Sermon For June 11, 2000
Pentecost
CHRISTIAN TESTAMENT: Sons & Daughters Shall Prophesy ~ Acts 2:1-21
Joshua and Morgan and Carrie, sometimes for Confirmation Sunday I feel like sharing words of good advise or encouragement, but this time I wanted to issue a challenge for you, because you and people like you are important to both the present and the future of the church. The Christian church, in many respects, has been losing influence in our country in recent years. Many of the main-line Protestant churches have been losing church members and there are people wondering what lies ahead for the Christian church. There are churches that are strong. In some cases, these successful churches carry on a massage, not of inclusiveness, of sharing God’s love with everyone, but instead a message of exclusiveness so that the church becomes a club for people who are loved by God. Everyone else is on the outside. Many of the members of the confirmation class, you included, had questions about what it means to believe in Jesus, what it means to be a Christian in today’s world, and struggled with those questions throughout confirmation. I understand those questions, because even before I decided to become a minister I had questions about the way that the Christian faith was expressed and the way that we were often called on to believe that there was only one right way to get to God. One way to know God’s love and anyone who didn’t know that way was then excluded.
The scripture today about Pentecost is really part 2 of a longer story. Early on in the book of Genesis, human beings decided that they were going to build a tower up to the heavens. They got caught up in their own importance and as they built the tower taller and taller, they felt that they had no need for God in their lives. What God’s spirit brought to that situation was a variety of languages so that people could no longer speak to one another. They could no longer communicate and the building came to a rapid halt. The tower of Babel, and to babble on and on is to talk incoherently. Pentecost is often seen as part 2, as the renewal of unity in humanity. God’s spirit is poured down and people are speaking in all different kinds of languages, but individuals who are coming and seeking to learn about God and God’s love, now hear that good news in their own language. So rather than trying to interpret the words of Jews who are speaking in Hebrew or in Aramaic they hear the Good News of God’s love in a way that can tough them immediately and directly.
Today we have a situation were people are talking all different kinds of languages of faith, sometimes not communicating with each other and often failing at conveying God’s love for all people in the world. As I thought about the way that the Holy Spirit speaks today to us, where we should be listening for God’s Holy Spirit speaking, the images of the computer, the internet, television, came to mind. In a lot of ways the culture of our country, the culture of youth is more inclusive than the culture of the church. This is a sad commentary on the church. Look at how many churches are struggling with the issue of rights for gay people, and then watch television programs, MTV, or sitcoms, where gay people are understood to be part of the diversity that exists in this world. There are smart people and not-so-smart people, people who are caring about others and people who are selfish. But gay people like heterosexual people are just part of the diversity that is portrayed in television programs, and in videos. The culture of the greater society is in many ways much more accepting than the culture of the church. On the Internet, there is a legal question now about “Napster” and the ability that this program provides for people to have access to a wide variety of music. If you have been following this, you know that a piece of music from a CD or even a record can be put into a digital format for computer and then transferred from one computer to another in a perfect form. The music that you download is a perfect digital copy of the original music. Record companies are unhappy about this transfer of music because nobody is paying for that CD or paying the company for the rights to that music. We know that is an illegal thing, but we also know that there are problems with the way that the recording industry is currently structured. When CD’s came along, they were a lot cheaper to produce than cassette tapes or vinyl albums. Instead of the price going down, the price more than doubled for a piece of music that you could carry home with you. The money for that was not going to the musicians that created the music, but it was going to the record company and the distribution companies. In order for people to share their creative talents, we have to find a more equitable way to split income, so that distributors and record companies are not getting rich off the efforts of the musicians. Napster is a way of saying that the recording company is not honest and truthful. It is young people that are using Napster over and over again to collect the songs that they want to listen to without worrying about buying those CD’s. Your challenging behavior may bring about needed change.
The Internet makes it possible for people to communicate with each other around the world in an instantaneous way. This creates communities that we never before thought were possible. In those new ways of looking at things, the church also needs to look at the way it expresses the Christian faith. The questions that all of you bring to the church are important for us as we try to find new ways to talk about community. You challenge our talk about God’s inclusive love that welcomes everybody in creation together. Today’s word to you is a challenge: to not give up the questioning, but instead to really push the church to find new ways to speak the faith.
We give thanks for your questions, and the guidance of God’s Spirit. Amen.