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The Mess That Is The Spirit
Numbers 11:23-40, John 7:37-39
June 12, 2011 (Pentecost Sunday)

Numbers 11:24-30

So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord; and he
gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent.
Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of
the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the
spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again. Two
men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad,
and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they
had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. And a
young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the
camp.” And Joshua son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen
men, said, “My lord Moses, stop them!” But Moses said to him, “Are you
jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and
that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” And Moses and the elders of
Israel returned to the camp.

John 7:37-39

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there,
he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who
believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart
shall flow rivers of living water.’” Now he said this about the Spirit, which
believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because
Jesus was not yet glorified.

Lately, there has been a whole genre of books, of memoirs, being published
that tell stories of people leaving faith, or at least leaving the institutions that
once embodied faith for some of them.  And I’ve been picking up these
books like crazy, because, for me, I am generally fascinated with people’s
stories of faith, and even their stories of non-faith or no faith.  I know that’s
probably not surprising, I know, for someone like me, but I’ve certainly
noticed this recent uptick in memoirs sharing peoples departure from church,
or sometimes faith altogether, and I think a lot of it has to do with the
general movement by many in our culture towards a deep skepticism about
whether or not religion can be anything but a toxic thing.  You only have to
look at the rise of fundamentalisms throughout the world, the increasing
conservative nature of religion, and the social and personal madness that it
often gives rise to, whether it’s religious fanatics thinking that God has told
them to ram air planes into high rise buildings so as to punish the
secularists, or even in our country, the meanness of spirit and divisive
rhetoric that is coming out of the religious right nowadays, the culture war
being waged by the Protestant and Catholic right against our secular culture,
and their demand they and they alone get to dictate who can and cannot
have birth control, who can and cannot get married, who can or cannot have
an abortion, who can and cannot have control over the teaching of science in
our high school classrooms.  All of it is turning off a lot of people nowadays,
and so now much of what is done in the name of Jesus, of Allah, of Yahweh,
is causing a generation of young people to believe, in contrast to their
parents, that religion is actually not a good thing, but is actually a negative
destructive force in society and they want nothing to do with it. The surveys
of American beliefs are showing that younger people, people under 40 or so,
are no longer even nominally claiming the Christian label, choosing instead
the non-religious label, or the no-faith label.  

So, I’m not surprised at that larger picture, of course, but there are also the
personal stories of individuals losing their faith that are filling those memoirs
that I love so much, beyond the statistics, the larger picture.  This week I
received a promotional email from the publisher Harper Collins advertising
some of their upcoming book releases and one of them caught my eye, a
just released memoir by a former Episcopalian priest and doctoral student,
Sarah Sentille, and book she has called Breaking Up With God.  The email
came with an excerpt, part of which I would like to share with you:

While I understood “God” to be the most powerful word in the English
language—so powerful that using it felt like picking up a weapon, unwieldy,
dangerous—people at church used the word casually, seemingly without
careful attention, or else they didn’t use it at all. Each week we followed the
liturgy set out in the Book of Common Prayer. We preached on the
lectionary texts. We chose hymns out of the hymnal. We recited creeds and
formulaic prayers. And that was that.

In our weekly staff meetings we barely talked about God. Theology, it
seemed, was not the point of running a church. Being an institution was the
point. Raising money, obeying the hierarchy, following rules, being right,
counting the number of people in the pews, deciding whether or not to
expand the building or get a new roof, caring for the community—that was
church work. And I’m not sure many people in the congregation came to
church to talk about God, either. They came to church because they wanted
to be in a community with one another. They came to figure out how to live
a life with meaning, how to do good work in the world, how to give back,
how to be better people. They came to church to be fed, with bread and
wine during Communion. They craved connection, and church seemed like a
place where this might happen. God was almost incidental to the whole
enterprise—background noise…

I was deeply disappointed. The distance between the theology I studied in
school and the theology being practiced in the pews and preached from the
pulpit by the priests on staff was enormous. Everything I took for granted—
the difference between “God” and God, the wide range of theological
possibilities, the need to think critically about the effects God-talk can have
on the world, the existence of other holy texts besides those collected in the
Bible, historical criticism—was absent, even heretical. I felt like I was going
crazy. The God I had come to believe in was nowhere to be found—and in
that God’s place was a different version of God I struggled to recognize...
What is going on? I wanted to shout.

I don’t think Sarah’s story is all that unfamiliar for many divinity students,
seminary students, and I don’t blame her an iota for her decision to leave the
church, nor dismiss her very real experience of finding a disconnect between
her theology and the lived theology or lack thereof she found in the actual
church.  I know many, many friends who are not interested in what the
church is selling, especially if they have already been inside the church, and
saw the ways we people of Christian faith have often riddled the body of
Christ with pain, so much pain, by our meanness and hypocrisy.  And yet, I
ask myself, first, why do I keep going back to this well to hear these stories
of people walking away from faith—what keeps me drawing from that well
that is not my own?  And secondly, why do I stay in the church, in the
institutional church, when I really think leaving is as valid and understandable
a choice as staying?  Why do you stay, I ask myself, knowing what Sarah
Sentille knows, which is how imperfect the church really is?  

Well, I am not sure I can completely answer those questions to your or my
satisfaction today, but I do think there is something to be learned from our
two Biblical texts, the ones we just heard, the first of which you may have
never actually heard before.  Today, of course, is Pentecost Sunday, the day
we celebrate the incoming of the Holy Spirit into the church, that Spirit that
Christ leaves behind to that church Sarah so struggles with, that I so
struggle with, that maybe you struggle with as well.  Christ does this at the
moment of his departure from this earth, his ascension into heaven, so says
the text.  In our first text concerning the Spirit, we have a story from the
Hebrew Bible that tells of a moment when Moses is on the cusp of spiritual
and emotional exhaustion, all of which was caused by the heavy burden of
having to lead the people of Israel during that difficult time in the wilderness
before they arrive in the Promised Land.  God has given Moses a solution,
and that solution was for Moses to share the heavy load of leadership, and
so God gifts the divine Spirit to these seventy elders, so they too can lead
the people, prophesy to the people, which simply means, in this particular
case, some sort of ecstatic experience that empowers them to lead the
people by telling them they path they should go on, which is what all good
prophets do, in the end.  But two men are missing from the event where the
Spirit of God is passed onto the elders, but God’s Spirit finds them in the
wider camp, and they too prophesy, but in the wrong place, which, according
to Joshua, is in that wider camp.  And Joshua goes to Moses to tell on these
two men, to rat them out, and so Moses rebukes him for this ridiculous
concern, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were
prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”

Now, I fell in love with this passage this week, because of the messiness, the
boundary stretching, the violations of decorum running through it, and to
have Moses telling Joshua that the whole point is the mess that the Spirit
brings, the whole point is for all of us to be infused, enamored, filled with
God, is a beautiful thing to behold.  When that happens, when boundaries
get crossed, then we all become prophets, become truth tellers to and for
each other, in this place, in this camp, so to speak.  Joshua wanted life to be
neat and nice and Moses tells him otherwise—in fact, the Spirit of God shows
him otherwise.  The point wasn’t to stay around Moses tent, but to do what
those two men did, which was to get beyond the tent, and help the people
get through this time in the desert, and to remind them that, indeed, God
was there, and here, and everywhere, and will be with them all the way to the
Promised Land, and beyond.   

In our second passage, we have Jesus in John’s Gospel telling the disciples
that he is the living water and that out of the heart of those that believe will
come living water, water that moves, not stale water, not still water, not
pristine water, but gushing, fresh water, with ripples abounding, with waves
aplenty, big and small I suspect.  But our composer, our John here, he wants
us to know that Jesus is this living water, this messy water, this sometimes
roaring water, and that this Spirit will only come when Christ sends us it to
us, just like the moment when God gifted that Spirit to the leaders of Israel
in our earlier text.   And, frankly, to Sarah’s point in that book, the Spirit
that Christ leaves behind isn’t still waters, but instead, it gives birth to a
river, to a larger church, that is frankly a foaming mess, and yet, a river full
of people who are themselves full of what Christ left behind, his Spirit,
himself in them.  

You see, where I sometimes think we and Sarah and others perhaps misread
the Christian story, the story of our faith, is in our belief that what Christ left
behind, his Spirit in us, would somehow make everything neat and clean,
would somehow makes us perfect, and thus the church perfect, or what is
understood to be perfection—a church where everything is theologically
driven, and where everyone’s motive for being at church were rooted in
loving God, and wanting to learn to love others in Christ’s name.  And yet,
the irony is that the church was never like that, never a magical place where
motives were never mixed, where spiritual desires where never up mixed with
very human desires—it was never a pure enterprise, this walk of faith, not in
Jesus’ day and with his disciples, and not now, in our own day and age, and
with us.

I was reading Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus, this past week, in
which the author shows the lay reader what many ministers learned in
seminary, which is that the ancient scribes often changed certain parts of our
Biblical text in order to clean what they felt was a messy part of a particular
section of the Bible, or to buttress a particular doctrine they believed in, or
sometimes, even to clean up the character of Jesus, when it wasn’t up to the
standard of those early scribes, the standard they believed Jesus should live
up to.  It’s ironic, isn’t it, that someone would want to clean up Christ’s
character, because it doesn’t live up to our standards?   Which, I think,
points to a larger truth, and that is that Christ that we so adore, and speak
so fondly of, is sometimes a bit messy, sometimes not always clear,
sometimes a bit head scratching, sometimes muddled and untidy—sometimes
Jesus is someone who is so much like us, the people he left behind with his
Spirit within us.  And so why should we be surprised that what the Spirit
leaves behind for us on that Pentecost Day thousands of years ago is any
less messy than the One who gave it to us in the first place?  The life of faith
and the community that was around Jesus was a mess to begin with, when
Christ was journeying in the first century with those imperfect, ego-driven,
sometimes unkind, always a bit dull-headed women and men, people like us.  

I guess the reason I read every memoir about leaving the faith I can get my
hands on is because it reminds me why I stay and why others go, and that
both choices are understandable and OK, though I miss people like Sarah—
we need more prophets like her, truth tellers, forth tellers, who tell us the
truth about the shallowness of so much of our faith and the institutions that
hold that faith.  In one passage, she writes this:

I sometimes wonder how doctors, having seen inside the human body,
having dissected it, go about their daily lives interacting with the rest of us.
When they look at people, do they see what is happening on the inside? The
map of veins and arteries? The liver, the spleen, the stomach? Do they think
of the skeleton? The skull? Do they think of the limbs they’ve cut off or the
cancer they’ve cut out?

For Sarah, when she looked and lived inside the day to day life of the church
as a clergyperson, it was a huge disappointment for her, and I don’t think
that experience is all that unusual for clergy and lay people alike, frankly.  For
me, I never expected anything but a mess, a place full of messy people like
me who were doing what those disciples, those women and men were doing
thousands of years ago, which was learning how to love the particular mess
each and every one of us is.   I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the
church is the one place in our lives where the whole point is to learn how to
love each other, where we choose to learn that grand divine lesson with
those we choose to journey with and journey beside.  Now, we may learn
that lesson by accident, and sometimes by choice, in our own biological
families, or in the Lions or Lioness Club, or the Rotary, or in our bowling
league, which are all good and valuable places, but the church is the one
place where we are told that the whole point of the gathering and the walking
together is to learn how to love each other, despite the mess we each are,
just like Christ learned to love the mess of humanity that were his disciples,
and they came to learn the mess he was, and the messy and beautiful God
he shared with them, despite the efforts of the ancient scribes to scrub up
that picture of God in our most ancient of Biblical texts.

To use Sarah’s analogy here, when I do an autopsy of the body of Christ,
when I do my own forensic work, I see myself and I see you, imperfect as we
are, and I see Sarah Sentille, and others who don’t like what they see, and I’
m glad for them and their word of prophecy to and for us.   The Spirit that
Christ left behind was his very presence, that divine indwelling, and that
presence is sometimes no less a mess than it was two thousands of years
ago.  This week we’re doing our yearly rummage sale, yet another event
done simply, it seems, to take care of the imperfect institution, the imperfect
body, in which we do this work of learning how to love each other.  We’ll
struggle with each other, get frustrated with each other, we’ll wonder why
even bother, and we’ll likely laugh with each other, and tell stories about the
people who are no longer with us to do this rummage sale, and perhaps
share a word of inappropriate but well-meaning gossip, but I hope that in the
mess of the next couple of days that you’ll bless it, that you’ll bless the
mess, because in doing so you may be blessing the Spirit of God, who is still
at work in this place, and with us.  Amen.