Sermon: Beyond Cool and Indifferent

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Beyond Cool and Indifferent

By Charles Rush

November 11, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 6.9 Mb) ]

veral years ago I was preaching in Kentucky and an overly earnest young man came up to me before the service and asked me a question in front of a large number of people. He said ‘Before I listen to you preach tonight, I need to know if you are filled with the Holy Spirit?' These questions genuinely make me squirm. On the one hand, I want to say yes, because I do experience the presence of the Spirit in my life. On the other hand, in the South any talk of being Pentecostal was looked on with some suspicion. It was associated with people who were poor, relatively uneducated, people who were on the fringes of society. Today Pentecostals are more mainstream but they are still associated with people who raise their hands in worship, people who put 2 or 3 religious bumper stickers on their cars, people who have some association with Tulsa, Oklahoma, who usually have an old boxed set of tapes from Jim and Tammy Faye Baker in the back of the closet somewhere, people who at one time in their life were associated with Amway or Shaklee home cleaning products. I don't want to be a religious snob but I don't want any part of this either.

At the very least, being Pentecostal is associated with people who elevate the heart so far above the head that the sentimental movement of the Spirit takes the place of hard mental work. When I was a freshman at college, we had to memorize passages from the work of Edmund Burke, for our debate class. Professor Lawrence would call on us at random and we had to recite. One of my classmates was called on and took her place at the front of the class, and declined to recite the passage assigned, announcing to us that she had prayed about the matter the night before and the Lord had laid upon her a message of a different sort to give us, which she did: it was a remarkable testimonial and a hush followed its conclusion. We waited for Professor Lawrence. He pressed his fingers to his lips for a moment, considering what to say and then said “Madam, as God is not taking this course for credit, I dare not evaluate the truth of what He has had you to say; you are, however, and you fail.” There fell another victim of the heart to the mind.

Our challenge here at Christ Church, here in Summit, is quite different. We are not in danger of elevating the heart over the mind. It is closer to the opposite but it is an equally important spiritual challenge. Our culture and our religion can still pretty well be defined as main-line WASP. It doesn't want too much of anything. There is an inscription on the tombstone of the Countess of Huntington, just outside Winchester, England. It was elegant and would make a fine inscription for almost all of us here today. It read ‘She was a Godly, righteous, and sober Lady, bounteous in good works and Christian affections, a firm believer in the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and devoid of the taint of enthusiasm.' Apparently, she was a member of the Baultristrol Country Club. I jest, of course. But we know these people (devoid of any taint of enthusiasm) because we are these people. And this is particularly true of our religion. We have a well developed air of detachment, a certain objectivity and tolerance, a cultural cool. I've heard the Episcopal Church described as "God's Frozen Chosen".

We don't want to be too passionate about anything, lest it look fanatical. New Yorkers particularly develop this liberal tolerance towards all things religious that has a way of inoculating any and all religious sentiment as a personal expression rather like the choice to sport a boa or a boe tie to work. I certainly want to be tolerant, but I'm afraid of this kind of tolerance too. You may recall what Ernest Hemingway wrote of Francis Macomber, “He always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him, if it weren't so sinister.”

Too much tolerance is rather too relaxed, flabby, and deadening as a spiritual demeanor. There is a cartoon from The New Yorker that shows a man who had just entered an office and peered across and down the other side of a desk, and said to another man who was lying on his back on the floor behind his desk ‘Look, Gormly, there is such a thing as being too laid back'. Woody Allen once remarked, ‘I don't do mellow well, pretty soon I start to mush and then to rot.' True infidels are not just Monsters of Evil, the infidels are the genuinely, decidedly indifferent. They have no fire in the belly one way or the other. They are nice but not good, which is only a step away from being dead but not yet buried.

One of my greatest fears for us in the liberal end of the church is that believing little, we will settle for passionless lives of quiet civility. Heinrich Heine, the German-Jewish poet was standing with a friend before the great cathedral of Amiens. When the friend asked, ‘Why can't people build awe inspiring sanctuaries like this anymore?' Heine replied, ‘My dear friend, in those days people had convictions. We moderns have opinions, and it takes more than opinions to build a gothic cathedral. Mere opinions is what you get when tolerance is not a means to an end but becomes an end in itself

Spiritually speaking, we are a long way from living up to our potential. We are terrific at volunteering our time for worthy causes, at raising money for worthy organizations, and doing community building. But on a spiritual level in our lives, too many of us are simply waiting for God to come and write a message to us personally across the evening sky before we develop ourselves on a spiritual level.

We are like the servants who worked for a Duke and Duchess on a country estate in England. The Duke and Duchess were away most of the time and left the servants to tend to the estate while they were away.

One year the Duchess decided to get an accounting from all of the servants so she called them in one at a time and asked them what they did exactly and how things were going. About an hour into the interview, an old man came into the room.

The Duchess said, “Let me see, you have been with us now twenty years?”

“Yes ma'am” said the servant.

“Your job is to walk the dog?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“But the dog has been dead for 18 years?”

“Is there anything else your grace would like me to do?”

We wouldn't think about ignoring the advice of our doctors about the things we need to do to maintain health, we wouldn't think about ignoring our financial advisors about the things we need to do to attain fiscal independence, but we act towards God too often like a befuddled and indolent servant, needing God's constant supervision like young children who stop their chores the minute you turn your back and just stand there doing nothing, anything, but the one thing that needs to be done.

The disciples were not too different from us really. After Jesus died and was resurrected, we are told that they continued to meet behind closed doors. They had a very meaningful personal piety but they weren't about to share that with anyone. They certainly wouldn't talk about it in public for fear that the other Jews would think they were a little whacky. They met behind closed doors. They were content to settle for a passionless life of quiet civility.

They are like Moses in the Old Testament. Moses had been born into the midst of his peoples suffering in Egypt. He saw their slavery. He witnessed their oppression. One time he even got so angry that he killed an Egyptian. But Moses ran away. He was hiding in Midian, tending his sheep, minding his own business, content to settle for a passionless life of quiet civility. When God comes to him in a flame, a bush that is on fire.

God tells Moses ‘Go speak to Pharaoh, let my people go', the last thing in the world that Moses wants to do.

God gives the disciples miraculous power to speak in the native languages from all around the Mediterranean, the last thing in the world that they really want to do. Moses saw God in the fire of a bush, the disciples get tongues of fire.

The wonderful and disturbing news of the gospel is that while God does not condemn us, God does commission us. God prods us to get out there and do things we would have never imagined we would be doing.

The disciples were content to stay to themselves in Jerusalem but God compels them to go unto all the world. There is a clear direction to the gospel for the walls between Christian, Jew, and Muslim have been broken down. The walls between Europeans, Africans, Arabs, Asians have been broken down. The walls between men and women, the walls between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between liberal and conservative, between educated and illiterate, have been broken down.

Do they still exist? Of course, but the Spirit of God is actively blowing through them because they don't count. Jesus used to say, ‘We are all children of God.” Before God, we each stand as anxious sinners in need of forgiveness and recreation.

And what a moving experience that can be. Several years ago, I was at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Glide is a downtown church, overflowing in attendance every Sunday with people from every ethnic group and every walk of life because they have an active outreach program to the homeless and to the people on the street. There is was in my tweed jacket and a bow tie, the uniform for an academic conference, and next to me sat two homeless men that still reeked of the Mad Dog 20/20 they had worked on all Saturday night. On the other side, were two people who dressed like women and walked like men. The minister asked us all to stand up and hug someone next to us and say ‘God bless you'. So we all stood up and I turned to these cross dressers who were reaching out to hug me already. I was confused and I said ‘God bless you brother... I mean sister.” And one of them looked back at me and said ‘honey, I'm just a child o God.' I stood corrected. She was right or maybe he, I don't know. But I have to hand it to those folks in that church because that is the kind of church that God intends. We get filled with the Spirit and we move out into the world and we come together with people that are different than we are under God. God will prod us, God will cajole us, but ultimately we will do this because this is the commission that God has given us.

And the disciples do it with courage. A week previously they were scared to death. At Jesus trial, they all ran away. When the Roman soldiers came, they were out of there. At the trial, not one of them came to plead on Jesus behalf. After he died they not only met behind closed doors, they kept the door locked. But the Spirit came over them and they were filled with a profound courage and boldness. You can't make this up. It either happens to you or it doesn't.

It happened to Jim Loder. Jim was a Psychology Professor at Harvard Divinity School, very adept at counseling people through their emotional crises, but spiritually asleep by his own account. One summer he was driving the Volkswagen Van on vacation when he got a flat tire. He was out fixing the flat tire when a car veered off the road, slammed into the back of his van and the van landed right on top of him, pinning him to the ground, crushing his chest. In a split second his wife assessed the situation, a 5 ft., 90 pound woman (dripping wet). She cried out in a moment something like ‘O God help me save this man. And with that she leaned down, grabbed the front bumper of the van, picked it up off her husband and moved it off of him. Dr. Loder saw his life pass before him. He was feeling the life pass out of him when the van was lifted and a new surge of energy and calm relief poured over his whole person. He later named this experience ‘the transforming moment' and that is the name of his book on the subject. That experience changed Dr. Loder's whole life. His little wife tore her stomach muscles and he spent quite some time in the hospital but they both were fine.

He was simply stunned by the supernatural power that was released by his wife in lifting that car and its relation to prayer.

Now I want to tell you that he didn't entirely change. When you hear him lecture, he is still pretty impenetrable and his books are as dense as any Harvard professor, but he began to make prayer and the invocation of the Holy Spirit of God in his life, the very center of what he was about. He changed the focus of his research entirely so that it wasn't so horizontal and it became defined by the transcendent power. And if you go to see him for counseling now, he might well take you back. Sometimes, he has been known to stop in the middle of someone's speech and say ‘this is a matter that needs to be taken to God in prayer right now'. Frequently, his patients look back at him slack jawed but there is something about his confident demeanor that relaxes people to close their eyes for a moment, a novel experience in counseling. And he prays for them. People report that it is not unnatural or coercive. It is more like healing. It is a comforting power.

Jim Loder got a dose of the courage that comes from the Spirit of God resting upon you. It changed the disciples from reserved and insular to courageous and embracing the other. It can change you too. You don't have to make it up or exaggerate a normal life. You might begin by regularly praying ‘Come Holy Spirit' and just see what happens.

In his great piece in 1963 James Baldwin wrote “If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of the prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” James predicted the consuming fire of God's judgment because we had not addressed racial reconciliation seriously.

The truth is, the kind of fire that God really sends, the kind of fire God sent at Pentecost, it was the cleansing power of the Spirit to fill us with courage and cajoles us, drives us out to be involved in a risk and a reconciliation we don't want to do. Watch out, God is going to get hold of you yet. Amen.