St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Strathroy, Ontario

Hearts Inspired

December 4, 2011

For our second week of Advent, and to go with the candle of Peace, I’ve chosen a snowflake as our symbol of the week because, to me, there are few things in this world that I find as peaceful as a gentle snowfall.  The one I dream about is the one when the flakes are big, light and fluffy, and they drift down and deaden all the sound around you;  they’re coming down so thick that you can’t see to the end of the street;  because it’s only the first fall of snow, there’s no layer of ice underfoot on the sidewalk to make your path treacherous; and the sand trucks haven’t gone by yet to make the snow dirty.  On that kind of day, after you come in from your walk, your cheeks all bright and rosy from the chill in the air, all you want to do is enjoy a mug of hot chocolate while looking out the window and just be at peace with the world.

You’ll understand, then, that I was disappointed with Wednesday’s first snowfall of the year – a centimetre of messy wet slush coming down overnight on top of thirty millimetres of rain-soaked ground made for an ugly morning, with very little of the “peace” that I was hoping for!  The truth is, snow only rarely comes in a “pretty” fashion, and often with wind and a bitter chill thrown in for good measure.  We’re in a time when storms seem to form more easily than they did ten or twenty years ago – last year at this time, we were dreading the first of two storms that ended up paralyzing this area for much of two weeks;  the Maritimes endured four storms in four weeks last December, and then everyone got hit with the big one that ended on Groundhog Day.  This video is from Havertown, Pennsylvania, showing the snow that came down during a storm in February of 2010 that dumped 27 inches at their airport. These aren’t walk-around-in-the-beauty snows, but huddle-up-and-keep-warm storms where nothing is moving but the plows and the snowmobiles!

I remember one storm in particular from my time in PEI – where we were living, on the western end of the Island, we tended to get the storms that came through here first and then scooted up the St. Lawrence, whereas the eastern end of the Island got the ones that had come up the Eastern seaboard.  Each were bad in their own way, of course, and this first one was predicted to be a doozy and threatened the whole Island!  I may have mentioned before how easy it was for the Island to lose power to large sections in a hurry – for instance, there was one cable coming around the corner at Miscouche, and if it broke, fifteen thousand people were instantly in the dark.  So, for a day and a half, people scurried about to be ready for it.

Fairly early on the morning the storm was supposed to hit, our phone rang;  it was a friend of ours, the Anglican minister from up the road.  She was about the same age as my mother and I was about the same age as her son, so we were sort of surrogates for each other and she was being what her son Joe and I took to calling “Rev. Mummy” that day.  She wanted to make sure that we had canned food and blankets, first of all, and was relieved to hear that we had recently invested in a Coleman stove, so that we could cook food if the power went out.  However, I also remember that she asked if we’d “put up some water.”  I’d never heard that phrase before;  she meant, did we have any buckets or bottles of clean drinking water set aside if the power went out, as it almost surely would when the storm hit.  We had forgotten that we were on a well, not any kind of municipal system that might have a generator-powered backup.  Kathy and I did so immediately, and the storm hit in the early afternoon.  I remember the power going out, but only for a couple of hours.  It was good, however, that we had been prepared for whatever was coming, because once the first snowflake hit the ground, everything closed;  everyone was sent home from wherever they worked, and if you didn’t have groceries, you were going to be hungry!  But because we were prepared, we passed through the storm pretty much at peace.

 

John the Baptist came into a “stormy” world, in order to prepare the way for the coming of God’s Anointed One.  If you’ve been in church over Advent seasons past and have heard other sermons about John the Baptist, then you’re well aware of his message and how he was caught between two very different groups of people:  the common folk, struggling to make ends meet, without the means to be as devout as they might have wished and yearning for good news from God;  and the social and religious elite, confident in their ways and traditions and in total shock that someone might even suggest that they were off-base, at least as far as God was concerned.  Someone once said that a good preacher “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable” – well, John certainly did that!  The people came to him, confessing their sins and being symbolically washed “clean” in the dirty waters of the Jordan River.  He talked of salvation;  he spoke of compassion;  he urged confession and reconciliation.  Understandably, then, he also had to deal with misidentification – the people weren’t seeing him as simply the messenger but as the One sent by God, the Messiah who would save the people from their enemies and lead them to freedom.

But John was not the One, and he knew it.  “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me;  I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” (Mark 1:7)  Many years, on Maundy Thursday, we hear about how dealing with the feet of a visitor was the duty of the lowest slave in a wealthy man’s household, and John, with all of his power, zest and verve, declares that he himself is even lower than that, at least in his own estimation.  He then says, to reinforce this opinion of himself and his own work, “I have baptized you with water;  but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (v.8)  The water is but a poor substitute for what God’s Anointed One would bring to the people – John’s purpose was to take them along the first steps and allow them to be open to where the Messiah would take them, and what the Messiah would give them.

So, what is the Holy Spirit?  And what does it mean to be “baptized” with the Holy Spirit?  As Presbyterians, we keep asking these questions because we have a hard time with the Holy Spirit, the third and most ephemeral aspect of God.  The Holy Spirit defies description – even on the day of Pentecost, all we have are comparisons:  “a sound like a rushing wind,” “tounges as of fire”;  at Jesus’ baptism, it was something like a dove that alighted upon Him.  The Spirit is not definable, and yet It is what is in the world today.  Comparing it to a wind is appropriate:  we don’t see the Spirit itself, but we see what and who gets caught up in Its blowing.

To be “baptized” by the Spirit means to be covered by It, to be filled by It, to release yourself into It and allow yourself to be moved by It.  This can take many forms, though there are many groups within the Christian Church who want to place a single specific defining moment upon Its presence, and that is the Pentecost moment – the gift of speaking in tongues.  I remember a congregation (again out in PEI) that had as an article of faith that if you had not had the ecstatic moment of the gift of tongues, then you had not been baptized by the Holy Spirit, you were not saved, and they wanted as little to do with you as possible!  We tried to run an ecumenical Alpha Program one year at the Alberton Community School and a member of this congregation wanted to see what Alpha was all about, but as soon as we ministers said that we were going to start each week with a time of worship, she bolted for the door, because any type of “worship” that we were going to offer would be tainted by the fact that we were not “true” Christians, as she understood God’s way to be.

I personally think the Spirit comes upon us in many different ways, and that tongues is only one of the gifts of the Spirit, rather than the defining gift, and that if we are open to It and our hearts are prepared for It and willing to allow It to move us when It sees fit, then we can do amazing things.

Here’s an analogy for you.  I read a story once about a house fire.  The fire department was still several minutes away, everyone was out and safe, and yet someone got it in their heads that Grandma’s upright piano had to be saved.  The two men in the group went back into the smoke;  each grabbed one end of the piano;  they heaved and hauled and wiggled and cursed and dragged and pulled and pushed and shoved and the two of them alone got the piano out of the house and away from the danger of the flames.  The fire department arrived, the fire was put out, repairs were made, and a few weeks later it came time to put stuff back into the house.  Now, a couple of months ago, I told you about my own adventures with moving a piano in high school – ten guys hauling one piano up a switchback flight of stairs, and the same ten guys required to bring it back down when the event was done with it!  Well, the two who had moved the piano out discovered that now, they were in no way up to the task of moving it back in, and it required the assistance of several friends and neighbours to do so.

Now, you can say that it was adrenaline, that it was the heat of the moment, or that it was the passion that gets aroused when one is doing something that needed doing!  Well, the Holy Spirit does much the same thing:  it gives what is needed in times when there really isn’t much chance of it being there.  It gives the ability to overcome.  It gives the ability to endure.  It gives what is needed, though perhaps not necessarily what is wanted, if, as I said, we are open to Its moving.

The three things that most of us are looking for in this life, when it comes to God, are 1) the Assurance of His presence, 2) Guidance (especially in times of crisis), and 3) the Strength to endure when the world seems to be crushing us beneath a load of woes and cares.  These are the kinds of things that the Spirit has been given to us to awaken, to energize, and to enliven.  And when we are full, then it spills out of us and into the world around us, touching hearts and lives.  We may not see the effect, or the effect we see may not be the one we’re looking for – many resist the moving of the Spirit because they can’t control it or they don’t believe in it or they simply won’t surrender to it.  In that case, perhaps our job is not to be a rushing wind but rather to plant a seed, or to be a snowflake.

Yeah, a snowflake.

Every time there’s a snowstorm, the owners of flat-roofed buildings lose their minds because they know that while snow is only building up a flake at a time, when it’s a million flakes, or a billion flakes, or a trillion flakes, bad things can happen!

(video of the Minneapolis Metrodome ceiling collapsing last February)

But turn this idea around:  perhaps all we can offer someone from ourselves is a “snowflake” of peace, a “snowflake” of hope, a “snowflake” of joy, a “snowflake” of love – not much on its own, but if ours are combined with others, perhaps the heart of the one in need can truly be prepared for the Spirit’s moving, and be moved in an awesome and overwhelming way.

Then we will see what God can do!

Our hearts will be both inspired and inspiring, through the blessings of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.