“Goose Chase”

Listen to the sermon here.

We have a plastic goose in our backyard.  Each year around Easter it “magically” appears and it begins “distributing” candied eggs to the kids many mornings (our kids being as young as they are, this goose is part Santa, part Easter bunny, but don’t tell them that).  Many mornings when they wake up during the Easter season the kids find a treat under or on top of the goose.  It’s not every day.  The goose is unpredictable.  It’s not the same gift, sometimes the goose brings eggs, sometimes cartons, sometimes chocolate, sometimes sugar candy, sometimes something big, sometimes something small.  The gifts are diverse.  Sometimes the goose brings the kids together, for sometimes the candy is sealed shut and they need to work together to open it. 

This morning we got up and the goose was gone.  Flown out for the year, to return next Easter.  I told the kids this morning that today is Pentecost.  It’s a new season.  The goose has gone, but the tradition of diverse, unpredictable gifts which pulls us together, which is perfect preparation for Pentecost remain.  They help prepare us for our second lesson, the well-known recounting of the entrance of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the ability to speak and understand diversity, and the birth of the church.  Listen to God’s holy word.  

Let us pray.  Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us.  On this day when the Holy Spirit came to God’s followers, may the spirit come to us in special, startling and life changes ways.  Amen.

I spent a good part of this past week in New York at a meeting of Christian and Jewish leaders focused on dialogue between the two communities.  I was supposed to take Amtrak but as many of you know Amtrak wasn’t running last Sunday due to its derailment the past week so I found myself on a bus driving up I95 with the Rabbi from Washington Hebrew Congregation.   We were discussing the Amtrak cancelation and the public’s general nervousness about travel to the northeast.  The rabbi had just said that train and bus travel were still some of the safest was to travel when, Boom, there was an explosion on our bus.  A violent rush came from above as smoky mist starting pouring out of the “employee only” overhead compartment right across from us.  The bus driver heard the boom but missed the smoke.  Thinking the tires had blown out or we had hit something, he quickly pulled over to the shoulder and walked about the outside of the bus. He checked the tires, opened the underneath baggage compartment, looked under the hood, searching for the source of the explosion.

Meanwhile, the bus passengers were on edge as we were calling him back into the bus as the smoke continued to rush out of the employee compartment.  He returned and saw it.  The driver told the person right underneath it to move out of the way.  He shifted his weight back and forth to balance himself.  He reached up to open the compartment when a women seated nearby just clued in to the situation and said, “Oh wait, that is probably my seltzer maker.”

She explained she liked to make her own seltzer water and carried a CO2 a gas compressor with her when she traveled.  She apparently didn’t realize she had put it in the employees-only compartment and the bouncing of the bus caused it to explode.  The driver, who was on a schedule, was not happy to have been on such a wild goose chase.  We anxious passengers, already on edge from recent travel issues in the news, were caught off guard by rush from above.    

What a way to begin Pentecost week.  The book of Acts tells us that Jesus’ disciples were sitting in the upper room when “bang.”  It was all shaken up.   All of a sudden there was a rush from heaven and the wind started to blow inside the room.  Smoky mist, as the prophet Joel foretold, was seen.  Flames started to appear. The disciples themselves were on fire with the spirit and began to speak different languages. All of them were talking at the same time. People from different nations heard others speaking their language. “And all were perplexed, and said to one another, ‘What does this mean?’” They tried to figure out where the rush from above was coming from and the meaning of the miracle. 

Then they remembered that just before Jesus had left the disciples to ascend to Heaven he had said, “You shall receive power from the Holy Spirit . . . and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”

His statement came true as people responded when called.  Peter gave a sermon and 3000 people joined.  Testimony to how the Holy Spirit was moving in the world, helping the people connect with God.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote that Pentecost is not just a remembered event but “an ongoing process by which the Spirit regularly rattles, bewilders, and turns the world upside down.  It’s the promise that the Spirit of God will continue to stir and energize imagination and faith and hope.”

That is true for us.  The spirit has been at work at Bradley Hills recently shaping our community.  Our congregational vitality task force began gathering last winter to make decisions.  Thinking about our congregational life and lay ministries.   They have inspired us to put our sails up to the spirit to help us discern God’s will.  The Spirit motivates and carries us throughout this process and will help guide the decisions of that group for the benefit for our church.

When we were thinking about an important decisions in our community, this spring, I found myself struggling with a particular decision.   I had to give it to the Holy Spirit to help and it helped us make a good decisions.

In winter I was inspired by our time with congregational vitality and think about prayer as the center felt a strong call to put prayer in center of worship.   To temporarily pull back from preaching the way and location I often do so focus on.   Making the focus for a few weeks was on prayer as the center piece of worship.  That has carried over into my prayers and worship focus this spring.

Now Congregational Vitality gets ready to complete its work for now and share some ideas and we think can changes our processes.  We know that perhaps one of the great take aways from that process is putting the sails up to the spirit and being willing to change something in our spiritual life for the sake of the spirit.  To be led by the Spirit. We hope that is the case at Bradley Hills.

This can be challenging for Presbyterians.  We are thought of as the frozen chosen for a reason.  The story if told of one Sunday morning in a formal, decent and orderly church, as the sermon began and the preacher made his first point, a woman sitting in the back of the sanctuary said out loud, “Amen, brother.” People turned around in their pews and looked at her curiously. When the preacher made his second point, she said, louder this time, “Preach it. Preach it!” More stares and consternation and discomfort in the pews around her. When the preacher got to his third and concluding point, the woman stood up, raised her hands in the air, and yelled, “Praise God Almighty.” An usher approached. “Ma’am, is there something wrong?” he asked. “Why no,” she answered, “I have the Spirit.” “Well,” he sniffed, “you certainly didn’t get it here.”  Our hope is to celebrate the spirit at Bradley Hills.  The Holy Spirit cannot be contained.  It likes to shake things up. That has been the Christian experience of the Holy Spirit since the beginning.  Time and again when we try to control the Holy of God, it breaks free.   

At Pentecost,” Peter Gomes once said, “the people did not become less than they were; they became more that they had been, because they became one with all who heard and understood that God is alive and active in this world”[i]

We celebrate Pentecost today to remember the gift of the Holy Spirit come into the community 2000 years ago, but also to remember that the spirit is live and at work in the church today uniting us as the body of Christ.

Pentecost forces us to speak the gospel in lots of different languages to those coming to our area, joining us at church.   At Bradley Hills and in our everyday lives we have to learn the language of those hurting as they remember of loved one who died or are broken or who served or who miss someone far from home.  We have to speak the language of the students anxious over exams. Who are going to lay flowers at a grave tomorrow or to visit the church later today.  Those who built this church and those who visit.  We have to speak the language of those who have doubts about their faith.

The Spirit of Pentecost encourages us to celebrate our diversity, to speak our minds and to listen to others.  To seek to understand. 

The Holy Spirit flows through into the church so others can come in, speaking a variety of tongues, but also so that we can all go out to the world to participate in Christ’s mission.

Our world is being torn apart because we cannot deal with difference. Frequently difference in religious belief is seen as part of the problem.   Jonathan Swift once said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate one another but not enough religion to make us love one another.”  This is why my trip to New York this week was so important.  We Presbyterians have a challenge with our relationship with the Jewish community because of our national General Assembly actions.  Yet what we model at 6601 with BJC, of being spiritual siblings sharing sacred space, is vital.  The church, our church, is called to be the place where we learn how to honor and appreciate difference, and so we perhaps can be a world held together by the Spirit who binds us all to God: from wherever we come from, whatever our race, gender, creed, orientation, politics, age or occupation is, and to learn to love deeply through it all. 

The spirit is what compels us out of our self-focus, out of wherever we are, out into the world to join in causes greater than ourselves.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day – It is a day that we give thanks for those who served and gave their lives for us.  Those who gave their today for our tomorrow.  The church is where we learn about the gift of the Holy Spirit and nurture a congregation who seeks to understand and follow where the Spirit of God leads so that in giving of ourselves to causes greater than ourselves, we may shape the future as the spirit leads.

Many congregations use the dove as the primary symbol of the Holy Spirit.  The spirit descended upon Jesus during his baptism like a dove.  The dove represents peace.  The dove is used in the PCUSA symbol with the dove descending from above.  When I was in school we visited the Isle of Iona, a special spot of deep spirituality off the coast of Scotland.  There, as with many parts of Scotland and Celtic Christianity, the wild goose was often used at churches at Pentecost as a symbol of the Holy Spirit.  As a person of Celtic descent it resonates with me as a way to talk about the Spirit. For Celtic Christians the uncontrollable, untamed nature of the wild goose more closely characterized the movement of the Spirit than did a peaceful dove.

The spirit is always on the move, doing unexpected things.  I love how Hilary Ann Golden put it.  She writes, “Like a goose it’s loud, passionate, sometimes unpredictable, unnerving.”[ii] The spirit of God cannot be tamed or contained.  That is certainly the case with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.   It is more like a goose than the dove.  So when we look at this symbol here on the lectern, we might see a goose as our symbol of the spirit.

So on this Sunday we remember.  We remember those who sacrificed.  We remember those who served.  We remember the day the Holy Spirit came into our world like a goose.  We proclaim that that spirit is still alive.  Still moving in our world.  Shaking things up. 

I hope that one can get it here at Bradley Hills.  That we experience how the Holy Spirit flows through our church when we least expect it and sends us out as the body of Christ to the world which needs to appreciate how diversity is a strength and how through understanding we can be greater together than we are apart.  That is what the spirit offers.  Let us chase it, claim and follow where it leads.   Amen.