“Test Everything”
Sermon of the Rev. Daniel L. Hatch
First Congregational Church of
Stockbridge
3rd Sunday of Advent,
December 11, 2011
Scriptures: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; Isaiah 61: 1-4, 8-11
Text: Do not quench the spirit, do not despise prophesy, but test everything; hold
fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil. I Thessolonians 5:19-22
Greetings:
Opening Prayer: Divine Spirit, Heart-pulse of the universe, known by many names, in this season of gathering darkness, help us to remember that darkness is the best place from which to see light. As we prepare for the rebirth of the “Word made flesh”, grant that we may be good stewards of your Word this morning. Take my voice and speak through it, open our hearts, our eyes, our minds and our ears that we might hear a word you would have for each of us today and, having heard, have the courage to act as living Words to your glory. Amen
Sermon:
This is the third Sunday in Advent, the Sunday of Love. What are you expecting on Christmas Day as the culmination of this Advent season: A memory of a baby born in a manger among adoring animals visited by poor shepherds summoned by angelannouncing the birth of a Savior? That is Luke’s version. Or are you cherishing Matthew’s version of wise men, bewitched by a star, seeking a new born king of the Jews which they find in house over which the star comes to rest? These are wonderful stories, but we can’t let them just take us back to a time and place 2000 plus years ago. Instead we must embrace them as something that points us toward something far greater; an ever evolving cycle of birth and rebirth of incarnational faith and Love within each and every one of us, as we seek to make manifest in our lives and the world the Love we know and embrace. How we do this is what I want to explore with you this morning.
First, a bit of current context: in the late 70’s, while doing some substitute teaching
there was a statistic that said the average high school graduate would have five careers, three of which had not yet been invented. If you look at what has happened since then in the whole electronic and dot com industry you can appreciate the truth of that prediction. I recently learned that much of what is taught to freshmen in college today is obsolete by the time they are seniors.
Times have changed and are changing. Today we have more information available to us than the sum total of all information since the beginning of recorded time. Our culture, like our knowledge is changing exponentially rather than linearly. Earlier this Fall I went to an I-Max presentation on the Hubble Telescope in Washington, D.C. I learned that not only can we observe stars being born and dying, but also that there are over 200 other galaxies beyond ours and that the universe is expanding faster than we ever thought, unfolding in an intricate relational dance that gives witness to an awesome divine reality.
Most of us born before 1980 were trained to be linear thinkers. Linear thinking was the
method used to teach me faith and Christianity in Sunday school, confirmation class and Bible studies. Today’s exponentially changing culture requires creative thinking, not linear thinking. Our multi-tasking younger generations are using parts of their brains we linear thinkers never used, which is part of the reason that the younger generation finds church as we older folks know, like, and practice it, very boring. This a major factor in the declining attendance in mainline churches. Today’s reality is that our way of thinking about the divine was pretty much packaged and standardized in the 4th Century. If we are to allow Christ to be born anew in us this Christmas we must begin to re-think, re-language, and re-live the divine in the 21 Century.
How do we do that? Paul has an answer in our text for today. It is the summary of his first
letter to the church in Thessolonica: Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil.
Most of what Paul says is straight forward. We are to rejoice at the gift of life, and live
life prayerfully with an attitude of gratitude, abstaining from every form of evil. But what does Paul mean by not quenching the Spirit and testing everything?
First, we must remember that Jesus in his farewell address to his disciples, found in John 14:25, promised that the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Jesus did not promise them a Bible. Yes, it was the Spirit that guided the writing of scriptures, the Spirit that guides us in their interpretation, and in their rewriting. We already see this in the number of different Bibles available today.
As one place to start we need to allow the Spirit to guide us in releasing the Divine from
the fetters of outmoded language. As an example, take the first six words of the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father who art in heaven…. In testing them I found them woefully lacking in being able to encompass the nature of the Divine I have come to know. For me “our” implies a possessiveness that does not resonate with my sense of “one God”, as
it excludes those who have other names for and understanding of the Divine. “Father
who” attributes anthropomorphic characteristic to the Divine, which for me severely limits the nature of the Divine. Most of the younger generation thinks of God more as an energy field of love, Qi, or universal consciousness. That works for me as a relational life force inherent in our ever-expanding universe. Finally “art in Heaven” as a locus for the Divine does not encompass my belief that the Divine is in me and in you and every single facet of creation. Besides, we can go back to the Big Bang and have yet to find heaven!
Having tested, I opened myself to see where the Spirit might guide me. The Spirit, at
this point, has guided me to I begin my prayer with “Divine Spirit, Source of Love and Life, known by many names….” This currently works for me. It is a matter of faith, my faith, not fact, which I believe that I have to hold firmly enough to live by as an operational hypothesis but also lightly enough to be open to new understanding. Like John Robinson who said to our Pilgrim forbearers before sending them off to the New World four centuries ago: “There is yet more truth and light to break forth from God’s Holy Word”, I strongly believe that the Divine, to which we refer as God, is “still speaking.”
Besides testing the words we use to refer to the Divine, I feel we also have to find more fluid and less dogmatic theological concepts, such as the Trinity. I opened to the Spirit’s guidance by asking the question, “How can we, as finite human beings, begin to comprehend that which is vastly infinite and beyond total comprehension? I was led to test Jesus’ words to the Pharisees in Luke 17: 21, the kingdom of God is within you. If the kingdom of God is within me, I needed a different way of understanding the Trinity than the one I had learned in church. The Spirit led me to realize, given the finite limits of human nature, that there are three primary ways that we can begin to comprehend the infinite nature of the Divine: creation, incarnation, and inspiration.
1) Creation The first sign of life, outside of division of cells in most animals and birds, is
the heart beat. It is a gift of the Creator, the Source of Life and an apriority indication of unconditional love, as that heart keeps beating no matter what we do, and we don’t even have to think about it. Thus in the old Trinitarian sense, it is God that beats our heart that resides in our heart.
2) Incarnation It is in our mind that we develop the language, meaning and understanding with which we interpret life and all that goes with life. It is in our mind that we realize the incarnate nature of the Divine. Paul knew this when he said in 1 Corinthians 2:16, We have (present tense) the mind of Christ. Unlike the beating of our hearts over which we have little control, we have a lot of control over our minds and how we develop our mind of Christ. So Christ is in our mind, waiting to be allowed to grow and
mature.
3) Inspiration Where does inspiration come from? My sense is that it comes from outside us. The Hebrew word, ruach, means both spirit and breath. Therefore I believe that inspiration comes from the universe through our breathing—the most important element in most spiritual practices which seek to open us up to the movement of the Spirit.
Thus with God in our heart, Christ in our mind, and the Holy Spirit in our breathing, we
are divine creatures, each one of us an embodiment of the Divine. Therefore on this Sunday of Love as we move towards the rebirth of the Divine within us this Christmas, let us seek to enable the Spirit to not just help us share love, but rather to become an individual, unique manifestation of Love.
If we can do this then, like Isaiah, we can boldly proclaim:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display God’s glory.
On this Advent Sunday of love as we prepare for our new spiritual rebirth this Christmas, what better gift can we bring to the fullness of the Christ being born within us than to strive to live in such a way as to become a living fulfillment of this passage? This is
especially so when we remember, according to Luke’s story world that a very human Jesus, who had become divinely human, claimed at the very beginning of his ministry that he was the fulfillment of this passage.
May each of us continue to prepare for the rebirth of Christ within each of us this Christmas by testing everything and holding on to what is good in order to allow the Spirit to transform each of us into an unabashed manifestation of Divine Love, into a divine human being.
I bless you on your way with these words inspired by Paul: May the God of peace sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless as you seek to become like Christ, evermore divinely human, trusting in the guidance of the Spirit, testing everything, and holding fast to what is good.
In so doing, may you live Love find ever new joy this Christmas!