Pentecost is often called “the birthday of the church.” But if we are born “not of flesh, but of water and the Spirit,” (John 3:5), then this church body is a spiritual body and it simply cannot have had a natural birthday on which it was plopped into the daylight of history a blinking wet chick.
“You are doing it all wrong,” Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. “Not everything–but the main thing: your celebration of communion—why, it’s not really communion. You’re doing it all wrong. ” Are we doing it right? In his book “Rabbi Jesus”, professor Bruce Chilton argues that what we’re doing is not at all what Jesus was up to at his last supper.
A lot of people do not want their crown. They want their religion to tell them what is true and what to do. The church has often colluded with its people to persuade them that the main purpose of the church is to rain down guilt and self-reproach for ourselves, honor and glory to Thee . . . Yet I defy anyone to find one word from the gospels where Jesus himself demands such of the faithful.
In this season of Lent, we desire to see our sin and its consequences. Here we are also in another season, at the conclusion of a month celebrating the history of women. By its very existence, such a celebration refers us to the context which gave rise to it: that the contrivances of men have for so long mismeasured the reality and power of women. But first we must deal with the biblical Letter of Timothy. Women-sit-down-and-shut-up Timothy. Women-make-babies-Timothy. He is still here. . .
Is not this your transfiguration: “Now that I have felt him, I can see him?” Jesus is not visible except to the inward eye, the feeling eye. There was nothing there for all to see. The gospels are plain-spoken in this–some saw him as devil, some as disturbed, some as miscreant, some as master, some as transfigured in the light of God, some face to face. Never suppose that your faith, and your deepening faith, depends on some fact yet to be pinned down, or on your forlorn acceptance of some assertion that seems to you contrary to nature. Faith is not a thing so small. It is a feeling for life that gives sight to the blind.
Have you ever encountered an evangelical . . . owner of a new car? By “evangelical,” I do not for the moment have in mind a Christian evangelical, but rather a person with a very positive attitude about a personal experience—and they want to talk about it. “Oh man! You just gotta drive this. The torque, the control, these seats. And you have not heard sound—Beethoven never heard Beethoven—like you hear in here. Try it. You gotta get one.” Now that’s an evangelical! Have you never been evangelical?
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