Today
we will confirm Christians for a life of service
to God and God’s people.
We
will pray “Strengthen O Lord your servant with your Holy Spirit;
empower her for your service . . . .”
Pentecost
is the perfect day for this sacrament.
It
is the perfect day because that’s what happened
to the apostles on the first
Pentecost.
To
get this story, we need some context.
Luke
wrote two companion books
-- the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.
Literarily,
the two books have parallel plots.
In
each book, the main character is the Holy Spirit.
The
Gospel of Luke is about the Holy Spirit acting through Jesus.
Acts
is about the Holy Spirit acting through the Church.
In
Luke, the action gets started
when the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus.
It’s
the Spirit of God filling Jesus body and soul
that makes his words the Word of the
Lord
and his actions the saving acts of
God.
So
what is God’s agenda?
Jesus
answers as he kicks off his mission.
He
says,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
because
he has anointed me to
proclaim good news to the poor,
release to the
captive, recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed
go free . . . .”
That Spirit is what made Jesus God.
On
Pentecost, that same Spirit transformed a motley crew of lost,
confused, followers of a departed messiah the Church.
The
same Spirit that made Jesus the Christ,
makes us the Body of Christ.
From
the day of Pentecost to today we have been the Church
because and only because:
The Spirit
of the Lord is upon us because
he has anointed us to proclaim good news to
the poor,
release to the captive, recovery of
sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free . . . .
In
Confirmation, we convey on each of our members
the spiritual power to carry out God’s mission in this world.
That
probably isn’t what most of us came here for.
We
expect the Church and the Christian faith
to play a decidedly different role in our lives.
Secular
society has already given us a life project.
Our
parents, our friends, TV shows, movies, commercials,
magazines, and self-improvement
books
have already told us
what life is for.
They
have told us how to be human.
And
it is an exhausting, life-consuming job.
We
do not need religious extra-curricular activities,
let alone some grand mission to
change the world.
We
want the Church to provide us
a spiritual support
for our secular life project.
We
want Jesus to be a supporting actor in our movie.
We
want the emotional equivalent of a nutritional supplement
to give us a boost at the hard job
of our life.
I
totally get that and respect it.
But
there are a couple of problems.
First,
the modern Western secular definition of humanity
and prescription for life is failing
us.
The
secular recipe for life has left us lonely,
alienated from each other,
despairing of meaning, and often angry.
Our
life projects are real.
They
are legitimate and respectable.
But
they are too small to make a life worthwhile.
2,000
years ago, St. Augustine said,
we
were made for something larger than this world.
The
secular definition of life just isn’t enough.
And
so we panic, desperate to find something
compelling enough to live and die for.
In
his book War Is A Force That Gives Us
Meaning,
war correspondent Chris
Hedges says
we are addicted
to war because
it temporarily exhilarates us and gives us a sense
we are doing
something important.
Regular
life in the modern world doesn’t do that.
In
a Vanity Fair article, Sebastian Junger
explains why PTSD is so prevalent and so hard to cure
for American soldiers.
Civilian
society does not provide returning soldiers a sense
of meaning and belonging.
They
are stuck in their war experience – even if it was traumatic –
because it was the only time in their lives
they have felt deep belonging and that they are doing
something
that mattered enough to deserve their life commitment.
Similarly,
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks tells us something surprising
about terrorism.
Most
suicide bombers are not even observant Muslims.
Terrorist
cells provide a sense of belonging
and terrorist acts feel meaningful and important.
We
are that desperate for a cause worth dying for,
because without it, we don’t have enough to live for.
Las
Vegas has recently seen a surge of gang violence.
Clark
County teachers report 1st and 2nd graders
are already talking about “jumping” into gangs.
Even
our children are that desperate for a community.
We
are dying of thirst for belonging
in this secular desert.
That’s
one reason a little help with our life project
for the coming week isn’t enough.
Here’s
reason number two.
We come to God because we
need something.
We need some healing or
peace or joy.
But the Catch 22 is: our
spiritual needs can never be met
as long as we are trying to get them met.
So God patches us up a
little,
then gives us a mission to help someone else.
In the course of serving
others,
we get healed ourselves, find peace ourselves,
discover our own joy.
Jesus said, “Whoever
tries to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Through confirmation, we
offer a community of belonging.
Is that a sweet supportive
brotherhood?
Sometimes. Other times not
so much.
The Church is a bunch of
flawed, stiff-necked, wrong-headed,
obdurate,
and exasperating people.
But we belong to each
other in Christ.
We are the Body of Christ
-- not because we always
like each other
-- sometimes
we like each other, but that’s gravy.
We
are the Body of Christ because we were redeemed
by the same Savior on the same Cross.
We
are the Body of Christ because we
breathe the same breath he breathed.
We
live by the same Spirit.
The
Spirit of the Lord is upon us because it has anointed us
to carry forward the mission Jesus
began.
So
if you want to belong to somebody,
you can belong to us and we will belong to you.
If
you want a mission to make your life count for something,
we got a mission – the Kingdom of God.
That
means turning this world upside down
so that cruelty, injustice, and greed
are cast out.
Isaiah
says,
“Never again will there be a child
who lives only a few days . . .
No longer will they build houses and
others dwell in them
or plant and others eat. . . .
They will not labor in vain or bear
children for misfortune.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain.”
We
have a mission too big to accomplish in human history,
but a mission that begins here,
today, with us;
a
mission that will carry us and sustain us,
-- it will be profoundly
inconvenient --
but
it will invest out lives with meaning
every moment and every hour that the
Lord our God has given us.
