SERMON
at
Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
The Feast of Pentecost
May 23, 2010
by
The Rev. Stanley C. Kemmerer, AHC

My wife tells the story (several of you have heard me tell it) of sitting in her pew pondering how large a role religion plays in the world’s conflicts, how many have been dispossessed, abused, and killed in the name of one person or another’s so-called religious faith. In the midst of this, she reports, she heard a “voice” say, “None of you have got it right, but that’s all right!”

All these voices. Competing voices. Competing religions. Competing Christian voices declaring their way is the only way to salvation. Congregations, even in the same town or region, circling like vultures to pick up the disaffected or dislocated of their co-religionists’ congregations. As I read the Tower of Babel story in preparation for this Sunday I couldn’t help but think how completely Yahweh God achieved his purpose over the years.

Well, partly. If the goal were to prevent mankind from building such grand structures that it would convince itself it could accomplish everything on its own, without the help or support of its God, it might not appear that goal has been achieved. Not when we look at current events!

I think it interesting, though, when we look at the sweep of history, particularly how this morning’s lessons demonstrate the use of language in God’s plan under, first, the old covenant and, then, the New Covenant brought in by Jesus. In the first instance, Yahweh God uses language to confuse; in the second, God, through the Holy Spirit, uses language to unify.

I find it fascinating that we hear these lessons when we do this year. Liturgically, the Feast of Pentecost is always placed at the threshold between the two halves of the Church Year, the historic half, now coming to a close as we conclude our annual walk through salvation history, and the teaching half, now beginning, in which we applying the meaning and implication of the history through which we’ve walked.

The liturgical positioning is the constant. This year the secular calendar tracks with the Church calendar: Next weekend is Memorial Day Weekend, the traditional beginning of summer, the annual separation which ends the program year in schools and businesses. Summer serves as a time of recreation, of refueling.

It also serves as a time of planning. I tell my jobseeker clients it’s the second best time of the year to look for a job, second only to the period between Thanksgiving and the first of a new year. Why? Because the third biggest hiring month of a year is September, the harvest of the program planning done for the new program year during the summer.

This year’s Pentecost observance happens to fall shortly after the consecration of our new bishop, this diocese’s first non-Connecticut priest. He pointed this out himself during the disernment process. It colors the perspective he brings to the office. He has absolutely no Connecticut experience. He comes as a tabula rasa, a “clean slate.”

But, so appropriate to this Pentecost and any Pentecost’s message, though his Connecticut slate may be clean, his slate itself is not only not clean, it is rich with what is written on it.

Look at his bio: The man grows up in a working class family in Fitchburg, MA, (His father was a welder I believe.) the first of his family to go to college. And the college he goes to is one where someone from such a background is definitely in the minority! Then to Cambridge, MA to seminary, a place also known for its dominant institution of higher learning, Harvard.

You’d think he’d be tainted by all this. Au contraire, upon graduation and ordination, acting out Taft’s motto, “Not to be served but to serve,” he goes and spends the first year plus of his ordained life among the poorest of the poor, in Haiti. But he doesn’t go in, often, the usual way such workers have gone, as a bearer of the wisdom and benificence of the rich, American way of life. No. He goes as a learner, under the direction of its indigenous Haitian bishop, to help, under his direction. And is immersed in the “tongue” of Haiti, a unique dialect of French/Portuguese, in which he becomes fluent!

Ask him what God is to him and what the work of the Church is to him and he will answer, essentially with one word: reconciliation. Peacemaking. Welding the different and competing “tongues” into a unity of mutual respect and eagerness to learn the ways of the “other.” His travels, his teaching, his associations, his entire life for his active ministry, are all global. Multi-cultural. Interreligious.

His remarks at his consecration are brief. He ends them with a statement I’ve heard him repeat on several occasions since: “Now it begins.” The work. The discernment is past. As a therapist friend of mine was fond of saying, “Insight is bull; you finally have to change.” “Now it begins” is another way of saying that.

We stand at the cusp of summer. We’ve anticipated the coming of the Christ child. We’ve celebrated his birth and watched him amaze and astound his elders in the Temple. We’ve learned of his ministry. We’ve watched him cause their outrage by his “speaking truth to power,” the challenge he offered to “the way we’ve always done it.” We’ve watched him pay the price. And claim the victory. And put in place the succession plan.

Which now begins.

Summer offers a unique opportunity. It’s a time when we explore. Many of us are not in our usual surroundings for at least part of the time. Wherever we are, though, there are opportunities to learn, to explore, to hear the Gospel spoken in another “tongue.” That “tongue” may still be English but with a different accent, a different color, a different socioeconomic class. To hear it with the attitude it has something to teach is to participate in “Now it begins.”

The doctor in my Iowa congregation (The town was tiny enough that we were a little Rotary!: We had the doctor, the banker, the digger, the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician and there were just about one of each in the town!) and his wife had reached that point in his career where each year they would take a major trip. Wherever they went they would not miss church. They would bring back the bulletin. And the story. It caught on. A good kind of competition began. Our people started making it a point to get to church, bring back the bulletin, tell the story. Perhaps the doctor’s were among the more exotic. But others were as colorful. And surprising.

Class: I’d like to give you an assignment this morning: Do that. Bring back the bulletins. Be ready to tell the story. In announcement time. You have some storytelling practice. You’ve done wonderfully. This is just another opportunity.

Let’s use our summer, our reflections, our explorations, our experiences of “other tongues” during this special period to inform how our “Now it begins” can, following in the Pentecost tradition change the confusion of our modern Towers of Babel into the unity and reconciliation of that first Pentecost.