"Wild Card," Pentecost A, Acts 2:1-21, June 12, 2011

Pentecost - A
Acts 2:1-21
June 12, 2011

Wild Card

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Every year the members of the Annual Conference gather for four days of worshiping, celebrating our mission and ministry, and engaging in holy conferencing. That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is that every year we gather for four days of spinning our message, promoting our own institutions, and bickering with one another about money and sex. Both ways of describing what the Annual Conference does are more or less accurate. The difference between them has to do with how tired and frustrated the story teller is. Let me say that I bless Alan Lerstrom and Kathi Mitchell for being willing to take on the role of lay member of Annual Conference.

As difficult as it can be sometimes, the Annual Conference is important. Our Book of Discipline describes the Annual Conference as the “basic organizational unit of the United Methodist Church.” Its major business this year was the election of delegates to the next General Conference. Our General Conference meets every four years and is the voice of the global United Methodist Church. It sets the agenda for our denomination for the next four years, or what we call a “quadrennium.” It is composed of clergy and laity delegated by Annual Conferences from around the world. Kathi Mitchell decided to stand as a candidate for the lay delegation from our Annual Conference this year. She did pretty well, all things considered, though she didn’t gain a spot on either the General Conference or Jurisdictional Conference delegations.

If you’re not bewildered by just this mention of three different kind of Conferences it’s because you’ve been around United Methodists for a long time. The universal first impression of our denomination is that it is organized to a fare-thee-well. We can’t really help it. It’s in our denomination’s DNA. The founder of our movement, John Wesley, came at life in an extremely organized fashion. That’s the nice way to put it. The Freudian and perhaps not so nice way to put it would be to say that he was “anal retentive.” Basically, he was a control freak.

Control freaks seek structure and order, especially when there isn’t enough structure and order. If they are high-functioning control freaks, they are able to bring their organizational vision to bear on disordered circumstances in a helpful way. If they are not high-functioning they try to control everything by stamping out all creativity and spontaneity. Those who are not control freaks find this annoying.

Every movement, every organization, and I think, every person needs some degree of order. And every movement, every organization, and every person needs some degree of creative freedom. Even a machine needs a certain amount of what is called “play.” A wheel bearing needs a few thousandths of an inch of wiggle room. Otherwise it will overheat, the surfaces will weld together and it will freeze up. Too much wiggle room and a bearing will wear out, and then it will overheat, weld together and freeze up.

In the religious context, too little play leads to what we call legalism. Without enough play, all we see are the rules. Rules are good. They are intended to help us live by showing us the shape of the world that we live in. They show us a life that will work with rather than against the grain of the universe.

But when all we see are the rules, our lives become like wheel bearings with too little play. We overheat. Parts of our lives that are supposed to slip over each other, stick instead. We grind to a halt. Too many rules that are too tight result in the end of all movement. For living beings, that is the same thing as death.

At the other end of the spectrum from organization, order and control are creativity, freedom and spontaneity. We who are part of the biblical tradition have always called that end of the spectrum “spirit.” In fact, since it expresses part of God’s nature we have called it “The Spirit of Yahweh” or “The Spirit of God.”

It’s only fair to warn you that, coming as it does from the opposite end of spectrum from order and control, the Spirit (with a capital “S”) can be more than a little disturbing, upsetting, anxiety-provoking and even scary.

Consider the images of the Spirit that are used in the Bible. Yes, a dove is used as one of those images. At the scene of Jesus’ baptism in Mark’s gospel, for example, the heavens are torn open and a dove descends on Jesus. A heaven-splitting dove is disturbing enough, but then the dove “drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness,” using the same word that describes Jesus driving the money-changers out of the temple. So much for harmless, gentle doves.

We might make “windy” noises, but we know about mighty winds. We’ve seen “mighty winds” wreak havoc all across the southern part of our country and even in our own state. “Mighty winds” are nothing to mess around with.

We might wave red, orange and yellow crêpe paper over each other’s heads. But real fire, another of the favorite images for the Spirit, has a disturbing double aspect. On the one hand, fire gives light, transforms flesh into meat, dough into bread, clay into pottery and ore into metal. It heats our homes. It adds atmosphere, too. A candle-lit dinner loses something if the candles aren’t lit. But as the folks of Arizona know too well, fire can be enormously destructive and dangerous. As of yesterday, the wildfire there had burned over 629 square miles. That’s a square that’s twenty-five miles on a side.

The Spirit is creative, powerful and life-giving. It is also playful, wild and unpredictable. The Spirit has little respect for rules or structures or orderly processes. It avoids committee meetings and conferences. It doesn’t keep appointments reliably.

The Spirit is God at God’s freest. It cannot be tamed or domesticated or produced on demand by any technique or technology. The Spirit of God is a church bureaucrat’s worst nightmare. Its unmanageability gives headaches to church managers at every level—from bishops to pastors. Like new wine it ferments and foments and ruins any attempt to squeeze it into old containers.

And here we are today, celebrating the gift of the Spirit and asking for more! What are we thinking?

As chaotic as the Spirit is, it is also the source of our life as a movement. The times of greatest challenge for the Christian movement have also been the times when the Spirit’s work has become the most evident. In our own challenging times we need the presence of the Spirit among us.

The trick, I suppose, is discovering how to live with the Spirit when all attempts to get it to work through our committees fails. It’s not a matter of striking a balance. Whenever the Spirit gets involved, balance is no longer an option. It’s more a matter of keeping our feet and trying to go with the flow. I remember a story about a Taoist master and his disciple who were walking along a rain-swollen river when the master stumbled on a rock and fell in. The horror-stricken disciple ran along the river as fast as he could, trying in vain to keep up with his master and to find some way to rescue him. The master was swept out of sight around a bend in river, but the disciple did not give up. Finally, he came upon the old man, sitting on a rock beside the river, soaking wet and laughing. He asked, “Master, are you all right? What happened?” The master answered, “Well, as you know, I fell into the river. It carried me along for a while and then I fell out again. And here I am.”

We need to figure out how to become more supple, able to change direction quickly in response to the Spirit’s movement. We need less of five year plans and more of taking the very next step, the one set in front of us and trusting that the Spirit will bear us up. We need fewer committees and more ministry. We need less structure and more life. We need less work and more play. We need fewer rules and more room to move.

How much more? I don’t know. How much is too much? I don’t know. When do we get to the point that creative play becomes destructive chaos? I don’t know. How much of the Spirit should we ask for? I don’t know how much. I only know we need more. So we’ll ask for more. And let God decide how much.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.