A New Age Upon Us
Sermon by James W. Crawford
Pentecost, May 31, 1998
Happy birthday, everyone! A glorious anniversary to you all! Today we celebrate a new beginning in world history. We rejoice in a world no longer ruled by the tyrannies and illusions of the present time, but we now surrender to the blessings of unity and understanding. We celebrate today the founding of a colony of heaven; we announce a beachhead established in our world bearing the force and energy of liberation. Pentecost represents the birthday of the church, a community of a Messianic age set among the structures and agencies of this old age, reconciling, healing, demonstrating in a broken and divisive world the possibilities of challenging, dynamic, loving community. Happy birthday, new world. Happy birthday, new community.
I
New world? New community? With Indians and Pakistanis threatening each other with bellicose words, ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs? With cafeterias in middle schools turning into shooting galleries? With Serbs and ethnic Albanians pursuing and acting out tribal hatreds in Kosovo? A new world? Are you kidding?
Indeed, not. That great narrative we read a few moments ago describes the power and dynamics of this new world we celebrate. Luke, who writes this narrative, Luke's allusion to a reconciled humanity referring to Parthians and Medes, Arabs and Jews, Greeks and Capadocians envisions the ends of the earth and all its national, creedal, racial, geographic and tribal polarities embraced by the love of Christ and forged by the spirit into a single, mutually encouraging and focused missionary community. Luke proclaims the universal possibilities of a torn and fragmented world finally healed by outgoing servant love. He knows it will be a gathering we have never experienced before. That is why those stormy and explosive words spoken by Peter from the prophet Joel, those images suggesting new beginnings, like blood, fire, smoke, visions -- radical discontinuities, the language of apocalypse. This illustrates a creation so new, so revolutionary it can be described in language no less charged and vivid.
II
This Pentecostal vision, this birth through the spirit of the new age draws us again into the world of the Biblical promise. The roots of our identity as Christians, the cornerstone of our existence rests on our hope. We Christians cherish the living legacy of the Hebrew prophets, for instance, because they envision new futures amid fierce and frequently murderous resistance. Remember the prophet Isaiah? A spokesman for the future if ever there lived one. He promises a peaceable kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb, the infant plays over the viper's nest, where swords are beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, where we will neither learn and nor engage in war any more. And why is that hope so striking? Because Isaiah's promise of peace comes while the evidence screams, "No way!" Isaiah and his people find themselves surrounded by empires, warlords and tyrants hungering to invade their nation, slaughter the citizenry, and bend them to slavery. In face of catastrophe, Isaiah sees history turned upside down, a reversal of violence and inhumanity, a peaceable world community through and beyond anticipated defeat and ruin.
Or Joel: the prophet included in our lesson this morning, the source of the vision in that very first Christian sermon, that passionate oration delivered by Peter countering the bystander's accusation of the spirit-filled Christian community drunk and debauched so early in the morning. Joel: for all his wild imagery, what more vivid futuristic panorama could Peter have chosen for a festival of the Holy Spirit? Joel's words come to us from an agricultural land, a farming culture, devastated by drought -- crops shrunken and burned as if by fire -- but even worse, a land plagued by locusts devouring, mutilating, ravaging everything in their fierce and frenzied invasion. Joel speaks from amid a frightened and ruined people; starvation slinks and terror rules among them. But Joel speaks for a future against a future mocked. He gathers a starving and desolate community, leans on his God because finally that is all they have, and they are delivered. Hope against hope. Pentecost, you see, if it does nothing else, forges our vocation as a prophetic community reminding the world of a startling new future where the dissonance of the human race becomes the unity of the human family. That is the promise of Pentecost. That is the mission of God and God's church.
III
How, then, do we celebrate this anniversary? How do we, a people born at Pentecost, keep alive to the promptings and power of the Spirit? We do it, I think, by remaining true to our Pentecost beginnings, by committing ourselves to, working for and exemplifying among ourselves and to the world's skeptical bystanders a new future for God's world.
And for all the apocalyptic imagery of the New Testament, the language of radical hope, we know the immediate future is a function of staying power and will be built brick by brick, step by painful step. We know the future of God in our time comes by perseverance and tenacity.
In our own city, for instance. Did you see the cover on the front of Newsweek this last issue? It is a Boston guy: The Rev. Eugene Rivers. He is described as "Savior of the Streets" and his cover picture is titled, "God versus Gangs; what's the hottest idea in crime fighting? -- the power of religion." Gene Rivers pastors a Dorchester Pentecostal Storefront and he runs the Ella Baker House in Dorchester. Newsweek tells us when Rivers moved to Dorchester a drug dealer named Selvin Brown escorted him around the neighborhood crackhouses, drug dens and booze halls. Brown tells Rivers why the battle is being lost for inner city kids. "I'm there when Johnny goes out for a loaf of bread for mama. I'm there. You're not. I win, you lose. It's all about being there."
You got it right, Mr. Brown! And then Newsweek continues with some astute analysis. "For decades," it says, "liberals and conservatives have argued past one another about the crisis of the inner city. The right was obsessed with crime, out-of-wedlock births and the (so-called) 'responsibility' of the underclass; the left only wanted to talk about poverty, the need for government intervention, and the (so called) 'rights' of the poor. Now both sides are beginning to form an unlikely alliance founded on the idea that the only way to rescue kids from the seduction of drug and gang cultures is with another, more powerful set of values: a substitute family for young people who almost never have two parents and may not even have one, at home. And the only institution with the spiritual message and the physical presence to offer these traditional values, these strange bedfellows have concluded, is the church." Amid all the other dramatic changes of local community life, Rivers points out, "the church is the last institution left standing."
True! And what I appreciated about the Newsweek article lies in its binding together of religious commitment and public responsibility. It pictures the kind of commitment men and women of this church and our tradition have always sustained: a public faith, a commitment to the health life of the public square.
You see, what happens on Pentecost Sunday is a pouring out of the spirit, a granting of power enabling that diverse gathering to join as one with courage and freedom to testify and serve the vision and future of Jesus Christ in our city and world.
And it is tough. It demands a lot of us. Some of you will remember Norman Cousins. He used to edit The Saturday Review of Literature -- an author and social critic with a vast humanitarian heart. In an anthology of his observations he crystallizes, I think, some troubling attitudes as the massive issues of urban life confront us. He does not call them attitudes devoid of the Spirit, but I do.
The problem is the individual who thinks that one person cannot possibly make a difference in the destiny of society.
It's the individual who doesn't really understand the nature of a just and free society and what is required to make it work.
The problem lies with the individual who has no comprehension of the multiplying power of single but sovereign units . . . or the individual who has no real awareness of the billions of bricks that had to be put into place, one by one, over many centuries, in order to dwell in a commonwealth's structure of justice and peace. Nor does that person see any special obligation to those who continue building the structure or to those who will live in it afterward, for better or for worse. . .
A spiritless witness! To be sure, the issues in the public arena can be overwhelming. Public education, medical care, safety, housing, environment, income, jobs -- all big time. But as Cousins suggests, our cities may break down not only because of an array of anarchic social forces, but because we finally resign ourselves to futility and maybe just do not care. Somewhere, Saul Alinsky, that passionate and ingenious Chicago community organizer, puts his finger on it. Taking the skeptic's adage, "When I see it, I'll believe it," Alinski turns the adage around. "When you believe it; then you'll see it." That is why some folk from this congregation are going to march in the AIDS Walk next week; why others throw themselves into efforts for Habitat for Humanity, others take that hunger walk the first Sunday in May, and yes, others plunge themselves into job development, some become partners for elders, some lobby for legal services, some march for economic justice, some write to dictators in order to free political prisoners and to sustain human rights, that is why Rick Chrisman, among others, fights for "reproductive rights." We won't win all the battles, but in a future promised by the spirit -- if we believe it we may see it.
IV
So friends, How celebrate Pentecost? How rejoice in the new age forged by the spirit? Let me offer an old-fashioned exhortation: do not get discouraged about the possibilities for making a difference in God's world. Heaven knows we in the churches, in our eagerness for survival, can get as inertia-bound as any human aggregation this side of heaven. But Pentecost reminds us we are in existence not simply to survive in a risky time, but to stand and to speak for a new future in this time. That is who we are: a community of the future; love's future. Pentecost envisions that future in radical terms. God grant, as the prophet Joel promises, the Spirit may pour out on each of us and on this congregation as a whole, that young and old, male and female may see visions, dream dreams and live recreated in God's Sprit-transformed world.
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