Transcript
A few summers ago, I attended a week-long preaching conference at Kirkridge, which featured several of the most notable homileticians of our day, Ernest Campbell, Virginia Mollenkott, Charles Rice, Robert Raines, and my personal favorite, the person who I have described to the workshop that I'm working with this week as my homiletical god, Fred Craddock. It was an unusual opportunity to sit at the feet of the greats, and I was literally on my way from parish ministry
to seminary ministry, having just left the Pluckemin Presbyterian and being in the car on the way west to SFTS. And I wanted one last chance to be a consumer before I had to start being a dispenser, and I signed up. Halfway into the week, I regretted my decision to attend this conference, when it was revealed that one of the course's requirements was that each of us was going to have to preach on an assigned text, on
three hours notice, to a small group of peers and Fred Craddock. I remember the afternoon when it was my turn to preach, frantically trying to pull together a sermon and comforting myself with the thought this will be the hardest time I will ever have to preach in my life. I was wrong. I sat in the balcony last night and lingered a little after the service and thought I would come up and see what this pulpit was
like. And as I sat there waiting for the sanctuary to clear, I was sort of fixed on the pulpit, you know, meditating, trying to get into the spirit of things. And all of a sudden, I thought I saw Jurgen Moltmann standing here, because I think the first time that I ever sat in that pew and looked at this pulpit, it was filled by Jurgen Moltmann. And then I saw sort of the form of Jazzy standing in
this pulpit saying, behold, I stand at the door at Nock. And I thought, what am I doing here? So when I say that there is good news in Acts chapter two for every nervous preacher, for every bashful witness, for every faint-hearted spokesperson for the gospel, it's not just you that I am preaching to. And there is good news in Acts two for the likes of you and me, whether we are still, some of us, sometimes
faint-hearted or whether we are most often The news from Acts chapter two is good. For all of us who from time to time have our challenge to proclaim the word, capital W, in our word, for all of us who from time to time wonder if we really have, if we ever had, if we might have lost the gift. Good news. If you have ever wondered if you've forgotten God's language, the language with which God communicates
to us and we to each other, the language of the spirit in which we know and are known through the word. If you've ever doubted your ability to live attentively to God's word, the news is good. For the gospel, as Acts two for preaches it, is that we are more than our biological possibility. More than the chemical reaction of cerebrum and cerebellum. More than cartilage, bone, sinew and muscle can support. More than adrenaline and burned up
calories can generate. More than the sound of air being pushed through the larynx by We are more than our biological possibility. It has been said that if problem solving is the mental genius of our species, contemplation and its expression is our spiritual genius. Both because we are creatures made in the image of God and because we are spirit-filled people in the post-Tanakhot sense. We are more than our biological possibilities. We are more than we
know. And we have the capacity for fearless contemplation of gigantic things, for imaginative inquiry into God's unknown and for the articulation of what God reveals to us there. We have every chance, as essayist Carol Bly says, we have every chance not just to be the little people of the little word, but to be madly expressive. And what could be better than Acts 2? What is biologically, logically less likely than those sometimes whiny Galileans transformed into angel
tongue orators? If that isn't comforting to all of us who are ever reluctant to speak God's word, we are either beyond comforting or beyond believing, which is a disturbing possibility. But then you can hardly brush up against this glorious text without wondering about those who resist its promise. What about those who seem hell bent on avoiding God's word? Those who shrink divine and human commerce to the problems and biological limitations. Those who've heard the prophecy, been
shown the dreams and offered the visions, and who continue to squint up to the heavens or across the sea as if the word of God were something hard, off, far, difficult to discern. You know, the kind of person, maybe somebody who is so curved in on him or herself, so absorbed in working out the problems of one life for like a rubik's cube, that they've become mute and deaf in the self-absorption. It happens. It happens
to individuals. It happens to groups. What about them? And what about the times that we have been them? Could it be that the first step in losing the ability to speak a spirit-prompted word is losing the ability to hear a spirit-prompted word? In her book, Letters from the Country, Carol Bly tells of a writer's class that she gave, and a young student, a young poet, wrote about his feelings in this class, about being a
single parent, about trying to keep his sanity as he struggled to care by himself for his children. In his poem, he raced up the stairs, grabbed a gun, and shot the clock. When he finished reading the poem to the class and sat down in the hush, someone said, I certainly am glad you shared that with us. I'd really like to thank you for sharing. Could it be that the first step in losing the ability to speak
a spirit-prompted word is losing the ability to hear a spirit-prompted word? Sly comments on the incident, she says. If we are truly serious about life, we are going to stop thanking people for sharing. It isn't enough response to what has been offered. We might add that whenever the spirit-prompted word is ignored, the entire language is endangered. Whenever the spirit-prompted word is ignored, when it is not spoken or acted on, the entire language
is endangered. How often do we skirt the spirit-prompted word by pretending like the people in the writing class that we don't really see the content of what's being said? I think this is a favorite dodge of ours, sort of peculiar to our generation, but then I don't know if there's a Hebrew translation for thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing, we say, to the young father poet or to the seven-year-old artist's
watercolor of an ominous mushroom cloud, we say. I like the way you've used the orange here. Thank you for sharing, we say, to the crazy woman who climbs over the wall and into the nuclear arsenal, and between each other, conversations like this are overheard. Not, of course, on this campus. Where have you been? Oh, to hear Tutu. Was it good? Oh, yeah, he can really preach. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing, Desmond, Jesse, Bella,
Malcolm. The entire language is endangered because we shrink from it, because we shrink it to the level of problem-solving and biological limitations because we address the form and miss the content of the Spirit-prompted word. The language is endangered. We struggle to speak God's word because we have gotten used to hearing it. But the gospel is that in the light of the resurrection, in the fire and wind and water of the Spirit, we are more
than our biological possibilities. In burning bushes, burning coals, and burning chariots, from dung hills and cisterns and pits, through monuments and signs and tablets, with the voices of angels and prophets and one ask, God has spoken. God has spoken. God has spoken of old to reach a contrary people, even the people who were sometimes trying very hard not to be reached. And now in these last days, God has spoken to us in the sun. And in
the all-time Pentecostal power of his Spirit. Yes, the fireworks that followed the ascension were for you and for me. God reaching out in perhaps the most spectacular display of her career, the hound of heaven, transcending the babble of the human family's tongue and accosting us in our own language. Friends, that the church has survived thus far, that we are all improbably, gloriously here together tonight is one evidence of the word's tremendous power. We are more
than our biological possibilities. We are more than we know. Make no mistake. The word is very near you. It is in your mouth that you can do it. Amen.