Texts:

• First Reading Genesis 1:1-2:4a
• Psalm 8:1-9
• Second Reading 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
• Gospel Matthew 28:16-20

Manuscript:

It has been a week.

It has been a week since I stood here on Pentecost, asking what good news we would proclaim, and asking how long, O God, until we can finally stop placing unnecessary boundaries between ourselves.

It has been a week of complicated feelings. In all honesty, I avoided marches and protests in DC while I lived in the area—well before the 2016 election had actually taken place, I even made plans to be out of town for what would become the weekend of President Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March.

It has been a week of being thankful that, among other things, our TV is still back in DC, so while we can and do find out what’s happening on the internet, we can’t watch anything live, so it was Tuesday morning before I heard about our President forcefully clearing clergy off a church patio so he could pose for a picture holding a borrowed Bible. One that he returned, I imagine, unopened.

It has been a week of watching in real time the polarization of our country, shown in conversations between people whose social media feeds were presenting them with wildly different pictures of the protests—some saw only images of police tired, worn down, or even attacked, of looting and rioting, while others saw only images of police on the attack, acting in some cases more like counter-protesters than law enforcement by escalating conflict and attacking otherwise peaceful protests. I do not want to engage in both-sides-ism. Only those who have been given the public trust can betray that trust.

It has been a week of thinking how we talk about strength, force, and power, about peace, justice, authority, and…yes, law and order, and the fact that all too often we conflate those words, assuming that force is strength is power is authority, or that order is peace, and law is justice.

It has been a week, yes, because that is what we call seven days, that is what we call our imitation of God’s cycle of creation and rest. I say our imitation because too many people get caught up in this idea that God counts days the same way that we do, even though, as I have said before, the sun that governs our days and the moon and stars that light our nights were not created until the fourth day of creation. Nothing good comes from trying to tie God to our limitations.

It has been a week because we saw value in setting aside time for rest, time for worship out of every seven, as God did.

It has been a week of having no idea what I would say when I stood here again.

It has been a week in which I have not changed these paraments. Traditionally, the red is only used for the one day of Pentecost, and the occasional ordination or installation service, which, hopefully, is less than once a year in any given congregation.

It has been a week when I have not yet been ready to let go of the message of Pentecost, when God equipped the early church with the power to speak in the languages of those around them. God did not change the crowd, did not change the audience, so that they could understand Aramaic. God changed the disciples so they could speak.

It has been a week where I have reflected on the fact that I am now an authority figure. You have given me authority alongside your trust to be your pastor. I exercise that authority by speaking.

God’s power, too, comes from speech.

I counted. In the six days of creation, the NRSV uses the exact phrase “God said” nine times. The last two of those “God said” are the first instructions given to humans by God:

God said, “Be fruitful and multiply.”

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”

The first seven are the acts of creation.

God said, “Let there be light.”

God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’”

God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”

God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.”

God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.”

God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.”

God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

God speaks and the universe responds with creation. It has been a week since I spoke to you because that is how we respond to God’s seven acts of speech over the six periods of creation. Each of the six days gets one, and the third day gets two: the separation of land from water and the creation of vegetation because even as the land was formed God saw that it was good, but also that it needed the plants whose roots hold it in place, a fact known all too well in West Virginia and other places prone to landslides. That is just one of many ecological or creation-care sermons that I could preach from this text, and, if you give me time in future years, I hope we can get to them.

It may be dangerous to remind you of this, but I am here, ultimately, because you invited me. You trusted me to be your pastor, to listen to your fears, worries, and joys, and also to speak, sometimes to you, sometimes for you. I hope I never just speak at you.

I am standing here and speaking because speech has power. God created our world and universe with seven sentences.

After those seven sentences, God speaks to us, two sentences telling us to go into this world God made for us, to learn and grow ourselves, and to care for this world as God cares for us. The Psalmist says:

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
   the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
   mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
   and crowned them with glory and honour.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
   you have put all things under their feet,
all sheep and oxen,
   and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
   whatever passes along the paths of the seas.”

God made us stewards over this world. God gave us speech. God empowered and commanded the prophets to prophesy, to speak. God spoke to us in greater detail and clarity through the life of Jesus, and when we rejected that message and crucified Christ, God spoke to us through the resurrection.

The disciples asked Jesus when they would rise up and defeat Rome on the battlefield, and Jesus told them “not yet” and ascended into Heaven.

The disciples waited and prayed. The waited and listened. They waited and spoke with God until the Holy Spirit descended upon them and gave them the ability to speak to the world in all its languages.

Human diversity is beautiful and good to God; God does not wipe it away through Pentecost but maintains that diversity while breaking down the divisions we build around it.

God speaks, but we do not always listen.

In South Africa, churches were segregated by law, and before you start to think that we in the US are better because we haven’t had such a law since, I think, the shortly after the Civil War, we should also remember that no one has needed a law to segregate US churches.

In 1982 a group of South African churches came together to speak against that segregation and apartheid more generally and wrote the Belhar Confession to articulate their beliefs about the unity and diversity of the Church.

They came together to add their voice to God’s, because too many do not listen, and when they do not, the Church must add its voice to God’s, because that is what God called the church to do at Pentecost. God has entrusted the Church to speak with God, to speak with those God sees that we do not. God calls the Church, not just the institution, not just the national leadership, not just the clergy or those standing in a pulpit, God calls the whole Church to speak, to be the conduit for God’s speech.

God does not call us to remain silent. God does not call us to sit passively. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the Law, the Prophets, and the Wisdom writings, throughout the New Testament, the Gospels and the Letters, God adds God’s voice to those who society does not hear. God calls us to speak so that we can amplify the voices of the unheard. We are not called to speak on their behalf. We are not called to speak for others. We are called to amplify, and to amplify, we must first listen.

God did not enter the world through the Roman nobility. God entered the world through an otherwise insignificant family just trying to make ends meet under a regime of occupation and oppression, of violence: physical, economic, mental, and spiritual.

Jesus did not seek to recreate those structures with different leadership, but to break them down. The prophets did not tell the Israelite and Judean kings to build bigger armies, to conquer further lands, but to look to see the effects of their rulings and systems on those already living among them, the orphan, the poor, the immigrant, the stranger.

God speaks, but we do not listen. We are easily distracted. We keep building systems that are maintained by force, and fear, and coercion. We keep failing to maintain the world that God called good, working instead to make it in our fallen image.

And God keeps calling us back. God keeps placing stumbling blocks in our path to show us our errors. God keeps reminding us to speak with those whose voices are not heard, whose messages are stifled with a cross, with a fist, with a knee on their neck.

God is still speaking, still acting, and creating. Winter still turns to spring and our mountains still turn from brown to green. God is still working with us and through us to call us back to the goodness of God’s original creation.