Sermon for Year C, First Sunday After
Pentecost (Trinity Sunday)
By The Rev. Torey Lightcap
May 26, 2013
St. Thomas Episcopal Church
“Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit: Week I –
Wisdom”
Who, in your life, has loved
you unconditionally?
I don’t mean to assume anything
about this crowd,
But don’t you think that each of us in our
lifetimes
Should have experiences of being around
people who love us and care for us
With no thought for themselves?
Folks who just want to see us
have better and do better than they’ve had and done?
Usually, these folks are
parents or grandparents or adoptive parents or close siblings
Or someone who takes a healthy interest.
Maybe a teacher or some mentor
in business or in life.
Looking back, I’ve been the
benefit of many such mentors:
I worked for Charles, who’s funny and clever and
taught me to think way ahead;
Another guy also named Charles could spot a
mistake a mile away and gently correct.
There was Peter. He wanted to
change the future to make less war, by studying the past.
There was Rick – enigmatic,
full-throated:
Taught me that only by embracing my
imperfections and shadows
Could I really learn to love and depend on
God.
There was Will, whose voice and
advice play in my head all the time like a stuck record.
There was even a guy who called himself Snake if you can believe that:
A guy who saw a positive path for me to grow
up with and encouraged me to take it,
Even though we only knew each other for
just a few hours.
You approach a certain point in
your life, and you ask yourself,
What
have all these mentors taught me? What have they given me?
And I suppose you do that, in
part, because you’re busy asking yourself,
Okay, out
of this rich treasury, what am I now supposed to give back to the world?
Today, the First Sunday After
Pentecost, is celebrated as Trinity Sunday.
That’s traditionally been a day
on which to explain the Holy Trinity,
And to give some lip service along the way to
the concept of the Holy Spirit.
Good luck with that, right? Doesn’t that sound like
fun? Doctrine?!
Being told about the Holy Spirit rather than experiencing it?
Preaching is supposed to be the
business of enlightenment and inspiration;
It isn’t necessarily teaching and lecturing;
they’re two different things.
A lesson or lecture is fine,
but you can’t have them regularly from the pulpit.
You need food of a different
sort.
So. Today I want to start
something that will not end for a good long while.
That in fact won’t be over
until the end of July.
Three Sundays starting now,
then a break for three weeks, then four Sundays in July.
The subject of these sermons in
this season of Pentecost is simply this:
In the world of mentors who give
unconditional love,
What has the Holy Spirit given
to you that you now have to offer to
the world?
What does the Spirit do in us
that we get to do in the world?
I have one simple goal for this
process,
And that is to give you a chance –
I can only give you a chance, but you have
to take it –
To give you a chance to fall head over heels in love with the Holy Spirit.
Not as an idea. Not as an
abstraction or a concept. Not as a doctrine on paper.
But as something very real and
a true Person of the Holy Trinity and expression of God:
To fall in love with this aspect of God.
You may have heard me say last
week that I am praying for Pentecost.
These sermons are my public way
of doing just that.
This is my commitment to you.
You wanna ride this roller
coaster with me?
Okay. Let’s climb in. Sit down.
Seat belts. Restraint bar.
I don’t really care if you keep
your hands in the car at all times;
Though we aren’t terribly evangelical here,
are we?
So just do whatever seems best.
We’re climing now, climbing … tick tick tick.
If you’re afraid of heights,
you’ll need to grab onto someone who isn’t
And holdontogether.
Be warned, now: it’s a roller coaster.
I think it’ll go fast and we’ll
have fun,
But it’ll also be bumpy and we might get a
little queasy along the way!
That’s the price of riding.
We’re cresting the hill … Week
One starts … now.
The basic ground for this work
comes from Isaiah chapter eleven: quote,
“A shoot will come up from the stump of
Jesse;
From his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him —
The Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
The Spirit of counsel and of might,
The Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the
Lord.”
The first gift of the Spirit of
God is Wisdom.
Wisdom.
When I was a kid I used to
pester my mom with all kinds of questions.
I remember having a lot of
conversations with her back to me,
Because she was washing dishes at the kitchen
window,
And I was staring down at our – I now
understand – unnaturally clean linoleum
floor.
One day I said, “Mom, what’s
the difference between understanding and wisdom?”
There was quite a long pause.
At last she said, “Shug,
wouldn’t you normally want to come in out of a thunderstorm?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. Who
wants to get rained on or hit by lightning?”
She said, “That’s understanding something.”
She said, “How many years did
it take you to figure that out?”
I thought about it and said,
“Maybe I didn’t know any better until I was about five.”
“Five years,” she said. “That’s
wisdom.”
Five years was the amount of
time it took me to figure something out about storms.
The process of accruing
knowledge.
Learning it and re-learning it
until I understood it inside and out. Half a decade.
Learned it til I earned it – a
journey, a process.
Learned it til something deeper
slid into place from way down inside me,
And said, Only
a fool would chance it, playing around in lightning and hail.
Time.
Time is the difference between understanding
and wisdom.
Knowledge is the raw material,
but only time turns it into something truly usable.
Time puts the jerky in the beef,
the deep flavor in the coffee bean, the bubble in the beer.
I disctinctly recall being
about ten years old,
And squeezing a few handfuls of grapes into a
styrofoam bowl,
And then putting them on the shelf of a dark
backyard shed,
And waiting … waiting.
I wondered how long it could
possibly take to make wine anyway.
I remember waiting fifteen whole minutes before taking a
sip,
And being shocked that whatever was supposed
to have happened, hadn’t yet happened.
Fifteen minutes and no wine?
What a bummer. Maybe I had the wrong kinds of grapes.
I clearly had the concept that
grapes need some time to become wine,
But how much would be acceptable? When was a
grape not a grape anymore?
Wisdom is what happens over time,
and after time has passed,
And if that’s true, then wisdom is also the
seasoned strength that lives in us
When we have flexed the muscles of patience
and waiting and learning
Over and over and over and over.
Strength, and deep
understanding, derived from waiting.
We get to the place where
knowledge ultimately becomes wisdom.
Memory, looking back, brings
discernment.
Years ago in Texas, I was part
of a church that was committed to the idea
Of doing things together in an
intergenerational way.
Almost on a lark, we decided at
one point to invite everyone
To listen to four very different people who
had passed the age of seventy-five
As they spoke for just a few minutes apiece
On the subject of what they had learned in
life
That they would consider worthy of telling
to others.
(We might think about doing the
same thing here.)
We billed it as “A Night of Wisdom
Shared,”
And as I recall, the room was packed.
I hope this isn’t doing any of
those folks a disservice,
But what I remember happening
Was that all four people shared pretty much
the same set of ideas:
That after everything is said
and done, it really is going to be okay …
Life will bring you pain, but
it’s how you decide to meet that pain
that matters …
You’re not God …
But you need God …
That you’re going to hurt
people and be hurt in life, and you have to make amends …
To change with life a little as life changes you, and
you’ll be richer for it …
It was a feast.
We video-recorded it and put
the tape in the church library,
And it was checked out many times.
Later, after one of the people
featured in the video died,
Portions of that presentation were played at
her funeral.
All of which had ought to teach us something:
Most of
the time, the world wants to know what you know:
That’s generally how you make a living.
But on rare occasions, with no
selfish intention, the world will ask for your wisdom,
And in that moment you will find the best of
yourself
Being pulled out of you, and placed on
display, on offer, for the life of the world.
And what is more, it’s usually
just one life at a time that’s asking,
Not a roomful of strangers.
But Hey – a gift is a gift. Use
it.
The gift of God – the Spirit of
God – the Holy Spirit –
Wisdom placed deeply within you, acquired
over long periods of time,
Times you went through things you didn’t
understand and couldn’t explain,
And now, inexplicably still, here at this
moment, drawn out from you.
Simple knowledge fermented into
indisputably good judgment.
More than just common sense, too,
or knowing your facts,
Or being shrewd or sophisticated or
philosophical.
But rather, being a conduit for
love and compassion and fearless grace.
That’s God messing about in
your heart. God’s Spirit stirring the pot.
It’s all so beautifully and
simply described by Jesus,
When he tells us about a lot of seed that was
scattered indiscriminately:
How it landed everywhere – a path, rocky
ground, among thorns,
And even a little bit among good soil.
How mostly it went nowhere or
got carried off,
Except what landed in the good soil, and over
time became harvestable,
And made for a fabulous yield: a hundred,
sixty, or thirty times what was sown:
A bumper-crop: seeds in the ground that
eventually were more than useful.
Seeds that grew from nothing to
become something folks could use to live on.
Can you see your life’s wisdom
like that?
As a gift of the Spirit, meant
to feed people who are hungry for it?
For that’s precisely what it
is.
Wisdom.
Let us pray.
Gracious Spirit, keep giving to us those things you know we need,
And more than that, those
things we need to give away.
Above all, give us the spirit of Jesus.
Amen.
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