Wind and Fire: May 20, 2018

It is an aerial shot. To the upper left, lava, the burning roof of a home. To the lower right, the aquamarine of an in-ground pool, another home, lava steadily approaching. This photo, one of the week’s 15 “best” according to the Washington Post’s website, is not a happy picture. We may know that the earth moves and shakes, that volcanoes are the very reason those beautiful islands exist, but cleansing fire doesn’t feel quite so cleansing when it is your home going up in flame, your neighborhood experiencing the slow motion disaster of Kilauea’s most recent eruption, though in truth, that volcano has been continuously active since 1983. It destroyed most of the nearby town of Kalapana in 1990, burying the church, the local store, and 100 homes under 50 – 80 feet of lava.

Scripture warns against building your house on sand. It should also warn against building your house on a volcano, and the Big Island is nothing more than five volcanos. Or it might warn against building your house anywhere that is low and flat. Or anywhere that is dry, like the entire West Coast of the United States. Or anywhere that the rain we need and the wind that cools us can become a hurricane or a tornado. Or pretty much anywhere,, really, because this planet is a moving shaking swirling ball of chaos on a good day, and that ignoring the approximately 7.6 billion humans on the planet, the apex predator that has proven capable of disrupting the planet’s most basic systems.

Meanwhile, an ocean and a continent away, Manhattan attorney Aaron Schlossberg, the descendent of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, went on an anti-immigrant racist tirade in the city that has served as the port of entry for generation after generation of immigrants whose children would go on to speak fluent English, who would become inventors and soldiers and teachers and scientists and, alas, racist Manhattan attorneys. Schlossberg’s beef, the thing that sent him into the tantrum caught on cellphone video, was that customers were speaking with an employee at Fresh Kitchen in Spanish. He ranted and raved and insisted he would call ICE to report employees he was certain were undocumented. He was, he insisted, tired of paying for their welfare. This is, of course, the Schrödinger’s Cat of immigration, stealing your job while living off of welfare.

Some people never learn. This is not the first time Schlossberg has been caught on camera in a racist tirade. He was captured on video in October 2016 exploding at a man on the sidewalk who he referred to as an “ugly foreigner”, though with additional language not suitable for church or pretty much anywhere. In May of 2017, he was part of a violent Zionist protest against a Palestinian activist, calling one rabbi a “fake Jew.” But the richest part of the whole story is that Schlossberg is himself fluent in Spanish and advertises that fluency on the website of his legal practice, clearly hoping to attract Latinx clients. Good luck with that…

These previous incidents didn’t seem to deter him, but I think karma might finally be what karma is reputed to be. A name change and a move to Mexico might well be in order. I mean, he does speak Spanish…

So, on this week when we celebrate fire and the gift of tongues, fire and the gift of tongues make the news. Come, Holy Spirit. No, seriously… we could really use a little help down here.

Today’s reading is a story told through the lens of Pauline Christianity, which would become the dominant tradition, for Paul is, in many ways, the founder of Christianity, taking the message of a revolutionary Jewish teacher and translating it in a way that allowed non-Jews to hear it, to find hope and comfort in it, to find meaning for their lives in that message during an anxious time. It was a message so powerful that it attracted not just the poor and oppressed, a group always looking for some answer, any answer, to their suffering, but that also attracted those with power and education.

But Paul is not yet the great evangelist, the bridge between Jewish reform and a diverse world, at this point. He is still a Pharisee, and will soon be holding the cloaks, egging on the mob as they murder one of the first deacons. Paul’s story is the story of a changed heart, of a man who sought reconciliation with the very people he persecuted.

This reading, then, is the story through a Pauline lens, but it is also the story of Peter and those first disciples, that group that Jesus had called to be his partners in changing the world, in announcing the Kingdom of God. These are the men and women who watched as those threatened by the teaching of Jesus became angrier and angrier, as the scribes and Pharisees used trumped up charges to have Jesus executed, protecting their power, smug in their self-righteousness. But these disciples who watched him die are also the women and men who experienced him as alive again even after they had seen him murdered by the state, who learned more and understood more clearly for bonus forty days with him, and then, he charged them with growing the church, and he disappeared again, promising that they would have what they needed.

And there, in Jerusalem, a rush of violent wind, divided tongues, as of flame, and they were filled with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of serendipitous creativity and holy love. And the very first thing that happens is an act of translation.

If it was written today, instead of “new wine,” we might hear that they were suspected of “hitting the Beaujolais.” Peter responds that they are not drunk, but in truth, what they were saying, what Peter would say, the prophet Joel and the Spirit and blood and fire and smoky mist… it sounded like crazy talk.

Blood and fire and smoky mist, one thousand nine hundred and eighty eight years ago. Kilauea, Schlossberg, Santa Fe High School. Not much has changed.

The Jesus message hasn’t really changed either, even if some would pervert it. Those babbling voices in Jerusalem dared to tell the world that we are not caught in the hands of some fickle and cruel deity, but are the product of a God who loves, seeks, calls, who reaches out and who knows how to forgive. They dared to tell the world about this God who sides with the oppressed, who they believed knows what it is to suffer, who they had seen suffer. They dared to believe that this God loved even beyond lines of race and national origin. They dared to tell the world that what they had experienced in Jesus was love so powerful that it could not be defeated by the worst the world had to offer, petty nit-picking, raging jealousy, scapegoating and torture. They dared to believe that in a world of us vs. them, there was only us, that they are us and we are them, for that is what the rabbi taught them.

Jerusalem was both a backward hellhole at the far edge of the empire and a cosmopolitan town. Our reading gives us more than a dozen regions and languages represented among the crowd, and even in that polyglot region where so many could spoke two, three, sometimes four languages, a dozen or so is a bit much. These disciples are not diplomats or world travelers. Four of them were called from their fishing nets!

But they believed that what they had experienced in Jesus, what he had taught them, was going to change the world, could make the broken whole again. And they had the Holy Spirit.

Do you believe that message of Jesus, the example we learn from his life of love and courage, can change the world?

Pentecost, rushing winds and tongues as if of fire, is understood as the birth of the church. The church comes into existence in an act of translation. Paul would become its greatest translator, but he would not be the last. Though the act of translation would sometimes be chained to the horrors of colonialism and cultural annihilation, translation itself was an act of sharing, a gift, that basically said “Here is a way to a better life, a life that need not ever end.”

At its best, translation was both linguistic and cultural, a way to help others understand the loving God and the loving experience of God in Jesus from where they were, in words they understood. To be sure, there was mistranslation at times, the lily-white blue-eyed Jesus with flowing hair where there had once been a ruddy and dark Semitic tribesman. But prayer in house churches became great choral pieces and the soaring arches in stone and African rhythms. The backbreaking work of those in chains became a new Exodus and a cry for a Savior, as Jesus was translated into Negro spirituals and hope for freedom and justice, into the cadences of resistance in Mississippi and El Salvador. It was translated into hair metal and praise song and Christian hip-hop, and still is every day as choirs take up new pieces of music, as sacred art becomes a rainbow of doors on the front lawn or a row of white crosses.

Of course, you have to believe it to want to translate it, have to live it for the rushing wind to blow and the divided tongues to land. And that is mighty hard to do when it has become so corrupted, when it gets wrapped up in the misogyny of the Baptist leader Paige Patterson or the Islamophobia and neo-nationalist stylings of his colleague Franklin Graham or the hatred and homophobia of James Dobson or the anti-Semitism of Robert Jeffress who prayed at the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem.

These hateful angry men use our faith as a weapon against the weak and as a sort-of religious ATM where they can withdraw money and power. We can’t even get millennials in the door, for they find the Christianity in the headlines irrelevant at best, and truly disgusting most days, as flag and cross and AR-15 become interchangeable symbols of hate and division. And if we do get them in the door, we all too often refuse to speak in a language they understand, refuse the act of translation, insisting not on the deep tradition of two thousand years but on the tradition of some random point in the past that we romanticize, as if life in Christ was perfected in 1965. But life in Christ was not perfected in 1965, and the things Jesus taught and lived look nothing like what passes for Christian in this country, and we are killing our faith with our good manners and our good taste, for Jesus is dusty feet and a madman in the cemetery.

And Pentecost is babbling chaos, it is spiritual Beaujolais at 9 o’clock in the morning, it is the courage to speak a truth that startles, and it is the ability to preach the good news so that it can be heard by people who speak different languages, by those who like Bach and those who like beatbox. It is a community that is courageous enough and generous enough to learn new hymns, to embrace change, for a living faith is a changing faith. The Holy Spirit does not suddenly give all of those folks from Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, the ability to understand the language of the disciples. It is very clear… “in our own languages we hear them speaking.” The Holy Spirit does not demand that those who need Christ learn the language of church. It demands that the church learn to speak the language of those who need Christ.

Pentecost is us having the courage to say without apology that there is no Christ in the politics of hatred and oppression, and that those who wish to use our faith as a weapon have no place here. Come you sick and sinful and repent of your racism and greed and fear and homophobia. Come! Our sisters and brothers in the Northeast Harbor church say they “welcome all who welcome all,” and that should be our mantra as well, for we must not swap courageous love for comfort. We must never affirm any belief that claims one gender or one race or one nation or one way of loving or one style of music is better than the other, for Jesus is the least of these, is dancing in a pride parade and playing guitar in a coffeehouse church. And if we believe what he said, we have a lot of translating to do, a lot of good news to reclaim and to share, for there are too many bodies on the dance floor, the classroom floor, in the dust of Gaza.

People are scared and we have good news. Kilauea is gonna happen, and sadly, so too will Schlossberg. And we have good news. Are we willing to translate it?

Come Holy Spirit, in tongues, in a rushing wind. Come in power and in truth. Make us just a little crazy… crazy enough to speak love into the world.

Amen.