Beyond the Patio

Time for Renewal
(Acts 2:1-21 and John 15:26-27; 16:4b to 15)

Norman Rockwell was responsible for many of the covers that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post over the years. There was nothing more haunting and enduring than one that appeared many years ago. It is still haunting and enduring because it touches on something that touches us all.  I found this beautiful written description of it somewhere but I’m not sure where so I can’t honestly give the proper credit that it deserves:

The scene is in a restaurant in a city somewhere. It is sort of a quick lunch place with no tablecloths on the tables, just the ketchup and mustard jars on the bare wood. It seems to be raining outside. An elderly man with a raincoat and umbrella has turned at the door. Another man glances up as he sits there smoking a cigar over a newspaper and the remains of his coffee. Two teenagers sit at a table, one of the with a cigarette in his mouth. They are all looking at the same thing, which is an old woman and a small boy who are sharing a table with the teenagers. Their heads are bowed. They are saying grace. The people watching them watch in dazed fascination. The small boy’s ears stick out from his head like handles of a jug. The old woman’s eyes are closed, her hair untidy under a hat that had seen better days. The people are watching something that you feel they may have been part of once but are part of no longer. Through the plate glass window and the rain, the city looks dim, monotonous, industrial. The old woman and the boy are saying grace there, and for a moment the silence in the place is fathomless. The watchers are watching something that they’ve all but forgotten and will probably forget again as soon as the moment passes. The old woman and the boy in their old fashioned clothes, praying their old fashioned prayer, are leftovers from a day that has long since ceased to be.

This picture is fascinating to me because I believe that it is the way that many people view the church today –  old fashioned and part of a day that has long since ceased to be.

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I’m sure that for the majority of the people in our society the church is a mystery, a question mark. In a recent survey in our country,  it was announced that fewer people have any contact with the church or any organized religion than ten years ago.  Even less people in British Columbia than in some other parts of Canada.  So knowledge about the church’s beliefs and practices is declining rapidly. Great Cathedrals still stand. The churches still stand, big ones and little ones, some almost full every Sunday, some almost empty. The church is still in business but a growing number of people in our society wonder what business the church is in?  What goes on in these strange buildings scattered over the face of the earth? Why do people continue to go there? What do they find when they get there? What do they fail to find?  Fundamentalists, liberals, evangelicals, humanists, charismatics, Anglicans, United Church, Roman Catholics and hundreds more denominations.  There are probably2500 Christian denominations in North America and we hear the echo of the words of Jesus’ prayer, “that they may be one”.   Are they all  doing the same thing or different things?  Are there those who say “We’re right and all the others are wrong”? Is there any sense in which you can say that God is present in any of them, or all of them? Is there anything more or less important, real, holy, going on there than any other place?

Sometimes the people who go to church every Sunday ask the same questions. Sometimes the church is just as much a mystery to those who are involved than those who are on the outside. The church is intact. The plumbing and the furnace work, at least most of the time. The Sunday School rooms are clean and well lit. The bills are paid, sermons are preached, many people are baptized and married, people of all ages die and are buried. The wine is poured and bread eaten over and over again. “Drink this, eat this, in remembrance of me.” and Jesus is remembered here, and we come to remember, and be remembered. We pray. We worship. Sometimes we even open our hearts a little to the one who promised to lead us and strengthen us for his work in the world. Sometimes we yearn for something more. At times, and maybe even most of the time we experience an emptiness, a sense of something missing, even when the church is full of people and a great feast is in progress. For many the heart has somehow gone out of the church, the passion has been replaced by shadows, and the host is no longer there. We wonder whether we are speaking a dead language, or visiting a museum, or hearing an echo of something that had meaning at some other time. We take so little out in the world with us that if we were to sit down at McDonald s and say grace, or say or do anything to suggest that we are Christian, the golden arches would shake with astonishment.

Then I think of an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous which has no building, no budget, no priesthood, but only people who come together wherever they are to seek help in their helplessness from each other and from God as they understand God and who are ready at any ungodly hour or moment  to go to each other s rescue.  Whereas you and I, who are called to be Christ’s to one another, often pass as ships in the night.

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However, be that what it may, in the Church, through today’s readings,  we are reminded of God’s promise, “In the last days it shall be , God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophecy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days I will pour out my spirit…” (Acts 2:17) And again, ” When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.”(John 16:13).  Something extraordinary happened in Jerusalem at the time of Pentecost – so extraordinary that the church exists because of it, and we still gather here today because of it.

So, even though we at some times think that the church is empty, without heart, passion, and presence, and even though are looked upon from the outside as a part of a day that has long passed, and even though we may be so caught up in our churchly business that we fail as a Christ centered community to make any great difference to the world — Even though all this may be true and we may perceive the church on the brink of being destroyed, GOD IS NOT DESTROYED, and God can bring newness out of any situation.  Even at the point of disheartening when all seems lost a prophet is able to say, “The time is coming, says God, when I will pour out my spirit on all flesh” Even at a time when a group of heavy hearted disciples mourn the death of their leader, they can remember words ” I will send a new counselor to you, even the Spirit of Truth.” And we realize that God’s Spirit, and new life can well up among us at any time and in any place — in an upper room in Jerusalem where a few scared followers of Jesus had gathered waiting for that which they didn’t even have the foggiest notion what they were waiting for, or even in a small greasy spoon restaurant in the middle of a city someplace in the rain, where an old woman and a young boy pause to say grace. Or in this time and this place – here, right now.

We just have to be open to it:

Heaven knows terrible things happen to people in this world. The good die young, the wicked prosper, and in any one town anywhere there is grief enough to freeze the blood.  But from deep within whatever the hidden spring is that life wells up from, there wells up into our lives, even in the darkest and maybe especially then, a power to heal, to breathe new life into us, to warm our hearts, to set us on fire.  And in this regard, I think, every man is a mystic because every man at one time or another experiences in the thick of his joy or his pain the power out of the depths of his life to bless him.  I do not believe that it matters greatly what name you call this power – the Spirit of God is only one of it’s names – but what I think does matter, vastly, is that we open ourselves to receive it, that we address it and let ourselves be addressed by it; that we move in the direction that it seeks to move us, the direction of fuller communion with itself and with one another. I believe that for our sakes this Spirit beneath our spirits will make Christ’s of us before we are done, or for our own sakes, it will destroy us

Frederick Buechner The Magnificent Defeat, Seabury Paperback, N.Y., 1968 p. 115

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You know I love Spring because there is a newness in the air, when you finally begin to feel the warm wind against your skin, and the soft misty rain in your face, when the whole world takes on a new look and the fresh green grass begins to look like a carpet again. The smell of the freshly out grass is like no other smell

You hear the birds that you haven’t heard in a long time when they fly back from wherever they flock to when the winter comes. And the leaves are bursting forth

People are out in their yards, coming out from wherever they have been all winter, and they talk to one another, and open their doors so that you hear sounds that you haven’t heard in a long time ……voices…….clattering of dishes…….sound of children practicing the piano.  They practice that tune that every child who ever learned to play the piano plays in the Spring …da ..da ..da ..da. da. da. da da. (Moonlight sonata)

You see people walking, cycling, holding hands, preparing for weddings, and you feel like seventeen again and if you are anything like me you can’t stand feeling like seventeen again.

There is newness. It is like the first sound of a waking child and for a mortal like me it is completely overwhelming.

That is the feeling that I get at this time in the church. Church has been through a great struggle, like wilderness experience but something new is happening.

It almost seems like Spring and you know that God is not just able to renew the earth but to renew the world. God can even renew humanity. God is able to renew life itself. God is able to renew you and me.

It is time to sing the hymn “She Flies On”

SHE FLIES ON     By Gordon Light

Refrain:

She comes sailing on the wind,
Her wings flashing in the sun;
On a journey just begun, she flies on.
And in the passage of her flight,
Her song rings out through the night,
Full of laughter, full of light, she flies on.

Silent waters rocking on the morning of our birth,
Like an empty cradle waiting to be filled.
And from the heart of God the Spirit moved upon the earth,
Like a mother breathing life into her child.

Many were the dreamers whose eyes were given sight
When the Spirit filled their dreams with life and form.
Deserts turned to gardens, broken hearts found new delight,
And then down the ages still she flew on.

To a gentle girl in Galilee, a gentle breeze she came,
A whisper softly calling in the dark,
The promise of a child of peace whose reign would never end,
Mary sang the Spirit song within her heart.

Flying to the river, she waited circling high
Above the child now grown so full of grace.
As he rose up from the water, she swept down from the sky,
And she carried him away in her embrace.

Long after the deep darkness that fell upon the world,
After dawn returned in flame of rising sun,
The Spirit touched the earth again, again her wings unfurled,
Bringing life in wind and fire as she flew on.

This hymn was written by Gordon Light in 1985
copyright W,.M: Common Cup company 1985
words and music are found in Songs For A Gospel People ,
Wood Lake Books Incorporated, Winfield B.C., Canada 1989

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