Journey's Weekly Homilies

Homily by Tom Kinzie
Pentecost Sunday May 19, 2002

Our lives are in God and God is in our lives.  This means that we are a people open to change as we live our lives more and more out of the reality of God’s presence.  When we are no longer able to change our faith is dead or dying.  But if we are alive to growth and change we say we live in the Spirit and the Spirit lives in us.  This Spirit is, in the image of Genesis, the breath of God, that animating and life-giving source among us and in us.  So, on this Sunday we celebrate not some abstract doctrine but something very practical.  For we are asking together, we are wondering together, in the truest sense of that word, how and where when this Spirit will lead us in our daily lives.

I think that one of most important biblical passages about the Spirit may well be this one from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control . . . If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.” This completely moves us from the theoretical to the practical.  It would be a mistake to think, however, that practical knowledge is any easier to obtain than theoretical or abstract knowledge.

There is a story about a young monk who was experiencing difficulty in fulfilling his monastic vocation.  The honeymoon phase was over,  The initial joy and excitement of being in his new life had worn off.  All he could see now was the repetitious, monotonous, day after day recitation of the Psalter stretching out before him like an endless freeway drive through a barren and uninteresting landscape (or Eastern Montana for that matter).  So, the monk, fearing he had lost his vocation, went to one of the wise elders of the monastery, a man renowned for his sanctity and for his many, many years in the community.  The old monk heard the young monk out and then responded with gentleness and not a little cussedness.  “Don’t worry,” said the old monk, “the first fifty years are the hardest.”

I have reached the age where such advice is beginning to make sense.  I don’t mean that I am any wiser than I used to be.  Perhaps, I no longer make the mistakes I used to make or at least I don’t make them as often as I used to. But the ones I do make now seem to be whoppers!  When I attempt to look at the problems that seem to keep reappearing I think there is one central thing that is the crux of the matter.  It has to do with control.  It is the attempt to tighten the boundaries around my life at the very moment when giving up control would be the most powerful and most helpful thing I could do.  Why?  Control is the attempt to put firm boundaries around our lives.  It is an attempt to limit the damage.  It tries to make it seem that after all we really knew what we doing and it couldn't’t have been only our fault that things didn't’t turn out to well.   Or, it tries to convey the message that it doesn't’t really matter too much, anyway.  All of that ends up as only erecting fences that keep out damage, perhaps, but unfortunately it can also keep grace out as well.  Being firmly in control at all times, and especially in those times of pain and struggle, hinders the free flow of grace and the power of the Spirit to bring about personal and corporate transformation.  It means that we do not trust the Spirit to provide what is needed in our lives at the very moment we most need the Spirit in our lives.

Wisdom teachers throughout the ages have suggested that the surest Spiritual path is to walk through the troubles we face rather that to protect ourselves from them.  I take it this is not about pretending those troubles are not there.  It is not about blinding or isolating ourselves or imagining this world is always a wonderful place when it so clearly isn't’t.  Rather, the wisdom of the ages is that any emotional or spiritual system that has as its first aim protection of the self inevitably fails. It doesn't’t get us to some new place we need in our lives.   Required is what Richard Rohr calls learning to breathe under water.  It is that difficult.  Believe me when I say it is not what I usually want to hear.

Only the Spirit will lead us to a new place in life.  Only in the Spirit will we have enough emotional and moral expansiveness or openness to live in a different and new way.  Defensiveness and tactics of self-protection constrict our lives.  We get rigid.  We tense for the first or next blow.  But the Spirit calls us to drop our guard and walk out past the sentries posted at the borders of our hearts.

Let me give just one example: Jesus says that we are to love our enemies.  Clearly, this is a fundamental shift in ordinary human consciousness.  Think of a person you really cannot stand, not some abstract person, but a real life and blood person.  Think of how angry, how anxious, how restrained you have often felt around that particular person.  Think of how that person has hurt you or humiliated you or angered you.  (Let alone how you have done the same thing to him or her.)  And then think of what Jesus suggests should be our central attitude towards this person.  Jesus calls us to be in a relationship of unconditional love to that very person. It certainly does mean exchanging the need for control for the gift of acceptance.  I suspect that this is nothing we will be able to accomplish on our own without the presence of the Spirit freeing us each step of the way.

Recently I read a suggestion that we ought to have in our minds and hearts one specific person and that we ought to practice this loving of enemies with this one particular person for three months.  I believe it is even harder than it sounds.   It does make me think that the word “practice” is key here.  To be a person in the Spirit will require much practice; it’s nothing we get all at once.  For some of us, the first fifty years will be the hardest.  I thought of this when visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C. recently.

As I walked into the densely, dark atmosphere of the museum I was apprehensive.  The stark outline of human evil was already pressing upon me though I had just entered the building.  I was handed an identification card with a photo of Jeno Katz, a Hungarian Jew who died at Auschwitz in 1944, at the age of 50.  What a poignant but important action this is by the museum, to make the story of the holocaust, about the 6 million murdered, also specifically about this one person, Jeno Katz, near my age when he was destroyed by the Nazi’s.  About this one person at least, the museum seems to be saying, you are not allowed to leave here with only an abstraction.

There is, near the end of the museum, a section devoted to the rescuers of Jews, those who in holocaust literature are termed “The Righteous.”  It must be emphasized that they represent a very small minority of people, including Christians, who might have made a difference before and during those terrible years.  But again and again, when the rescuers were asked why they did what they did to hide, save, or speak out for Jews, the answer was simply, “What else?” or “Anyone would have done the same.”  But of course it wasn't’t simple and not just anyone did it.

There is the famous example of the French village of La Cherbon where almost the entire population of Hugenots from that area, led by their pastor, saved the lives of thousands of Jews. “The Chambonais hid Jews in their homes, sometimes for as long as four years, provided them with forged I.D. and ration cards, and helped them over the border to safety in Switzerland. With their history of persecution as a religious minority in Catholic France, empathy for Jews as the people of the Old Testament, and the powerful leadership and example of their pastor and his wife, Andre and Magda Trocme, the people of Chambon acted on their conviction that it was their duty to help their "neighbors" in need.  The Chambonais rejected any labeling of their behavior as heroic. They said: ‘Things had to be done and we happened to be there to do them. It was the most natural thing in the world to help these people.’ After the round-up and deportation of Jews in Paris in July 1942, Pastor Trocme had delivered a sermon to his parishioners, ‘The Christian Church should drop to its knees and beg pardon of God for its present incapacity and cowardice.’”

I wonder how much practice of living in the Spirit those parishioners had had prior to that moment of crisis and discipleship?  I wonder if they had somehow found it important to walk in the Spirit in all moments of their lives, the large and the small moments, so that when a time of great trial and danger emerged, they already knew what to do?

We celebrate this Sunday the birth of the church and in that birth the blessing in our lives of the proximity of the Spirit.  This is a Spirit of Life in a culture too much accustomed to death.  This Spirit is a gift of God and the presence of Jesus in our midst, a way of love and justice in world so caught up with the massive building of the emotional and physical armaments of self-preservation.  And yet, we can practice to live our lives differently and the proof of this difference will simply be this: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.