Marking another year

Day of Pentecost--Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Series A

Pentecost marks the church's birthday. I write these words on New Year's Day, as the world marks another year of life and history. As these two celebrations, which are normally separated by time, collide in my consciousness, three words dart around my mind. The first two words are tsunami and insurgents. The third word, the word that connects the first two, is destruction.

The evening news reports that an earthquake-triggered tsunami has claimed more than 150,000 lives in South Asia. (As I edit page proofs in late February, the number has climbed to 240,000.) CNN tells us that the death count is incomprehensible. On this day of bowl games, I am mindful that, as an undergraduate, I spent many Saturdays in the fall as one of 108,000+ fans who packed The Big House in Ann Arbor--the football stadium of The University of Michigan. While I would ask you to kindly forgive the sports illustration, my first in over twenty years of preaching and writing, the image of all those fans filling a football stadium and suddenly being washed away transforms the tsunami's numerical death toll from incomprehensible to all too real and all the more devastating.

The new year brought elections to Iraq. Our government assures us that elections will bring democracy. Insurgents promise that elections will bring more killing; their threat is so real that some political parties chose not to participate in the elections. By the time Pentecost rolls around, the new government will be in place. We pray that democracy rather than killing comes to Iraq. As we pray, the names and the faces of soldiers killed in action that many of us watch on television each night, together with the awareness of many more names and faces that we will never see, make the reality of this brand of destruction anything but incomprehensible.

What will the church and its preachers say to a world marking another year of overwhelming death and destruction? After all, this is the real world into which the church is born on Pentecost. For the sake of this world, God gives the church Spirit, speech, boldness, and life. How will we use these gifts in the coming year? What will the church say to the world this Pentecost? How will we distinguish between the Reign of God and the reign of terror? Many voices are loudly connecting those dots. How will we?

What we say depends, in part, on what the world is talking about. Will tsunami and insurgents still dart around the world's consciousness come Pentecost, or will words even more death-dealing and destructive occupy our minds? But there is a core concern that the world wants addressed, an urgent message that the world yearns to hear. This concern transcends circumstance; the message cuts to the heart of the matter. Confronted by change--global and local, individual and communal, great and small--our notions of God's nature, God's future, and our role in that future are often threatened. (For more on this, see my When God Speaks through Change [Alban Institute, 2005], 13.) People's beliefs become unstable as they question how a loving God can allow evil to exist. They want to know where God is in this mess and what God is doing about it.

Emboldened by the Spirit, God calls the church out of its buildings to proclaim to the world that tsunami and insurgents, death and destruction, are not God's will and plan for the world. As I contemplate the church's mission, for me Jesus' instruction to "make disciples" (Mt 28:19) pales in importance to Jesus' instruction to tell people, "The kingdom of God has come near to you" (Lk 10:9). Though I found it difficult as a pastor to go "cold calling" in order to invite potential new members to join my congregation, I could get excited about celebrating Pentecost as part of a group that takes to the streets to tell our neighbors that earthquakes and suicide bombs are not the world that God intends. Rather than an indication of God's will, rather than part of some divine plan, death and destruction are contrary to God. When destruction strikes in ways both unimagined and all too familiar, God meets us in the worst of it and weeps with us. And rather than explaining it away, as if death and destruction always happen for a reason, God's response is victory. God brings new life. In the end, destruction does not win. Jesus does.

Terry C. Graunke, a mission developer in Central Point, Oregon (outside Medford), spends his days knocking on doors in order to tell people what God is doing in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Pastor Graunke invites us to trust Jesus' promise--"I am with you always"--and preach boldly about the God who drives chaos away. Tell about the God who can and does bind up the broken, forgive, and restore relationships. Take a risk and share the promise of Jesus with another outside your present fellowship so that you might be amazed by the power of Jesus' promise.