Sermon: Pentecost, 2003

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Pentecost, 2003

By Charles Rush

June 1, 2003

en we first think about the movement of the Spirit, our minds gravitate towards something like Our Lady of Lourdes, where a young French girl reportedly saw a vision of the Madonna that she wanted to heal people. Since then, thousands and thousands of people have made the pilgrimage to the site and experienced something miraculous.

Or when we think of the movement of the Spirit, we think of the spark of creativity that moves writers to the quotable quote. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. Great quotes feel like they come from outside of us because it is so hard to generate these on our own.

I have a couple colleagues that occasionally send me samples of their students work to prove that point, papers written with time pressures, no doubt, and simple fatigue. The following come from English 101. “He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.” Close but not quite. Or this, “She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.” Not quite right either. Or this, “The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.” Or this by a mature student returning for school. “She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.” Finally, “He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.” Again, close but not quite there. Great quotes come upon us with a wave of inspiration.

Our text this morning is given to us in the shape and form of something miraculous. Partly this is unfortunate for us post-Enlightenment, post-Modern readers because a block is thrown up at the first that shields us from the most important, obvious insight. Because the profound reality about the life of the Spirit is not it's miraculous character but the quality of transcendence that we all participate in and understand.

It is the fundamentum of life itself. When I was in divinity school and a chaplain in the Emergency room of a downtown urban hospital, I got a call late one afternoon, asking if I would sit vigil with a woman that was dying and had no family or friends to be with her. I went to see her and she was so weak that she couldn't speak. But I remember praying for her, holding her hand, and laying a hand on her forehead as I prayed. I remember that she just barely squeezed my hand after I was done. She lingered on for some time, but at some point the nurses called me again and I sat next to her as her breathing became labored and she developed what the staff calls ‘the death rattles'. After a while, she expired. It was late afternoon. Spontaneously, when I could sense that the end was coming, I began praying for her, almost like a chant. As those of you who have lived through this will attest, it was a sacred journey to walk with her in the shadow of the valley of death. And oddly peaceful. But there was a moment, just after she died, that is visceral… the transition from inspirited to dead, from the flexible animated aliveness to the taut and cold. The Spirit has departed. Just as it was tangibly present, so it was gone. And I was scared, not in the sense of being scared of ghosts, but existentially afraid in the face of the anxiety of death itself. I was still focused on her and in the moment, but I could almost hear myself under my breath saying, ‘I don't want to die'. It was a lightheaded moment, almost a dizzy moment. I remember walking out into the early evening in front of the hospital, into the humid early evening, all of the rush hour traffic heading home, thinking how strange it was that life just goes on. It seemed for a moment that everything should just stop in honor of the moment, but it doesn't.

Likewise, the giddiness at the beginning of life. I believe I was all of 23 when our first child was born. Apart from some Lamaze classes, I had no idea what to expect. I was just focused on the mechanics of helping my wife with the breathing, telling her she didn't really need that medication… what a mistake that was… She said something like “Don't tell me what I need” with an expression redolent of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Bring in the Demerol… make that morphine, make that heroin, whatever…

But then that moment, when this child was actually born. I hadn't thought about it in advance, but when he started breathing, the room was shot through with transcendence. It is just such a mystical thing, so much bigger than the mechanics of science just sperm and egg growing, so much bigger than just you and your spouse. You are watching the mystery of the life force, the Spirit kick-start a new generation, a new avatar. It is a fundamentally divine moment, the primordial spiritual experience. I just remember being overwhelmed with a great wave of gratitude and the wonderful word used so often in the bible about God, a sense of awe. I remember just standing in front of the window at the nursery with the blank gaze that young men get just watching new life in wonder, like it is said of Mary, ‘she pondered all these things in her heart and wondered what they might mean.'

We are surrounded by the ‘life force' in all of its mystery but somehow we only really pay attention to its transcendent dimension at the beginning and at the end. There are moments in between-when we feel really alive, when long hoped for things come to fruition before our very eyes, when something precious we think we have lost is saved, when we are dizzy with love, when the acceptance of God pours over us- but largely we live our days in ordinary time.

But all of these extraordinary moments, we have a sense of the way that life is shot through with the transcendent dimension of the Spirit. It under girds all existence.

I love the line at the beginning of the Bible that says literally, “When God began creating… the Spirit of God moved across the waters.” The structure of the universe is shot through with the life force. As Teilhard de Chardin pointed out in his meticulous depiction of the evolution of the universe, evolutionary development is shot through with the transcendent spirit. There is a direction to evolution towards the greater interiorization and the manifestation of a fuller realm of the spiritual.

In the broadest terms, he points out that evolution moves from the inorganic, to the organic, to the conscious, to the self-conscious, to the self-directed. The higher evolutionary forms of being, primates and humans, manifesting greater degrees of self-control, self-direction, as well as a variety of other spiritual qualities of self-transcendence.

As you know, our search for how inorganic chemical compounds mixed with electricity to actually form the first cells remains elusive. Somehow it happened and single celled organisms came into being. Teilhard speculates that early in the earth's life, there were great seas of single celled organisms that radiated- that is they multiplied until they had effectively reached the limit of their extended growth. At this point he speculates that a super concentration of single-celled organisms, under the right conditions, involuted- a wonderful term. That is, they turned in on themselves, reorganizing into a new complex reality, a multi-celled organism.

The fact that this happened is the reality of the transcendent Spirit- the life force- that is shot through all of material reality. Built into the dynamic of evolution is not only a movement towards complexity, but that complexity itself has an interior dimension to it. As that process of interiorization evolves towards higher, more complex beings, sentience develops- the ability to sense, feel. As sentience evolves in the process of interiorization, consciousness emerges. As consciousness evolves in the process of interiorization, self-consciousness emerges, as in higher primates and humans.

Philosophers often say of humans that they not only know, they know that they know. We have an awareness of past, present, and the future. We possess a sense of time and an ability to plan for the future that becomes dominant, where less complex forms of life are primarily directed by hormones released in response to the rhythms of the annual cycle. We also are influenced by hormonal rhythms but we have an ability to over-ride them mentally with a self-direction less complex forms of life do not have.

Likewise, philosophers often say of humans that they possess a moral capacity that less complex forms of life do not have in the same way. We are motivated by guilt and shame, integrity and virtue. In Genesis, we are told that God made us stewards of the earth, stewards of the creatures of the earth. That is to say that humans are responsible for maintaining the ecosystem in a way that other creatures are not, in large part because we are able to alter the ecosystem in exponential proportion to other creatures.

Our moral capacity is intricately wrapped up with our technological prowess, what the Roman philosophers referred to as homo faber, Man the toolmaker. Stanley Kubrick did a wonderful job depicting this in the opening scene of 2001 Space Odyssey. The very first scene has a group of primates from millennia ago on the plain in Tanzania. They are dancing around the monolith, Kubrick's depiction of God, the life-force, that is generating energy so that the primates are getting excited to the point of a primal religious ecstasy that signals a creative break-through.

Something changes in the primates. The next day, when they are approached by a rival group of primates, they go through the same aggressive dances they use to scare off their enemy that they have used for centuries but the leader primate that has had a break through moment, picks up the bleached thigh bone of a dead water buffalo and wields the proverbial first tool, a weapon, hitting the leader of the rival group who falls to the ground unconscious. Spark jumps the gap as the killer realizes the new found power of his tool, all the other primates exalting his dominance. The moral dimension is the interior side of technological development.

He throws the new tool in the air which Kubrick morphs into a space ship slowly turning end over end through the galaxies, leaping us forward to the near future when we will create our own biosphere around us, so self-directed that the earth does not control us so much as we control it. You may recall that the movie then explores the interior spiritual challenge of advanced technology in the relationship between the space captain Dave and the computer HAL, upon which the biosphere is completely dependent. Kubrick was giving early voice to the anxiety lots of people have about the fact that we are facing a new level of interior involution through the exponential growth of technological sophistication.

Indeed, we are presently living through a radical step forward in evolutionary history- the genome project. We are unraveling the basic structures that determine our evolutionary development and it appears likely that in the relatively near future, we will be able to direct our evolutionary path. People are concerned about that, worried about that because we are assuming powers that were formerly the realm of the gods and they are right. Yet, this is the inevitable direction of our spiritual evolution. And what it shall produce- monstrous deformation or angelic health- we won't be able to say for generations.

But when you stand back and take in the breadth of our world, when you take in the long direction of the shape and direction of evolution, when you see the wonder of breath in new life and the passing of breath in life that ceases to be, you can see that our world is simply shot through with transcendence, with the Spirit of life itself.

This is the power that God released on Pentecost. That experience that the disciples had was a concentrated spiritual elixir, which is available to all of us in different degrees at different times.

I only want to mention one obvious example today, more as a reminder of our ability to heal. It is the power of prayer. Each of us is filled with the life Spirit, the Spirit that grows things and heals thing. We can focus that energy, concentrate that energy, and thereby alter the world around us for good and for evil.

Prayer is the concentration and channeling of our spiritual energy and it makes a material difference. Dr. Herbert Benson, who teaches at Harvard medical school, has written on the subject. He cites one study where people were asked to pray for mold spores to grow in a petri dish. They compared the growth rates of mold spores that were prayed for by a group of people versus the growth rates for mold spores that were not prayed for. They didn't tell the people praying how to pray or what they meant by prayer. They just asked them to do it. Some people prayed in the name of Jesus, others in the name of God, others in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as our Jewish brothers and sisters would say. Some were church people, others were not. But they prayed. Lo, behold, the mold spores grew substantially faster when they were prayed for.

When our healing energies are focused together, they materially alter reality. Not everything is cured obviously. Not everything can be cured. But healing and blessing are released and we respond to it with.

And prayer takes many forms. I've heard of cases, and even been part of them, where someone has a terminal illness, and their friends and loved ones gather round them to tell them how important they were in their lives, to tell them how much they loved them, spend time in grace and blessing. Despite the fact that they are weakened almost unto death from their illness, they will develop an almost miraculous strength for a few days, and bounce back before death overcomes them.

Prayer gets us through, sometimes monstrous inhumanity. Aleksander Solsynitzen's short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” describes how innocent prisoners in Stalin's Gulag used focused prayer to give them an image of hope to keep them alive with meaning and purpose in the midst of wanton arbitrariness and degradation. Focused spiritual concentration can become an enormously powerful force when you practice it day in and day out. It can give you vision and purpose to get you on through the difficult days.

We didn't need the independent scientific studies from Harvard Medical School to corroborate what we have already lived, that we have the spiritual power to channel and release blessing and healing.

But I point out the bigger picture and I remind you of the personal dimension of the transcendent that is all around us, to simply say what Jesus said, ‘do not be afraid to use it.' Draw upon the power of the spirit, channel it for the good, envision yourself healing, envision those around you being blessed. And watch them grow.

Amen