God Is Still Speaking
“When the Spirit of truth comes, that Spirit will guide you into all the truth; for the Spirit will not speak independently, but will speak whatever the Spirit hears, and will announce to you the things that are yet to come.” — John 16:13
A few weeks ago, I was sharing some time with a colleague who asked if there was a specific incident to which I pointed as the initiation of a call to ordained ministry. As it happened, there is. So I shared it with him.
I have shared the story about that incident here before, but not in a long, long time. So, some of you may have heard it. Others have not. Hence, I’d like to share it again, especially for those who have not. (Slight pause.)
I have been a church member, involved in church work across several denominations since I was a teen. When I moved to Maine from New York City to marry Bonnie, I joined First Parish Church, United Church of Christ, in Brunswick.
Having done so, I became aware of Bangor Theological Seminary. Since the day it was established in 1814, the same year the Norwich Church was incorporated, Bangor has specialized in people like me, those who enter ordained ministry as a second career.
Frankly, I always did have some sense of a call to ordained ministry. And I always did my best to ignore it. Still, I decided to get on the Seminary mailing list.
Probably after the Admissions Office sent me too many flyers without a response, they sent me a letter asking if I wanted to remain on that list. I answered “yes.” They sent me a catalogue. For some reason, they had not done that before.
I set aside some time alone to sit and read through it. And, as I read boring course descriptions, I found myself crying. At that point I remembered an Episcopal priest friend who said when she realized she had a ‘call to ministry’ she cried for three hours. I knew something was up, so I went to see my pastor, Bill Imes.
Together, we formed a Discernment Committee made up of church members. After working with them, sorting out as many issues as possible, treating the possibility of a call to ordained ministry in a serious way, a year and a half later I entered Bangor Seminary. (Slight pause.)
The kind of story I just offered is often called ‘personal testimony.’ Such narratives are not meant to exclusively be about what happens in a call to ordained ministry. Many are also called to do the work of the church as members of the laity. Those kinds of stories— stories of being called by God to do all kinds of things from committee work to being a member of a choir to being an usher to spending time staffing the Food Pantry— those stories need to be shared.
Now, any kind of personal testimony raises a number of questions. Among them are: ‘is God still speaking to us?’ ‘Is it possible that sometimes God speaks and we fail to hear?’ ‘Is God only a personal God, a God who just speaks to an individual or does God speak to whole communities of faith?’ ‘Can this God, who we claim is a God of all people, be somehow described by all of us, collectively?’
Those questions address three kinds of calls: the call of God to the individual, the call of God to the local church and the call of God to the whole church. That poses another obvious question: ‘what is church?’ (Slight pause.)
I quoted a definition of church offered by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Newsletter published Friday. Many of you probably have that Newsletter already.
“Church,” said Williams, “is a distinctive social body given coherence by the action of God in Jesus.” As I said in my article, I find both the breadth and the precision of this definition appealing.
In its breadth, it encompasses each individual, the local church and the greater church. In its precision, it recognizes the unifying (quote): “action of God in Jesus.”
But what does this stuff about church, the collective, mean to us, as individuals? What does it mean to be church, together? And, indeed, don’t definitions, themselves, and even gathered groups like churches, make things less personal, more distant, obtuse? (Slight pause.)
The Rev. Dr. John Buchanan is a Presbyterian pastor at a large church in Chicago. In a recent edition of The Christian Century he reminisced about church when he was a teen. Confirmation class consisted of memorizing the questions and answers in The Westminister Shorter Catechism— 107 questions and answers.
The church elders (all, quite literally, elderly men) made sure the task had been accomplished by questioning the teens because they questioned the Confirmands. After all, one becomes a Christian on the basis of what one knows about salvation, God, Jesus, the Trinity— right? (Slight pause.)
Well, it’s more than that. Faith, Buchanan says, is also defined by following Jesus, thereby becoming a part of the people of God. Faith is certainly not defined by rote learning. That truth came home to him when, last Easter, he laid hands on each person in a current Confirmation class.
The class included his granddaughter Rachel. Rachel has Down Syndrome. During a year of Confirmation classes, that class learned together in the classroom, prayed together, served meals to the homeless together, experienced the church as a place of service and celebration of the God of the Trinity, this God, Buchanan knew only in rote answers as a teen. This God we call Trinity— Creator, Redeemer and Spirit— became personalized.
Yes, the class still reviewed the catechism questions about the God of Trinity. There is no doubt this is a necessary piece. But they also came to a place where they felt the definition. [1] (Slight pause.)
So, who is God? What is church? How are they intertwined? Is it possible God is personal and Church impersonal or is God is impersonal and church personal?
And what is this personal call and personal witness stuff about, anyway? How does the church witness? How do we, you and I, witness as individuals and how do we witness together?
Also, how do we integrate feeling and knowing? How can we come to both know about and feel— experience— God who is still speaking, this God defined as Trinity? (Slight pause.)
I believe God calls each of us to be a member of a community of faith. I believe God then calls each us to do specific work within that community of faith. And I also believe that God calls us to be together within the community of faith, calls us to a mission of mutual respect, love and commitment and, thereby, to witness to our individual faith and our collective faith.
After all, God has no hands but ours, no feet but ours, no mind but ours, no heart but ours, no voice but ours to act in this world God created. If we are not aware of these calls of God on our lives, nothing of God gets done. Therefore, God calls all of us, no matter what our gifts and talents, whatever they are.
And we Christians do give voice to what we feel in naming God Trinity— Creator, Redeemer and Spirit. That is historically true. Indeed, in a couple of minutes we will recite The Nicene Creed, a document which has spoken to Christians for some 1,700 years— this description of God as Trinity. On the other hand, wasn’t that document, literally, written by elderly men way back in the 4th Century?
So, how can that be personal? Why would and why should we recite it? Did those elders in ancient times know what they were saying? (Slight pause.)
Actually, they did know what they were saying. The words they proposed merely describe their experience of God. It is, therefore, our responsibility to examine it with enough depth to attempt to see what they are trying to say to us. After all, if it has lasted this long, perhaps we need to honor it enough to strive to see if it is as personal as they believed it to be.
And that, that may be the deepest of truths: personal relationship of any kind is not just about or only about feeling. A personal relationship of any kind does not happen and does not develop without work. Any relationship does not become truly personal unless we do the work which nurtures that relationship.
Therefore, The Nicene Creed or any creed or any church cannot be personal unless we strive to do the work which nurtures relationship. Doing the relational work helps and, indeed, ensures that this God who is defined as Trinity will also be felt, experienced. (Slight pause.)
So, is God still speaking? Yes. But we need to do the work which will ensure that we are listening to God. John Buchanan’s granddaughter, Rachel, did that work. Each of us can do that work. And, as it happens, the work of relationship which needs to be done is the kind of work which places God at the center of our lives. Can we do the work which places God at the center of our lives? (Slight pause.)
So, perhaps the vital point is very simple: are we willing to do that work, work which will allow us to listen for the movement of the Spirit. After all, Scripture tells us the Spirit is moving and does move. Scripture tells us God is still speaking.
How do I know God is still speaking? Indeed, is what it says in the Gospel we have come to know as John (quote): “When the Spirit of truth comes, that Spirit will guide you into all the truth; for the Spirit will not speak independently, but will speak whatever the Spirit hears, and will announce to you the things that are yet to come.” God is still speaking. Amen.
United Church of Christ, First Congregational, Norwich, New York
05/30/2010
ENDPIECE: It is the practice of the Pastor to speak after the Closing Hymn, but before the Benediction. This, then, is an précis of what the pastor said before the blessing: [Before speaking the Pastor placed a small device on a pedestal at the head of the center isle, a device which had been used in the Children’s Time. It was a perpetual motion like machine (powered by a battery) which moved back and forth. The visual effect matched what the pastor said. The Pastor started the device and stopped the device upon getting to the word ‘silent’ in this brief statement.] “Personal testimony is when we talk about our relationship with God. I want to suggest, if we do not talk to one another about our experience of God, God becomes silent and impersonal.”
[1] The Rev. Dr. John M. Buchanan; The Christian Century, June 1, 2010; Volume 127, Number 11; From the Editor’s Desk, Page 3.
Ha! I love your parenthetical reminders to pause, if only so slightly.
ReplyDeleteLovely sermon, by the way. Thanks for sharing it.