At
the first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit united
a wildly diverse group of people
constituting them as the
Body of Christ.
Just
as Jesus was anointed with the Spirit
to proclaim good news, to heal, and
to liberate,
the
Church was anointed to do those same things in his name.
But
this wasn’t the Holy Spirit’s first rodeo.
We
have older stories about how the Spirit works.
A
thousand years before Pentecost,
the Holy Spirit descended on a farmer boy named Saul.
It
happened this way.
For
400 years, Israel was a loose confederation of tribes.
They
each went their own way most of the time.
They
would have made good Nevadans.
But
whenever an outsider attacked one of the tribes,
the others were supposed to join in
the defense.
There
was a problem though. Attendance.
During
those 400 years, when tribes were attacked
not once did all of the other tribes
show up for battle. Not
once.
Then
one day, the little Israelite village of Jabesh Gilead
was besieged by a large foreign tribe,
the Ammonites.
Jabesh
Gilead began negotiating the terms of surrender.
But
Nahash the Ammonite leader said, you can surrender,
and we will let you live, but we
will gouge out the right eye
of every
one of you as a sign of Israel’s disgrace.
That gave
the people of Jabesh Gilead pause.
The liked
their right eyes.
So they
said, “Give us 7 days to send for help.
If no one
comes to save us, then you can gouge out our eyes
and we will be your vassals.”
Nahash the Ammonite
said, “No problem.”
He was that
confident that no one would show up.
Israel’s
reputation had gotten around.
Messengers
from Jabesh Gilead asked the tribe of Benjamin to save them.
This was a
long shot.
The
Benjaminites had done atrocious things to fellow Israelites before
and
there was particularly bad blood between the tribe of Benjamin
and
Jabesh Gilead.
The
Benjaminites were not likely saviors,
but the situation was just so
horrible,
the Benjaminites began
to mourn.
Young Saul
was a farmer of the tribe of Benjamin.
That day he
returned with his oxen from the fields.
When Saul
heard about the siege of Jabesh Gilead,
the Spirit of the Lord fell upon him
and he gave up farming.
He hacked
his oxen into pieces and sent a piece of ox
to each of the other 11 tribes with
the message,
“This will happen to your oxen
if I don’t see you at the battle day
after tomorrow.”
Saul got a
good turnout.
It was the first time all the tribes actually showed up
and Jabesh
Gilead was saved.
Through Saul, the Holy Spirit called together 12 tribes
for a
common mission with the simple message
from
the Solomon Burke r & b song,
“If one of
us is chained, none of us are free.”//
A thousand years later,
that same
Spirit united people
from every
nation to be the Church,
continuing
the mission of Jesus, who said,
“The Spirit
of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me
to proclaim
good news to the poor, . . . liberty to the captives,
recovery of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”
That’s the same thing the Spirit was up to at Jabesh Gilead
–
to set at liberty
those who are oppressed.
The Holy Spirit does something miraculous and life-giving.
To us it looks like three things but they are so connected,
you can’t
have one without the other.
First, the Spirit works inside each soul to pull our own
self together.
to help us
get our act together,
to assemble
our thoughts and feelings into some order
as in “pull
yourself together, man”
We get so scattered in life.
We do so many jobs and tasks, play so many roles,
we lose touch with who
we are inside.
We want so many little things, worry over so many things,
strive for so many goals,
we lose touch with our
basic desire.
We need to reassemble,
to have our souls and
our lives sewn back together
like Tinkerbelle sewing
Peter Pan’s shadow to his heel.
Second, there is the interpersonal level.
The Spirit overcomes our social separation to form us as a
community.
Just as our personal lives get scattered,
our community gets
scattered.
We split off from each other.
We get distracted and don’t pay enough attention
even to the people we
love most.
When we do connect with others,
we are like
the tribes of Israel
caring only about the folks who are most
like us.
We cut off the rest of the world.
Sociologist Jim Bishop
says American culture
today is becoming
more and more
fragmented .
We self-segregate into little enclaves.
More than ever before,
we live near people
like us.
We socialize with people like us.
We talk with people like us.
We gather in groups of the like-minded,
listen to the
like-minded,
and so
become increasingly small-minded.
Like the Israelites divided into tribes,
we live in silos,
keeping our circles of those we care about
as small as
possible.
It makes for a small, cramped life, a stingy shadow of a life,
filled with tasks but devoid of passion and
direction.
We are starving to rediscover each other
to explore a new world
in each others
beauty,
humor, and quirkiness.
Finally, there is the matter of mission.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t just act inside an individual to heal that
individual
as a solo project.
We reconnect with our own souls, we find our own inner coherence,
through befriending
others.
It is paradoxical -- we connect inwardly and outwardly at the same time.
The Spirit brings us together in common mission by reminding us
of our inner
connectedness.
“If one of us is chained, none of us are free.”
If the Holy Spirit is doing the connecting,
it is never just about
relationship for the sake of relationship.
It isn’t just feeling sweetly close, or
relaxed and serene, or blissed out,
or
high on Jesus.
The Holy Spirit is not a matchmaker for
spiritual one-night stands.
The Spirit of the Lord is not upon us
because he has anointed us
to
feel exhilarated and have a nice day.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon us because he has anointed
us
to proclaim
good news to the poor, . . . liberty to the captives,
recovery of
sight to the blind,
to set at
liberty those who are oppressed.”
We find our unity and wholeness
when we befriend
each other /for a common liberating mission.//
“If one of us is chained, none of us are free.”
This is the great paradox of Christian faith.
It heals us. It makes us whole.
But the healing doesn’t’ happen as long as we as individual focus on
ourselves.
It doesn’t happen when we as a group, as a congregation or even a
diocese,
focus on ourselves.
Healing happens, wholeness manifests, life gels
when we engage the mission
to heal the broken
world.
It is in giving that we receive.
It is in healing that we are healed.
It is in setting others free that we ourselves taste freedom.
