Acts 8:
4-25
NPMC
Psalm
123
5 Pentecost
Anita Retzlaff
July 5, 2009
The Spirit breaking loose: here and now!
Grace and peace to you from God the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. In our moment of silent reflection and prayer this morning we remember our brothers and sisters in Christ who mourn the recent loss of family members; Jamie Rempel, Betty Epp, Sheila and Terry Harding and those who are reminded by these deaths, of the losses they have lived through over the years. Let us pray…. God of the living and the dead we pray for your Spirit to come upon us: your Spirit of comfort and of joy for the living of this day. Kindle in us a deep gratitude for the gifts of each day, each memory and each person whom we love. Bless us now in our worship together. AMEN
Simon, the local magician, was held in awe by the townspeople. So begins our story from scripture this morning. Let’s listen again to the description of Simon’s experience from the translation of Eugene Petersen’s The Message.
Previous to Philip’s arrival, a certain Simon had practiced magic in the city, posing as a famous man and dazzling all the Samaritans with his wizardry. He had them all, from little children to old men, eating out of his hand. They all thought he had supernatural powers, and called him “the Great Wizard.” He had been around a long time and everyone was more or less in awe of him.
But when Philip came to town announcing the news of God’s kingdom and proclaiming the name of Jesus Christ, they forgot Simon and were baptized, becoming believers right and left! Even Simon himself believed and was baptized. From that moment he was like Philip’s shadow, so fascinated with all the God-signs and miracles that he wouldn’t leave Philip’s side.
When the apostles in Jerusalem received the report that Samaria had accepted God’s Message, they sent Peter and John down to pray for them to receive the Holy Spirit. Up to this point they had only been baptized in the name of the Master Jesus; the Holy Spirit hadn’t yet fallen upon them. Then the apostles laid their hands on them and they did receive the Holy Spirit.
When Simon saw that the apostles by merely laying on hands conferred the Spirit, he pulled out his money, excited, and said, “Sell me your secret! Show me how you did that! How much do you want? Name your price!”
Peter said, “To hell with your money! And you along with it! Why, that’s unthinkable—trying to buy God’s gift! You’ll never be part of what God is doing by striking bargains and offering bribes. Change your ways—and now! Ask the Master to forgive you for trying to use God to make money. I can see this is an old habit with you; you reek with money-lust.”
“Oh!” said Simon, “pray for me! Pray to the Master that nothing like this will ever happen to me!”
I really appreciate this story about Simon the Magician. Simon represents to me the ways in which, in our enthusiasm, we misunderstand the source of transformation in our lives. The entire Book of Acts is a story of the Spirit of God changing lives; an extended commentary on radical transformation – conversion – if you will. We have all been there! You and I have lived through amazing transformations, second chances and new insights and like Simon, in our enthusiasm, we sometimes get it wrong!
The Spirit of God, experienced by us as compassion or a new love or a new way to live, breaks loose in our world and we get caught up in the amazement and beauty of the moment. Surely there must be some way we can make it last, this feeling of acceptance and grace, maybe we can make new rules or buy particular objects or property so that we can own the experience and control it all so we have it at our disposal whenever we need a lift.
Yet the Spirit of God and the new life that comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be owned or purchased or controlled. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to buy a healthy dose of the Spirit and keep it bottled or preserved for our use? But that is missing the point of the way in which God works. The truth be told that when the Spirit actually breaks loose, it does so often out of great turmoil and upheaval – hardly a controlled situation. Take the setting of Simon’s story as an example; it comes just before Saul’s conversion. Believers in Jesus Christ are being hunted and terrorized. The message of the gospel is going out into the wilds of Samaria, the places of ritual impurity as far as most God-fearing Jews were concerned. The news of Jesus Christ is spreading fast and furiously but not because it is condoned by the establishment of the time and given good reviews by the press. The word of God is spreading in the midst of persecution and it is going out to the fringes of society and embraced by those considered unacceptable by the establishment types.
So let’s just try to imagine what that might feel like today before we succumb to sentimentality about what The Spirit on the move might look like. I’ll tell you right now what I don’t think it looked like: a group of well dressed, well heeled people sitting in orderly rows, speaking politely to each other, listening with respect and making plans for lunch after a service. Now don’t get me wrong, that is not to say that the Spirit isn’t present in our orderly rows but when we experience it as having really let loose I suspect that the Spirit of God finds us in rather different and more disorderly circumstances.
The story of the Doukhobors that I shared with the children is such an example. 7000 people in Russia on June 29, 1895 decided to take a stand and to change the course of human history. They burned all of their guns and arms making the statement that they, from this time forward, refused to kill other human beings regardless of the consequences. The Doukhobours lived with the hope that this action would be the beginning of the cessation of all war on earth. That was the Spirit breaking loose. The scene wasn’t pretty or orderly. Neither was the persecution that followed.
The Spirit is breaking loose in our midst too and I don’t think we are too comfortable about some of the manifestations of this Spirit on the move. Last Sunday Allan referred to the article in a recent Canadian Mennonite – which you all receive – an interview with Phyllis Tickle, a deeply spiritual theologian and writer. She describes the Spirit breaking loose in the midst of the profound societal shift we are experiencing right now. Our former ways of doing things, our institutions, including the church, are changing rapidly. I think we all feel it. Sometimes it feels like we are leaving home and we long for the old comforts of days gone by. But when the Spirit breaks loose Phyllis Tickle assures us that Christianity is revitalized even though it finds expression in altered forms.
For example the institutional church all around the world right now is fighting about sexuality, about women in ministry (in some places), about the styles of worship music, about the use of birth control and condoms to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS and on and on. There is a whole generation of young people watching all this and they are ready to scrap tradition and start somewhere else. They are responding to the good news of Jesus in other ways than sitting in neatly spaced pews (and again, that is not a slam against us) and they are loathe to participate in angry discussions about homosexuality. The message of hope in Christ is being spread through cyberspace on social networking sights like Facebook and Twitter. Communities of faith are emerging in wildly new settings; I can’t begin to imagine how they work. I just read about them.
One thing that I do know about the internet and getting a message out to multitudes is that I participate in online petitions sometimes through the website Avaaz. Avaaz is concerned with social justice issues all around the globe and they can elicit 100s of thousands of signatures in a few days. There is a new way for the Spirit to break loose in our world and it feels as different to us today as the setting of Simon the Magician’s story of 2000 years ago.
So, this is just to remind us that the Spirit continues to break free from our controlled establishments and that there is an irony to being faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Human instinct will have us build institutions to house the important things of our society and our religious life together. We learn to love Jesus and we build an institution around our understanding. There is nothing wrong with that but the challenge comes – and here is the irony – at the very same time that we are building community we also must be dismantling parts of the aging structure – the parts that don’t really work anymore - and adapt to the new work of the Spirit. As Phyllis Tickle and others remind us, approximately every 500 years there is a monumental shake-up in our society and the church. What comes out of that turmoil looks very different than what came before. 500 years ago the Anabaptist wing of the church emerged alongside the Lutheran and Reformed churches. At the time all of these new movements were persecuted and expanding rapidly; the Spirit broke loose and defied the structures and protocol of the time. And yet what was once new and daring now often appears pretty ossified, crumbling and empty compared to our church half a millennium ago.
We might say that the Western part of the church is stagnating and needs a shake-up. The Mennonite church is growing rapidly, but not here: it is growing in the southern hemisphere. So “how do we keep the revolution green?” Or put another way, how do we remain open to the Spirit’s nudging, here and now? We are in the midst of a cataclysmic shift - worldwide.
First of all, we begin, along with Simon, by repenting of those things of the gospel which we don’t understand or attempt to misuse. And then, I think, we simply open our hearts to the working of the Spirit, recognizing that we tend to resist the unknown and the stranger: that we prefer to seek comfort in the recognizable past but that we also deeply desire to be faithful to God’s call in the present. And so we thank God for the Spirit that breaks loose and has transformed our lives. For, it is the Spirit who intercedes for us in prayer when we are grief-stricken. It is the Spirit who cracks open new possibilities that we had never, ever, dreamt of and so in all these ways the mercy of God guides our lives and awaits our faithful response. Thanks be to God! AMEN