Spirit of the Heartland

A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
The Rev. Patricia A. Gillespie

Acts 1:1-14
Psalm 47
1 Peter 4:12-19
John 17:1-11

Jesus is gone. Disappeared into the clouds. And the disciples are left standing around looking up. They are waiting for Jesus to come back so he can tell them what to do. And we wait with them. Waiting for Jesus to come into our lives. Hoping he'll tell us what to do next. Or more likely, what the disciples and we really want is for Jesus to come back so he can do it for us: make our lives good for us, save us, heal us, love us. We wait for Jesus to come back and for him to do what needs to be done.

It feels like that now in our Spirit of the Heartland churches. We talk about "discernment,"waiting for Jesus to tell us what to do. But for many of us, what we really want is for someone who is "Jesus-like" – a priest, a few committed lay ministers -- to come and do it for us. And suddenly here come the Messengers in white saying, "Why are you hanging around staring into space? – stop waiting for someone to do it for you."

Today at Good Samaritan we're baptizing a baby. Perhaps we are a bit envious of little Paige. How good it would be to be like her and have others make our baptismal promises for us. But even little Paige, once she has been baptized and sealed by the Holy Spirit, will have work to do while she waits and grows – her own work of ministry while her parents and Godparents keep their promise to ‘help this child grow into the full stature of Christ.' She, like all babies including the one born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, was sent to help us learn us something about love. For now that is one of the gifts the Spirit has given her so that she can do Christ's work in the world.

But most of us are not baby Christians. We don't have others making our baptismal promises for us. So the messengers dressed in baptismal white are telling us to stop standing around, to get busy. They're reminding us that we have received the Holy Spirit. And that the Spirit has given us the gifts we need to be Christ in the world, to do what needs to be done.

But this is scary. The arrival of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our church is frightening. It means life, but life means change and growth. And so we are afraid, like the disciples staring up at the cloud. We want it like it used to be. So we stand around looking up and hoping that Jesus will come really soon and take care of things.

And instead Jesus gives us the promise of the Spirit. But the coming Spirit is an unknown, and that too is frightening. We, like the disciples, are tempted to run away, to leave Jerusalem and the church and to look for something safe and familiar.

But Jesus said to wait for the promise -- the promise of the Spirit. It's scary because at some level we know a biblical truth about the Spirit. We learned it from Mary of Nazareth. We see it in the prophets and the apostles as well. The truth is that when you say "yes" to the Spirit you get pregnant. Instead of looking up into the sky, we should be looking out for the Spirit.

Being a Christian means being pregnant with the Holy Spirit. That's not always easy. Like any pregnancy, although there may be hope and great joy, there is also much waiting and very likely some suffering. Many pregnant women find that it's often easier if you keep busy. In the same way, spiritual pregnancy -- that is, being Christian -- is also a balance between activity and waiting.

Listen to the advice in today's readings:

• Peter tells us to "entrust [our]selves to a faithful Creator, while continuing to do good."
• Our first reading from Acts suggests that we devote ourselves to prayer while we wait.
• Our gospel reading answers the "what would Jesus do" question when Jesus makes that clear that the way he glorified the Father was by finishing the work God gave him to do (even when that meant suffering). And that part of that work was to make God's name known.