think) been in a church where suddenly a multitude of languages is spoken. So I find Pentecost makes me feel pretty guilty. And folks in the churches feel the same way. Most of the congregations I have served have felt burnt out; they don't feel flames dancing on their heads. They are lucky if one or two new folks show up once in a while, much less multitudes. They, like me, probably wouldn't know what to do if the windows suddenly burst open and the Holy Spirit came racing in...Time for Renewal
Norman Rockwell was responsible for many of the covers that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post over the years. There was nothing more haunting and enduring than one that appeared many years ago. It is still haunting and enduring because it touches on something that touches us all. I found this beautiful written description of it somewhere but I’m not sure where so I can’t honestly give the proper credit that it deserves: The scene is in a restaurant in a city somewhere. It is sort of a quick lunch place with no tablecloths on the tables, just the ketchup and mustard jars on the bare wood. It seems to be raining outside. An elderly man with a raincoat and umbrella has turned at the door. Another man glances up as he sits there smoking a cigar over a newspaper and the remains of his coffee. Two teenagers sit at a table, one of the with a cigarette in his mouth. They are all looking at the same thing, which is an old woman and a small boy who are sharing a table with the teenagers. Their heads are bowed. They are saying grace...Unconverted Difference
In 1492, in Salamanca, Spain, Antonio de Nebrija presented to Queen Isabella his latest book. Nebrija wrote the first textbook on the grammar of the Spanish language—a grammar of the vernacular, the ordinary language spoken in markets and in fields, at home and on the streets. No other European country had a textbook for their common language. That would be absurd, a waste of time. When Nebrija presented his textbook to the queen, she was confused, puzzled. The bishop had to explain the book’s significance. “After your Highness has subjected barbarous peoples and nations of varied tongues,” he said, “with conquest will come the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes, among them will be our language.”...The Language of Home
Some years ago I was part of an Internet discussion group with a United Church of Canada pastor named Chris Ewing, from Saskatchewan. I remember how she shared an experience she’d had at the time her first child was born. Back then, she was living and working in Montreal, serving a French-speaking church. The people of the church encouraged her to speak to her young son, Ian, in French, and to let her husband speak to him in English. That way, he would grow up bilingual. “I tried,” Chris wrote. “Really I did. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn't speak to my own flesh and blood in my second language. It wasn’t that my French was poor; it wasn’t.... The barrier was not in my grasp of the language but in my soul.... I feel the same way about [all] my acquired languages: though they help me grasp and participate in the world better, they are still an object interposed between me and that world; and for genuine intimacy, all objects need to be out of the way.”...
Illustrated Resources from 2017
The Politics of Traversing Difference
In college I spent a semester abroad in Namibia. The official language of Namibia is English; however, it is the first language for very few households in the country. As a result of their colonial history, the first language of the majority of the country’s white population is Afrikaans, while native families speak a variety of tribal languages in addition to English and Afrikaans. As a part of my study program I had the privilege of spending some time with a family in a rural farm in the Northern part of the country. My host family primarily spoke Damara-Nama; however, they were all fluent in Afrikaans, and my host sister, who was also a college student, was fluent in English as well.Blowing Down Barriers
They come from around the world to share their sorrow and fear from a dreadful experience: a loved one has been killed in a terror attack. They are the children and siblings of those who died on 9/11, in the Middle East conflict, in the train bombing in Madrid, from attacks in Norway, Indonesia, Northern Ireland. There are 55 of them. Their destination is a summer camp held at Brynn Mawr College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its purpose is to foster understanding and, by sharing their common experience, keep fear and hatred from crippling the next generation. Here Jews play basketball with Palestinians; Muslims and Christians hike together; a teen from Northern Ireland learns to make a bracelet, taught by a teen from the South. Though their countries are enemies, they share the same devastating loss, a loss only they truly understand...Source of Power
Once an American had a visitor from England. He wanted to show his guest the marvels of our country, so he took him to Niagara Falls. From above they could appreciate the expanse of the Falls, as they looked from the U.S. to the Canadian side. Then they went below where the water made a deafening noise. The American explained about the enormous quantity of water and its great force. He had to practically shout into his friends ear as he concluded, "There is the greatest unused power in the world." The visitor was duly impressed; he had seen nothing like it in his own country. But then, like a good Englishman, he started to think a little deeper. "Yes," he said to his American host, "the power here is great, but there is something much greater. The greatest unused power in the world is the Holy Spirit of the Living God." This anecdote goes back to the nineteenth century. Since then about ten percent of Niagara Falls has been harnessed to produce hydroelectric power.Pentecost (A)(2017)
When I read that Martin Luther once claimed, “prophesying, visions and dreams are all one thing,” I thought of Olga Sanchez Martinez. In her book, Enrique’s Journey, Sonia Nazario describes her work at the shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd. Some refugees who try to flee Central America for the United States through Mexico lose limbs to the train on which they’re riding. Some end up in Martinez’s shelter in the city of Tapachula, Mexico. There Olga tries to heal those whom what Nazario calls “the beast” have wounded. She buys blood and medicine for them. Martinez also nurses injured refugees until they can be taken back home. A local surgeon says, “Without her a lot of patients would have died.”...The Miracle of Hearing
In his book When I Relax I Feel Guilty, wilderness ministry pioneer and motivational speaker Ted Hansel told a version of this story: A person who had lived most of his life in the western wilderness was walking with a friend in New York City. Suddenly the man stopped and told his city friend, “I hear a cricket.” The friend laughed at him, “That’s impossible. Look around—buses, cabs, horns, people. Nobody could hear a cricket over all that racket.” “But I do. I hear a cricket.” And the man from the wilderness led his friend across the street and down the block to a shrub growing in a cement planter. He dug under the leaves and, sure enough, pulled out a cricket. The friend was astonished. “How did you do that?” “It’s simple really. It all depends on what you listen for. Watch this.” The mountain man reached in his jeans pocket, took out a handful of change and dropped it on the sidewalk. As the nickels, dimes and quarters jangled on the cement, every head within a block turned in their direction. “See,” he smiled as he picked up his change, ‘It all depends on what you’re listening for.”The Unstoppable Holy Spirit
In 1944, Ronald Hall had a problem. As Bishop of Hong Kong, he was responsible for the Anglican Christians in Macau, then a neutral territory under Portuguese control, but Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and parts of China during the Second World War had made it impossible for clergymen to travel and administer the sacraments to them. They were a church without a priest. A few years earlier, Bishop Hall had sent them a deaconess, who, as a woman, was able to travel behind enemy lines in order to care for them. She had even been given special permission to distribute the Lord’s Supper to them, but, as a deacon, she wasn’t able to celebrate Communion—only give out the bread and wine that a priest had already consecrated in another service. Eventually, even that special arrangement became unsustainable, and Bishop Hall was forced to make a choice.The Holy Spirit, The Breath of God
I have been wearing a pedometer for as long as I can remember. while it continues to monitor movement, it also recognizes the need in each of us to pay attention to what is most basic: our every breath and in so doing to improve our health. In fact, as I understand it, it can ‘tell’ when your breathing becomes shorter in length. It calls you out on the level of tension you are carrying. And it repeats the words my coach and therapist has spoken to me for more than twenty years. “Take slow deep breaths now…” whenever it is I need to pace myself and pay attention.God In Between
There’s a children’s Book that I love. I won’t tell you the name of the book because the book’s title is also the book’s ultimate meaning. I will tell you that the book is written by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, who just happens to be the second woman to be ordained as a rabbi back in 1974. She is also the first rabbi to become a mother. Sandy Eisenberg Sasso brings the wisdom she has learned as a rabbi to her children’s books. As the Christian celebration of Pentecost is intimately tied to the Jewish festival of Shavout, when the Jewish people read the Book of Ruth, it seems fitting to read to you from the book of a Jewish Rabbi.Come, Holy Spirit: Saying Yes
Our simple prayer, “Come Holy Spirit,” is the first step towards saying “yes” to God’s desire in our life of faith. We are called, with the Spirit’s help, to say yes to God! The question for us is can we say yes to God at work? Can we say yes to stepping out from behind our closed doors and into the deep waters of loving our neighbors? Can we say yes to allowing the locked doors of our hearts and minds to be opened again and again and again?Why Does Pentecost Come at the Time of Spring Harvest?
In Christian thought, we don’t make much of the Holy Spirit coming at the time of the spring harvest feast, though it offers an important insight into the mission of the Spirit in the world. Christ is the seed that has died, has been planted and has sprung again to life. The Spirit is the Lord of the Harvest. The Spirit brings it, brings us, to fruition. What Christ sows, the Spirit tills.A Day for....Weddings?
Pieter Brueghel's painting "The Whitsun Bride", below, calls attention to an old folk practice and an alternate name for Pentecost. The folk practice was the adornment of a village "bride" with particular flowers followed by a parade through the village with the children "begging" as on Halloween. The parade took place the week after Pentecost, which is also called Whitsunday. The ceremony highlighted the Whitsun flower, pinksterbloem (which also means "a girl foolishly attired"), which may be one of several flowers blooming around the time of Pentecost. The combination of weddings and flowers brings to Pentecost more a feeling of Spring, fertility, and new life that is often more associated with Easter than Pentecost.Praying for Pentecost
distraction is perhaps the most powerful narcotic on the planet. Simply put, what this means is that our daily communion, the manna that sustains us, is distraction—television, game-shows, sporting-events, sit-coms, talk-shows, entertainment-news, scandals reported in the daily papers, pop music, movies, theatre, and the like. Not that these are bad. What’s bad is that they eventually anesthetize us...Breathe on Me, Breath of God
That is a dramatic sign of a healthy person... to have a sense of humor and to be able to laugh at yourself. It's delightful to laugh with children at the cute and funny things they sometimes say. It's fun to laugh at the comical antics of circus clowns or the hilarious wit of good comedians... But, the best humor of all is when we laugh at ourselves. It's a real mark of emotional maturity. It eases our self-pity; it diminishes our pride and saves us from taking ourselves too seriously. Ethel Barrymore said it well. She said: "You grow up when you get your first good laugh at yourself." To have a good sense of humor...to be able to laugh at yourself... those are significant and dramatic signs of a healthy personality.The Known Unknowns
Years ago, Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, was answering some questions about the war in Afghanistan. The reporters wanted to know how certain Rumsfeld was, based on military intelligence, about the strategy he was proposing. Here’s how he responded: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”...
Illustrated Resources from 2016
The Politics of Language
When I was a seminary student, I worked as a chaplain at a large public hospital in Dallas, Texas. Many of the people who came into the hospital were Hispanic, and so, as a part of my orientation, I was given a set of index cards with simple Spanish phrases and prayers. One day, not long after I had begun this position, I was called to the room of a frantic elderly woman. The nurses were trying to calm her down, but she was clearly agitated and angry, chiding them in Spanish. “What can you do, Chaplain?” they asked. I was twenty-one years old. I knew only the Spanish that was written on my little index card. And I knew even less about how to calm down frantic patients in a hospital. So I did the only thing I could think to do—I pulled out my index card and began to read: “Padre nuestro…” The Lord’s prayer. I’m sure my pronunciation was horrible. But the woman stopped. She smiled softly at me, bowed her head, and whispering, joined in the prayerPreaching Helps (C)(2016)
Bridge to Terabithia is very fertile soil for people who want to preach or teach about transformation. It’s Katherine Patterson’s remarkable story of Jess Aarons and Leslie Burke. Their friendship transforms Jess in remarkable ways. In it we read of how Jess later “thought about it all day, how before Leslie came, he had been a nothing — a stupid, weird little kid who drew funny pictures and chased a cow field trying to act big — trying to hide a whole mob of foolish little fears running riot in his gut. It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king.”Inconceivable
I want to begin, briefly this morning by telling you about a movie called The Princess Bride. It’s one of my favorite movies and Mary loves it as well. The movie was released in 1987; so it’s been around a while. There’s a chance you’ve seen the movie but just in case, I want to tell you a bit about the film. There is a beautiful princess (who’s not quite a princess). Her name is Buttercup. Buttercup is in love with her farmhand, Wesley. Wesley is poor and impoverished. Eventually, like many from our own island seeks his fortune at sea. Word returns to poor Buttercup that Wesley has been captured and killed by the Dread Pirate Roberts. Her heart broken, she is betrothed in marriage to Humperdinck, the Crown Prince of Florin. On the night before her wedding, she’s kidnapped by a mismatched crew of bandits; a Romanian giant, a Spanish swordsman, and an Italian intellectual. Humperdinck is planning to have her murdered and blame a neighboring country, Guilder. Her body will then be planted on the Guilder frontier...Praying for Another Pentecost
And so, Pentecost. As I've considered my recent foray into Facebook controversy, I am recognizing what we all know so very well: In many cases, too much of the time, a whole lot more than language divides us in our world today. In fact, it seems to me that understanding different languages without the need of translators would be no more of a miracle than Republicans and Democrats being able to listen to understand enough to begin to work towards profoundly important things for the sake of our common life together.A Spirit Too Subtle to Be Seen
Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story that wonderfully illustrates the teaching of St. Ignatius. It’s called, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The plot of the story is simple enough, though my summary does it no justice. A grandmother accompanies her son and his family on a road trip through the South. She’s the original “Church Lady.” Prejudiced, judgmental, she is a hard-to-please, know-it-all. She’s constantly correcting others, second guessing, and insisting that everything, and everyone, was better when she was a girl. That’s why, today, grandma is convinced, “a good man is hard to find.”Of Spirits and the Spirit
Some of today’s most popular television shows and movies are built around belief in the supernatural, which reflects what Americans say they believe about otherworldly occurrences. Shows like Supernatural, The Walking Dead, and The Flash, along with movies like the hugely popular Avengers and Star Wars franchises all feature characters with powers normal humans don’t possess.Speaking Our Language
Today we feel the wind beneath our wings Today the hidden fountain flows and plays Today the church draws breath at last and sings As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise. This is the feast of fire, air, and water Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth. The earth herself awakens to her maker And is translated out of death to birth. The right words come today in their right order And every word spells freedom and release Today the gospel crosses every border All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace Today the lost are found in His translation. Whose mother-tongue is Love, in every nation.A Gold Logie Pentecost
The TV Week Logie Awards are not something I’ve often taken much notice of, but it would have been hard to escape the excitement generated by last Sunday night’s awarding of the Gold Logie to Waleed Aly. As has been pointed out repeatedly, it has not been common to give this award to someone who expresses an informed and intelligent critique of our culture, and neither has it been common to give it to people with brown skin, or Muslim faith, or, as he put it himself, unpronounceable names. And one of the things that makes his win particularly important, is that this prize is essentially a popularity contest. It is voted on by the public. And not, for the most part by the sort of inner-city leftie public who trumpet the cause of multiculturalism and might like to think of Waleed Aly as one of them. It is voted for by the readers of TV Week, which is not what readers of Eureka Street or the Guardian Weekly usually turn to next. So Waleed Aly’s win has been widely celebrated as a testimony to an increasingly mature acceptance of multiculturalism in the mainstream Australian community...Pentecost's Aural Lessons
We were hunkered in a Wisconsin basement, watching water gush through the edges of a closed window. A summer storm raged, its straight-line winds** later calculated at 100mph. No tornado ever developed, but the brief ferocity caused destruction across our region. While the rain penetrating every miniscule fissure and flaw in the window's frame was unnerving, the outside sound seemed worse. The wind mimicked the proverbial roar of a freight train. It was as if individual cracks of thunder coalesced into a steady, unrelenting blur of noise. Louder became louder became louder. The storm rampaged past our rented condo and neighborhood. Suddenly the basement filled with an eerie, startling . . . Silence.The Pentecost Conspiracy
Years ago a conscientious homeowner wrote to a manufacturer of cast iron pipes, telling them that he had found that by pouring pure hydrochloric acid down the drain, he immediately opened the grease-clogged pipes. He asked if there was any way in which the acid might be harmful to the pipes. The plumbing manufacturer wrote back to him. “Thank you for your letter. The consequence of such acid upon ferrous-constructed materials is certain to be deleterious. We therefore strongly urge you to terminate such activity for the welfare of your plumbing.” He read their letter and responded, thanking them and saying that he was relieved that he was doing the right thing in using the acid...
Illustrated Resources from 2015
Pentecost (B)(2015)
("In 1897, the British writer H G Wells published his classic science-fiction story, The Invisible Man. It tells the story of a rejected and disgruntled man, Griffin, who invents a way to make himself invisible; and who then tries to use his invisibility to become a kind of Nietzschean "superman", ruling through the force of his will and the power over others which he thinks being invisible will give him. What he fails to realize that being invisible has adverse consequences of its own...")Hey, Where's My Miracle?
("In the film Henry Poole Is Here, Henry has been recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, and in response, he purchases a new home where he can consume a steady diet of pizza and whiskey in solitude as he awaits the inevitable. Not long after moving into this house though, a strange phenomenon occurs. A somewhat nosey neighbor notices the image of Christ on the side of his house, she is convinced it has miraculous powers and it mysteriously starts to exude blood...")Pentecost (B)(2015)
"In the fall of 2004, Hurricane Ivan hit the Gulf Coast with a fury that did not peter out until it reached the North Carolina mountains. I know, I was there. I was leading a retreat for a group of young pastors. It had been raining all day and we knew a hurricane had hit the Gulf. After dinner, I went out and sat on the lodge porch and looked at the rain on the lake, trying to do some last minute program adjustment. Suddenly, I realized what was happening right in front of my eyes. I thought, "Look at that, little tornadoes, water sprites, dancing across the lake...") (Scroll down the page for these reflections.)Downpour
("California is in a severe drought. Normally it rains in the time from mid-October to March, but for the past few years it has been bone dry. Some say we may only have a year of water left. We are thirsty. In December, we had a couple days of downpour rain. It was glorious. It was as if the earth opened up to drink it in. Kids played in the puddles. My garden grew tenfold. The city came alive...")Hot Heads
("As I write these words, millions of Christians throughout the world are risking their lives and liberties for the sake of the Gospel. Just think about this: According to the Christian organization Open Doors, there are actual reports of people in Syria—right in the midst of bloody civil war and the murderous encroachment of ISIS—actually converting to Christianity. Consider the passion they must have for the Word of God!...")Pentecost (B)(2015)
As Frederick Buechner notes, the word “spirit” gets drained of meaning through over-use. We hear about “school spirit,” the “spirit of ’76,” “team spirit,” “the Christmas spirit.” The new electronic sign by a local high school regularly posts the hours of operation for something called “The Spirit Shop.” But it can be difficult to define just what “spirit” means for any of those things. The adjective “spiritual” has not fared much better. This word has been plastered all over the place in the last twenty years to the point where it can define everything from genuinely pious Christian faith all the way over to those who talk about the “zen of economics.” Ostensibly “spiritual people” may be those who attend church every week or those who never go to church but who use their Jeep Grand Cherokee to zip up to the edge of a cliff on weekends so they can meditate on the unity of sky, rock, and soul...Driveway Moments
("I had such a "driveway" moment a few months ago when I was listening to a Canadian Broadcasting Company program called Tapestry. The program's current host, Mary Hynes, was interviewing former chef, secular intellectual, skeptic, and journalist Sara Miles, about her unexpected--and inconvenient--conversion to Christianity when she entered a church on impulse in San Francisco one Sunday. You see, Miles was raised as an atheist and she was happily living an 'enthusiastically secular life' as a restaurant cook and journalist, indifferent to religion at best...")Flames Shaped Like Question Marks
("With apologies to Robert Heinlein's classic 1961 sci-fi novel, how often do you feel like a stranger in a strange land in your own "land," home, school, office or . . .? For some in the crowd, they felt less a stranger and more a neighbor. I once worked with a hospice social worker that would ask, 'I wonder what I will learn today?' as he left the office. He was musing-humorously and seriously-what his day might be like as he met patients in their homes...")Our Own Native Tongue
In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, B.B. King recounted how he came to sing the blues. He said, “Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. … I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play. … I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say, ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re gonna be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.The Legacy
("This week, the jury empaneled to decide the fate of the surviving marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, sentenced him to death, for four murders , dozens of maimings, hundreds of shrapnel and other injuries, including persistent deafness in many from the noise of the bombs. They felt that he showed no remorse in his months of sitting before them while the testimony of these injuries was given...")The Holy Spirit as Coach
("The Holy Spirit is fire, light, comforter, wind and breath—all images and descriptions found in the Scriptures. How about one more image, clearly not found in the Scriptures? The Spirit is the cricket player who urges on his fellow player to continue to run and so score another run. The image is used by the Jesuit priest poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in a sermon delivered in 1882 in Liverpool. As Hopkins develops it, the Spirit or Paraclete is 'one who comforts, who cheers, who encourages, who persuades, who exhorts, who stirs up, who urges forward… He calls us on to good.'...")Tobacco, Church and Nostalgia
("The day before I gave that talk to those college students, the Pew Research Center published a new study. Now for those of us in ministry, seeing a new study from the Pew Research Center is the equivalent of a tobacco industry executive waking up in the morning to see a new advisory from the surgeon general. You know it's not going to be a good day. It was bad. Christianity is declining, still. Especially Protestant Christianity...")Pentecosts Are Happening All the Time
("We named our organization Project ACTS: We were an Ecumenical Organization of about fifteen Churches in Roslindale and Hyde Park, two Boston neighborhoods. It was 1981 and we'd been working to draw together the congregations in an inaugural convention. There was a Greek Orthodox Church, Two Large Roman Catholic congregations and a salad bowl of our Protestant denominations...")Breathe on Me, Breath of God
("Let me begin with three quick stories. See if you can find the common thread that runs through them. The first story is about a woman who lives here in Texas. She is a motivational speaker who is often asked to give the key-note address at conventions and convocations. Recently she returned home after speaking five nights in a row...." includes three humorous illustrations)
Illustrated Resources from 2014
The Magnificence of God
Consider the famous masterpiece City Lights by Charlie Chaplain in 1931 which was produced during the Great Depression. Chaplin played the tramp, the outcaste of society, the vagabond with "nowhere to lay his head." He becomes the strange vehicle of salvation for a poor blind girl, and for a rich man bent on drowning himself. The reward for his "heroism" is that he is befriended by the rich man. Finally the little tramp is accused of the theft of money which the rich man in his drunken generosity had given him. Fleeing the police, he manages to get the money to the blind girl for an operation to restore her sight, but is then apprehended and imprisoned. After serving his sentence he emerges from prison, shabbier and lonelier than ever. And the girl, who all along had imagined the little tramp to be a handsome young man of means, does not even recognize him. As he happens to trudge forlornly by the window of her new floral shop, he is ridiculed by the very one whose sight the "stolen" money had restored, and for whom he had gone to prison. Only in the final scene does she discover that this pitiful, disheveled tramp was her benefactor, when she touches his arm and face once again, as in her blindness, and in that moment of revelation whispers, "You!" she says, and he nods, asking, "You can see now?" She replies, sobbing, "Yes, I can see now." Then the Tramp smiles shyly at the girl as the film ends...Pentecost and Jackie Robinson
("The events of Pentecost remind me of baseball in America in 1947 and 1948. Baseball was and is referred to as America's national pastime. After the war, hundreds of the best players had returned from the war to take up their positions in the national game and American's flocked to the stadiums to watch their favorite players pick up right where they left off. But unlike the military that many of these players had just left, there were no African-Americans in baseball...")Straight Talking
("Years ago a conscientious homeowner wrote to a manufacturer of cast iron pipes, telling them that he had found that by pouring pure hydrochloric acid down the drain, he immediately cleared grease-clogged pipes. He asked if there was any way in which the acid might be harmful to the pipes. The pipe manufacturer wrote back to him, 'Thank you for your letter. The consequence of such acid upon ferrous-constructed materials is certain to be deleterious...")Kindle in Us
("Unless the eye catch fire, God will not be seen. Unless the ear catch fire, God will not be heard. Unless the tongue catch fire, God will not be named. Unless the Heart catch fire, God will not be loved. Unless the mind catch fire, God will not be known...")An Old Man's Dream
A recent lecture by Timothy Cardinal Dolan was entitled 'Soul-Head-Heart; The Three Popes'. For me, the most moving part of the lecture was his discussion of Pope John Paul II. Cardinal Dolan pointed to him as a renewer of the soul of the Church, indeed of the world. Especially I was moved by the description of Pope John Paul II at prayer...the Pope regularly arrived an hour before Mass for prayer. People loved simply to be near him as he silently prayed...In Praise of Ineffieciency
("Some of you may know about the Family Promise organization that has begun work in Lawrence. It is a program that hosts homeless families in churches. Each week, the families spend the nights at a different local church. In the mornings, a van takes children to school. Adults go to school, work, or the day center where they can work on budgets, educational opportunities, or job searches...")We Came Crying Hither
("Late in King Lear, the old King, cast off by his unloving daughters and wandering in a storm, comes upon his faithful servant Gloucester. The earl's eyes have been ripped out by Lear's enemies. Recognizing him, the king reminds him just how human tears are: 'If thou wilt weep my fortune, take my eyes. I know thee well enough: thy name is Gloucester. Thou must be patient. We came crying hither. Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air We wail and cry...")Controlling the Wind
("Did you know that in the Bible the Hebrew and Greek word for Spirit literally means 'wind'? The great preacher Fred Craddock says, 'I cannot describe the Holy Spirit. I cannot explain the Spirit of God. Jesus said it is like a mystery, like the wind. You don't see the wind, and yet you know when it comes and when it goes.'...")The Gift That Is Ours
"I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Prison Meditations speaking of a certain experience that he had of the Holy Spirit: 'I vividly recall that night (of torture)...and how I prayed to God that he might send death to deliver me because of the helplessness and the pain I felt I could no longer endure, and the violence and hatred to which I was no longer equal. How I wrestled with God that night and finally in my great need crept to him, weeping..." and another quoteLiving with More Power
("One time there was a man who was discouraged and had a broken heart. He went home and told his wife, Sophia, that he was a failure because he had been fired from his job at the customhouse. Upon hearing the news, she startled him with an exclamation of joy. 'Now,' she said triumphantly, 'you can write your book!' To that he responded with the question, 'What are we going to live on while I am writing this book?'..." and another illustration)Are You Qualified?
("Not long ago, David Brooks published a remarkable column called 'The Summoned Life'. In it, he draws a distinction between what he calls The Well-Planned Life and the Summoned Life. The Well-Planned Life is just what you think it is: it's all about gathering up those diplomas, qualifications and experiences so you can move up the career ladder, rung by rung. The Summoned Life, as Brooks describes it, is different....")
Illustrated Resources from 2012 and 2013
We've Got Spirit, Yes We Do!
("There was a little Christian lady from my hometown named Ethel Young. Every Sunday for 25 years Miss Ethel went to the City County Jail to teach the prisoners their Sunday School lesson. Every Sunday for 25 years she was faithfully there. Then one Sunday Miss Ethel had to miss because she was ill...")Pentecost (B)(2012)
Miss Ev left her island home for many months each year. A ferry to Florida and then the long rail journey to New York – though she was never able to book a comfort compartment like the others. Blacks didn't travel in comfort in those days. And once in New York she had to keep in her place – black casual domestic workers the lowest of the low...What Does This Mean?
("On 28 July 1944, barely seven weeks after the D Day landings in Normandy, Mrs Bavass wrote to Mrs Blower: 'My dear Mrs Blower, I feel I want so much to write to you, although I know nothing that I can say to comfort you can be of much help. I do feel that at least you know how we grieve with you as our son Alastair was fatally wounded by the same shell which hit John...")The Comforter Has Come: Everywhere, Always, for All
("If you want to splurge on an expensive coffee table book, I have a suggestion — Michael Benson's Far Out: A Space Time Chronicle. In an odd sort of way it's the perfect book for Pentecost. I don't ever recall enjoying a book more that I understood less. The 228 color astrophotographic images compiled by Benson, along with his commentary, provoke cosmological meditations that merge the scientific and the sacred...")To Dream the
ImpossibleDreamSometimes when I get the titles of the choir’s music, if I don’t know the song, I go to YouTube to find it. Almost every time I do that, a certain video pops up. I don’t always watch it, but I sometimes do. I guess I do it fairly often, because my family has started to say, “Oh, Mom’s watching that one again.” It’s the clip of Susan Boyle’s audition for Britain’s Got Talent in 2009.[1] Susan appears on stage as rather ordinary-looking, some might even say dowdy, forty-seven year old woman. She answers a few questions from the judges and her attempts at humor seem to make the audience laugh at her, not with her. Simon Cowell, one of the judges, asks her what her dream is and she says “to be a professional singer.” The camera cuts to the audience, and we see a teenage girl roll her eyes and the judges exchange a “yeah, right” look. Finally, she gets to sing. As the first notes come out clear and beautiful, the audience begins to applaud. Then as the song goes on, they rise to their feet. One judge’s eyebrows go up; another’s mouth drops open. The crowd surges to its feet again when she sustains a long moving note and continues to cheer her through the rest of the song...The Ways of God (And Some Other Ways)
Early one Saturday morning, my friend’s Jewish neighbor peered out and saw him struggling with a ladder, planning wash the upstairs windows on their two-story home. The neighbor – whose windows were of the same make – called out to him, “Why don’t you do that from the inside?” These were the sort of windows which, by flipping a lever, you can pull into the house for easy cleaning. “I can’t figure it out,” my friend responded, apparently too proud to admit he was so mechanically klutzy he even needed to hire out such a simple task. The neighbor, resting at home on Saturday, his religious sabbath, called out again, “I could come over tomorrow and show you. What would be a good time?” “You know what I do tomorrow!?” my pastor friend responded. There is little time for washing windows on a Sunday for most pastors! “Hmmm,” said the sabbath-observant Jewish next-door neighbor, perhaps recalling for whom God created the sabbath in the first place, “wait there a minute and I’ll be over.” Jesus said that the sabbath was made for humanity and not humanity for the sabbath...The Baghdad Breeze and the Power of the Holy Spirit
("Aseel Albanna came to the United States for a four week visit from Iraq twenty years ago. When war broke out and it was unsafe for her to return, through family she found a way to stay on as a student. So it was that she was 'away from home' during those tragic years when her country was destroyed by war...")Pentecost: Oh, How the Holy Spirit Still Moves
("I was working corn pack at Del Monte in August of 1980. My job that late summer season was to work the cutters. This meant my task was to dislodge ears of corn which got stuck en route to being parted from their kernels. I wore a white plastic apron and heavy rubber gloves. The blades were sharp and those gloves were meant to protect our hands. I carried a wooden stick --- for poking into the machines to dislodge those ears of corn...")*With the Advocate's Inspiration
("Both of these places where I worked were advanced in providing the best possible care and education for the clients in the least restrictive environment. Still, sometimes choices had to be made on their behalf. For example, when Brenda's condition had deteriorated to the point where she couldn't swallow without choking, someone had to approve the insertion of a feeding tube")*Coming Home to God
("I watched a television programme this week called Hitler's Children. It was about about the children and grandchildren of some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, people whose whole lives had been blighted, through no fault of their own, by the surnames they bore. One of them, Rainer Hoess, was the grandson of the commandant of Auschwitz...")What's the Gift?
("When Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross was writing her famous book on death and dying, part of her research involved interviewing dying patients in the hospital, trying to find out how they felt and thought as they faced death. As she went from room to room in the hospital, she began to notice a remarkable pattern. Sometimes she would go into a dying person's room and the person would be calm, at peace...")The Holy Gust
Years ago, a Harvard University professor sought out Phillips Brooks, perhaps the most beloved clergyman in Boston’s history, and a good Episcopalian. The professor had a serious problem and needed help. He spent an hour with Phillips Brooks and came out a changed man. Later it dawned on him that he had forgotten to ask Brooks about his problem. He wrote later on, “I did not care; I had found out that what I needed was not the solution to a special problem, but the contagion of a triumphant spirit.” I like that phrase, “the contagion of a triumphant spirit.” A triumphant spirit is contagious. That was the spirit with which Simon Peter stood up to address that large throng on the day of Pentecost...What’s Gotten into You?
A few years ago in America magazine, Diane Bergant, a scripture scholar, began her commentary on today’s readings with the question, “What’s gotten into you?” It’s a question that we usually ask when someone is acting strangely, or in some unaccustomed way, or maybe even outrageously. But she felt that it was appropriate for today’s feast. The very people who for days, even weeks, had hidden themselves in fear for their lives, were out and about and acting in astonishing ways. They no longer lived in secret. In fact, they were calling attention to themselves by their behavior. What had gotten into them? Well, as we all know, it was the Spirit...The Pouring Out of Satyagraha on Pentecost
For the second week in a row I begin with a story from Christian writer Diana Butler Bass and her important new book Christianity After Religion. As the end of Lent 2011 neared, I went to my local bank to deposit some checks. Three tellers were working that morning, all women. One woman wore a pale ivory hijab as a head covering; the second woman’s forehead bore the dark red mark known as a bindi; the third woman had a small crucifix hanging around her neck. I walked up and laughed. “You all look like the United Nations of banking!” They exchanged glances and smiled. “You are so right,” said the Hindu woman. “You should meet our customers! But we cover a lot of languages between the three of us.” It was a quiet morning. They wanted to talk. I said something about being a vegetarian for Lent. The Hindu woman wanted to give me some family recipes; the Muslim woman wanted to know more about Christian fasting practices. I shared how we had dedicated Lent that year to eating simply and exploring vegetarian foods from different parts of the world. “When we eat Indian food,” I explained, “we try to talk about the church in India or pray for people in India. The same for African and Asian and Latin American countries.” “What a wonderful idea!” the Muslim woman said. “We need to love our traditions and be faithful to our God; but we teach the beauty and goodness of the other religions too.” Her Hindu colleague chimed in, “That is the only way to peace — to be ourselves and to create understanding between all people.” … I glanced at my watch. I needed to get to an appointment. I thanked them for their insights. “I would wish you a Happy Easter,” I said hoping they would hear the sincerity in my voice, “but, instead, I wish you both peace.” I started to walk away when the Muslim teller said to me, “Peace of Jesus the Prophet. And a very happy Easter to you.” And the Hindu woman called out, “Happy Easter!” When I reached my car, I realized that I was crying. I had only rarely felt the power of the resurrected Jesus so completely in my soul...Pentecost (C)(2013)
Not everyone likes asparagus. I know this because Glen, an American friend of mine, has recently "come out" as an asparagus hater after many years of silent suffering, false smiles and little white lies. But his thin veneer of civilization finally cracked last Thanksgiving at the family dinner (for Brits, think Christmas dinner, but with more patriotism). And he still believes that it would never have happened if his dad hadn't insisted on a second round of bourbon before dinner...Silence Our Companion
("When I was a hospice chaplain, I visited a woman in her fifties dying of cancer. Among the many assaults on her body, she had a tracheotomy and could not speak. But somehow, we communicated. I'd ask a question or make a comment. She'd nod or shake her head, blink her eyes or raise her eyebrows. She'd frown. And oh how she smiled! I prayed with my eyes open. She prayed with her whole body...")Praying for Pentecost
("scripture assures us that the holy spirit is not a generic force, one-size-fits-all, but a person, a relationship, a spirit that has "particular manifestations" and gives itself to each of us uniquely so that the understanding and strength that we receive are geared to help us in our own particular struggles...")*As of Fire and Wind
("Three ladies had a bible study and were talking about being refined by the fire. They did not understand about being refined in the fire like silver. One volunteered to go to the silversmith and see what that meant. When she went she did not tell the silversmith why she was really there. He proceeded to tell her about being sure the silver was put in to the hottest part of the fire...")Learning About the Holy Spirit from Mrs. Szymanski
("I volunteered in the hospital and reported to Sister Rose who had charge of the volunteer program. 'Who do you think I should visit today?' I asked her. 'Mrs. Szymanski', she told me. Off I went. Mrs. Szymanski was a parishioner in the nearby Roman Catholic Church and had been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer. She was a delight, a woman of real deep faith...")Fire from Heaven
"Is there any food more universally loved than ice cream? Of course there was no "ice cream" until there could be "ice-on-demand". Ice cream did not come into its own, was not tasted by other than the uber-rich, until both electricity and its kissing cousin "refrigeration" came into the mix.
Illustrated Resources from 2011
It Was the Holy Ghost
("Francesca told her older sister, Rosa, that she was going be a missionary. Rosa laughed, but Francesca said, 'The moment I was being anointed with chrism in confirmation. I cannot say what I felt, but I know it was the Holy Ghost...")The Pentecost of Peace
Right click on your mouse and drag it over the text to make it visible.("In May 1983 and May 1985, I attended Sojourners' Peace Pentecost rallies in Washington, D.C.--prayer services and inspiring speakers and nonviolent demonstrations against war and injustice. Those were some of the most electrifying Pentecost experiences of my life...")
Pentecost (A)(2011)
When Rick Warren's book The Purpose-Driven Life, came out a number of women came to me and asked if they could read it. An interesting question, given I couldn't stop them if they chose to read it and we don't offer an imprimatur like the Vatican does. We chose to read it together...*Pentecost (A)(2011)
About 20 years ago, there was a terrible famine in East Africa. I'm sure you remember it. When television pictures were shown around the world of thousands of sick and starving men, women and children crowded into refugee camps, there was a global public outcry that, in this day and age, the rest of the world could permit over a million people to starve to death...*Pentecost (A)(2011)(#2)
("Not everyone likes asparagus. I know this because Glen - an American friend of mine - has recently 'come out' as an asparagus hater after many years of silent suffering, false smiles and little white lies. But his thin veneer of civilization finally cracked last Thanksgiving at the family dinner...")They Understood
(Right click on your mouse and drag it over the text to make it visible.)("There was an editorial in the National Catholic Register that featured the Jesuit Fr. Dan Berrigan's message to peacemakers, delivered Nov. 29 at Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat House on Staten Island, N.Y. in 2010. Persevere was its message...")
Deeper Language
("Two years ago, outside of Guatemala City, Lorenzo Rosebaugh, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate, was shot to death as he was driving with a number of his fellow missionaries to a community meeting. The real motive behind his killing may never be known. On the surface, it appeared to be nothing more than a violent robbery...")The Power of the Spirit
"Years ago a conscientious homeowner wrote to a manufacturer of cast iron pipes, telling them that he had found that by pouring pure hydrochloric acid down the drain, he immediately opened the grease-clogged pipes. He asked if there was any way in which the acid might be harmful to the pipes..." and another illustration*Pentecost (A)(2011)
("She is almost 87 years old. Affectionately, she is called Auntie Nor. She is a great believer and a woman of authentic faith. She has a special relationship with the Holy Spirit and believes that her body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. It's not just devotion and trust that she has in the Spirit; it's complete utter confidence...")Breakfast at Faithfulness
("But there in the basement fellowship hall of this church, sitting around tables with mismatched chairs, and eating a breakfast fixed by hands of love and hope, I found one of the most faithful congregations I have ever encountered. Only 18 members, but 19 ministries carried out by this congregation of ordinary, everyday folk...")Just Your Typical Sunday Morning
["I glanced to the back and saw that there was only one usher ready to take up the offering. I figured Bob, being the rather proper person he is (always a coat and tie on Sunday), would simply ask one of the other folks sitting in the back to help, as usually happens. But he went over to Paul and asked him. I could tell by Paul's reaction that he thought he was being asked to put something in the plate, and Paul has nothing to put in the plate, as Paul is mentally challenged, usually disheveled, always seeking food and other things when he comes to church..."]Wrong!
(Sermon Starter by Leonard Sweet) (discussing The Limits of Growth. The entire conference had a "doom-and-gloom" feel to it, as the projections of scientists and economists foresaw the end of the world as we know it based on population growth, the destruction of natural resources, etc. Their conclusions were dire..." and another illustrationThe Universal Language of Love
A five-year-old girl had the opportunity to meet a little German girl, Katrina, a little girl her own age. All afternoon they ran and played tag and chased butterflies. Her parents marveled at how well they got along, in spite of the fact that neither spoke a word of the other's language...
Illustrated Resources from 2008 to 2010
The Power of the Holy Spirit
("When Stephen Langton returned to England from exile, he saw the King ruling in an arbitrary manner. To counteract the king's injustice, Archbishop Langton gathered the English barons at a place called Runnymede in June of 1215. He helped them write a document which lays out basic rights regarding taxation, due process and certain legal protections for the Church...")The Soul's Most Welcome Guest
("Tom Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, tells a beautiful story about the presence and power of the Holy Spirit: Once he was with a group of people praying in front of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. That day eleven young women passed by them on their way into the clinic..")Woosh!
Martin Marty has served for decades as a contributing editor of Christian Century magazine, a journal highly respected among clergy and lay leaders. He also once taught second grade Church School – one wonders which is the greater honor! He tells a story that shows the pouring-out of the Spirit can even come upon 8 year-olds, demonstrating that the Spirit is alive and working in places we might never expect. His story is about an 8 year-old boy who once attended his classes. Stephen was a special child, and by the time he had reached second grade, his progressive mental disability had become obvious to his friends. Dr. Marty said that one of his greatest concerns in teaching Stephen’s class was whether the other eight students could hold on to their love for Stephen as they came increasingly to realize he was different. In April of that year, he asked his students to bring to class a small object they could hide inside one of those plastic egg-shaped containers that some products are packaged in, something that represented the gift of new life. But because he was afraid Stephen might not have understood, he placed all the unmarked containers in the center of the table, and asked Stephen to open them, one at a time. The first one held a crocus, and one of the students erupted with the pride of possession, saying, “I brought that one!” Next came a rock which Dr. Marty thought would surely be Stephen’s, since rocks don’t symbolize new life. But one of the other students shouted, “That’s mine! The rock has moss on it, and it has just turned green again!” A butterfly flew from the third container, and another student beamed that her choice had been the best so far. But the fourth container was empty. Dr. Marty thought it had to be Stephen’s and was going to move quickly to the next egg, but Stephen objected and said, “Don’t skip mine!” You know how second graders can be; they all shouted with one voice, “But it’s empty!” “That’s right,” Stephen said. “The tomb was empty. New life for everyone!” Stephen knew. That Summer, Stephen died. At the grave, mourners found eight small egg containers. All of them empty. The story is true. So is the mystery, and Stephen knew...The Promise of Pentecost
In February, NASA launched the space shuttle Endeavour, in what was billed as the last nighttime liftoff. Originally, launch STS-130 was scheduled for 4:39, a.m., February 7. They say a space shuttle launch is dangerous. Not just to the astronauts, but to spectators. Liquid hydrogen, 423 degrees below zero, is combined with liquid oxygen to inaugurate an explosive thrust of 37 million horsepower. The explosion consumes so much fuel that, were it water in a swimming pool, the pool would drain in 25 seconds. The closest non-NASA spectators must watch from six miles away, across water. Even the raw explosive sound would kill you if you were located much closer than a football field from the launch. On February 7, Florida was cold: forty-two degrees, and the sky was crystal. The Big Dipper and the North Star were imprinted into the nighttime sky above the launch pad. Spectators lined the shore of the Banana River. They huddled with friends for hours, in blankets to keep warm...In Praise of Ineffieciency
("Some of you may know about the Family Promise organization that has begun work in Lawrence. It is a program that hosts homeless families in churches. Each week, the families spend the nights at a different local church. In the mornings, a van takes children to school. Adults go to school, work, or the day center where they can work on budgets, educational opportunities, or job searches...")*Fruits of the Spirit
("There's a story from the time of the Exodus about the first glimpse the people of Israel had into the Promised Land. They came near to its borders and decided to send spies into it to see what it was like. The spies came back with glowing reports of the rich crops they saw there, but with alarming tales of the strength of the inhabitants as well...")Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines
("The thing that makes the Indianapolis 500 what it is, is the great invention called the internal combustion engine. Somehow, and this is certainly beyond my feeble engineering understanding, fuel ignites, combustion happens, and off they go...")Wind of Change
("Fred Craddock tells about a lecture he gave on the US west coast speaking at a seminary. A student stood up and said, 'Before you speak, I need to know if you are Pentecostal.' The room grew silent. Craddock looked around for the Dean of the seminary, who was nowhere to be found. The student continued to ask. Craddock replied, 'Do you mean do I belong to the Pentecostal Church?'...")Pentecost (A)(2008)
("The family arrived on a warm June day: a mother, grandmother, and five children ranging in ages from 17 to 3. As they scrambled out of the van, it was apparent just how tired they were. Some time ago this family had traveled from a refugee camp in Cameroon to Darfur, Sudan...")Pentecost: Fire and Breath
("In my junior year of high school, I landed in the hospital several times because one of my lungs kept collapsing. It wasn't due to an injury; each collapse was spontaneous...")Pentecost Happened at a Meeting
("One of the central events that shaped Christian history and history in general, happened not to an individual off praying alone or to a monk on a mountain-top or to a solitary Buddha meditating under a tree. None of these. Pentecost happened at meeting and it happened to a community...")The Broken English of Pentecost
["Jesse Caldwell tells the story of Vietnamese woman who was waiting her turn to be examined in a crowded hospital emergency room. She gradually became aware of a frustrating 'non-conversation' being attempted a few seats down. A nurse was trying to ask a new patient for some details on her illness..."]The Rush and Hush of Pentecost
("One of the most endangered species in the world today is "family time". In fact, you could make the case that there are too many kids being raised in families who do not know the meaning of "family time". Traveling down an interstate on a long car trip used to be good "family time"......")The Spirit of My Mother's Church
"The spirit of our Mother's church we carry with us throughout our lives. It pursues us, woes us, reminds us of God's love for us. The great church father Augustine knew something of this. His mother, Monica, hounded him, in a compassionate way, but she hounded him."The Universal Language
("A five-year-old girl had the opportunity to meet a little German girl, Katrina, a little girl her own age. All afternoon they ran and played tag and chased butterflies. Her parents marveled at how well they got along, in spite of the fact that neither spoke a word of the other's language...")Sermon Starter (Trinity Sunday)(B)(2009)
("There are countless stories of transformation, but one that has always resonated with me was the story of the wolf of Gubbio. During the time when St. Francis of Assisi was living in the city of Gubbio, a large, ferocious wolf was terrorizing the area, devouring not only livestock but also human beings. One day, St. Francis decided to go and meet the wolf...")The Church on Fire
("There was a fellow who came to Mark Twain's house twice every day trying to sell him fish. But, Mark Twain kept saying, "No thank you." Finally, he felt that the man's persistence ought to be rewarded. He said to his wife, "I am going to buy a fish from that man," which he did...")Fired Up for God
("One time there was a man who was discouraged and had a broken heart. He went home and told his wife, Sophia, that he was a failure because he had been fired from his job at the customhouse. Upon hearing the news, she startled him with an exclamation of joy. 'Now,' she said triumphantly, 'you can write your book!'...")Pentecost (B)(2009)
("There's a story about two young priests, both parents of school-aged children, both of whom had lost their spouses due to untimely deaths. One had lost his wife several years before, the other, only recently. One day they met over coffee, and the recently widowed priest asked his friend how he had endured such pain and loss...")The Gift of the Holy Spirit
("A little old lady planning a vacation wrote a letter to a particular campground to inquire about its facilities. She could not bring herself to write the word "toilet" so she finally settled on the term, "BC," which, to her, meant "bathroom commode." The initials baffled the campground manager...")
Illustrated Resources from 2006 and 2007
Pentecost (C)(2007)
("The great philosopher Kierkegaard told a parable of the wild goose. It left its flock flying in formation in search of food. It was weak and starved. By happy providence it found a barnyard filled with good food, ate until full and slept...")The Holy Spirit Will Be Leading Us
("It is interesting that the church has always chosen to have the Holy Spirit represented by a dove. A dove that is white, pure, calm, and loving. However, the Celtic Christians once chose the wild goose as the symbol to represent the Holy Spirit. If you have ever been around a wild goose – you know they are quite noisy and bothersome bird...")*Pentecost (C)(2007)
("The most remarkable Pentecost in my forty-four years of ministry happened over thirty years ago. It was ten o'clock Saturday night. I was just finally finishing my Pentecost sermon. The phone rang. A high school girl in our congregation had been in a terrible automobile accident and she was in the hospital in very critical condition...")Beyond Babel: Pentecost Sunday
("In 1951 when the linguist Richard Pittman (1915-1998) produced a mimeographed list of the known languages of the world, his "ethnologue," as he called it, identified 46 languages...")A Butterfly's Breath
I came across a thought that fascinated me. It is called the “Butterfly Effect.” The insight of the “Butterfly Effect” is that even the slightest, most imperceptible influence upon a system can bring about great change and fluctuation in that system. The example, hence the name the author uses, says that even the movement of the air caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can bring a change to weather patterns on the other side of the globe...Sacred Babbling
Harvard theologian and Professor Harvey Cox has researched and written about the Pentecostal movement extensively over the years. In his book Fire from Heaven, he asserts that the Pentecostal movement is the fastest growing Christian movement by far in the world...Breath
The Earth's atmosphere is a relatively thin envelope of gases composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a smidgen of others. Perhaps our most vital activity in return for our lives, together with all the rest of creation, the animals, the plants, is constantly to be at the process of recycling this envelope...*Let Her Fly
("In his book Mountain Memories One, Granville Deitz tells about the apparent manifestation of God among the people of West Virginia. The manifestation occurred during an evangelist's tent meeting...")Throw Away the Padlocks and Join the Spirit's Dance of Life
I saw a DVD the other night called ‘Evelyn’. It was based on a true story about Desmond Doyle an Irish worker whose 3 young children were taken into care in Catholic Institutions when his wife left him in the 1950s. He fought a legal battle to regain custody of them,. This required overturning the provisions of the Irish Children’s Act which did not allow for a father to care for his own children in the absence of their mother and a case presented in Irish Spreme Court in which it was claimed that the Children's Act contravened several sections of the Irish Constitution. This father ‘went to the ends of the earth’ to get his children back. In the final court scene, Desmond was questioned by the prosecutor who said to him,“You must know the fundamental building block of our society is the family whose very model is the holy family Jesus, Mary and Joseph. How can you as a single father and as a dubious catholic possibly claim to bring up your children without a mother. There is absolutley no precedent for it in the religion in which you allegedly believe.” To which Doyle responded, “There is, there is a precendent if you would like to call it. The fundamental building block is not the holy family, it is the Holy Trinity – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. When my mother died my Father brought us up on his own with only the Holy Spirit to guide him. He used to say the Holy Spirit was love – I’ve worked hard to become a better person and I have filled myself up with the Holy Spirit so I could bring my kids up surrounded by love.”...God in Us
("One of my favorite childhood memories is going with my dad to visit his sawmill in western Oregon. I grew up around the high-pitched whine of the saws and the wonderful fragrance of Douglas fir sawdust flying through the air...")Pentecost (C)((2007)
("Once upon a time a new family moved into a neighborhood. It was a nice neighborhood and it was very close to where the Daddy worked, so close he could walk to work...")Pentecost (C)(2004)
("Once upon a time there was a grammar school boy's football team that had a good chance of winning the championship of their league...")*The Tower, the Wind and Murphy
("Once upon a time there were three little pigs.... We'll ignore the first two pigs, because their houses weren't up to code, anyway. But the third little pig ... Ah, the third little pig was an engineer...")A Miracle of Hearing
("Remember George Jefferson? He was Archie Bunker's neighbour on All in the Family and then there was a show about him and his wife, living in their 'duluxe apartment in the sky'. Next door lived 'Bentley...")Breathing Deeply
("A couple of years ago, I went with our volunteer group to the Stewpot's volunteer appreciation luncheon. While we began to eat, a group of the Stewpot's clients got up and stood by the piano on risers. But they all stood up, took a deep collective breath, and began to sing...")Partners in Ministry
("I love the way Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, put it: 'It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view...We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work...We plant the seeds that one day will grow...")Holy Spirit: Change Agent
When the Holy Spirit changes a life, it is a gradual process to be sure – a process that takes patience, time and seasons of growth. But, even though transformation is a process, it’s not just a re-shaping of the same old stuff we were, but a total metamorphosis of one way of being to another. You see, the Holy Spirit works in our lives to create something totally different and new, like the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly...*The Gift of Fire
("In 1996, a gunman went on a rampage in Port Arthur, Australia, and killed some 35 people. One of the first to be shot was a man named Tony Kistan, who was a member of the Salvation Army. Tony was a 51 year-old man from Sydney, Australia, who just happened to be in a cafe at Port Arthur with his wife Sarah when the shooting began...")Pentecost (C)(2007)
("it is possible to look back and see clearly that there was one really critical moment in the recent history of Northern Ireland when the level of violence started finally to decline. That moment was about ten years ago when a bomb exploded at a Remembrance Day parade in Enniskillen...")If the Spirit Dwells in You
("Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching A Stone To Talk humorously writes about the sad condition she observes in many Christian churches today: 'Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?...")The Power of Being Human
("I think little Christopher was just three or four years old when he was severely injured. He was with his parents in a store that had two levels and the shopping carts were moved from floor to floor on a conveyor system. Christopher and his family were waiting for their cart to come down to the first floor when it broke free...")A Church on Fire
("In the 1840's, Christian Schonbein, was messing around in his wife's kitchen and spilled some acid. He mopped up the mess with a handy cotton apron, then realized he should dry the apron. When he held the wet apron over the stove, it disappeared in a smokeless explosion...")Wild Spirit
("It reminds me of the old story about a man who walks into a Presbyterian church one day, while the preacher is holding forth. He makes his way right down to the front pew and sits there...")
Illustrated Resources (and Other Resources of Merit) from the Archives
Can We Talk?
("Richard Rubin, who writes now for a fancy magazine, was a radio announcer in Alabama when he was young. His responsibilities consisted of reading news and emergency weather bulletins on the air. One night, he was reading just such a bulletin, when a tornado came through the small town from which he was broadcasting...")The Pentecostal Wild Goose
("While the Roman Church imaged the Holy Spirit in the form of a peaceful, graceful dove, the Ancient Celts understood the Holy Spirit to be like a wild goose. When you hear of the Spirit descending like a heavenly dove on you, you hear harps and strings softly playing and get a peaceful feeling. The image of a wild goose descending upon you is a different matter altogether. A wild goose is one noisy, bothersome bird...")Kindred Spirit/s: But If 2 & 2 & 50 Make a ‘Millions’ . . .
The Spirit makes us all kin, all related in Christ and connected to faith-promise, faith-people everywhere -- every class, color, condition, nation, and tongue. The equally ageless spirit Pete Seeger sings the song, “Just my hands can’t tear a prison down / Just your hands can’t tear a prison down / But if two and two and fifty make a million / We’ll see that day come round / We’ll see that day come round.” The verses continue, ”Just my hands can’t build a bridge of peace,” “Just my strength can’t ban the atom bomb,” “Just my heart can’t turn this world to love,” “Just my eyes can’t see the way ahead,"...Imagination and Transformation: Self, Culture, Church
("One of my best friends, Mary Ellen, had a recurrence of cancer. As they told her that she was not going to recover, she asked me if I would conduct a prayer service because she said that she was in the void. About three hundred people came and laid hands on Mary Ellen and prayed over her..." and several other illustrations)The Curse Reversed
("Having grown up in the south, I can distinguish between redneck slang and an aristocratic drawl. Seminary in Chicago acquainted me with the mid-western twang, and grad school in New Jersey introduced me to nasal northeastern. In the men's room at the County Line BBQ restaurant on San Antonio's famed Riverwalk, I heard an hilarious soundtrack called How To Talk Texan...")*Making a List, Checking It Twice
("Have you ever noticed that our culture seems captivated by making lists? We like lists. Some make 'to-do' lists, shopping lists and then there's Celebrity lists, 'who's who' lists, lists of the wealthy, debtors lists, court lists where in Ireland 'the peculiar interest is not so much the crime, but that you got 'caught'...")*Return to the Source
("We all know that having an incorrect address on your mail, means it won't reach the intended recipient. But, if you were to send a letter to God, what address would you use? The answer is, of course, 'Heaven'. Similarly prayers to Jesus could be addressed 'Jesus in heaven, at the right hand of God'. But how about the Holy Spirit?...")Pentecost (B)(1997)
In Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, much is made of thank-you notes, especially thank-you notes for weddings presents. One of her sample letters reads as follows: Dear Aunt Patience: Rhino and I are thrilled with the magnificent silver sugar shaker you sent us. It adds not only beauty and dignity to our table, but amusement, too, as some of our friends who are both ignorant and daring have not waited for the berries to be served, but have shaken it over their meat. "This could only have come from your Aunt Patience," said one, and we were proud to say that it had. Rhino joins me in thanking you for your kindness. We look forward to having you in our new home. Love, Daffodil Most of us have gotten gifts that we weren't quite sure how to use. We smile politely, say "thank you very much," but think to ourselves, "what on earth am I supposed to do with this?" With any luck, the giver will notice a look of perplexity on our faces, and give us some clue as to the intended purpose of the item. But, just as often, we are left to figure it out for ourselves. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don't, and there are times that we just never find out how this beautiful but strange gift is supposed to be used...The Dance of the Spirit
("A friend of mine tells the story of visiting her grandmother in little southern town. After attending an emotional revival service where people jumped about and shouted out loud, she asked her grandmother if that meant that the people were being touched by the Holy Spirit...")*Woosh!
("Martin Marty tells the story about an 8 year-old boy who once attended his classes. Stephen was a special child, and by the time he had reached second grade, his progressive mental disability had become obvious to his friends...")*Yakity Yak
("A friend of mine recently shared his summer vacation story from last year. He called his reflection Unifying a Scattered World Under One Trademark. While on a tour through the southern states, his family stopped at the World of Coca Cola in downtown Atlanta. The site was built in time for the 1996 Olympic Games...")Come, Holy Spirit
("One bright Sunday morning like today, Benson's mother hurries into her son's bedroom and wakes him up. 'Benson, it's Sunday. Time to get up! Time to get up and go to church! Get up!' Benson mumbles from under the covers, 'I don't want to go'. 'What do you mean you don't want to go?' says the mother...")The Force Be with You
("It seems that one day a bee became trapped inside Victor Hugo's study and it was, in its attempt to escape from the room, furiously beating itself and bumping itself against one of the windows. Hugo saw on the floor other bees that had already killed themselves doing the very same thing, so he decided to rescue the small creature that was dashing out its little brains on the window...")The Power and Presence of Christ
("The story is told of a man called Yates who, during the depression, owned a sheep ranch in Texas. He did not have enough money to continue paying on the mortgage - in fact he was forced like many others to live on government subsidies. Each day as he tended his sheep he worried about how he was going to pay his bills...")Never Abandoned
("The late Ozzie Nelson used to tell this story about his son, Ricky: 'Ricky was just a young boy when his friend, Walter, came over to spend the weekend with him. I got off work a little early so I could play with the boys. We went into the backyard & started throwing a football around, I was getting really good when Ricky said, "Hey, Dad, you're great!"... and other illustrations")Come, Holy Spirit
("There is a period of human history called the Dark Ages. It started in about the fifth century and continued for the next 600 years. You might say it was a 600-year depression – food was scarce, people lived hand-to-mouth – and Western civilisation barely hung by a thread. The one bright spot was the local cathedral. Building cathedrals even in small towns gave work to thousands of people..." and another short illustration)Hearing and Speaking
("There have been numerous books written on the difficulty that men and women have in communicating. It has been estimated that women say something like 6,000 – 8,000 words a day and that men utter 2,000 – 4,000 words a day. At the end of the day the man has spoken his 4,000 words and doesn't want to communicate any more. He simply wants to sit quietly, watch TV and go to bed....")When God Speaks
("When travelling in non-English speaking countries, signs that have obviously been literally translated into English for visitors can be often confusing and amusing. Here are a couple of examples. From a brochure of a car rental firm in Tokyo, 'When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigour...")Pentecost (A)(2005)
("Once upon a time a new family moved into a neighborhood. It was a nice neighborhood and it was very close to where the Daddy worked, so close he could walk to work. There was only one thing wrong with the neighborhood. Most people weren't Irish!...")*Confirmation Sunday (B)(2003)
("Springfield Community Church is an interesting church. The pastor is Timothy Lovejoy who all the people of Springfield seem to endure. His name is a bit of a distraction because he certainly does not love joy. He is more famous for his fire and brimstone sermons, that come in handy when the furnace in the church breaks down, than for his love or compassion...")*The Main Thing
("A friend of mine reported that she was the program for a group of elderly ladies in a church in our area. Dana is quite the singer and she has a program of songs which she brings to women's groups, particularly older women's groups. She likes the look on their faces when she sings 'Holy City'. The woman beam as they listen to the familiar music...")*What Language Do You Speak?
("there is the old story about Pepe Rodriguez, a notorious bank robber in the old West. He would sneak across the border from Mexico, rob banks in Texas, and then escape back into Mexico before the police could catch up with him...")Pentecost (A)(1999)
The family was tired and sleepy as the car drove through the night. Suddenly there was a sputter, and the car came to a stop. The driver groaned, realizing he had run out of gas. The family waited on the lonely stretch of road. A car stopped and a man came over to the anxious family. He was dirty and disheveled and the car he drove looked like it had come from a junkyard. Much to the family's surprise the man produced a can of gasoline and refused any money for it. As he drove off into the dark the mother said, "He was a real character." From the backseat the little girl remarked, "I think he was Jesus."...Overcoming Language Barriers
("Listen to my favorite spiritual mentor Henri Nouwen: 'Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place...")Bug Buildup
("Workers at wind farms have long noticed that electricity-generating wind turbines are plagued by strange and unexpected fluctuations in their power output. The reason was unknown, until scientists at last identified the mystery substance: smooshed bugs. Insects accumulate on the turbines' propellers, adding aerodynamic drag and siphoning off up to a quarter of the windmills' energy production each year...")Friendly Fire
("Wildfires are no enemy of the forest. They clear the ground of accumulating leaves, branches and needles, making room for trees to grow. In the same way, the fire of the Holy Spirit can clear the undergrowth and debris of our lives, and allow new life to appear...")Pentecost (C)(2001)
Scroll down the page for this resource.Several years ago I had the urge to build a small sail boat. It was only nine feet long and made of plywood. The mast and the rudder and the center board were all home made. After many months of gluing and sanding and painting, the boat was finally ready for its maiden voyage. We took it up to Twin Lakes, raised the bright yellow and red sail, and as the gentle breeze caught the sail, we moved slowly away from the dock. Toward the center of the lake the wind picked up and all secured right with the world. Suddenly, I heard the splintering of wood. As I checked for the source of the noise, I found that the mast, which is the main pole that holds up the sail, had jumped out of its mounting and was tearing up the deck. I had failed to build a secure mounting. The mast toppled over and the sail sank into the water. I sat on my little sail boat bobbing up and down in the water feeling quite dejected. Finally, a friend came along side and towed me in with his motor boat. I took the sailboat home and rebuilt the mounting support and fixed the deck. A few weeks later we went out again. This time the mast held and we had many years of fun in our small sailboat. In many ways this experience parallels life. As Father Vince Dwyer says in his book Lift Your Sails, "The winds of God's grace are always blowing but we must make an effort to raise our sails." Our lives are a mixture of good and bad, of light and darkness, of courage and fear, of concern and indifference. But it is in the conflicting personalities we are that the Holy Spirit chooses to work.
Pentecost (A)(1996)
("Regina Coupar has written this poem called pentecost: when the Spirit touches us we become changed the new wine which is poured into each of us by the Spirit of God changes the vessel which holds it where we were empty we become filled where we are dead we are brought to life where we were afraid we are afraid no more...")Pentecost (B)(1997)
("There was once a university student who went to Europe to study architecture. He and a friend bought Eurail Youth Passes so that they could tour around as much as they pleased. Often they would book overnight passage and sleep on the train to avoid the cost of hotel accommodation. One night, during such a trip, in northern Italy one of the young men awakened in the middle of the night to find the train stopped...." and another illustration)To Feel the Winds of God
("I once read a story about a boy whose only stated qualification for a job as a farm hand was 'I can sleep on windy nights'. The farmer was perplexed as to what this meant but since he was also desperate he hired the boy anyway. he did what he was asked and was always available when he was needed...")Winds of Spirit: A Proper Introduction
("When Daniel Boorstin was Librarian of Congress he was on a PBS TV show with a box holding the articles that Abraham Lincoln had with him the night he was assassinated. There was a handkerchief with his name embroidered on it..." and other quotes)Pentecost (C)(2004)
Charles Lloyd, the world renowned tenor sax, flute, and virtually anything-like-a- woodwind virtuoso, who gave us Forest Flower at Monterey Pop, and Billy Higgins, the quintessential West Coast jazz drummer and sideman for literally hundreds of recordings of the past 50 years or so, worked on an extended suite in the months leading up to Higgins' death in 2001. It is a varied and extraordinary musical meditation titled Which Way Is East (EMC recording, 1878/79). Both musicians play an array of instruments and sing. The music is written and played from the perspective that Billy Higgins is leaving this world. In the booklet that accompanies the two-CD set, there is a conversation between Lloyd and Higgins as Higgins lies in bed. The end of this conversation about their musical collaboration goes like this:...*Happy Birthday!
("In her book Reclaiming The 'L' Word, Kelly Fryer tells of a day at seminary when she did not want to be in class. It was a beautiful day and many of the students were gazing out the window wishing they could be outside playing. The professor realized that no one was listening and he slammed his notebook shut...")*Wind in Our Sails
("John Masefield’s Sea Fever – whether you are a sailor or not, it stirs something in many of us. I lived for many years in Gosport, on the other side of the harbour from Portsmouth. Often I would stand at the harbour and see the ships leaving port...")Beating Babel
("In David Brinkley's excellent book Washington Goes to War, we find the story of the transformation of our nation's capital from a sleepy southern town into the massive machine it became during World War II. Brinkley was a young reporter at the time and recalls the isolationist feeling that was pervasive in America prior to Pearl Harbor..." and other illustrations)The Gift of Fire
I read recently of a couple of preacher's kids who were observed by their mother playing an unusual game with a baby doll at a construction site next to their home. The little girl would present the doll to her brother who would sprinkle a few drops of water on it then throw it into a deep hole that was to become a future neighbor's basement. The little girl would climb down, retrieve the doll, and the process would start all over again. "What are you doing?" the mother asked. "We're playing DADDY. We're baptizing babies." The mother asked for a demonstration. With great reverence, the little girl presented the doll to her brother who sprinkled a few drops of water on it again while saying, "In the name of the Father and the Son and IN THE HOLE HE GOES."...The Real Force Be With You!
("George Lucas said in a recent interview, 'I put the Force into the movie in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people--more a belief in God than a belief in any particular religious system. I wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery.'...")Visions and Dreams
("a National Geographic special that aired sometime back which featured a man - a senior citizen, in his 70's or 80's - who climbed a mountain in Antarctica. When he made it to the top and was asked if he had anything to say to those watching...")Searching for Pentecost
("Once upon a time there was a great land, with many people. This land had many things, like TVs and video games, and in this land you could do many things, like rollerblading and skiing, playing soccer and baseball. Not only that, there were many pretty things, like flowers and birds, mountains and oceans...")Wild Goose Chases
("Wild Geese Flying by Ronald Meredith: It was a quiet evening in early spring, when out of the night came the sound of wild geese flying. I ran to the house and breathless, announced the excitement. What is to compare with wild geese across the moon?...")When Pentecost Ends Too Soon
("A few years ago I talked with a friend of mine who's a pastor in New England. 'How's your building program going?' I asked. 'Oh, we ran out of money before we got to the worship space,' she said. I thought to myself, 'What could be more important than the worship space?' But I kept my thoughts to myself. 'We renovated the basement,' she said...")Set the World on Fire
("a 10-year-old boy was taking piano lessons. He didn't practice at all and his mother felt as if she was throwing her money away. His mother really wanted him to stick with the piano, but she could not find any way to keep him motivated. Just as she was about to give up on the idea altogether, she saw an advertisement about an upcoming concert of a renowned concert pianist..." and other illustrations)First Hand Experience
("when I was in ninth grade at a Bible Camp, Mount Carmel near Alexandria, Minnesota, I had a born again experience with Pastor Hammer speaking, in his white dinner jacket in that old auditorium. I clearly remember. I remember writing in my pocket Bible that I came to know the Lord that night...")Wind: Air on the Move
("From Christina Rossetti, a Christian poet: 'Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you? But when the leaves hang trembling, the wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. But when the leaves bow down their heads, the Wind is passing by...")*The Answer Is Blowing Like the Wind
("Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible is the story of Nathan Price, a stubborn evangelical missionary who takes his long-suffering wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959, where he proceeds to trample all over the local culture with both humorous and tragic results..." and another illustration)*Incendiary Grace
("In his book The Kingdom of God is a Party, Tony Campolo tells of a time he was speaking in Honolulu, Hawaii. Because of the time change, he found himself wide awake at 3:30 in the morning. So he went out to get a cup of coffee at one of those all night greasy-spoon diners..." and another illustration)*The Pastor Gets Windy...Again
("When I was very young, I was fascinated with fireflies, although back in Pennsylvania where I lived at the time, we called them 'lightning bugs'. Whatever you call them, they seemed magical to me. How else could you describe a tiny dance of lights flickering on and off every summer night in our otherwise mundane back yard?...")Danger: High Voltage
When I was growing up, we had the inner workings of an old-timey, wall-mounted telephone, the kind with the receiver on one side and a handle on the other with the speaker sticking out the front. The way it worked in the old days was, you cranked the handle a couple of times to get the operator, and she'd place your call for you. Well, my Dad had taken the generator out of an old telephone and mounted it on a board. For fun, we'd sit around the dining room table and take turns holding the wire while someone gently turned the handle. If they turned it slowly, you'd feel a little tingle, and, if they gave it a quick turn or two, it'd give you a real jolt. Sometimes, we'd get several kids sitting around the table holding hands. The one sitting next to the generator would hold the wire. The person turning the handle would start out slowly, then gradually get faster and faster until someone couldn't stand it any more and broke the circuit. Electricity is conductive – once the current gets generated, it flows out in every direction bringing energy and power to everything it touches. Well, I like to think that the Holy Spirit, like electricity, has this conductive property...Becoming the People of God
the movie Hotel Rwanda, is absolutely horrible to watch. Yet it's important to see because it is true. Before viewing it, I knew what had happened, and I knew it was terrible. But I still wasn't prepared for what I would see. It's like seeing the Passion of Christ all over again, and I suffered through it, as I did that one. ...Fire of Love
("Dennis Linn tells of Hilda coming into his office one day because her son had tried to commit suicide for the fourth time. She described how her son was involved in prostitution, drug dealing and murder and then ended her list of her son's 'big sins' with, 'What bothers me most is that my son says he wants nothing to do with God...")Pentecost (B)(2003)
("One thing that many of the political analysts have noticed is that, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to look back and see clearly that there was one really critical moment in the recent history of Northern Ireland when the level of violence started finally to decline. That moment was about ten years ago when a bomb exploded at a Remembrance Day parade in Enniskillen - a small town of about 10,000 people...")Gasping for the Spirit
("A young man decided that he wanted to grow in his spiritual life so he traveled to an ancient monastery to seek spiritual guidance from a well-known monk. The elder guide listened patiently to the young man tell his story and his reasons for wanting a deeper experience with God. After the young man finished that spiritual guide, stood up and instructed the young man to follow him...")A Museum Faith No Longer
("William Seymour was born in Louisiana, the son of former slaves.We was raised a Baptist and as a young man had several intensive dreams and visions.He contracted smallpox and went blind in his left eye at the age of 25.About this time, he moved to Indianapolis and worked as a railroad porter and waiter in a fashionable restaurant..." and another illustration)The Power Is On
("A story is told of one man in North Dakota who worked long and hard to get electricity to the remote sections of the state. He not only had to make several trips to Washington, but he also had to convince people in the state to get wired for the day when the 'juice' was turned on. The man had a real vision for the future...")Snorkeling and the Holy Spirit
("Recently, I had a foreign visitor, Peter, whom I took to enjoy snorkeling, my favorite recreation in my favorite places. He was enthralled by the multitude of multicolored fish, the variety of sea life, the starfish and the sea urchins. What I took so much for granted fascinated him...")Public Speaking
("There once was a church in need of a new pastor, the old one having reached that age when he could finally go out to pasture. They did their goodbyes well by him, serving up a $10 a plate dinner in the church basement to add to his retirement fund. They barbershopped 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' and told nice stories about him...")By Wind and Fire on Pentecost Morn
("So we're all ready to tell the story of Pentecost, and we're going to have some fun doing it, for we're going to tell that story with the help of some jazz musicians. And, with the help of our instrumentalists, let's practice your lines, the refrain. 'We were gathered that morning in the upper room; We were waiting, we were waiting...")Altogether Together
("As the poet once wrote: 'All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all...")Ride the Wind
Annie Dillard in her Pulitzer Prize winning book Pilgrim At Tinker Creek reflects on this tendency of human beings to look backwards – she describes it as downstream - at all the things that have flowed away from us. Relationships – our youth – good health – so often we find ourselves gazing down the creek where so much of life has floated downstream...Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
("Old blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra passed away not too long ago. He had a wonderfully smooth and mellow voice. I grew up listening to him and the others in the Rat Pack. You know: Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Out of the Rat pack, Frank Sinatra was my mother's all time favorite...")Don't Be Spooked by the Holy Spirit
("J. Danson Smith wrote a poem that describes what the disciples had to be going through. 'Waiting! Yes, patiently waiting! Till next steps made plain shall be; To hear, with the inner hearing, The Voice that will call for me...")Shaped by the Fire
("And that's where the spiritual experience in Waterford comes in. It began with a simple phrase by the tour guide. She was showing us the inspection room. All of sudden we heard a loud crash. Some of us jumped. And then she explained, 'When you get to the Showroom and Store, you will find that we don't sell culls or seconds. There are no seconds in Waterford Crystal...")We Didn't Start the Fire
("Like the title from Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start The Fire. The fire of Pentecost, the flame of the Holy Spirit comes from God in order to empower our lives and the lives of these youth so that together we can dare great things for God, and share the message of Christ with the world...")The Holy Spirit: God Breaking Down Walls
("I am an incurable Star Trek fan. One installment of the series centered around an intelligent life form from another planet called a Medeusian. Medeusians possess no physical body. They are creatures made of pure thought or spirit. In the story, the Medeusian had an opportunity to enter a human body. His comment about human existence is useful for our discussion this morning...")Awareness
Years ago I worked with a young woman had become addicted to alcohol. She also became involved with a violent man who beat her on a regular basis and sometimes until she was black and blue. She also became pregnant. She reached a point where she felt completely alone confused and didn't know where to turn. She finally sought help in a shelter for abused women. Against all odds she managed to deal with her alcoholism through help from A.A. and ongoing counseling. She was also able to escape from the abusive relationship she was in. Somehow she found some strength to keep going. When I talked with her I often felt that I was in the presence of a glory that was beyond both of us. She was in touch with a power beyond her own strength. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the gift of the Spirit.The Gift That is Ours
I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Prison Meditations speaking of a certain experience that he had of the Holy Spirit: I vividly recall that night (of torture)...and how I prayed to God that he might send death to deliver me because of the helplessness and the pain I felt I could no longer endure, and the violence and hatred to which I was no longer equal. How I wrestled with God that night and finally in my great need crept to him, weeping. Not until morning did a great peace come to me, a blissful awareness of light, strength, and warmth, bringing with it the conviction that I must see this thing through and at the same time the blessed assurance that I should see it through. Solace in Woe. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.Living by the Spirit
John Wesley, understood the importance of the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church. He wrote that through the presence and the power of God's Holy Spirit the the Christian should: Do all the good you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as you ever can. Through the Holy Spirit we are empowered to carry out the will and the work of God in the world.A Time of Renewal
("Norman Rockwell was responsible for many of the covers that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post over the years. There was nothing more haunting and enduring than one that appeared over forty years ago. It is still haunting and enduring because it touches on something that touches us all..." and other illustrations)Why Join the Church?
("The most famous of the utopian novels was one written by a man named Edward Bellamy, called Looking Backwards, which is still, incidentally, among the best sellers of all time. It sold millions of copies. It was written in the 1890s, and it looked forward to seeing what the world would be like in the 1990s, in the decade in which we are living...")Let's Get Together
("There was a special on the PBS channel recently about three families who lived on the prairie. It was an experiment to see whether or not 21st century families could live the way people lived in the 19th century. Their mission was to plant crops, raise animals and prepare themselves for the upcoming winter. At that point they were evaluated and then returned to their normal lives...")The Green Face of God: Christianity in an Age of Ecocide
("At bedtime I sometimes read to my five-year-old daughter the Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax. The story takes place in a bucolic setting of heavily fruited Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, and Brown Bear Bar-ba-loots; it is a place where 'from the rippulous pond[s] / comes the comforting sounds / of the Humming-fish humming / while splashing around...")Preachers, All!
("I was talking to a state judge not long ago, and he was telling me some of the history of the clothing that judges wear. He tells me that, in the early days of our Republic, American judges made a big deal of not wearing wigs or robes...")The Prevailing Spirit
Here's how Walter Kasper puts this matter between us and the Holy Spirit: 'Everywhere that life breaks forth and comes into being, everywhere that new life as it were seethes and bubbles, and even, in the form of hope, everywhere that life is violently devastated, throttled, gagged and slain — wherever true life exists, there the Spirit of God is at work.'..." and other true life examples of the Spirit at work in the world...Reflections on Pentecost (A)(2005)
("I had a course in Seminary by Prof. Dr. Richard Jensen who wrote a book entitled Touched by the Spirit, and we used that book in his class. Prof. Dr. Jensen talked about his experience with speaking in tongues and the whole Pentecostal experience. He urged us to look closely at the Acts text...")The Spirit Within, the Spirit Without
("A closing story by D. L. Moody says this: Some old divine has pictured Peter preaching on the day of Pentecost. A man pushed his way through the crowd, and said: 'Peter, do you think there is hope for me? I am the man who made that crown of thorns and placed them upon Christ's brow; do you think he will save me?'...")Pentecost (C)(2004)
Many years ago I read historian Martin Marty’s helpful little book Baptism. He began by describing the awe, mystery, and wonder of an early church baptism when to be baptized was a highly countercultural act. The newly baptized was leaving the old life behind to enter into the new community of God’s people. Having set a scene altogether unfamiliar to the present-day Christian reader, Marty contrasted that baptism with the kind of baptism one might regularly experience in a Lutheran congregation. There the parents’ greatest fear was that the pastor would get too much water on the baby, thus spoiling the child’s hair or clothing right before the pictures were to be taken. It was an effective introduction to a tract on the meaning of Holy Baptism...
Currently Unavailable
Pentecost
["The children's writer Michael Morpurgo was interviewed on the radio recently. He spoke about his love of music (he likes Handel and is less keen on Bach) and of Venice. By way of apparent contrast, he also spoke of his passion for farms..."]Pentecost
("Flow is the title and theme of a widely influential book by a scholar with a far-from-flowing name. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's 'flow' is 'the mental state of operation in which a person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus...")The Gift of Communication
("Beer company Coors put its slogan Turn It Loose, into Spanish, where it was read as 'Suffer From Diarrhea'. Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: 'Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.'..." and other illustrations)The Wind That Blew the Walls Down
Several years ago, a team of six people from our church traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to help rebuild houses and lives torn apart by the tornadoes that left behind a trail of destruction there. Even though it had been a year since the tornadoes wreaked havoc there, and a lot of clean-up and rebuilding had already taken place there, still the magnitude of the destruction left behind was haunting. I had seen pictures and footage on the news; but until I saw the destruction for myself, got to know some of the survivors, and got to listen to some of their stories, I did not fully understand the force and power of a mighty wind. The wind is a force to be reckoned with...Dreams and Visions
("Blare Gooch is a 13-year old boy in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Two days after the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Blare saw a little boy crying in a pile of rubble on a newscast. The story brought him to tears. The next day, still thinking about what he'd seen, Blare remembered the teddy bear that always comforted him. 'Then I thought, 'We could start a drive for Haiti,'' said Blare...")The Language of the Spirit
("Terri Pilarski, an Episcopal priest, tells of a family that arrived on a warm June day: a mother, grandmother, and five children ranging in ages from 17 to 3. They had traveled from a refugee camp in Cameroon to Sudan. There they caught a plane that flew them to Paris, then to the United States. The littlest ones were teary-eyed and clingy, hanging on to the bone-thin hand of their grandmother...")How Did These Guys Get So Smart?
("Everything is getting "smart" these days. Mobil Oil has introduced its 'Smart Pass', a gadget you simply wave at a gas pump and you can immediately fill you car with fuel and be on your way - no more credit cards and no more cash. In the prototype stage of development is the next generation of the 'smart car', which gauges the distance between your vehicle and the car in front of you and automatically slows your car down when that distance narrows beyond safe limits...")