This sermon was preached for Day of Pentecost Sunday, May 19, 2024 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Acts 2:1-21, John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15, and Psalm 104:25-35, 37.
May God’s word only be spoken and God’s word only be heard.
In seminary and priest training, we spent just about as much time learning how to listen well as we did learning how to speak and teach. This is because the key to all loving relationships is skillful listening. And good connection is all about listening to understand rather than listening to respond. Now one of the most important types of listening priests and chaplains-in-training are drilled on is called reflective listening. At its most basic, reflective listening is simply reflecting back to the people what they just said. Your response is your understanding of what they said. Done without skill, it can sometimes land as sort of annoying. Yes, yes, that’s what I said. But the deeper skill to reflective listening is listening for the piece of what is said that has the most gravity, contains the most emotional weight or spiritual significance - and sometimes it’s in the off-handed comment.
With skillful ears and a skillful heart, reflective listening becomes less like holding up a mirror. It becomes more like pointing out the hidden doorknob tucked in a paragraph of speech. Reflecting back that small but important word or phrase becomes an invitation for the speaker to twist the knob on the door to a deep room inside themselves - the one they need a little extra support to step inside. All the listener is doing is listening to understand and saying back what was said. But a new level of understanding and self-listening is happening inside the speaker, too.
I wonder when it was the last time you felt truly heard. Take a moment and bring that experience into your mind. Was anything opened up inside yourself?
I’m used to focusing on the skill of speaking when it comes to the miracle of Pentecost. When the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples they are suddenly given the power to speak in multiple languages none of them had known before. They are able to be understood by the crowd of diverse people who have come from all over for the Jewish festival of Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of speaking truth.
But this idea of holy listening, it’s made me pause and look at this passage and the passage from the Gospel of John again. When the disciples were gifted with the ability to speak multiple languages, I wonder were they also given the ability to understand them, too? Could the skill of holy listening be just as important to the creation and flourishing of church community as the skill of fluent, compelling speech?
We’re pretty used to seeing our relationship with God as pretty mono-directional - God speaks, we listen. Yet all throughout scripture we read that God listens to God’s people. In the person of Jesus Christ, we experience God as radically compassionate, stepping fully into the experience of humankind. God crouching down to our human level to see and understand our hurts, listening and reflecting them back. In the end, we worship a triune God, a God who is at God’s essence interrelationship itself: three persons listening to one another.
Once again in today’s Gospel we find ourselves in the midst of Jesus’ farewell prayer. He is preparing the disciples for his departure: both his death on the cross and his ascension into heaven. He reassures them he will not leave them on their own. The Advocate, the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost is coming. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus says. “She will guide you into all the truth; for she will not speak on her own, but will speak whatever she hears.” She will speak whatever she hears - from God and yes, from us, too. The Holy Spirit speaks truth to us because the Holy Spirit knows how to listen first.
In 2004, the United Church of Christ came out with a series of advertisements with the tagline “God is still speaking,” I wonder if we can add another tagline, too. “God is still listening.” The Holy Spirit is listening in order to be able to speak truth back to us, truths we are now ready to understand. She is learning the language of our own hearts so that we might find new understandings within ourselves.
Jesus promises that the Spirit of Truth will give us the courage to speak truth to power. To declare God’s truth to all the various rulers of our world that would lie to us about our value, our belovedness, and the belovedness of our neighbors. “And when she comes, she will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”
Recently, I had someone remark to me how hard it is to be taught one thing for the majority of one’s life - like that only men can be priests or that you can't be gay and Christian - only to watch those facts shift and change. We were made to memorize certain prayers and passages of scripture as children, only to be presented with new and different versions. How can truth be truth and yet evolve and shift?
Jesus says, “I am the truth.” To Christians, truth isn’t one set of concrete presuppositions or a checklist of eternal facts. Truth is a person. Truth lives and breathes and speaks and loves. To live in truth is to be in right relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. True connection with God in Christ, well, that requires us listening to God. But it also means God is listening to us.
Here is a key paradox of the Christian faith: The essence of God will always and forever be love and God’s will will always be for the salvation of all of God’s creation. And yet what love and flourishing look like and mean take new forms across time and place, people and context. God’s word is unchangeable and eternal. And yet God is ever updating God’s word to meet our needs and understanding.
Likewise, what needs to be condemned most in the world is both always the same and always changing. Our enemy will always be that which breaks and distorts our relationships with one another and God - that which leads us to hurt and kill, ignore and demean. But the form that evil takes, the words it uses, shifts and changes constantly in order to confuse and mislead us. We must always be listening for hate, for violence, for dehumanization and contempt, in the new and familiar forms they take. We must always be learning the new words that allow the Good New of God’s love to be truly heard by the people who need it most.
A very relevant example of ongoing translation for us today is the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed contains the essential, unchangeable beliefs of the Christian faith and transmits them from generation to generation. But to do that effectively, the words themselves must change and adapt as the meaning of words shift. Today and for this next liturgical season, we’ll be returning to reciting the 1979 Book of Common Prayer wording for the Creed - and I will be very curious to hear how that lands for you. I’m going to highlight now a particular change that might catch you up:
In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, Episcopalians prayed this about Jesus: “Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” For us men, Jesus was made man. But in 1979 Book of Common Prayer, we pray “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” For us, Jesus was made man. Then in 1997, the supplemental worship resource Enriching Our Worship introduced the wording we’ve been using at St. Mark’s lately, “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.” For us, Jesus became truly human.
Now even though the words have shifted over the last hundred years, the essential meaning of the Creed has not changed in the last 1600. I would even argue that “human” is a much more accurate translation of the original Greek wording than “man” and “men.” Updating the Creed so that its intended meaning could be better understood by the average person required the Episcopal Church to listen first. We listened to the way the meaning of words shift and change. We listened for who felt left out.
It meant we had to pay attention to how using “man” and “mankind” to refer to all human beings had dropped out of fashion. We had to realize that “made man” was starting to be heard as emphasizing Jesus’ maleness rather than emphasizing his humanness, as in the original Greek. That it was unwittingly giving strength to the enemy and the wider societal lie that men are more holy or closer to Christ than women. We had to acknowledge that using the words “for us men” was becoming a barrier to more and more people believing they, too, were included in God’s plan for salvation.
Each Sunday, when we say the Creed together, we are reflecting back to the Holy Spirit what the church has heard from her about the truth about God, humankind, and right relationship with the divine and each other. Each Sunday, when I preach, I am to speak only what I hear, opening the doors inside myself and inviting you to open doors inside yourselves, too. Each Sunday, when we pray, we ask God to continue to hear us, to keep listening. To speak what we need to deepen our understanding of love.
We are who we are as Church today because we have kept listening to the ongoing revelation of the Holy Spirit. Because we are continually learning the language of the people all around us and because the Holy Spirit gives us the words, we can speak back to all people the unchangeable truth at the heart of the Gospel, the truth that lies behind every closed door of their hearts: Despite what you have heard, despite your deepest fears, you are loved. You are not alone. Love is calling you home.
The miracle of Pentecost is still unfolding as we listen to the Holy Spirit and, I would dare to say, as the Holy Spirit listens to us. Thanks be to God.
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