For All the Saints

A week ago our congregation in Sumner, Maine said, “Fare Well” and, “Godspeed” to one of the saints of the church.  

Tom Bragg was just a month shy of his 93^rd birthday.  Serving as sexton of our local cemetery, he had completed the last mowing of the season the week before he died, and his list of remaining chores included weed-whacking around the stones, and rototilling and sowing winter rye on the 100’ x 100’ pumpkin and veggie garden at the church.  A man of deep faith, Tom served as Deacon, and Trustee over the years, and was out in front of about every major church project.  His advice when one of his sons asked about ageing was, “Don’t get old.  They’ll try to talk you into it, but don’t let them.”

This week on All Saint’s Sunday, we will lay to rest another of the saints.  George Jarvi, age 90, led a more private life than Tom, but he was no less a practitioner of the faith.

Both men were, as they say, generous to a fault, freely sharing the produce of their gardens with anyone in need, and likewise the meat they raised or the results of their hunting.  They didn’t hesitate to speak of their faith, but never pushed it in ways that put down or demeaned others.  They were genuinely humble, and had bone-dry senses of humor with which they could make a point, be self-deprecating and very funny, all in a few well-chosen words.

 

In this age of self-absorption, when awkward traffic situations too often lead to incidents of road rage, George once used that humor to defuse a situation that could easily have gotten out of hand.  It was a hot summer day, and George’s car overheated on a busy bridge over the Androscoggin River.  While he was trying to get it started, a Cadillac pulled up behind him, driven by a large florid-faced man who, while chomping on his cigar, leaned on the horn, and blew it without letting up.  George calmly walked over to the car, and in a friendly tone of voice said, “I’m having a devil of a time trying to get this thing going.  I wonder if you’d be willing to go over and give it a try – I can stay here and keep your horn blowing.”  The honking ceased.

Two of the saints, but that’s a widely misunderstood word, so perhaps I ought to explain what I mean.  In the New Testament the word (Hagios), which is translated “saint,” signifies "separation to God," or putting God first, and is used of all believers, not just of certain exceptional characters we could call “Super Believers.”  By this definition, Tom and George are two of the saints, in that their lives testified to their love and trust in God.  Neither was perfect, but each of them understood his imperfection and sought to move beyond it.  With the rest of the gathered community of faith they did things they ought not to have done, and left undone things they ought to have done.  They had moments of strong conviction and belief, and moments of doubt and wondering.  It is of people like this that Paul and others write in the numerous references to “the saints” that are sprinkled throughout the letters of the New Testament.

Recovering this word, and the corresponding sense of our churches as communities of saints could go a long way toward drawing us out of the sense of malaise that afflicts many churches.  After all, there is a big difference between seeing our churches as voluntary associations defined by membership, and communities of disciples growing into the love of God as seen in Jesus Christ.  In the first instance our church connection is one more community commitment among many.  In the second, our commitment to live and pray and work together as the body of Christ can give shape and meaning to the living of our lives.  Understanding who the saints really are can relieve us of the fear that we are not good enough, and it can save us from exaggerating our own self-importance.  We do this trusting that Christ calls us to bring our imperfect lives together, to be re-formed by him, and used by him to change whatever corner of the world we inhabit, be it large or small.

There is a song written in England in 1929 that captures this understanding of the saints.  The writer, Lesbia Scott, was a young mother in her twenties, who wrote a number of hymns for her children, to help them understand some of the basic concepts of the Christian Faith.  It is usually sung to a bouncy tune, and while the lyrics show the song’s English origin, it is actually better known on this side of the Atlantic than in the United Kingdom.  It captures for children what I’m saying here for adults:

I Sing A Song of the Saints of God

I sing a song of the saints of God,


Patient and brave and true,


Who toiled and fought and lived and died


For the Lord they loved and knew.


And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,


And one was a shepherdess on the green;


They were all of them saints of God, and I mean,


God helping, to be one too.

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,


And his love made them strong;


And they followed the right for Jesus' sake 


The whole of their good lives long.


And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,


And one was slain by a fierce wild beast;


And there's not any reason, no, not the least,


Why I shouldn't be one too.

They lived not only in ages past,


There are hundreds of thousands still.


The world is bright with the joyous saints


Who love to do Jesus' will.


You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,


In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;


For the saints of God are just folk like me,


And I mean to be one too.

An alternate third verse, found in some hymn books, aims to relate more readily to North American language and society:

They lived not only in ages past;


There are hundreds of thousands still.


The world is bright with the joyous saints


Who love to do Jesus' will.


You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store,


In church, by the sea, in the house next door;


They are saints of God, whether rich or poor,


And I mean to be one too.

This weekend may we celebrate the lives of the Saints, great and small alike.

Howard MacMullen

© November, 2013

Capability Church

After an unusually wet August and early September our part of Maine is experiencing some very pleasant autumn weather.  There’s been a hint of frost on a couple of nights, but no damage to late-season veggies and flowers.  Above all, the ground is beginning to dry out, which means we’ll be able to till it and prepare for winter.  Part of this process is cutting grass, which is growing thick and green, thanks to the extra rain and humidity.

This is all part of a seasonal cycle, much more familiar to our forebears than it ordinarily is to us.  Having grown up in the country I have a sense of the cycle, but that sense became dulled through years of living and working in suburban and urban communities.  Now in partial retirement, living on the farm where my wife grew up, and helping her bring its gardens back to life, I find the sense of the old rhythms returning.  I also find that reading on gardening and related subjects yields some surprising insights.

One of these reads is Michael Pollan’s book Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education.  In Second Nature Pollan, whose overall knowledge of gardening is encyclopedic, focuses on the placement of gardens on any given property.  Rather than creating a single garden for everything, and then mowing everything else, Pollan suggests looking carefully at the totality of the land available, be it a quarter-acre or extensive fields and woods.  Once you know what you want to grow, he suggests finding the best place to put each planting, with lawn, trees and bushes placed to tie the whole together.  Describing all this, Pollan draws on the ideas of the eighteenth century English landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown.

Brown’s designs created the grounds of such estates as Blenheim Palace, Warwick Castle, Kew Gardens and Highclere Castle, the latter better known to PBS fans as Downton Abbey.  Brown earned the nickname “Capability” not for his personal talent, which was enormous, but for his approach to each property he designed.  “What,” he would ask, “is the capability of this place?”  Should this little hill be cleared or magnified?  Should that little brook lead into a pond, or its course be widened to create a small river?  Should the flower gardens be set off by a narrow lawn that draws the eye past the flowers to the valley beyond?  Can the kitchen garden enhance the house, or would a line of shrubs between them do a better job of showing the house to advantage?  Each property is unique, and what works for one will not do for its neighbor.  Brown’s ideas were controversial at the time, and they certainly do not fit with the uniformity demanded in some of our neighborhoods today.  However, a walk about the properties in which he had a hand is never a dull experience; you come away with a strong sense of place.  I find myself drawing on his ideas as we work to create new gardens here in Maine.

Lately Capability Brown’s approach has been in my thinking about church planning.  At first glance this may seem a wildly unrelated connection, but please bear with me. 

Drawing on many years of planning and assessment exercises in a number of different churches I’m familiar with the usual approaches.  We seek God’s guidance to discover what we ought to do in order to better flourish as a congregation.  We often delegate this task to an ad hoc committee convened for the purpose, and then have the committee report back to the congregation, which may or may not vote on proposals.  Is our committee structure right?  Do we have activities for everyone?  Is the worship vital, and do people “relate” to it?  Are the pastor’s sermons the kind we need (or want)?  Are we getting enough pledges, and are people giving enough?  How can we increase giving?  Does the building need work, and how can we pay for that?  Are new people coming to church, and how can we attract more?  How about outreach?  Will that bring in new members?  What missions do we support?  And why?

These are all perfectly valid questions, though many of them betray deep anxiety over money.  We answer them, define ways to implement recommendations and, depending on how committed we are to seeing them through, they serve as a way of steering our course for the next few years.  The approach can be helpful, though in truth it seldom issues in passionate recommitment.

But suppose we took a page from Capability Brown?  We would begin in prayer, seeking direction, looking for ways to meet our needs as a gathered community, and hopefully to articulate a vision.  The next step, however, would not be to survey the congregation to determine their perspectives on what we’re doing right and what we need to change.  Instead, we’d look at our total picture, and ask the question, “What are the capabilities of this gathering of God’s people in this time and place?”

Who are we?  What is our faith like?  Are we highly verbal people?  Are we doers?  Are we prayers?  What are our occupations, and what do we do for recreation?  How many of us grew up here, and how many come from other places?  How often do people move?  What skills and talents do we know about?  How can we encourage people to tell us about those skill and talents we’re not aware of?  How many of us are there?  These and similar questions can help us create a portrait of who we are.

Then there’s the matter of where we are.  What is our town like? Are we a city church, a suburban church, a small town church or a rural church?  Are we an acknowledged part of the local scene, and if so what’s our reputation?

If we have a building, what’s it like?  Is it big, small or in between?  How many rooms are there, and what use do we make of them?  Are we on a postage stamp of land or do we have several acres, and in either case what do we do with the land?

As we answer these and similar questions we’ll begin to see a picture of who we are, where we are and what spiritual and physical resources we have at our disposal.  From this picture we can begin to sense what our capabilities are, and seeing those we can gain a vision of how our particular gathering of individuals, in our town or city, with the resources we have available in the present time, can serve God and our neighbors in ways that show forth the love of God and neighbor with authenticity.  Notice that the thrust of this approach is fundamentally positive.  Discovering the capabilities of people and church we attest that God has brought together these very individuals in this time and place for a purpose.  These capabilities, guided by the Holy Spirit of God can form the basis for a unique witness to the love of Christ, and in the process members and congregation can flourish in the light of that love.

Howard MacMullen

© October, 2013

Summertime Youth Mission Trips – Why?

In late July a group of eight senior high students and four adult advisors drove 700 miles from Fredericksburg, Virginia to Sumner, Maine to spend a week staffing a vacation Bible school, participating in community service projects, studying scripture and, of course, sightseeing.

This was the fourth year that the youth group from the Spotsylvania Presbyterian Church joined with the Congregational Church of East Sumner, U.C.C.  Each year’s visit leaves the youth and the church members looking forward to doing it all over again the following summer.  Rumor has it that some of the kids want to come and stay!

As pastor of the Sumner church have a front row seat to the Spotsy/Sumner connection.  It is but one example of what I see as a promising development in youth ministry.  Teams of youth and adults from churches all over the country combine concrete community service in the church’s name with fellowship and spiritual growth.  In New England it is common to find youth groups organize and raise funds to travel to small towns in Appalachia, urban ministries in major cities and Native American communities in the west.  The flavor and focus of each project is necessarily unique to the church sending the team and the receiving community.  In our case we host youth from the south, who come north to share their faith, their energy and themselves.  Youth and adults, visitors and residents alike gain new perspectives on the world, and new understandings of the role personal faith plays in giving time, talent and energy to others.

Time was, such trips were criticized as expensive indulgences on the part of well-heeled “do-gooders” who brought an attitude of superiority to the “service” they offered persons and groups they thought of as inferior.  There may have been some validity to such criticisms, and there’s no way of knowing if such attitudes are present in some of today’s projects, but I see none of that in the Spotsy/Sumner visits.  Talking with persons leading other trips, I believe that in recent years mission groups commit themselves to meeting others as partners, doing projects that help people, and also spend time building personal friendships and relationships between communities.

But what about the expenses?  These things do cost money.  What about continuity?  How can programs be conducted in such a way that relationships are ongoing?  And what does mounting such a project have to do with growing in faith? 

During this year’s Spotsy/Sumner event, Tim Habecker, leader of the group from Virginia, interviewed Bill Glass, President of the Congregation in Sumner.  In it Bill talks about the two facets of a successful partnership: the service offered to a small church, and the learning given in return to the youth and adults making the trip.  The interview isn’t long, but it sums up very well the things that have made the past four years memorable, and has us looking forward to what we may do next year.

The link below will take you to a YouTube posting of their conversation.  There is some background noise, so you’ll need to turn your volume up.

Howard MacMullen

© August, 2013

Click here to see the video interview

Beach Stones and God’s People

There is something soothing about the sound of a beach, especially at night.

On a sand beach, the waves have a particular timbre, and the hiss of receding water develops a distinct rhythm. The same sounds that encourage us to unwind are also hard at work. We have a sand-glazed bottle that we found on a sand dune on Cape Cod. Seasons of washing in the tide and sandblasting by the wind removed all indication of what came in the bottle, and left a simple thing of beauty.

On the rocky beach where we go in Maine the waves boom against ledges, the boom followed by soft clattering as millions of tiny stones are rolled together up and down the shore. It’s a sound that induces almost immediate relaxation, but here again the strength of wind and wave are at work. Starting off as rough chunks of granite, quartz or perhaps jasper, the action of the waves tumbles the stones together, wearing off the rough edges, shaping them in infinite variety, and polishing them to a high degree of smoothness. The abrasion of stone upon stone turns chunks of rocks into objects of great beauty.

Some years ago someone pointed out to me that a stone beach in Maine can show us something important about Christian community. We come into the church, all of us, from different families and places, each of us bringing our own particularities. We look different. We work at different vocations. We have different tastes, different skills; we have different abilities and different disabilities. All this difference, with one thing in common: at some level each of us wants to find meaning, hope, and purpose in our lives. We want to know where we fit in the overall scheme of things.  In short, we want to know God. All these differences, and we find ourselves together on the same beach, which we call “church.”

This is not to deny that life in community can be challenging, and even that it can take an unhealthy turn.  In 42 years of pastoral ministry I’ve seen plenty of challenge, and experienced my share of conflict to boot.  Now it’s perfectly true that conflict within our churches can get out of hand, and people can get hurt.  Additionally, it makes a very poor witness to those standing outside, who far too often conclude that if the latest scrum at First Church by the Village Green is a sample of Christianity in action, then they want no part of either.  But it is also in the difficult times that God moves to transform us, and perhaps that’s what we need to continually recall.  Christian community is not about growing us into nicer people; it’s about changing us into new beings.

Just as the particular beauty of each rock on the beach is drawn forth by the washing and rubbing of the tide, so the give and take, push and pull, yes even the abrasion of being together as church can wear off our edges, bring out our colors and shape the form of our Christian witness.  Sometimes it’s a refreshing tumble as we roll in the surf. Sometimes there is pressure as the needs of the moment pile us together. Sometimes we experience the abrasion of rubbing against the ideas and priorities of others.  But if we stay engaged and connected to one another, our life as God’s people will change us from lonely, isolated chunks of rock into unique stones of great beauty.  This is possible if we keep our eyes on what we have in common: our faith, and our desire to live it.  We can be together, can be rolled about like the stones on the beach, and in the process be shaped and grown as new persons and as renewing congregations.

Howard MacMullen

© August, 2013

Recreation? Yes! But Don’t Forget Re-Creation!

Summer is here, and in our part of the world the whole pace of life changes. 

“Triple-H” weather slows us down, forces us to reconsider the urgency of things, and reminds us that we are creatures, after all, and subject to creaturely limitations.  It’s not by accident that most people arrange for vacations in the summer.

The church year is affected, as members take advantage of the opportunity to get away, spend time with immediate family, reconnect with friends in far places and nurture ties to family in other parts of the country. 

During my first years in the ministry I tried to fight the annual slowdown.  After all, God doesn’t take a break.  Why should we?  Various friends suggested to me that they found God on the Cape, up in the mountains, inhabiting islands off the Maine coast, or even Out West.  At first I was skeptical: “Oh sure - God just happens to approve your favorite vacation spot!”

Then it hit me - God does approve.  Even more than the spots we might choose, God approves of our breaking our routines, resting from the frantic pace we maintain during most of the year and opening ourselves to a time in which we rest and renew relationships.  The God who declared the Sabbath day as a time of rest, for our benefit surely sees in our summer times of rest an opportunity to recreate us, to refresh us on our journeys.

The key, I have come to believe, is to make a distinction between recreation and re-creation.  Each has its place, and they often take place at the same time, but they are not identical.

Recreation is activity undertaken for the sheer pleasure of it.  It’s for cultivating an interest, for doing something that’s just plain fun.  It’s for the joy of being with people we love and care about.  Recreation breaks us out of our ruts.  It reminds us that there is more to life than just putting one foot in front of another.   Then there’s re-creation.  Re-creation is what happens when we seek God’s presence in the activities of our life, including our recreational times.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, for many years Pastor of Riverside Church in New York, is said to have had a standard reply to parishioners who came to him in June to explain that they would not be in church until the fall. The reason, they often said, was that they felt very close to God on the golf course.  “Wonderful!” Fosdick would exclaim, “But could you do me one favor?  I’m writing a book called Golfers’ Prayers, and it would mean a lot if you would write some of yours down so I could include them.”

Gotcha!  Yes, but there’s more than meets the eye.  Fosdick had a serious pastoral goal in his reply.  Rather than argue about whether God was more available on the ninth hole than in church, he suggested that in fact God is present wherever we might be...yea, even on the fairway, and in fact ought to be acknowledged.

It’s a simple thing, really.  We declare that God is the Lord of life; so all the world is filled with Divine presence.  We believe that Jesus came to give us new life, and that his coming was so our joy might be complete; so we should expect to encounter him in the things we love to do and the people we love to be with.

This summer, open your eyes to find our Lord’s presence in the things you do to relax.  Try your hand at a golfer’s prayer.  Or a fisherman’s.  Or a hiker’s, or boater’s, or driver’s or reader’s.  Ask God to use your down time for re-creation as well as recreation.  Go to church in the places where you vacation, and if you want to, drop me a line here at the blog (tospeakofgod@gmail.com) - if enough of you do I’ll post a collection in September.  Meantime, may your summer be truly blessed!

Howard MacMullen

© June, 2013

Is Your God Too Small?

This spring’s bombing at the Boston Marathon, the earlier shootings in Newtown, CT, and our society’s collective reactions to them, sent me back recently to a book by the English author J. B. Phillips entitled Your God Is Too Small.

Writing in the 50's, Phillips, a clergyman and scholar, surveyed a world wracked by two decades of economic depression and world war, and concluded that the spiritual complaints of many persons were the result of their believing in a “small” or at least “inadequate” God.  Most, he noted, were attempting to navigate the trials and challenges of adult life with an understanding of God they once acquired in Sunday School, but never updated as they grew older and had to deal with the complications and complexities of life.  A concept of God that is helpful to an elementary school child, living in a reasonably safe environment, is simply not adequate to an adult facing unemployment, war, or terminal illness.

Phillips identified a collection of lesser gods that seemed to reside in the minds of parishioners or students as a prelude to his description of the God we know in Christianity.  Among the diminutive pantheon were the Great Disappointer, the Grand Old Man, the Parental Hangover, the Pale Galilean, and the Surly Judge.  Rereading these pages, I noticed that some of these lesser gods are still alive and well, though others have arisen to reflect changing times.  In fact, it struck me that the time may be right to revisit Phillip’s insights, possibly under the title “Your God Is Still Too Small”.  Let’s visit two of our contemporary micro deities.

One of our era’s more prevalent could be called The Indulgent-And-Protective Grandparent.  In keeping with the spirit of the times, the Grandparent may be of either gender, infinitely understanding, and tolerant of our personal idiosyncrasies.  Above all else, the Grandparent is comfortable to have around.  This benevolent spirit may have house rules, but knows full well that no one is going to keep them, so as long as the violations are not mean-spirited, nothing will be said.

Protective as well as indulgent, the Grandparent is usually imagined to be “watching over” us, and if we happen to get into a nasty scrape, we look to this protective quality to get us out unscathed.

The Grandparent is adequate to sunny days and warm weather.  When life is moving forward on an even keel the sense of this indulgent, protective presence can be reassuring.  However, it is not fit for the trials of life.  I once visited a person dying of lung cancer, still chain-smoking, and asking with apparent sincerity, “How can God let this happen?”  The individual whose evenings always included a few highballs, and blames God for liver failure, and the adulterer who believes God should “make” a wounded spouse come back, are invoking the same Indulgent and Protective Grandparent, who should be willing to overlook behavior and fix up consequences.

Another in the pantheon is The Personal Bodyguard.  One thing we moderns crave is absolute physical security.  My personal guess is that this craving has grown in direct proportion to the modern world’s loss of faith in an existence beyond this life.  If what we have now is all we get, then it makes sense to want as much as we can have for as long as we can have it.  In such a world, what gods there are ought to be in the business of making sure we get every possible minute.

Followers look to the Personal Bodyguard to fend off everything from tornados and floods, to random violence and directed attacks.  Such a hero-god is expected to make distinctions between good people and bad, as well as between adults who have had a good life and children and youth who are just getting started.  Because all people die, believers in the Bodyguard are stuck with the idea that each death or injury is the direct result of the Bodyguard deciding not to protect this or that person.  If that is what we expect God to do, it is inevitable that persons who believe in the Bodyguard are always and everywhere raising the plaintive cry, “Why?”

Both the Grandparent and the Bodyguard are based on the assumption that God is benevolent, and desires good for people.  So far, so good - Christianity agrees.  But both ideas fly against the clearest imaginable cautions of scripture.  To those who want a god of endless indulgence, Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets.  I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17)

When people complained that innocent lives were lost in the collapse of a tower, he answered that such disasters befall good and evil people alike (Luke 13:4).  He told another crowd that rain (which can be either a blessing or a flood) falls on all regardless of who they are (Matthew 5:45).  These are not isolated proof-texts, but representative examples of what Jesus taught.  His message, in other words, was that we live in a dangerous world where good and bad things happen to all sorts of people.  Violations of the physical or moral laws do have consequences, but equally important, there are bad experiences, which are neither the punishment nor the failure of God.

How many more lesser gods are common to our time? And how can we describe the real God?  Send along your own nominations by email:  tospeakofgod@gmail.com.  Ferreting out these poorly defined, but inadequate substitutes is a step toward reflecting seriously on the fully adequate God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  Stay tuned – more thoughts, perhaps yours, will appear from time to time in future posts.

Howard MacMullen

©May, 2013

Note:  Your God is Too Small, by J.B. Phillips, can still be found, and is even available for Kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=J.B.+Phillips+your+god+is+too+small

A New Start – Babel Reversed

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. …Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, …The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, … And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them."...So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth… Therefore its [the city] name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the earth, and … scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Excerpted from Genesis 11:1-9 (NRSV)

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.  And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.  Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.  And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.  And they were amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?  And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?

Acts 2:1-8

The story of the Towel of Babel, one many of us have known since we attended Sunday school, has inspired monumental paintings and epic poems.  Its meaning is quite simple: human cleverness gives birth to pride of accomplishment, which grows into arrogance and a desire to displace God.  In the elegantly simple account preserved in Genesis, God confuses the tongues of humankind, and scatters the builders of the tower abroad, to save them from a presumption that could destroy them.

On Pentecost God reverses the process.  In the wake of Christ's triumph over sin and death, the Holy Spirit infuses the followers of Jesus with the capacity and will to carry the Good News to the far reaches of the earth.

With a sound like a mighty rushing wind, the gathered Apostles suddenly begin to declare the great deeds of God in languages other than their own.  Within minutes a crowd assembles.  Foreign visitors hear the message in their own languages, and while some don’t understand what is happening, others become followers on the spot.

Babel is undone, and Peter sees in the wind and flame the fulfillment of the words of the prophet Joel, who foresaw a day when the Spirit of God would be poured out upon many, a new era would begin and God’s New Creation would spread out upon the earth.

These two events, Babel and Pentecost, speak to us at three levels: they present a cautionary tale, followed by a foundational principle of life, and then offer a great hope.

The cautionary tale warns us that there is, within our humanness, a spirit that wants to become a substitute for God.  In our time this spirit encourages us to lay aside the God revealed in Jesus Christ.   We are invited to “reimagine” our faith in ways more pleasing to our individual personalities, or perhaps to fashion for ourselves gods that accommodate our individual quirks and demand nothing we are unready to give.  If we want to be done with faith altogether we can proceed into a totally secular future without any gods.  Paul describes this impulse to his protégé Timothy:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.

2 Timothy 4:3,4

Babel's fate tells us that this is the road to destruction.

The foundational principle is that while human pride and arrogance are ultimately destructive, faithful humility and a genuine desire to be of service to God are ultimately honored.  The error of Babel was the people’s desire to occupy heaven, the country of God, and make it over according to their own vision.  By contrast, the Apostles followed Jesus' command that they not begin their mission until he sent the Holy Spirit to guide them in God's Way rather than their own ways.  Their obedience resulted in success beyond all their dreams.

The great hope is that if we resist the spirits of the age, and seek instead to serve the purposes of God, there is available to us wisdom, strength and direction to do more for God than we could possibly do on our own or in service of other gods.  If we seek first the Kingdom of God, and its righteousness, the rest will follow, for the same Spirit who descended at Pentecost is our promised Companion until the end of the world.

Howard MacMullen

© May 2013