Renew and Replenish

2024-34
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The Day of Pentecost (Year B), May 19, 2024
Acts 2:1-21 ; Psalm 104:25-35, 37 ; Romans 8:22-27 ; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Yesterday, hundreds of Episcopalians from all over Western Washington descended on St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle to elect our next bishop. And the winner is …

… wait. What’s this “winner” stuff? This wasn’t a presidential election; it was a discernment process. I know, the distinction might be invisible to most. But that difference matters, because properly understood, this bishop election was not a competition. It was about listening for the presence and movement of the Holy Spirit and then responding.

But we’ll come back to that. First I want to share a classic Charles Schulz Peanuts cartoon with you.

Lucy comes into the room and sees Linus, who looks alarmed. “Oh, no!” he bursts out. “Not again!”

“What in the world is the matter with you?” Lucy asks.

“I’m aware of my tongue!”

“You’re what?!”

“I’m aware of my tongue …” Linus explains. “It’s an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel all lumped up …”

“That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard!”

“I can’t help it … I can’t put it out of my mind … I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren’t thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth … now it feels all lumped up again … the more I try to put it out of my mind, the more I think about it …”

“Good grief!” Lucy groans and walks away. But I’m sure you know what’s coming. Lucy stops in her tracks. “Oh, no!!”

She rushes back to Linus in a rage: “I oughta knock your block off!”[1]

Our mouths are never empty. We just don’t tend to think about it all the time. But if your tongue were missing … you’d know.

I guarantee that no preacher has ever made this comparison before, but I think the Holy Spirit is … like the tongue in our mouths. She is there all the time. She is functioning all the time. Without her we’d be in big trouble. But most of the time, we don’t think about her presence.

(I’m choosing she/her pronouns for the Holy Spirit today, but as I’ve pointed out in other sermons, you can use any pronouns you like for her. Others have done so as well, all the way back!)

You know, when many people look for evidence of God’s existence, they’re looking outward. Where is this celestial old man in the sky with a big beard and lightning bolts in hand? I don’t see him. But over the years I’ve stopped looking out there for God. When I look out there I see lots of wonderful things and lots of frightening things, but none of it necessarily points to an outside deity working to create all that is.

Over the years I’ve begun looking … well, inside myself to some degree, but that’s not a good enough image. More like … underneath. Behind. As if the universe in all its dimensions were a tapestry being woven by someone we can’t see. Theologian Paul Tillich talked about God as “the ground of all being.” We’re here, aren’t we? We’re aware, aren’t we? And becoming aware of God’s presence is a little like becoming aware of my tongue—it brings wonder and awe, and it’s not always comfortable!

On top of this, my specific experiences of love and joy have convinced me that we are not mere robots working out a predetermined program, but individual creatures with free will. I perceive that we are being urged, from behind the tapestry, to be in relationship with one another, to reach out beyond our fears, to provide for each other’s needs. Those needs include basic love and acceptance. They also include food and safety—the things that keep us alive and functioning in the universe as it is. We are to provide these for one another.

Today is the Day of Pentecost, known colloquially as the birthday of the Church. We hear that on this day, the Holy Spirit swept into Jerusalem with fierce purpose. And we hear apocalyptic language, as Peter quotes from the Prophet Joel. The language of apocalypse can be dire and frightening, or it can be uplifting and hopeful … or even both at once. We might see Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones this way … if the valley is full of bones, that means everybody’s dead. But if the bones come back to life, how can we even rely on the laws of physics anymore? What wondrous new things might God have in store for us? As today’s psalm puts it: “You send forth your spirit and they are created—and so you renew the face of the earth.”

And so we find on Pentecost that the Holy Spirit is the one who destroys all our carefully crafted stories. We show up with our own agendas, only to find that the Spirit has a completely different agenda that none of us could have imagined! The Holy Spirit is the chaos that clarifies. When she shows up in force, she will replenish us—and that literally means “to fill us up again.”

Why does this not happen all the time? Why does God not smooth out the universe immediately and make everything perfect? I don’t know. We don’t know. As the disciples waited for the Holy Spirit, so do we wait. We hope for what we don’t yet see, and we do our best to wait for it with patience.

Maybe, during our times of waiting, the Holy Spirit sits with us. Maybe as the disciples waited for the Holy Spirit, they simply weren’t aware of their tongues.

Maybe if we make a regular practice of quieting ourselves, we’ll come to recognize the Holy Spirit right here among us, as present as the tongues in our mouths.

Maybe then we won’t be able to keep our tongues still. Because they won’t feel all lumpy if we’re using them to speak!

Maybe sharing our experience of the Holy Spirit’s presence is exactly what the world needs right now, for renewal and replenishment. When we trust the Spirit to give us words, we’ll find we’re able to speak in ways that others can understand—even when their experience and culture and language are very different from our own.

And maybe, as we mature in our faith, we find ourselves better able to recognize the presence and action of the Holy Spirit not only in chaos, but also in moments of calm. We may find an increased tolerance for God’s kind of chaos as well, because it brings joy even through uncertainty—love even through times of great upheaval and pain and loss of control.

Ideally, we Christians spend all our lives getting better at exactly this sort of thing: recognizing the Holy Spirit’s presence and action. Yet no matter how much we say—and believe—that the Holy Spirit is working through the Church, that doesn’t mean that everything the Church does is blessed by God. Instead, it means that God decided, in all that odd divine wisdom, to involve us human beings in the salvation, reconciliation, and sanctification of the world. And we have every right to disagree with God’s judgment and trust in our abilities.

But from where I’m standing, it appears to be exactly what’s been going on all this time. God created a world that just keeps on changing. We didn’t ask to be born into it, but here we are. With every breath and every heartbeat, we are riding the waves of change—of a temporary world splashing through the sea of God’s eternity. There’s a beginning and end for every one of us and for the entire project. But here we find ourselves today, with a newly elected bishop. It is a time of new beginnings.

And—oh yeah—I haven’t said who we elected yet. I’d like to invite all of you to pray for the Rev. Phil LaBelle, who with his wife Melissa will move to Washington State over the summer. The consecration of our bishop-elect is slated for September 14 at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue … and everyone’s invited!



May this time of rapid change bring us through uncertainty and into renewal—through fear and into replenishment. May we all be filled with the Holy Spirit, as the original apostles were on that Day of Pentecost. And may the Spirit make us aware of our tongues—so that we, too, may use them to speak Good News to all who have ears to hear! Amen.

  [1] Charles Schulz, Peanuts, February 3, 1963.