Spirit of the Living God - Pentecost Jun 9 2019

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Spirit of the Living God

Tony E Dillon Hansen

A Sermon based upon Acts 2: 1-21, John 14:27, Psalm 104, and Romans 8:14-17

Let us begin with prayer. May the words of my mouth and meditations of all of our hearts be accepted in Your sight, Our Rock and Our Redeemer!

Happy Pentecost!  One of the high holy holidays of our faith!  Congratulations to our youth on their awesome confirmation!

Today, I present to you a couple stories to talk about the Spirit of the Living God.

IOWA vs ISU

The first story is a familiar one to Iowans. Picture it, it is the second Saturday of September and a train of cars are heading to Ames or Iowa City for the Iowa vs Iowa State football game. You know that my house is a house divided. So I am not going to tell you what is or isn’t correct about the best team on that field that day. What happens is interesting experience for all involved.  We witness people on both sides cheering and having great time before the game.  It moves to anxiety and nervousness as game progresses with prayers being lofted left and right for just the right pass or just the right fumble.  Then when the final is recorded, fans are either completely overjoyed or in complete misery. 

Was the spirit working for one side of prayers versus the other?  I submit to you that God is not just on one side no matter how good your curl at the end zone.

Despite winning or going home disappointed and hurt, God happens on both sides. God is comforting and connecting communities through the Spirit. If you look closely, you may even see God bridging the divide because God wants us to lift us – God wants us, not just some of us.

This leads me to my next story.

UBFM God Moments

God happens within and around the group and

With the people that we serve by teaching us that all deserve dignity & respect.

The next story is about a group that I am involved in Des Moines called UBFM. We provide an "extravagant welcome one burrito at a time." Every Thursday, a number of us gather in the basement of a church to put together supplies, sandwiches and burritos for homeless people around the metro. Then we are sent out on bike and car routes to deliver said gifts.  Before that, our leader does a safety briefing before sending people out. Each time, we are asked about God moments.  

You ask, what are those? When people find some positive development in a regular “client” or we just hear something positive, these are usually raised as God moments. 

There are times when there is none that are obvious, but I submit there is something happening right then and there - always. God is working in the group - in the preparations, the conversations, and the delivery.  People may not be aware when the spirit is working, but I have become accustomed to seeing the spirit working in that group.

UBFM may not be a formal church in our work, but God is working through them and in every interaction with the people we serve.  The Spirit is not just working within the group but those we serve as their faces light up when we show up. The Spirit is teaching us that every person on their place in life’s journey wants and deserves basic dignity and respect, and those people will sometimes gift us a prayer. That is truly moving.

Spirit works during success and our desperate hours.

You see, the Spirit works for us in many good ways during success or victory, and even in our most desperate hour (just like with the homeless, or the losing side of the game). The Spirit is working, nudging, tickling, comforting and just being amazing. The Spirit is working even, as our youth remind us, if we are not listening.

The key is that the spirit is working, and all we have to do is listen -- give it time. 

Some might say the spirit is in our faith.

  

Faith of Our Youth

I enjoyed working with the youth these past couple weeks and congrats to the leaders for their tremendous work! You are all to be commended!  The youth showed courage today, and their statement of faith reminds us that the Spirit lives though their example. So have some faith in our youth because they showed faith in the Holy Spirit!

Let the Spirit Work: Confessional

While we might want to overlook or forget (or it just feels hard), the spirit is working in our midst. In daily living, I admit and confess that sometimes I just wander away and forget but why?

It is because I let something get in the way, or I did not let God.

So, You, yes You!  Have faith; have spirit. Let it work for you.

Because:

The Holy Spirit expresses and reveals our community and God at work together.

The Holy Spirit expresses our hopes and aspirations while bringing us closer to the One because as Romans says, we are children of God led by the Spirit of God. So let us witness that spirit because God is grace and glory!

  

Give time in your daily lives to hear and see God at work because as St Paul writes, “now is the acceptable time.” In the moments of life, (e.g. prayer, trial, and success,) we can find God and that beautiful spirit.  If we just step back and breathe a moment, the Spirit is right there – next to your heart and soul. In this way, we can find that Spirit.

Yes, Now is the time.

Being the Example

Remember always, Jesus commands us to love God and to love our neighbor.  With this command, we can not only, experience the Spirit, but we can be an example of the Spirit working. We can be the example of that compassion during hard times like floods, tornados, loss, victory, and just decent humanity of acknowledging someone is there – not forgotten. We work through the Spirit of Christ in us. So, embody that Spirit for our community and all the great good that can happen.

Yes Now is the Time for that Spirit of God!

Wine @ 9:00?

The disciples were asked if they were filled with wine before 9:00. By our clock, it is just after 10:00.

The question should have been, are you filled with the Holy Spirit? If you were full of the Spirit, others might think you had enough wine too.  It makes you act funny, goofy, and happy. When you give it time to fill you, it opens you up, releases you from burdens, moves you, comforts you and grooves with you. Then you may find the spirit of the living God descend upon you.

Whether at a sports contest, during mission work, being sick, being homeless, being queer, saying prayer or just being alive… The spirit might be like having wine at the 10:00 hour.

Be filled with the peace that Jesus gives,

be filled with grace, comfort and hope.

The Spirit is working. Just look at the wonderful around you! And inside you!

Isnt that just awesome!?

Yes Now is the Time for that Spirit of God!

This is Pentecost – Be filled with peace -- be filled with the Spirit in you!

Thanks Be to God.

Woe to contentment (Lenten Journeys Luke13 and Luke6)

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Woe to contentment: Our work is not yet done.

Tony E Dillon Hansen

Reflection based upon Luke 13:31-35; Psalm 27; Genesis 15:17

Let us be in state of prayer. From Psalm 19, May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord You are our rock and our Redeemer!

Happy Lent!! 

In this time of Lent, we are positioned to reflect and think about our lives, what we miss, and what we could improve. 

As we continue on this journey through Lent , you could still consider prohibitions -- like abstaining from chocolates, Facebook, adult beverages, swearing (I have heard some of you and you know who you are) or something like that. Yes, I have my own practice. If you have one, great! if you don’t, I would like for you to consider adding something to your lives this season.

I submit to you to review and consider with me the sermon on the plain to serve as guideposts for our journey this year.  As I was working with the text, I saw the potential for gifts and focus points for each week -- even each day.  I hope you will as well.

So let us consider our current lesson that talks about this conversation with Jesus and put that in context of first part of that sermon on the plain.  So the question to ask is, what does a fox, the city of Jerusalem and woes have in common?  (In my goofy, dry sense of humor, that starts to sound like the beginning of a good joke.)

Let the spirit move us as it did Jesus.

Jesus is approached by some Pharisees that “warn” Jesus about Herod. This is kind of interesting, in of itself, because we have a set of elites warning Jesus about other elites. In the words of Robin Hood, as played by the wise Daffy Duck, “somethings amiss here.”

What does Jesus do? Calls out the boloney. Then tells them and all present, I am on my mission (ministry) and no one will prevent me from doing God’s work.  Further, you may not recognize Jesus’s work as it happens, but soon enough you will.

In this passage, we see one of Luke’s chief concerns is that of hypocrisy.  Here, Jesus laments over people’s attitudes towards the hypocrisy of the political elites, the religious elites here and the people who contently follow them. What is Jesus saying to us?

That might be best explained when we look back a few chapters -- using our section of the sermon on plain. Last week, our group walked together through first part of this Lenten journey through the sermon on the plain.  Allow me to recap.

We reviewed some of the beatitudes (blessed are the poor and the meek, for your reward is coming) essentially can be summarized to three points:

1)Blessed are you who seek the Truth! 2) Trust in God 3) because you are not alone. 

Further that reward is the kingdom of God. I submit to you that God does not want us to wait until death to participate.

Jesus’s sermon on the level place then brings us to some woes.

“…woe to you who are rich,
    …who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.
“…you who are laughing now,
    for you will … weep.

What are these woes? Woes against pleasure, no! These are woes against contentment.  Yes, we are blessed when we seek and trust in God, but we must be careful not to fall into the trap of contentment because contentment is a fleeting illusion.  In fact, contentment can lead to a form of idolatry rather than as venerating certain icons, money or personal success, but we are want to let these and worldly treasures prevent us from continuing to do what we are called to do. 

We have this throughout our lives, and I have a few examples where I have fallen short on this notion. Let me illustrate one.

I was reminded of this when watching the film Christopher Robin (a story about the Pooh, Tigger and Eeyore characters and the Hundred Acres Woods.) When I, as a father, am called to be a father for Tyler or to be a spouse to my love, yet when work calls, I too often felt compelled to switch gears and that became my focus for a day, evening or weekend. How many times have I missed something because I just did not do what I was called to do over an presumption of importance: an illusion of importance.  Even recently, I found myself in the middle of a project go-live and working an over-abundance of overtime to see successful objectives.  Yet, at what cost?

To consider this even more the irony is that it might have been easier to spend time with my family “doing nothing” than spend time anchored to my desk.  Perhaps it is necessary. Perhaps that is the purpose of holidays – even Jesus reminds us to take time for ourselves.

To counter these outside forces, I have intentionally enforced boundaries on these so that I might fulfill my promise and my call.

This is, however, more than just following through on a promise

It could have been easy for Jesus to hear the warning from the Pharisees here and stop what the mission and ministry, but that is not what God called of Jesus to do. Similarly, it could be easy for me or you to ignore truths in our society, especially when someone raises a potential warning and abandoned what we are called to do as followers of Christ.  That might be safe, that might be the compelling thing to do, but is it safe and is it worth our attention?

 

Why be content with saying the good words and then doing nothing with it? Why be content with just sitting in church when God calls us to do so much more.  We cannot be content with things because then we become the Jerusalem that Jesus laments -- while the fox takes from us, hides from and abuses power.

When you feel content with your Christian call today, you risk leaving the best part of yourself sitting in that pew when you leave worship and you risk not participating in God’s kingdom.

So What are we called to do that we are content ignoring? What are we substituting for what we are called to do; what God calls us to do?

Let us listen for a moment to some suggestions.

Over the past few years, I have grown quite a bit more faith in our youth. In fact, I would say that they have re-invigorated some of my work in the public sphere, and the youth are genuinely exciting me to do work!

The youth over the past few years have been calling out the fallacy of a broken system that seems designed to quiet us.  Perhaps this is one reason why Jesus calls upon us to listen to children because they have not understood our cultural ignorance as their own. Recently, they have been calling us to a truth with no place for contentment for what we think is “normal.”

Is it really ok to feel numb to another school shooting? 

Is it really ok to ruin God’s creation: our Earth: their future home?

Is it really ok to deny someone their justice, fairness or equality, whether immigrant, queer, black or blue?

Is it really ok to ignore the PTSD of honorable men and women returning from wars?

Is it really ok to be that normal?

The youth are compelling us to look at where we are -- just as Jesus does in these two pieces. 

They are calling out the fox and calling out Jerusalem - less we be that fox.

Let me put it another way.

My mother taught me a lesson once that when you move out of an apartment or house to leave it in better condition than we received it. Can we say that about our world and our youth – when we are content with “it is what it is”?

We, who do nothing, to prepare our world for them better than we received it do nothing to help our youth.

Perhaps, instead of busying ourselves with who should not be part of our community,

Perhaps, instead of nodding to rhetoric and ego, or violence as a way of life

Perhaps instead of forgetting what we are call to do

Perhaps instead of finding excuses to put off to tomorrow,

Perhaps then we do what the youth are calling us to do !

Perhaps then we do the work that is our mission as Christians – no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey.

We do not have to agree on everything but we don’t have to argue over the scraps dropped from the table of power.

We do not have to make excuses for them.

Like Christopher Robin, we can remember who we are and why we are here.

What is truly important in our lives is not just facades or worldly treasures,

But what God calls us to do for ourselves, our family, and our world.

No we don’t have to fight over scraps, rhetoric and illusions.

Let us listen to our youth.

I see the good Lord working through them and filling us with hope

That has long been forgotten.

We can be what God has invited us to be and to do his good work.

Again, Blessed are those who seek the Truth

Trust in God

Because you are not Alone.

Be mindful of contentment because

God is calling you to continue the good work.

“Blessed is the one who comes in the name off the Lord.” Luke 13:35

Is that you?

Thanks be to God!