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Jay Weldon Note: The Rev. John Rogers preached at King of Peace on Pentecost Sunday, May 11. He did so from notes and there is no sermon to place here online. Below is Pastoral Resident Jay Weldon's sermon from the same day, given at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Woodbine.
It was about a year ago, just as I was preparing to graduate from seminary, when a friend of mine—another student—and I were talking about Pentecost. He was working at a non-denominational church that met in a warehouse and I, well, I was an Episcopalian. He began telling me about his sermon for Pentecost Sunday. After reading the passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the one we heard just a minute ago, he had decided that Christians needed to be a little crazy. “The Holy Spirit came so that we could know God’s presence with us. We need to be a little crazy—speak in tongues, raise our hands up, run around and shout ‘halleluia’ when the Spirit is with us. If the Holy Spirit is with us, it should get a little crazy!” Then he stopped what he was saying and, stepping a little closer, he smiled and gave me a wink. “So what about you Episcopalians… do you ever get a little crazy?” He laughed a little bit, letting me know he didn’t expect an answer. He knew the answer already. It is no hidden secret that some people call us and the Presbyterians the Frozen Chosen. I suppose I could have mentioned parishes within our Church who are more charismatic, named places in Africa where the Anglican worship is certainly not as subdued as here. I wanted to defend what we do in worship, but he was just making a little joke. So I smiled, and then we talked about something else. However, he gave me a gift that day. I needed to answer the questions that he posed for me. Are Christians supposed to be a little crazy? If we’re not raising our hands and speaking in tongues, are we sure that the Spirit is at work in our midst? As I was on my way home that day, I drove past the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta, a remarkable stone and stained glass edifice located in a beautiful part of Midtown Atlanta, just across from the High Museum of Art. When I had been there, however, I had seen a different part of that church. I volunteered there with their Homeless Mentoring program, meeting with homeless gentlemen and women of Atlanta who were desperately looking for a better life. We worked with them for weeks and months at a time, helping them to identify ways that they could get off the streets and stay off the streets, working toward permanent solutions to rebuke the voices of their pasts. I remembered those days when I would speak individually to them, counseling them, praying with them. I would ask them if they had a church home, a community of faith on which they could rely. It happened more than once that I received funny looks. “Of course I do. I come to First Presbyterian. You see me here every week, sometimes twice! What do you mean do I have a church? This is my church. This is where I come to find God.” As I drove by that day, I was reminded that this church was more than we sometimes think. I proceeded north on Peachtree Street, curving around toward Buckhead and passing its intersection with Spring Street. There stood another striking house of worship—stained glass crafted in London in the 1920’s, the largest pipe organ in the Southeast—another church with vivid memories for me. It was there where I worked as youth minister for two years. But as I passed, I remembered something different about the church. My eye caught the porch and another memory came flooding. I could remember the many, many nights in autumn, winter, and spring, when I would see sleeping bags, pregnant with people, camped out there on our church stairs—there under the warm embrace of the risen Lord, captured in the finest of stained glass. There they found ephemeral respite from the streets, the cold; from danger and censure. On those steps, no one asked them to move; no one told them to get a job. For a few hours each night, they were safe from a world that held its treasures at bay, there under the embrace of the Pantokrator from Galilee. I wondered many nights as I saw them if they would have identified Peachtree Christian as their church. If they, as I, found God there when I needed divine embrace, and even on days when I thought I didn’t. And again I was reminded, Peachtree Christian is more than it seems. It was certainly so for me, during those years in Athens—wonderful, exciting, tempting years—when my own relationship to the church in her many manifestations may have saved me from myself. It wasn’t just one; there was the BSU, the Wesley Foundation, Campus Crusade, the Episcopal Student Center, these many outposts in the world of academia and moral decadence. I cannot say exactly which of them it was, just as I cannot say with certainty that things would have turned out differently for me if they had not been there, yet I feel a certain confidence that the church saved me from myself those years in Athens. Always pointing me back to the embrace of the risen Lord, in many ways like that stained glass on Peachtree, the church saved me from myself. It was the Man of La Mancha who said, “it is madness to see the world as it is and not as it can be.” I would also add that it is madness to see the church only as she appears to be and not as she can be… and sometimes is. Presbyterian Minister Tom Long tells the story of one woman who saw the church as the beacon of light, the harbor of hope that she can be. Grace Thomas was the child of a streetcar conductor from Birmingham, Alabama. She married and moved to Atlanta where she raised a family, worked as a secretary at the state capital and attended law school at night. Several years ago she was buried at the First Baptist Church cemetery in Decatur, Georgia. What is unique about this woman is that she ran for governor of Georgia in 1954 and 1962. In 1962 the civil rights movement was in full bloom and our beloved state was staring down the barrel of a loaded weapon. Just like this rifle, her statements often seemed loaded to the people whose hearts and minds she wanted to move. She traveled around the state with a message of progress and racial harmony. She received death threats and traveled with her family to protect her. One day, she went to give a campaign speech in the rural town of Louisville. You may recall that Louisville was our state’s first capital, and as such is rather old. The town square in Louisville is not a Revolutionary or Civil War monument, not the courthouse or Methodist church, but an old slave market where human beings were bought and sold. There between the stores and restaurants of the main street lies this shameful reminder. It was under the canopy of that slave market that she stood to speak. She addressed a crowd of farmers and merchants and she pointed at the slave market and said, “This, thank God, has passed and the new has come. Open your eyes. It’s time to join hands, all races together.” Somebody in the crowd asked her if she was a communist, an accusation which she could easily deny. Then another person asked her where she had gotten these crazy ideas. She thought about it for a minute, looking around at the landscape of this bucolic hamlet. And then she pointed at the steeple of the First Baptist Church, that spire reaching toward God, and she said, “I got them over there in Sunday School!” Yes, I guess the church is bigger than we think. Perhaps we are crazier than some give us credit. We see the world as it is but still hope for that glorious day of the Lord when it will be all that it can be. We still believe that Christ’ message—to love God and love each other—can change the world, just as it has changed us. We believe the crazy message—that Christ has reconciled the world to God—and we work for a world of peace, justice, and egalitarianism, believing that the work of reconciliation continues. We believe that crazy message that God, through Jesus Christ, desires to know us, to share in relationship with each of us. We are empowered by the Spirit, as the words of St. Paul speak to us today, to proclaim Jesus as Lord; that there is a better way to live, a better way to help others live. And while we are not known for our charismatic nature, our Pentecostal outbursts, or our fanatical proclamations, we are crazy. Yes, we are crazy. We believe that the peace which Christ offered to his disciples, the peace of a world reconciled to God, is still ours for the offering. We are crazy enough to believe, with the Psalmist, that the Spirit of God will still renew the face of the earth. We are crazy. We are crazy enough to believe that the church is bigger than it seems. We are crazy enough to believe that the same Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost is poured out on us today, is present with us transforming these ordinary elements of bread and wine. We are crazy enough to believe that the work of reconciliation begun in Christ may continue in us. In 1922, music composer Giacomo Puccini was diagnosed with cancer at the young age of 64. Though very ill, he continued to work on composing the opera Turandot, an opera that many consider to be his best. Some tried to convince him to give up his work, to simply enjoy the bit of life he had left. He refused. He instructed his students that they were to finish the composition if he proved unable. He passed on before completing Turnadot, and so his students gathered the scores of notes, studied them with particular care, and then finished his opera. In 1926, Turnadot was finally performed under the direction of one of Puccini’s students. When he reached the point at which Puccini’s composition ended, the conductor laid down his baton and turned to the audience. “Thus far the master wrote, and then he died.” There was shear silence as the noiseless minutes passed. Then he picked up his baton and smiled through his tears. “But his disciples have finished his work.” Tears flowed in rhythmic congruence with the music, and the sound of the applause went on and on.
It is madness to see the church only as she appears to be and
not as she can be… and sometimes is. We may never be overtly so, but we are
crazy. Yes, we are crazy. Thanks be to God! Amen.
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