“Poor in Spirit/Pour Out
Spirit”
Acts 2:1-21
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
May 31, 2009
Pentecost
“Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
-Matthew
5:3
“…I
will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh…”
-Acts 2:17
The
mind is a wondrous thing, isn’t it? Who
knows how it works and how it makes the associations it makes.
But, as I was reading our Pentecost passage this week and got to the part
where God says, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh...,” immediately into my mind, with no conscious volition on my part,
flashed the first of the beatitudes of Jesus:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” P-o-o-r
in spirit/p-o-u-r out Spirit…and with a little firing of the synapses in my
brain or a prompting of the Spirit or whatever happened, a sermon is born.
Heaven,
when it is referred to in the New Testament, very seldom refers to a celestial
rest home. Heaven in its biblical usage almost always is meant to connote union
with God, an existential at-one-ness with the God in whom we live and move and
have our being and thus, also, a felt oneness with all of life.
The kingdom of heaven to which
Jesus referred in his beatitude is an experience of life in which our bond with
God is so solid, so secure, so illuminating, so unitive as to alter and
transform the way we see and think about and interact with the world.
Such
a heaven is not and, in fact, cannot be gained through our own straining and
striving. It is offered to us
freely, poured out as it were on all flesh,
and we need only to supply the appropriate vessel to receive it, to be filled by
the divine gift. That vessel, as it
turns out, is humility.
One
of the defining parables of Jesus is his poem about the tax collector and the
Pharisee. You remember it, don’t
you? That I am not misusing the
parable in my favor can be seen in Luke’s introduction to it: “Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they
were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”
In other words, Jesus, too, is making the case for the primacy of
humility by citing its opposite.
“Two men went up to the temple to pray,
one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you
that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this
tax collector. I fast twice a week;
I give a tenth of all my income.’ But
the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven (so poor
in spirit was he), but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to
me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this
man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt
themselves will be humbled (and then presumably be put in a place where they can
receive the gift of heaven), but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke
18:9-14).
Those who trumpet their own accomplishments do not want the heaven of oneness with God. They are content with the rewards their own efforts and achievements garner. Or, to say it another way: “Self-proclaimed virtues are tainted virtues at best.” To whatever extent we are full of ourselves, we use up space that God’s poured-out Spirit could fill in us.
A
few years ago, one of my and our friends, the Reverend Stephen Phelps, who
taught several of us the practice of meditation, preached one of the finest
sermons that ever has graced this church’s one hundred seventy-five years.
His sermon was called “The Sent-Down
In
his magnificent sermon, Steve said that though our tendency most often is to try
to climb higher and ever higher in our lives, that path finally is doomed
because (1) there always will be someone who can climb higher than we can and
(2) eventually we will fall. Next to
Bear Stearns or Chrylser or General Motors, the cross of Christ might at one
time have seemed to be ineffectual or irrelevant, but it is not the cross that
is passing away. Just so, Steve told
us, there is a passageway to the
heaven of life. It is the path of
going lower. “On this path, there is no end but God, for no matter how low another
creature has fallen, you, by the grace of God, can choose to go down a step
lower, to be sent down, to serve…the stairway to heaven goes down”
(Stephen H. Phelps, “The Sent-Down Man,” First Presbyterian
Church, Lent 2007).
The
reason this is so is because, in going lower, you stop making more of yourself
and instead we begin being made, being
made by the pouring out of God’s Spirit on us into the image of the Sent-Down
Man we call Jesus and onto the road that has no end but God.
When,
in the sixth chapter of the Old Testament book of Micah, the people Israel
approach the prophet and ask how they might come to God in a way that will be
pleasing to God – “shall we come
before God with burnt offerings, with calves a year old…will the Lord be
pleased with thousands of rams or with tens of thousands of rivers of
oil…shall I give my firstborn…” – the prophet answers, “God
has told you, O mortal, what is good: what does God require of you but to do
justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah
6:6-8)
Humility
is the chalice into which we receive the wine of God’s Spirit that the
Pentecost God pours out onto all flesh. How
often have we read that first beatitude – “Blessed
are the poor in spirit…” – and thought, with some pride, “That
is not me”? We have thought
that being poor in spirit is a
deficiency when it is, in fact, a necessity if we are going to experience the
heaven of oneness with God and life. “Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.”
Sometimes
we have a hard time summoning humility in our lives but often life itself finds
ways of humbling us. Those times are
fraught with ache and anguish, but they also can be our salvation if, in their
wake, we are more modest about our invincibility and independence.
Thus, they can become times for opening heart, mind, and soul to the
poured out Spirit of God.
Heaven,
as the Bible mostly talks about it, is our participation in God’s life and
thus our lives take on an eternal dimension now because God is eternal.
Eternal life is not something outside of us conferred on us on some
distant day if we somehow are judged to have lived “good enough” lives.
Eternal life is no more and no less than our participation in God’s
life that God makes possible now by the pouring out of God’s Spirit.
“Spirit of the living God, fall
afresh on us. Melt us.
Mold us. Fill us.
Use us. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us.”
Pentecost is the celebrations of the means by which we participate in
God’s life and that is what the
Bible calls heaven. That is why we
need not fear “…though the earth
should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though the
waters roar and foam, though (even) the (financial) mountains tremble in their
tumult” (Psalm 46:2-3, adapted). When,
through humility, we receive the poured out Spirit, God is in us and we are in
God.
One
last thing: The Spirit of God by
filling persons builds community and communities.
What an extraordinary time it is to be alive.
We can continue to kill each other with our endless wars and in our
arrogance wipe out other species and in our hubris despoil the earth.
And yet, on every continent, a revolution in and for human dignity is
arising that is beginning to knit a sense of community among us as wide as the
world and is renewing our ties to the earth.
I believe this new morning in the world is none other than the work of
the Spirit being poured out on all flesh. Bravado
and braggadocio have had their day on the world’s stage and they have failed
us. Contemporary Parthians and Medes
and Elamites – residents of Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and China and Mexico
and America and Pakistan and Cuba – all are beginning “in
their own languages and ways” to open themselves to the healing hope of humility
and thus are coming to embrace the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of God, by
whatever name it is known to them.
Poor
in spirit/God’s poured out Spirit – that is the Pentecost combination that
gives life…to you, to us, to the world.
The
Spirit of God still is being poured out on all flesh.
My pastoral counsel? Receive
it!
Amen.
©
Copyright 2009 First Presbyterian Church