A Pentecost gift for
Witherspoon ... and for you
[5-7-08]
The Rev. Ralph G. Clingan sent us a
sermon he has prepared for Pentecost Sunday, for a congregation that he
describes as having been “mortally wounded by a homophobic fundamentalist
fellow Presbyterian minister.”
The Day of
Pentecost
“If you forgive the sins of
any, they are forgiven …” Jesus in John 20.23a
First reading:
Numbers (In the Wilderness) 11.24-30
Second reading: The Acts of the Apostles 2.1-21
Evidence of a Real
Spiritual Birth
Dearly beloved!
Some of the authors of the
Bible made clear distinctions between people who pretended to have
experienced a Spiritual birth and those who demonstrated evidence of an
authentic Spiritual birth by the Lord God of Israel and the Church. Today,
three types of evidence the Biblical witnesses presented will show we have
had a real Spiritual birth. So, as I proclaim God’s words according to our
readings, I want you to write down your experiences and actions that match
what we read and proclaim.
Our first reading today is in
the Book of Numbers, which Jews call “In the Wilderness.” Chapter 10 retells
the same story as Exodus 16.14-21.31. The Israelites yearned to eat meat and
the Lord God sent manna every day for them to eat. Nevertheless, they
complained and cried out loud in agony for actual meat, the flesh of birds,
fish or animals.
Most scholars think the
Israelites wrote “In the Wilderness,” or Numbers, during the Babylonian
exile, and 11.24-30 provided one of the proofs of a later date of origin
than the Exodus account. Evidence of a real Spiritual birth became important
during the extreme impoverishment and oppression of the Babylonian exile, a
fate much worse than wandering in the Sinai wilderness. Israelis experienced
starvation. Because of the desert ecology of Sinai in the experience of post
liberation nomadic wandering on the one hand, they became hungry and
thirsty; because of religious, cultural, and social oppression by the
Babylonians, they became poor and oppressed, on the other hand.
The Babylonians invented a
word to refer to the place where the Jews lived: Ghetto. Jeremiah
gave them a very clear way of being different from the Babylonians: A
special relationship with their Lord God. Jeremiah told them not to boast of
wealth, education, or power, but to boast only of knowing the Lord God, that
the Lord requires justice on planet Earth. Jeremiah told them they would
know the Lord God because God would create hearts of love in place of their
hearts of stone. When they experienced the new hearts of love from their
Lord God, they would know that the Lord God required them to do justice.
They would do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God when the Lord
God filled them with the Holy Spirit.
They would develop a
religion, culture and society that imitated the righteous ways of their Lord
God and inspire one another by up building, encouraging, consoling words and
deeds which would become evidence of a real Spiritual birth.
The author reported that Moses
took 70 elders from among the 12 tribes of Israel beyond the camp into and
around the Tent of Meeting. The place was always filled with smoke from
burning incense. The prayers of the people ascended to God through the smoke
and God sent the Holy Spirit to the people using the smoke. So, smoke from
burning incense means the Lord God and the people will be brought together
in a real spiritual encounter. The Holy Spirit of the Lord God filled the 70
elders plus the two men still in the camp, 72 altogether, 6 elders from each
tribe, and prophesying gave evidence of their spiritual experience. What
sorts of things did the biblical authors call prophesying?
Prophecy has three functions
in the Bible: 1. Building people up into the
likeness and righteousness of the Lord. 2. Encouraging people to imitate the
ways of the Lord in the way they live. 3. To console people when they
suffer, either because of some illness or injury, or because of persecution
or oppression by enemies. They sent Joshua to beg Moses to stop the
two men in the camp from prophesying because they wanted to confine prophecy
to the Tent of Meeting. If they could confine spiritual up building,
encouragement and consolation to the 70 men and Moses, they could go right
on criticizing and complaining. They could tear down Moses, Aaron, Miriam
and the elders, discourage them and make them very disconsolate and thereby
convince them to allow them to return to Egyptian slavery. When Joshua, the
spiritual leader of Moses, asked Moses to prevent the two young men from
prophesying, Moses replied that he wished every human being in the camp
would prophesy!
The elders, priests and prophets of Israel during the
Babylonian captivity wanted to build the people up in their religion,
encourage them in their culture, and console them in their oppression and
suffering. They wanted the exiled, crushed, oppressed people to yearn and
believe and hope and work for the time of liberation and restoration, to
remain unstained from their exposure to Babylonian religion, culture,
economics, education, and society. Moses wished that all Israelites would up
build, encourage and console one another, thereby inspiring the entire
community to imitate the ways of the Lord God, and so did the leaders of the
Israelis during the Babylonian exile.
Your words and deeds that
build others up into the ways of the Lord, your encouraging deeds and words
to discouraged people, and your words and deeds of consoling depressed and
downtrodden people are evidence of your real Spiritual birth.
Sometime just after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in Common
Era 70, somewhere in Palestine, a disciple of the apostle John used six
miracles of Jesus as the basis for creating what we call The Gospel of John.
The stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection in John 18-20 comprise the
Apostle John’s final miracle. Jesus came among the frightened disciples
later on the same day Mary Magdalene discovered that Jesus had arisen from
the dead. Their doors were locked to keep the Romans out, but the locked
doors did not prevent Jesus from coming among them. Jesus gave them a
special shalom, and breathed his Holy Spirit and God’s on the disciples and
gave them the power to forgive or retain sins.
If they forgave sins on earth, those sins
would be forgiven in heaven at the same immediate moment.
The words forgive and
forgiveness only appeared in this text and nowhere else in the entire Gospel
of John. Jesus came to give people the power, through Spiritual birth, of
becoming children of God. John the Baptizer greeted Jesus as the Lamb of God
who takes away the sins of the world. Nicodemus needed to have Jesus explain
the Spiritual birth. The way Jesus related to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s
well demonstrated forgiveness. Forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus
manifests the great gift of his death on the cross, wherein Jesus was the
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The gospels of Matthew and
Luke give us the Lord’s Prayer, in which the Lord God requires us to forgive
the sins of those who sin against us before our sins can be forgiven by the
Lord God. Your
words and deeds of forgiving those who sin against you are evidence of your
Spiritual birth.
What is the difference between permissiveness and
forgiveness? There are three differences:
1. The sinner wants to
be built up into the righteousness of the Lord God in the image, person, and
work of Jesus of Nazareth;
2. The sinner responds
whole heartedly to the encouraging commands of Jesus of Nazareth; and
3. The sinner wants the
consolation of forgiveness of her or his sins because the terrible burden of
guilt and shame he or she carries has been removed by Jesus, the Lamb of
God, who takes away the sins of the world.
Every mother of children I
ever knew realized how true forgiveness takes place. Mothers want to build
their children up into fine women and men. Mothers realize that their
children will fail and rebel from time to time, and stand ready to speak and
perform deeds and words that encourage their children to persevere and try
to improve their lives. Every mother does what her suffering need to bring
them consolation. Every girl needs to be shown and taught these ways of
relating to their future children, and, in my recent experience of my sons
and my daughters’ husbands, their boyfriends and husbands!
Did the mothers’ love for
their children cease because they chose boyfriends they did not like? No!
Why? Because their love came from real spiritual births. They realized that
love, forgiveness and repentance come from the crucified Jesus and had to
conform to his love, forgiveness and repentance.
When we really repent of
the sins that contradict the amazing grace of God in Jesus Christ, we will
demonstrate the reality of our spiritual birth.
The Book of the Acts of the
Apostles contains many stories of evidence of the real inspiration of the
Holy Spirit. Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus the disciples
gathered in Jerusalem experienced the noisy, powerful, fiery event recorded
in Acts 2, our second reading today. The tongues of fire empowered them to
speak languages they never before spoke, they ran out into the streets
prophesying loudly. Some thought they were drunk, but the apostle Peter
stood up and became a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 3,000 people
joined the disciples on that occasion. Peter’s text was one of the Jewish
lectionary readings for Pentecost, our Call to Worship today, from the Book
of Joel.
Our first reading, from “In
the Wilderness,” the Book of Numbers, was one of the Jewish lectionary
readings for Pentecost. Because the twelve apostles and the apostle Peter
were filled with the Holy Spirit and demonstrated evidence of it by
prophesying in languages other than Galileean Aramaic, the mission of the
Church should always be couched in the languages of the peoples.
Many languages enable us to prophesy, to
bring up building, encouraging, consoling messages to all sorts and
conditions of human beings everywhere.
Christians of the Reformation
and their heirs have translated the Bible into thousands of languages. I
chose to wear the Ross tartan today in honor of John Ross. Rev. Ross grew up
in speaking Gaelic. When he went to Edinburgh University at 16 was his first
exposure to English. He did well with languages, and wanted to become a
missionary to England from the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. He
learned Mandarin and Korean. He baptized the first Korean converts, 600 in
two congregations, which were formed around the translations of the New
Testament he supervised five Korean merchants to carry out.
Rev. John Ross enabled Koreans
to develop the Christian faith not as a clone of Scottish Presbyterianism,
but as a distinctive expression of their distinctive religious, cultural,
and social form of Christian faith, hope, and love. Throughout the decades
of Japanese and American oppression that followed, Koreans born again by the
Holy Spirit built up, encouraged and consoled one another, just as African
Americans did during the years when hope unborn was put to death on lynching
trees and by mass holocausts again and again, just as the
Dalit, or Untouchables of
India did during the ages of conservative Hindu caste discrimination. What
sorts of problems in us interfere with a real spiritual birth? Here are four:
Past Hurts, Low Self Esteem, Grudges, and Resentments.
A real spiritual birth yields
God’s love, which gradually erases our Past Hurts. Love eventually over
rides Low Self Esteem with the High Self Esteem of being God’s beloved
child. Nevertheless, we must completely turn off any grudges we hold and all
our resentments before the real spiritual birth from God’s great and Holy
Spirit can pour love into our hearts. We can do this when we go back to the
beginning of all spiritual birth, to forgiveness. Receiving God’s
forgiveness of our sins as often as every day, all our grudges and
resentments can eventually cease to exist in us, and the evidence of a real
spiritual birth can occur.
Whether forgiveness begins
with consolation in times of suffering, or encouragement of despairing folk,
or with building people up when crushed by oppression and discrimination the
Lord does not care. I can read today’s texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
Spanish, German and English, and they still say the same things I have
preached here this Pentecost Sunday. Evidence of a real spiritual birth
always will be the forgiveness of sins.
Recently Mrs. Mildred Loving
died at age 68. Mildred was an African American Virginian who fell in love
with and married a European American Virginian in the District of Columbia.
They wanted to move back to Virginia to establish a home and raise a family.
Interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia, and a Jewish volunteer lawyer
for the ACLU took their case all the way to the Supreme Court and eliminated
all such laws.
The mother of two of my
nephews and her partner were married in Las Vegas, but Oklahoma, where they
lived and raised their sons, did not recognize their marriage because they
are both women, until they got one of the volunteers from ACLU to help them
make the state do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.
God’s grace and mercy must
discipline and define the authenticity, or reality of our spiritual birth,
our Pentecost, or else we will be found incapable and unworthy of Holy
Communion with Jesus of Nazareth, our Christ, Lord, and Savior.
About the author:
Rev. Ralph Garlin Clingan,
PhD, retired member of Newark Presbytery, teaches Theology at St. Peter’s
College, Jersey City. His books include
Against Cheap Grace in a World Come of Age, an intellectual biography of
Clayton Powell, 1865-1953, vol. 9, Martin Luther King Jr.
Memorial Studies in Religion, Culture and Social Development, ed. Mozella
Mitchell (New York: Peter Lang, 2002) and
An Action Preaching Manual (Seoul: The Preaching Academy,
2002) in Korean and English. The same publisher will produce another book,
How to Prepare a Sermon Quickly,
which will include about 150 of his sermons in October. Dr. Clingan is
Maria’s husband and Jessica Rose Feldman’s grandpa!Pentecost
