(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on May 15, 2016, Pentecost)
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“Are You Seeing what I’m Doing?”
“Are You Seeing what I’m Doing?”
You probably know the story. In 2007, Joshua Bell, a Grammy-winning violinist, put on street clothes and performed some of the world’s classics in a Washington Metro station. Very few in the rush-hour crowd stopped to listen. Hardly a handful could appreciate the once-in-a-lifetime concert that serenaded them as they hurried through the halls.
When Philip asks Jesus, “Show us the Father and we will be satisfied,” I imagine that Jesus must feel a little bit like Joshua Bell felt in the Metro. Just as Joshua might well have asked the droves of people who passed him by, “Are you even hearing this?”, so Jesus asks Philip, “Are you seeing what I’m doing, are you hearing what I’m saying? How can you say, ‘Show us God,’ when God is in everything I do and say?”[1]
“Who Looks at the Wick?”
Annie Dillard, a writer who glories in the mysteries of the natural world, asks a question that I find particularly illuminating: “When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick?”[2] If the stories of Joshua Bell and Jesus are anything to go by, then the answer is, “Most of the world.” In the Metro, droves of people saw nothing more than the wick. They saw a man in street clothes. They did not see the flames around him, the music pealing off his violin this way and that. In Galilee and Jerusalem, plenty of people saw a homeless man wandering among the poor and the tax collectors and the prostitutes. But they did not see the holy flames around him. They might as well all have been making the same request that Philip made: “Jesus, if you really want us to believe what you’re saying, show us God.”[3]
In my paraphrase, Jesus responds, “What more could I show you? Do you not see the holy flames around me? Have you not heard the music I’ve been playing? Can’t you see that I am the wick and God is the flame? Can’t you see that I am an instrument and God is who plays me?” Jesus says that whenever he speaks, it is actually God speaking through him. And whenever he does something, it is actually God doing something through him (14:10). God is the Spirit who stirs within him. God is the call, and he is the response.
The Agnostic Heart of Belief?
Like a lot of us, Philip thinks that belief is a matter of being in the know, having the right connection, knowing the right name. For him, belief was about joining the winning side, being on the right side of power, ensuring his own salvation.
But in a flash, Jesus’ fiery words reduce this kind of belief to ashes. Listen again to what he says: “If you do not [believe], then believe me because of the works themselves” (14:11). Here in just a few words, Jesus burns through dogma and doctrine and confessions and creeds, and gets to the heart of belief. The heart of belief has very little to do with names and identities, with boundaries or borders, and everything to do with the works themselves. The heart of belief may even be said to be agnostic, in the sense that its passion is for the deeds themselves rather than comprehensively identifying the doer. Identifying the doer, I suspect, would be like trying to capture a flame in an airtight container. Ultimately the flame would vanish. Better to recognize the flame for what it is, the gift of goodness without which we cannot live, the gift of a God who is as loving as mysterious. Better to let this flame set our lives on fire, and the world around us.
“The Works Themselves”
But what is this flame? What are “the works themselves”? I think the works are the gospel that Jesus lives and proclaims. They are serving others. Healing them with a touch of compassion and a word of hope. Welcoming them when the world says they are unwelcome. Forgiving them whether or not they say “sorry.”
I cannot speak for anyone else. But the stories of Jesus touch my heart and inspire belief not because of his claim to authority, but because of his works. A man who welcomes tax collectors and prostitutes, who touches people where they hurt deepest and brings healing, who cries with the grieving, who forgives his enemies? How can I not believe in such life-changing works? How can I not believe in such a man?
And isn’t it the same in our world today? I see “the works themselves” around me all the time. It could be as simple as strangers keeping each other company in a hospital waiting room, as plain as a tearful reconciliation, as straightforward as the sacrifices that parents make for their children every day. And in each case, I am compelled in that instant to believe. I am compelled somewhere deep within to say, “Yes, that is the way. And the truth. And the life. That is how I am to live.”
To Catch Fire
And it’s like fire. It’s like a flame. Contagious. Catching. Infectious. Spreading. Believing in those works is inseparable from doing them. It’s just like Jesus says: “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do” (14:12). And then he makes the promise that he will do whatever a believer asks. Which I think is just another way of saying, when the fire catches hold of you, the spirit of God will be in you just as it was in Jesus, and you will welcome and heal and forgive and love just as he did.
To believe because of “the works themselves,” to catch fire from their holy sparks is what matters most, according to Jesus. Remember his story about the king who separates people as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (Matt 25:31-46)? The king welcomes into his kingdom the people who fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the needy, cared for the sick, visited the imprisoned. Their response to the king is both the most interesting and most overlooked part of the story. They say, “When did we do that?” In other words, they did all those things not because God told them to and not because they were looking for a reward. They fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, and cared for the sick “just because.” They did those things because they had faith not in a password or the winning side or a set of boundaries. They had faith in the works themselves—in the way and the truth and the life, which found flesh to the fullest in Jesus.
The Gospel of Pentecost
And that’s the gospel of Pentecost. Not that at one particular time God invested a set group of people with power. Not that God drew the boundaries around the church and said, “Now get in here if you want salvation.” The gospel of Pentecost is the good news that the fire never goes out. The followers of Jesus were worried that when he left, they would be nothing more than a group of helpless and wayward individuals. And truth be told, that same worry creeps in on us too from time to time, when we feel cold and alone, when we wonder if God is with us. But Christ promises in today’s story that we will never be alone, just as he himself was never alone. Christ promises that his followers will always have within them the Spirit of God speaking through them and working through them (cf. 14:10), a Spirit that plays not according to the rules of boundaries or memberships but rather like a wildfire that spreads through “the works themselves.”
On Pentecost, we as a church witness not to a creed or a to a confession, but to a way and truth and life, which is to say, to “the works themselves” that we see most fully in the flesh of Jesus Christ.
Two years ago, when Gayton Road sat down to reflect on its sense of calling, it concluded that it was to “love and care for one another and…the community.” What else is that but the calling to a way of life? What else is that but a calling of “the works themselves”? As I’ve talked with you individually, I’ve learned that Gayton Road feels a particular calling to welcome folks on the fringes of society, including the LGBT community, the autistic community, the community of internationals and refugees. Why? For no other reason than that the Spirit has caught fire in our hearts for these people. We don’t serve them because we’re seeking a reward or because we’re merely doing what someone else—the proverbial “man upstairs”—tells us to do. We’re doing it because the belief in “the works themselves” is inseparable from doing the works themselves. We are caught up in a holy wind, a sacred fire, not merely in our own interests but in other interests that through some divine twist have kindled the fire in our hearts.
Pentecost is about much more than celebrating something that happened long ago. It is about celebrating the mysteriously divine way that “the works themselves” seize our hearts today and spread the Spirit of God in the world like wildfire.
Prayer
Invisible God, whose beauty burns bright
In “the works themselves,”
Whose goodness compels us,
Whether we know it as God or as “just because”:
Might your wind fan the holy flames within
And lead us to do your works,
Drawing us along the way and the truth and the life.
In the name of Christ, who leaves us a Helper, your Holy Spirit:
Amen.
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[1] Paraphrased from 14:9-10.
[2] Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper, 1977), 71-72.
[3] Paraphrased from 14:10.
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