You make the winds your messengers, fire and flame your ministers.
—Psalm 104:4
I. Days 40-49
Bereft.
That’s the best word to describe the disciples in the days leading up to Pentecost.
They were bereft of all that had meant something to them for the past three years.
It seemed as though the whole world had conspired
to undo the man that had mean everything to them.
In his teaching and in his healing,
they had caught not just a glimpse of the God they had always believed in,
but it had seemed as though God had somehow been fleshed out in him.
He not only knew the Law of God, he lived it—
not in a mean-spirited, legalistic way,
but in a way that brought others near to God.
And he brought wholeness.
He healed people who were outcasts,
he brought peace who were in anguish,
he spoke words of forgiveness to people that no one else would even associate with.
He stepped outsides the bounds of decency
in order to grant the indecent the integrity they had thought they could abandon.
And just when it all seemed to be coming together,
just when it seemed that he was coming to a place where everybody—
not just the poor and the outcast and the outsiders—would be given a chance to hear him and believe,
it all came to a screeching halt.
He had been arrested
by those who disagreed with him and were jealous of his popularity.
He had been put on trial by both the religious and civil authorities.
Jerusalem and Rome had come together to condemn him,
and they had seen him executed by crucifixion,
the most agonizing death imaginable.
All this happened during the holiest festival of the year: The Passover.
If ever a Passover Lamb had been sacrificed, it had been Jesus.
And yet even that couldn’t stop him.
He had died on a Friday afternoon,
and by Sunday morning, word had spread that his grave was empty,
and that some of his female disciples had actually seen him and talked to him.
By that evening, all his followers were saying that he was alive,
having somehow conquered death.
But the encounters had ceased.
Those closest to him said that he had been taken up into heaven,
and that’s why nobody saw him anymore.
But of course that’s what they’d say.
It was more likely that the excitement had just died down,
that he had just died like everybody else,
and that the “Jesus-sightings”
had been nothing more than misplaced religious fervor.
And yet his followers couldn’t bring themselves
to abandon each other or what they’d come to believe.
Killing Jesus couldn’t kill the truth he’d lived and taught.
And so they stuck by each other,
and waited… for what, they couldn’t say.
Maybe they were waiting until they just couldn’t wait any longer.
Or maybe they were waiting for some sort of inspiration.
It’s a story that has repeated itself again and again throughout history—
particularly the history of the followers of Jesus.
People come together for a time,
because they feel that they’ve encountered the truth,
and they don’t want to lose it.
The world seems to conspire against them,
and so they stick by each other—often through thick and thin—
until finally they give up, move on, or die out.
More often than not, they are forgotten
and the truth they thought they’d experienced is forgotten with them.
As you might imagine, this was a real danger in Nazi Germany.
The established church had itself abandoned the truth.
In an effort to make its theology more patriotic,
it had officially adopted the beliefs of a group called the German Christians,
and altered its government
to make it more like the National Socialist government of the Third Reich.
Those who rejected what was going on were very few,
and they called themselves the Confessing Church.
Because the officially sanctioned universities and theological schools
were teaching German Christian beliefs,
the Confessing Church needed to educate its pastors in a new way.
And so a young pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer
who had recently earned his Ph.D. in Berlin,
was charged with establishing a seminary.
He did it in the little Pomeranian town of Finkenwalde, today located in Poland.
The young men who studied there (there were no women pastors in those days)
were few, and they knew their situation.
Their school was illegal and their beliefs were treasonous.
And though they were idealistic as all youth tend to be,
they were well aware that their fate might well be a prison sentence.
It’s difficult to know what their leader knew and what he expected to happen.
The nation was still at peace—if such a régime could ever be thought of as peaceful.
The Confessing Church was still being tolerated,
and its little seminary had not been immediately shut down.
But Bonhoeffer came from a well-positioned family.
It’s likely that he could read the handwriting on the wall.
It’s likely that he knew that the day would soon come
when his students would be scattered to the four winds.
And if he knew that war was coming (and it’s likely he did),
he also knew that dissenters such as the Finkenwalde alumni
would be among the first to be conscripted and sent to the front—
not as military chaplains, but as cannon fodder.
Bonhoeffer stressed that we are not united by our emotions,
and that the existence of truth
didn’t depend on whether or not we were emotionally attached to it.
Another thing he stressed among his students
was that visible Christian community is a gift of grace from God—
a grace that not everybody has.
Building upon that belief,
he also taught that being a specifically “Christian community
means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ,”
meaning
- that a Christian needs others for the sake of Christ;
- that a Christian comes to others only through Christ; and
- that, in Christ, we have been chosen and united for all eternity.
And the final thing I want to highlight among his teachings in Finkenwalde
is that “because Christ stands between me and another,
I must not long for unmediated community with that person.”
He knew that this would remind his students
that it was the grace of God that held them together, and not human emotion.
And I suspect that this would also remind them
when they had been separated from one another
that the same Christ that stood between them and their brothers as students
was still the only thing separating them in a hostile world.
III. Wind & Flame
Bonhoeffer’s teachings in his little book, Life Together,
were not based on his own innovations,
but had their roots on the Day of Pentecost,
the fiftieth day after the resurrection of Jesus.
The disciples were all together in one place, the Bible tells us,
waiting for something to happen.
And when it happened, it happened big.
It was as though the 104th Psalm had come alive in their midst,
that the winds had suddenly become God’s messengers and flames his ministers.
They were filled with the Spirit of God
in such a way that the Spirit mediated between them and other people.
Just as the whole world had conspired to undo the Christ they had followed,
now the Christ they had followed
was mediating to make his message comprehensible to the whole world.
The day described in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles
was a miraculous and emotional day,
and it might very well have burned itself out rather quickly.
Except that those who believed organized themselves together into a community
based not on the emotional high that they’d experienced,
but on mutual love, Bible study, prayer, and service to one another.
The whirlwind, red-hot Spirit that filled them on the Day of Pentecost
did not abandon them once things cooled off,
but united them and mediated between them
as the church became an established presence in the world.
Though the Book of Acts
describes the Spirit’s entry into everyday human interaction,
it’s Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians
that best describes and explains the Holy Spirit’s presence
in and among God’s people.
And it’s no mistake that the same two books—Acts and 1 Corinthians—
that speak more about the Holy Spirit than any others
also talk more about the church than any others.
Just as Acts describes
the continued presence of God’s Spirit and the birth of the church,
1 Corinthians describes the action of the Spirit
and the way the church is supposed to be the body of Christ in the world.
Human beings desire immediacy.
It goes against our nature to wait.
Waiting requires either faith or hope or both.
Immediacy brings knowledge, and knowledge cancels out both faith and hope;
for, as Paul wrote in Romans (8:24-25):
“hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what is seen?
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
And the writer of Hebrews (11:1) described faith
as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Thus, a community that exists in hope and in faith
cannot know the immediacy we desire.
In true Christian community,
the Spirit of Christ always stands between us and another.
At its root, after all, the word
immediate means that there is
no mediating presence.
To wish for such immediacy is to wish away the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Because everything we experience will be experienced through a filter,
we should pray that the filter
through which we experience each other and the world
be the Holy Spirit.
Otherwise, we fall victim to emotion, prejudgment, lust, or greed.
By perceiving one another through Christ,
can hope to rise above other mediators.
Just as we look to Christ as the mediator between us and the Divine,
through the Holy Spirit,
we can look to Christ as the mediator between us and our neighbor.
I think it must’ve been easier to be a patient Christian in the old days.
Heck, I even remember the old days.
Waiting was an everyday activity.
Long distance phone calls
were a pleasure most of us couldn’t afford on an everyday basis.
When I was in college, every call from Louisville to Ashland cost several dollars.
There were neither cell phones nor answering machines,
and so even the immediate pleasure of a phone call
was often delayed either by finances
or the simple fact that the other party might not be home.
So the only way I could usually communicate
with my former high school classmates on a regular basis
was what back then we simply called mail, but which today we’d call snail mail.
We would write letters, put them in an envelope, put a stamp on them,
take them to a mail box and wait for a reply.
Even the fastest reply would take a week.
But now we have social networking.
The advent of Facebook means not only
that we can communicate useful and needed information
to specifically targeted individual
and have them receive that information immediately,
but now we can broadcast useless and unnecessary information
to the whole world…
and the whole world will know immediately the last thought that crossed our minds.
I know I am not alone,
but I have fallen victim to this means of social networking.
I have gradually scaled back my interaction on Facebook,
and now use it for little more than posting links to sermons or pictures from church.
But at my peak, I, too, was posting way too many thoughts and opinions.
It should’ve occurred to me
when I found rants and opinions tedious when posted by others,
that those same others
would find my rants and unsolicited opinions no less tedious.
But it’s not just Facebook
that gives us a platform for immediate communication
with people that in the old days would have had to be contacted one by one
via a letter or individual toll calls.
We’ve also got cell phones that we carry everywhere
which we can use not only to communicate by voice,
but to send and receive text messages and emails.
In the heat of the moment, when my anger’s hot and my emotions are running high,
I can let the whole world know it… or at least everybody on my list of contacts.
If I want to yell at somebody,
then all I need is to press the ALL CAPS key, type an angry message, and hit send.
And then everybody and their mother’s cousin will know just how I feel.
No mediation necessary.
I guess I don’t need to tell you that this is seldom a good idea.
And when we’re calm and collected, we know this.
But when we’re emotional, we’re not viewing the world through our standard lens.
The filter through which we’re perceiving other people or a particular situation
is one of anger or hurt.
It’s the very kind of circumstance that should demand
we step back and think for a moment—or a day—
before communicating our feelings.
But the mediation of time is no longer necessary.
And if I have the capability to send a mass email
letting dozens of others know that I’m angry and who I’m angry at,
then everybody I’ve sent that email to has the capability to click Respond to All
and inform me and dozens of others that I’m an idiot.
And perhaps they’re right.
But by this time a veritable Blitzkrieg has begun,
and thoughts are flying back and forth over the internet,
and people’s feelings are being shared immediately…
and by immediately I mean both without the mediation of time,
or the mediation of a reasonable influence.
Immediacy is, more often than not, something we don’t need.
We need a mediator to stand between us and others.
Whether that mediator is time, another person, or the Spirit of God,
mediation is a good thing.
The Spirit’s mediating presence
helps us to speak to one another
and to receive each other’s words as Christian communication.
In that sense, perhaps it’s true that it creates a bit of distance…
though it must be said that spiritual distance
is better than the distance of raw emotion or prejudice.
But at the same time,
it reminds us when we are living without the grace of Christian community
that, even when we are not present with one another,
that the distance between us is the same.
If the Spirit is all that stands between us when we are face to face,
then the Spirit is all that stands between us when we are apart.
The Spirit that connects us to the risen and ascended Christ
is the same Spirit that makes us one in the body of Christ.
This is the message of Pentecost.
The immediacy of wind and the flame is ours, but we do not control it.
It is in God’s hands, and it is God that is served when the Spirit moves.
—©2012 Sam L. Greening, Jr.
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