May 28, 2004

Pentecost

Nothing in the Beatitudes suggests that “blessed are the religious.” Maybe it’s because the more religious one is, the fewer blessings one needs because religion is all about security and being right and decreasing the risks one takes.

On the other hand, the more we let our spirit loose from our religion, the riskier things get. Pentecost was a kind turning or breaking point between religion and spirit. Jesus had been hammering away trying to bust up that union now for a few years and not without a lot of risk to himself and here came the Holy Spirit at his behest to blow it all out of the tub.

When it happened, everybody got drunk on it (they don’t call that stuff “spirits” for naught) and wailed away in a linguistic whirlwind. For once, they communicated and chummed up pretty good. But it didn’t last long.

One of the worst things about a hangover is facing whoever your liable to wake up with. They rarely ever look as good as the night before. So ever since then, we’ve be building more religions to keep us between the curbs and the spirit at arm’s length.

It’s good for us to celebrate Pentecost, to remember that ordered chaos out of which we came and where we got a glimpse of what Jesus wanted us to see and to be, carrying on in our own tongues about the “mighty works of God” (Acts 2.11) . The church needs Pentecost maybe worse than ever right now. It seems to be becoming more and more religious and throwing up barriers against anything that looks like that smoke and mirrors fiasco reported in the Acts of the Apostles.

Generally, the more religious we are, the fewer risks we take. On the other hand, to mature spiritually (to live, grow, awaken) is to move from attachment to detachment. The more loving, the more risks. The more inclusive, the more need to cover your rear

A collegial style of life seems more becoming to a church than a hierarchical, pontifical style. It’s about community, and community is that possible state of grace to which we are called and that allows us to live in and sustain the inevitable tension between religion and faith.

Faith is the way spirit moves among us. Faith questions, religion answers. Religion patronizes. Faith cares. The church’s vocation is least of all, if at all, to preserve religion, nor even to propagate faith (in the sense of “adding” to it), but to be faithful, to be a sanctuary in which one can explore what it means to be human, that is, to discover the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God, as well as to witness to other communities or sanctuaries where such creativity can happen.

True conversion moves us away, then, from pretense to nonsense. The tragedy of religion is that it must always make sense of the world, that it seems so, might we say, rational. Maybe that’s where original sin came from, being reasonable.
One of the more profound things a church can do by being a church, a people, is to become a “somewhere” one can find a sense of “place,” a locus in the chaotic, madding crowd not for some brain-dead serenity and liturgical lethargy, but where chaos can be discovered as not all that alien to life, but indeed perhaps even quite central to life, where women and men and children can dare to discover who they are and be content to be who they discover, where all can connect and exchange their deepest searches into the wells of human imagination and spirit and offer them to one another with God’s comfort and joy and confidence.

It sickens me to hear some of our leaders speak as if the world would be “without” God if it were not for the church whose task they perceive is somehow to “bring” God to the world. Far from that, “church” is where people who may be thought of as “places-where-God-is” share those places in reverence and awe and jolly good hilarity.

A church marquee up in Denver, Colorado, counseled, “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.” Pray let us be a Pentecost church where we can be not afraid to tell God our plans.

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