Come like a mighty wind, and cleanse us
Come like fire and burn away our dross.
So went part of a prayer from the 7th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches meeting in Canberra, Australia in 1991. That Assembly created quite a horrified stir among some of the Christian denominations, particularly the more creedal and liturgical branches of Christianity attending the Assembly because aboriginal peoples moved through the crowd in the great tent of meeting beating their drums, using smoke in ways that derived from their so-called “pagan” past.
Another speaker at that Assembly told of her Chinese heritage myths and rituals, and dared to connect them to the same God that western cultures worshiped. She outraged many who felt that she had violated the “pure” and “doctrinally correct” way of worshipping and thinking about Christianity.
In 1733-34 in North Hampton, Massachusetts, among Puritans not known for religious enthusiasms, a revival began that was to become known as the First Great American Revival. From the preaching of Jonathan Edwards (which would put most people today to sleep inside of 10 minutes), religious stirrings began. Edwards believed it was the work of the Holy Spirit and vindication of “sound doctrine”, says the great historian of American religion, Sydney Ahlstrom.
And we ourselves, as Disciples of Christ, religious descendants, many of us, of frontier people who gathered at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County in August, 1801, for a great revival, that came to be known as the Second Great Awakening. Some 10-25,000 people were said to be in attendance at a time when Lexington, the largest settlement in the state barely had 2000 citizens. It was to be a “sacramental occasion”, offering people who had been “fenced off” by doctrinal differences, a chance to have the Lord’s supper. When it was over, Sydney Ahlstrom reported in his 1973 National Book Award book, A Religious History of the American People, “Cane Ridge was referred to as the greatest outpouring of the [Holy] Spirit since Pentecost. It marks a watershed in American church history, and the little log meetinghouse around which multitudes thronged and writhed has become a shrine for all who invoke ‘the frontier spirit’ in American Christianity.” [p. 433] That event was marked by what were called “bodily agitations or exercises”, and included falling and appearing as if dead; jerks; dancing until people were exhausted; barking like dogs, laughing—which Barton W. Stone, one of the organizing preachers of the Cane Ridge meeting, said, was confined solely to the religious—a “loud, hearty laughter” that excited laughter in no one else. The one laughing would appear rapturously solemn, and then the laughter would emerge.”
There are so many instances of non-approved, doctrinally incorrect, spirited gatherings across the history of the church that we should acknowledge that Pentecost—that Jewish celebration which brought many of the diaspora and many non-Jewish “God-fearers” from afar to Jerusalem 50 week days after the Passover; after the death and reported resurrection of an itinerant rabbi named Jesus— Pentecost was not a one time event.
From time to time, a fresh spirit seems to well up within people—horrifying the traditionalists with its excesses, and ways in which it stretches the boundaries of acceptable beliefs—and reforms their religious perceptions, practices, and “revives” the transmission of the story of Jesus. There are many more to which we could point: the monastic movement to reform Catholicism; the Protestant Reformation in all its many varieties. The fresh spirit of religious enthusiasm—a word which means to be “filled with God—en-theos”) generates new visions for human life; new structures of governance; new appreciations for diversity and difference.
And yes, revivals happen within other religions. Exotic religious manifestations of ecstasy—that lead to such things as occurred at Cane Ridge, in Jerusalem, in North Hampton, in Germany, Geneva, and elsewhere across the globe—occur also within the religions of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others.
Many people believe that such experiences are “gifts of God”, and indeed, I believe that they may be revelations of God. However, we also must be honest and acknowledge the scientific truth that they can also be induced by repetitive behaviors, by mob energy fields, by drugs, by dervish whirling, by meditation and intensive prayer. As the Psalmist notes, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” That capacity of the brain to be affected by environment, enthusiasms, ectasy—is but part of the mystery of who we are, and a gift, indeed, perhaps from God, who uses those who have experienced such revelatory moments as prophets to the rest of us.
Most of us, I dare say, would just as soon not have such a religious experience with such profound manifestations. Just a little “god-light”, please. We want a sense of God present in our lives, but not too much, thank you very much. I suspect that most of us think that religion is good in its place, but let’s not get too obsessed. Yet, where would be, my sisters and brothers, if it were not for those who were so in love with God that their persistence to know and be known by God led them to discover fresh truths, and prophetic insights to pass on to those of us who hang back from such overwhelming emotions? Where would we be without Joel, Isaiah, Moses, Ezekiel, Simon Peter, St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther and his namesake, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Calvin, John Knox, Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, Wendell Berry, Bill Coffin, Mother Teresa, Pope John XXIII, Gandhi, Bishop Tutu, Archbiship Oscar Romero, the Buddha, and yes, even Mohammed and thousands of other poets, artists, mystics and social reformers.
The New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others, would argue that there is no need to introduce God, or the “supernatural”, into what can be understood as a “natural” and explainable phenomenon. There may indeed be no need, no necessity, but the New Atheists miss the point altogether: religion is the poetry of science. Religion speaks of those things which create awe, wonder, and inspiration in us. It is no little thing that the word “spirit” in English, ruach in Hebrew, means breath. We speak of respiration—our breathing in and out. Genesis tells us that God breathed the “ruach”, the breath of life, into the nostrils of the beings God created. We speak of people “ex-piring” meaning that they have died, the “spirit” has gone out of them. And inspiration is that nebulous breath of fresh air that clears the cobwebs from our brains, gives us new insights and understanding, and offers us hope. Reality, the scientific natural world—much like reality TV—may momentarily create new understanding, new insights, or merely entertain us, but it cannot speak of reality in ways that motivate us and empower us to move into the future in fresh ways. This is religion’s great gift to the world.
So on this Pentecost Sunday, let me suggest another way of looking at these events….the one in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, and the successive ones including our own Disciples of Christ heritage from the Cane Ridge Second Great Awakening. What if we saw them not so much as isolated events, but as on-going dynamic forces which perform as the prayer I cited at the beginning of this sermon, and that is quoted, in part, in the opening sentences of the worship service this morning? What if, these movements for renewal, really were the winds that blew away false ideas and stultified methods of knowing God? What if they really were the fire that forced us to look at what really matters, not all the extraneous stuff we have attached to religion and our practice of it? What if these events were understood as the way the Creator continues to create new worlds of understanding, not by asking us all to speak God’s language—as if there were but one holy language of God—but as evidence that God, the Holiness at the heart of being, the Spirit of Truth behind and before all truths, the wisdom that transcends human knowledge—that God chooses to be known in, and to speak in our many languages, including our many languages of and about religion, and, in this third millennium, I would suggest that God may be prodding us to see the revelation of the holy and the heart of the good life in other religions besides Christianity.
In 1734, Jonathan Edwards, the Great Puritan Divine whose very tightly argued and exposited one to two hour sermons generated the Great Awakening on the American continent, wrote to a friend about the happenings in North Hampton, Massachusetts: “This town…never was so full of Love, nor so full of Joy, nor so full of distress as it has lately been….I never saw the Christian spirit in Love to Enemies so exemplified, in all my Life as I have seen it within this half year.” Having witnessed here in this little congregation a quiet and slowly emerging “fresh spirit”, I think we too know whereof Jonathan Edwards spoke.
The fresh spirit of God continually blows on the embers of faith, of trust that holiness sits at the core of being. The fresh spirit of God continually burns away all the accumulations of dross that weigh us down as human beings. Just as the Spirit at Pentecost is manifest through God choosing to speak in all the languages of the world—even those of extinct people—Luke is saying that God’s sweep of the world through the Spirit is comprehensive and all inclusive. Who are we to disbelieve that the fresh spirit of God is still at work, that God is still speaking the languages of our different hearts and minds, that God wants us to be a holy people with a holy vision for this holy world. So may it be. Amen.
