Sermon: The Progressive Holy Spirit

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The Progressive Holy Spirit

By Charles Rush

May 19, 2013

[ Audio (mp3, 5.3Mb) ]

is morning I want to remind you of why you think outside the box religiously, why we choose to be part of the faith tradition that has an eye to the future a little more than the past. I've been privileged to know really great conservative thinkers, partly because the approach of graduate school was historical and the very best conservatives not only know their history, they've read the original documents in the original language. Like Pope Benedict or Pope John Paul II before him (who had two PhDs, one on Sigmund Freud), they are formidable intellects first and foremost who were very well read.

I appreciate the appeal of tradition. The poet Heinrich Heine lived right at the height of the Enlightenment, early 1800's, when Europeans and Americans were questioning miracles, church dogma with alarming freedom. He was walking with a friend in Germany when they stopped in front of a massive Cathedral, built over a couple centuries, that dominated the town horizon. The friend said to him, “Heinrich, why can't we build cathedrals like that anymore?” Heine reflected for a moment and responded, “Because the people who built these buildings had convictions. We moderns have mere opinions.”

There is a view of the Modernist project that sees the academic disciplines after the Enlightenment as something of a corrosive relativity without any unifying center, so that like the those who were scattered from the Tower of Babel, each person feels entitled to their own autonomy. Relativity and secularity, they believe, go hand in hand to water down tradition to such an extent that they worry we will have no definitive center.

And it is true that the Latin term for tradition, traditio, literally means “binding yourself back in allegiance to the past”. So the Romans always saw religion as something that ought to bring the whole empire together in a unity of allegiance to their forebears. So religion was always had this political dimension in Rome. Their religious holidays were always patriotic, much more so than ours, and they had many more of them during the year. Pledging your faith in the gods was always affirming the gods of Rome and the well being of Rome.

Not surprisingly, this way of thinking, still faintly permeates the culture of the Roman Catholic Church. You could see that sense of it a couple months ago at the Inauguration of Pope Francis. The College of Cardinals from all corners of the earth returning back to Rome to elect the Pope, who comes out of his window to bless the crowd in the Vatican, buildings that are right on the site where the Roman church has been for 2000 years, with all of that history and clerical garb that is centuries old, using a system to elect the Pope that people used centuries ago. It has a majesty to it. It reinforces the sense that this is the authorized voice of Christianity, the time honored faith. I find it somewhat amazing that CNN and Fox actually defer to this tradition in their coverage, so the Pope, through the media, was allowed to broadcast a religious service literally all over the world. The Pope got a big percentage of the population of the world to pause for a moment of silence. It is impressive.

That is one direction that faith faces, to the past, remembering our origins and letting them guide us in the future.

But our text this morning reminds us that God doesn't simply want us looking to the past. The disciples in the very earliest days of the Church had this collective experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit that sparked their imagination, not about the past, but about the future. God inspired them, or the Holy Spirit conspired with all of them, not to return to some golden past, but to think in new ways about the new demands of the future.

We aren't just called to be the tail lights of history, putting the brakes on what is coming next in the name of Tradition. We are also called to be the head lights of history, helping to illuminate what is unforeseen that is coming at us next.

The past is a guide but it can never be an exhaustive manual. Socially speaking, we keep evolving. These days, more than ever, we are in unchartered territory. We have to rely on God still speaking to us, still inspiring us together to figure it out. That is really the problem with fundamentalism in every religious tradition. It romanticizes the past more than is warranted. Today, we are aware of these fundamentalist imams in Islam that want us to go back to the supposedly golden past when we had Sharia law in the 7th and 8th century. Trust me, the 7th and 8th centuries weren't such a great time to live.

We have a similar argument in Christianity. I remember hearing the leading fundamentalist in our country a generation ago, Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority. He gave a presentation on how progressives had gotten away from the bible back in the 80's before the end of the Cold War, how we needed to go back to our simpler past when we all just believed in God and country. After he finished, the progressive William Sloane Coffin got up to respond. At the time, he was the Minister of the Riverside Church in Manhattan and previously the chaplain at Yale. Bill had a salty way of telling it like it is. He said, “Jerry, the problem with you fundamentalists is that you always want us to go back to someplace purer in our storied past. You want us to go back, back to the days when women were in the kitchen. You want us to go back, back, back to the days when gays were in the closet. Back, back you are so backward looking in your orientation, you are more worried about the origin of our species rather than whether we have any future other than that of a nuclear holocaust.”

And Bill is largely right. As Jürgen Moltmann would say, we have to rely on the Spirit of God to fill us and help us to imaginatively pull us from the future towards a figuring out how to live sustainably and responsibly in a world come of age.

Our most substantive challenges, the things we actually sit around and worry about, come from Promethean leaps that humans have made in the past 50 years.

At the end of World War II we invented the atom bomb and shortly after that the hydrogen bomb and shortly after that we had the fire power, for the first time in human history, to actually destroy life on earth! We passed over into a new world that requires a new vision and social imagination to figure out how to live responsibly in the era when we can blow it all up.

In the 90's, we cracked the genome and for the first time in the earth's history, we humans became the first species to have the technical capability to directly alter our genetic evolution. I remember seeing one article that described the genome as “God's software” that we now understand. Our era will require a new vision and a new social imagination to figure out the limits as well as the possibilities of gene therapy. How will we live responsibly in an era when we can design human life.

This new world we all live in was completely beyond the purview of the writers of the bible, even the theologians of the past. Thank God that we have the Holy Spirit to give us new visions and the inspiration to address new and ever-changing situations. That is the pull of the future.

The bible and our tradition, of course, contain profound values. Scripture teaches us the way of love, scripture shows us how to live in reconciliation, to develop communal harmony, so that we establish a tolerable justice and peace in our world. The bible describes for us the humane values of compassion and understanding that God wants for the world.

But the most pressing social questions before us are questions that the writers of the bible could never have imagined might ever come up. Questions like:

What is our responsibility for global warming in a world where humans have proliferated to the point that our sheer success threatens the ecology for other living species? You probably know that we are living through a species extinction rate that scientists worry about. And all of us will be concerned about clean water in a short amount of time because of the simple fact that the world population has increased so dramatically in the past half century.

Questions like… How do we act compassionately towards others at the end of life in a world where we can artificially prolong life long enough that most of us will have to choose how and when we die? Even thirty years ago, this was not true.

Questions like… How do we live in a multi-cultural, multi-religious world? How do we live in a world where gay families are normative and we treat women as equals? More than that, how do we genuinely accept others who are different and actually celebrate our differences, weaving a new social tapestry so that they don't have to become like us but we can develop a new way of meeting and being? How do you deal with religious extremists who view this world as a threat to their core values?

Questions like… How do we balance our public and private selves in a world where we are able to re-create essentially your entire life virtually processing big data? If someone wants to in the future, they will be able to literally re-create the lives of all my grandchildren but that was not possible even for my children.

Questions like… How do we structure trade relations in an interdependent economic world to maximize international stability and a just prosperity for every nation? We never had to worry about Japan in the past but today their economic misery would adversely affect us in short order and we now think about how inter-connected we all are.

All of these questions we cannot answer directly or simply by looking to tradition and scripture to tell us what to do. We have to use the values of our spiritual tradition and pray for the mutual illumination of our social imaginations to collectively discern what is the wise way forward for the next generation. We have to pray for the Holy Spirit to pour out for us the power to develop a new vision for a new day and a new challenge.

What is becoming clearer with each passing year is that the dramatic increase in the world's population combined with a corresponding dramatic increase in technological sophistication is changing our social world at a pace that is eclipsing our social imagination. Our technical prowess far exceeds our ability to understand the consequences of all these changes. Our technical ability is outpacing our social imaginative powers to understand where we are really heading and anticipate the problems we are creating around us.

The conservative religious voices that sound the alarm that we are becoming untethered from the tradition of the past are right, but there is not going to be any going back either. That is not an option.

For better and worse, we simply must rely on the wisdom of our tradition, the faith to step out into an unknown future, and the hope that the Spirit of God will pull us forward to create the next generation. It is a lot more complicated, a lot harder than replicating the past with a tweak here and there, but it is much more creative and daring.

It is as adventurous and wild as the Spirit of God that moves like flames through us, unsettling and ever shifting, the way a blowing wind can fan a fire forward.

But it is also inclusive and unifying, pulling us all together like being able to suddenly understand people's language from far off, bringing cultures and ethnicities together in a transcendent community of compassion and humane understanding.

And that is why we are here. We want to be rooted in tradition but not rutted in it either. We want to keep our focus not just on the past, but on where we are headed next. We want to invoke the Holy Spirit among us to discern where we are headed next. We want to pray together for the wisdom to figure it out in a world come of age.

May the Spirit of the living God fall fresh on us… Amen.