Fade
Away and Radiate
Old
Testament Reading: Isaiah 6:1-8
New
Testament Reading: Mark 9:1-8
Text: Acts 2:1-4, 32-33
I continue this
morning in a series of sermons exploring themes that come to the surface
as I read and contemplate the Pentecost passage. It seems appropriate to
me, as there is a season of Pentecost, and not merely a single day of
it, for us to trace the Pentecostal themes throughout the designated
weeks. I begin with a note as to why the 120 proto-Christians were
gathered in the upper room in Jerusalem. What were they doing there? Why
not out in the streets mingling with the pilgrims,spreading the word?
Why not in the Temple
celebrating the feast themselves? Why were they sitting idle?
What they were doing was waiting,
tarrying, as the King James put it, and as Pentecostal piety has put it
ever since. In Acts 1:4 Luke recounted how the Risen Christ told the
disciples "not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of
the Father." So that is what they were doing: waiting. In this they are
like faithful Joshua in the book of Exodus. Pentecost was the
celebration of the ancient giving of the Torah from the summit of Sinai.
And there is reason to believe that Luke has juxtaposed the coming of
the Spirit on the same day as a counterpoint and counterpart to the Old
Testament event.
If so, then we must see the ascension
of Jesus into heaven as corresponding to the ascent of his prototype
Moses into the heights of cloud-sheathed Sinai. For forty days his
lieutenant Joshua waited on a lower ridge for him to return with the
tables of the Law. Even so, here we find 120 Joshuas waiting for Jesus
to send the new Law of the Spirit from the heavenly Sinai. And just as
Joshua finally rejoiced to greet the Law-laden Moses, the 120 come to
end of their tarrying by welcoming the descent of the Spirit.
Luke has Peter proclaim that the
excess of spiritual ecstasy witnessed by the skeptical crowd is
something poured out by the exalted Jesus. And now that he has poured
out these living waters, the fountain is open to all who may wish to
come and drink. This scene raises an acute theological and spiritual
issue that I have thought about many, many times through the last decade
or so. I have discussed it with some of you at times. It is this: are
the spiritual experiences of the Christian faith, or of any religion,
the result of God reaching down from heaven and into the human world, or
are they the result of human beings awakening to a spiritual reality
that always surrounds them? The Acts passage seems to say both. The
Risen Christ has poured out like a Christian Aquarius, a latter rain of
Spiritual power to inaugurate a New Age of Spirituality, commencing at
Pentecost. It is a divine penetration of the mundane world. Yet once he
has done it, the Living Waters are there for anyone to come and drink.
It is up to you to plug in, so to speak.
But I will tell you that I have major
problems with the very notion of God doing something. I have a hard time
believing that God exists as a character acting in temporal sequence,
for one thing. That would seem to make God already incarnate as a
humanoid being even before and apart from the incarnation of Christ. If
God acted in the same sort of way that we do, i.e. doing discrete deeds
in the flow of the time stream, if God were already down there amid his
creatures in the cause-&-effect sequence, why then he's already
incarnate, not that Ultimate who Is that He Is.
But, to level with you about my
skepticism, I just cannot accept the notion that there is an intelligent
being out there somewhere trying to communicate with us or to reach us
or teach us by means of pantomime. I guess I would say that in my
theology God is not someone on the other side. Rather God simply is
the Other Side. To picture God as a discrete being who might communicate
from beyond the veil seems to demote him to the proportions of a UFO
alien or some thing. Or at least that's the pitiful state of my
unbelief.
So what can I make of the traditional
idea of revelation, which would seem exactly to make of God a sender of
news flashes from the Dark Side of the Moon? I guess I'd go along with
Harry Emerson Fosdick on this one and say that every revelation of God
is simultaneously a discovery by human beings, via their own searchings,
their own ethical and mystical delvings. It is like drilling for oil and
suddenly hitting a gusher. Or, to give you some idea where my sermon
title came from (I will not tell you exactly where, except that it is a
song title), let me show you how well I recall a lesson from my
Astronomy course at Montclair State a million years ago. Scientists had
formulated what is now a familiar theory, that of the Big Bang, the
origin of the expanding universe from a small central sphere of tight,
hot matter compacted into the diameter of our solar system. For some
reason one day it exploded, sending atoms of hydrogen streaming outward
in every direction, eventually to form the galactic clusters, galaxies,
stars, and planets.
Now this sounded good to those
scientists, with their horn-rimmed glasses and shirt pockets full of
pencils and slide rules. But how to convince everyone else? Well, sir,
some of the boys over at Bell Labs devised a scheme. They got to
figuring and they figured that if the explosion had occurred in just the
way they posited, the primordial fireball thus created would have left a
lingering ghost of radiation that should be detectable, oh say, at three
degrees on the scale. So they tuned in the big dish at Bell Labs to
three degrees—and sure enough, there it was!
My guess is that, to speak mythically
as we have to do when we discuss matters of this type, the Holy is an
overarching aura of Sacred Radiance which does not trouble itself to
focus a beam and direct it earthward every now and again. I suspect that
spiritual experience is more a matter of being intrepid and determined,
like the boys at Bell Labs were, and finding a way to tap into it. To
tune in to it. Listen to a statement on the subject by Evelyn
Underhill
in her classic book Worship:
Strictly speaking, there is
no such thing as "natural religion":
the distinction which is often drawn between "natural" and "revealed"
faith is an artificial one, set up by theologizing minds. That
awed conviction of the reality of the Eternal over against us,
that awareness of the Absolute, that sense of God, which in one form
or another is the beginning of all worship, whether it seems to break
in from without, or to arise within the soul, does not and cannot
originate within man. It comes to him where he is, as a message from
another order...
There is something worth pondering
here. But I think Underhill immediately reintroduces the very
distinction she has tried to banish! There is no difference here between
special revelation and natural? Then why does she insist that the
God-consciousness must come from without? Rather than upending,
as Derrida would do, the distinction between revealed and natural
religion, she simply eliminates all natural religion!
Underhill describes a perfect example
of what Derrida calls the nonconcept of the "hymen"--a case where we can
spot a conduit of conceptual passage but without being able to assign
priority to passage in either direction. Since there is simply,
primordially this inner awareness within all people of the Holy, without
being able to show that it is the result of religious instruction from
without, or on the other hand that the projection of it outward from
inside us is the origin of religion, we would seem to have reached the
point where we can simply drop the debate that troubled me initially: is
God out there trying to get spiritual experience to us? Or are we to tap
into a latent, passive field of spirituality that waits for us like a
potent ocean of fiery new wine? Where is the initiative? With God or
with us? Does he move oward us? Or we to him? Or both? Or are they the
same thing viewed two ways?
How about Jesus Christ? Was he an
intrusion from a higher sphere into our own, a man who was a message
from God? Or was he the Promethean usurper of fire from the heavens? A
man who leaped like Icarus toward the Sun and returned unsinged? I agree
with Tillich who said that it works both ways: to say that Jesus is God
and man must mean that the ancient competing doctrines of adoptionism (a
man becoming divine) and incarnationism (God becoming human) must both
be true. Each is the corollary of the other.
So what was going on that Pentecost
as the 120 tarried in the upper room? The narrative describes it as a
pouring out of divine grace from heaven to earth. And yet I cannot help
but suspect that the traditional Pentecostal exegesis of these verses as
the precedent for holding tarrying meetings reveals another way of
reading the text, a countersignature in the text. Does the picture of
the days of tarrying not imply that what suddenly changed on Pentecost
day was not the availability of the Promise of the Father but rather the
ability of the 120 to appropriate it?
I think of another passage, saying
113 of the Gospel of Thomas. The disciples ask when the Kingdom of the
Father is going to arrive. Jesus says, "The Kingdom of the Father is
spread abroad upon the earth and men do not see it." It appears that one
may, by expecting spiritual reality to erupt spontaneously, miss that
very reality! One must instead recognize that it is already there, like
the current in the wiring of your house. All you have to do is go and
find a plug that fits the outlet. That is easier said than done, I
realize. That is what all the rituals of all the religions, the
Communion Table, the Zen koan, the recitation of the Koran, the mantras
of Hinduism, are for. You are trying to plug in. Even the silent and
patient waiting of the traditional tarrying meeting is a way of plugging
in. It is an exceedingly active passivity because a mindful one.
What will happen if you manage to do
it? If you plug in? Or to return to an earlier metaphor, if your
drilling hits the jackpot and you strike oil? It may be a gusher! Though
the reality of the spirit may not have been trying to make contact with
you (indeed I view it as at rest, placid, undisturbed), once you make
contact
with it you will know it to be a
living and consuming fire. The oil slept peacefully beneath the ground,
but once tapped, it burst forth in fury that one can scarcely contain.
The waters behind the dike may have been at rest, but when you unplug
the dike, it jets out in resistless power! The Holy is urgent and
blazing and alive! It is, however, not looking for you. You must look
for it. But be careful, when you have found it you will have roused a
sleeping tiger.