The kids are alright
Acts 2: 1-21 (The Message)
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
June 4, 2017 – Pentecost
In honor of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant Church in Germany has presented a robotic priest named BlessU-2 to the town of Wittenberg. It was in Wittenberg that Martin Luther is said to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of the town’s Catholic church. The robotic reverend offers assorted blessings in eight different languages. The only thing that bugs me about it is its masculine-sounding voice.
What do visitors make of this techno-pastor? Rudolf Wenz, a volunteer with the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, says that “those who are associated and set in their ways in church find it rather strange. But people who do not have any association with spirituality, or with the Protestant Church, they find it rather interesting, and in that way get to think about what Christianity has to offer. And in a way that is also what the Reformation was all about. …Luther also had at that time new medias; it was not the aural word that was taught to people, but it was the written word that came to give new thoughts.”
When the day of Pentecost arrived for those early disciples, when the Spirit came rushing through the room like a violent wind, like wildfire, it was said that they then began speaking in other languages: the languages of immigrants and foreign pilgrims in Jerusalem.
This past week UCC pastor Rev. Emily Heath wrote in her devotional piece that through the gift of the Spirit, the disciples could now speak in a way that was relevant to those around them. Technology has been and continues to be a language, a new media that allows us to speak, to be in relationship in ways that are relevant. When we are reluctant to learn and to engage in new technologies, new ways of communicating, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant, of relinquishing what it means to have a prophetic voice.
In the passage from the book of Acts, Peter quotes from the prophet Joel. The role of a prophet is to declare to society at large who God is and what God is doing, especially in times of upheaval, change, disaster or tragedy. When there is no prophetic voice, we humans usually fill the vacuum with the worst our fears can generate: God is angry with us; they are to blame; faith in God doesn’t work, it’s a waste of time; God is absent; God is dead; we are alone. Eugene Peterson writes in his introduction to Joel that the prophet calls “his people to an immediate awareness that there wasn’t a day that went by that they weren’t dealing with God. We are always dealing with God.”
We are always dealing with the sacred—with what is good and true and beautiful and just (and most of the time it’s problematic)—and how to speak about the sacred in ways that are relevant.
Two millennia ago the disciples went from celebrating the law given on stone tablets 3000 years before, to the Word incarnate and then written upon their hearts; from an exclusive faith to one in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. 500 years after the Reformation and the invention of the printed word, we look more at screens than flip pages of a book or newspaper. In the last 100 years we’ve gone from a deeper understanding about what it means to be a man or a woman, to be heterosexual beings, to then LGBTQIA orientations, to now speaking of sexuality and gender as a continuum and fluid; from binary pronouns to non-binary pronouns and titles. In the last 60 years we’ve witnessed a church boom to a church exodus to the Church in decline.
Or is it the Spirit pouring out on all flesh, continually pouring out new insights, new directions? Is it the Spirit moving not just within the confines of church community but ALL community?
In every generation, we who are older have worried about those who come after us. There was a time when someone worried about our future and about who we would be as adults, as leaders. In every age, technology has moved faster than we have been prepared to engage it. When the baby boomer generation came of age in the 1960’s, in that Age of Aquarius, it was people like my grandparents who worried for the future of this nation and this world. As a member of Generation X, I often feel like I’ve got one foot on what was and the other on what will be. Sooner or later we all have to choose whether to stay where we are or to make the road by moving forward on it.
As it happened in our own time, our graduates and young adults are inheriting the accumulation of our choices and decisions and much of it is overwhelming: climate change, poverty, inequality, terrorism, the increasing potential for global conflict. And we’re not so different from those disciples living in the midst of empire; who, right up until that Holy Spirit moment, had no idea what was coming next for them.
And yet. And yet. Your young people shall see visions and your elders shall dream dreams. Mark Zuckerberg, in his commencement address at Harvard, said that it is time for his generation to define a new social contract: “We should have a society that measures progress, not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income, to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas. And we’re all going to make mistakes.”
We need to trust that indeed younger generations do have vision, the kids are alright, and we need to learn the languages, engage the new media forms of that vision; to embrace that Holy Spirit moment of wildfire and dare with it.
And we who are older need to remember to dream and to dream fearlessly. Both our fresh visions of justice and our long-held dreams of peace are the prophetic voice so desperately needed in these times of upheaval, change, disaster, and tragedy. Like those disciples of old, we are being given fresh opportunity to reorient our lives and our life together, to deal with God, with the sacred, every day in a new way, to journey in a direction we had not thought of.
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
June 4, 2017 – Pentecost
In honor of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant Church in Germany has presented a robotic priest named BlessU-2 to the town of Wittenberg. It was in Wittenberg that Martin Luther is said to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of the town’s Catholic church. The robotic reverend offers assorted blessings in eight different languages. The only thing that bugs me about it is its masculine-sounding voice.
What do visitors make of this techno-pastor? Rudolf Wenz, a volunteer with the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, says that “those who are associated and set in their ways in church find it rather strange. But people who do not have any association with spirituality, or with the Protestant Church, they find it rather interesting, and in that way get to think about what Christianity has to offer. And in a way that is also what the Reformation was all about. …Luther also had at that time new medias; it was not the aural word that was taught to people, but it was the written word that came to give new thoughts.”
When the day of Pentecost arrived for those early disciples, when the Spirit came rushing through the room like a violent wind, like wildfire, it was said that they then began speaking in other languages: the languages of immigrants and foreign pilgrims in Jerusalem.
In the passage from the book of Acts, Peter quotes from the prophet Joel. The role of a prophet is to declare to society at large who God is and what God is doing, especially in times of upheaval, change, disaster or tragedy. When there is no prophetic voice, we humans usually fill the vacuum with the worst our fears can generate: God is angry with us; they are to blame; faith in God doesn’t work, it’s a waste of time; God is absent; God is dead; we are alone. Eugene Peterson writes in his introduction to Joel that the prophet calls “his people to an immediate awareness that there wasn’t a day that went by that they weren’t dealing with God. We are always dealing with God.”
We are always dealing with the sacred—with what is good and true and beautiful and just (and most of the time it’s problematic)—and how to speak about the sacred in ways that are relevant.
Or is it the Spirit pouring out on all flesh, continually pouring out new insights, new directions? Is it the Spirit moving not just within the confines of church community but ALL community?
As it happened in our own time, our graduates and young adults are inheriting the accumulation of our choices and decisions and much of it is overwhelming: climate change, poverty, inequality, terrorism, the increasing potential for global conflict. And we’re not so different from those disciples living in the midst of empire; who, right up until that Holy Spirit moment, had no idea what was coming next for them.
And yet. And yet. Your young people shall see visions and your elders shall dream dreams. Mark Zuckerberg, in his commencement address at Harvard, said that it is time for his generation to define a new social contract: “We should have a society that measures progress, not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income, to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas. And we’re all going to make mistakes.”
We need to trust that indeed younger generations do have vision, the kids are alright, and we need to learn the languages, engage the new media forms of that vision; to embrace that Holy Spirit moment of wildfire and dare with it.
Come Holy Spirit, scoundrel of grace, rascal of heaven and of earth, set our hearts on fire and disturb our complacency and our biases and our bank accounts and our desire for security. Bother us into God’s beloved community. Hassle us until there is heaven on earth, thy will be done. Amen.
A Franciscan Benediction
May God bless you
with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships
so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears
to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them
and turn their pain to joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness
to believe that you can make a difference in this world,
so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
A Franciscan Benediction
May God bless you
with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships
so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears
to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them
and turn their pain to joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness
to believe that you can make a difference in this world,
so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
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