Sermon by Rev. Russell Daye
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax

Your Sons and Your Daughters Shall Prophesy

Joel 2: 23-32; Luke 18: 9-14

'Then afterwards I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.' There have been a small number of occasions when I was part of a group of people upon whom the Spirit was dramatically poured. It happened once at the closing worship of a conference that brought together theological students from across the country and across the theological spectrum. After a week of discussion, reflection, and sometimes heated debate - which showed us just how divided Christians, even young idealistic ones, could be - we gathered for one final act of worship. The service was shaped by personal testimony and the repetitive, meditative music of the Taize community. At some point you could feel the cool, intellectual headspace of our discussions giveaway to the heat of the Spirit, and the divisions among us start to fade away. In song, our many voices melted into one, and we understood that we were being given a gift of the love of God, a gift much more important than the doctrines over which we had battled for a week.

Music was key for another event at which I witnessed the Spirit being poured out upon human beings. It was a Peter Gabriel concert at the Montréal forum. He is perhaps the most skillful performer I have ever seen, transcending the quality of his songs to draw together his listeners into one body with one breath and one heartbeat. Our common experience was one of rhythm and fun and joy until he introduced 'Biko,' a song about the charismatic, South African black power advocate who was murdered by the apartheid police.

September '77, Port Elizabeth weather fine. It was business as usual in police room 619. Oh Biko, Biko … The man is dead. When I try and sleep at night I can only dream in red. The outside world is black and white with only one colour dead. Oh Biko, Biko, … The man is dead. You can blow out a candle but you can't blow out a fire. Once the flames begin to catch the wind will blow it higher. Oh Biko, Biko…

In that moment, 15,000 people in a hockey stadium caught the wind and were set alight. Somehow we understood that the joy, the deep goodness that we had experience together in song and rhythm was affronted by the ugly truth of police room 619 and that our voices were to be used not only to enjoy a song but to cry against that ugliness.

On both of the occasions that I have just described to you, I went away with a deeper knowledge of love, of evil, of the power of the Spirit, and of the way each of us is called to be used by the Spirit to transform evil with love. After each of these peak experiences I had something akin to a new sense of smell, which I could use to discern more clearly the beauty and the ugliness, the truth and the deception, the purity and the guile we find in the world. But it is crucial to point out that this was not my sense of smell. The experiences that had opened me to this sense were not my experiences. They were communal experiences. It was a shared sense. The depth of the experiences and the power of the new sense that we carried away from them lay in the fact that individuality had been transcended, and that, for a time, our hermetically sealed selves had surrendered to a larger, deeper field of humanity with a common breath, a common purpose, a common a beating of the heart.

Then afterwards I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.

The joining of our hearts drew us deeper into the marrow of this great and strange world, and provided us with a shift in perception. We did not seeing visions as do great mystics or the mentally ill. But the pouring of the Spirit gave us the powers of dream, vision, and prophecy. In other words, we were given access to a deeper stratum of life, to an implicate order, if you will. We were drawn deeper into the core of the world, and there found a vitality and a sense of mission. Also transferred, was a profound sense of humility. We understood that the preoccupations of our lives were in a real sense mundane and distractions from something more true.

There is a sad postscript sad to both of the awakenings that I have described to you. As the days and weeks passed, as the participants were separated by space and time and distraction, our unity disintegrated and with it the immersion in life's deep marrow and the powers of vision. At least that is my experience, and I am sure that it is the norm.

Speaking plainly, I think the place we found during those awakenings and later lost was what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven, the place into which he spent his entire ministry trying to draw people.

I bet that many of you have had experiences akin to the ones I described, that many of you have found yourself in the presence of the holy and have had a deep longing to dwell there forever, only to see the Kingdom recede and your life return to the prosaic?

Why do we come here? Why do we come to this place of worship? The best answer to that question is that we come seeking to have the Spirit poured upon this human flesh. We come seeking to be driven down deeper into the marrow of life. We come seeking to be pulled into the implicate order. We come seeking to have the bonds of individuality torn off us and to join more fully the Body of Christ, to have our hearts join the beating of that heart, our breath become that breath. Sometimes it happens, and that is both beautiful and tragic. Beautiful because we dwell in a better land for a time. Tragic because, sooner or later, we are inevitably cast out of that land.

It is heresy to believe that we can control either the granting of this experience or its loss. We are slaves to grace. It is foolish to believe that those great and strange moments are of our construction. (This is a heresy that all clergy hold to some of the time, especially during the long hours of worship preparation!). But it is also folly to believe that we can do nothing to prepare for them, or to prolong the sojourn of such a moment in a life that has been gifted with it.

Let me return to the pouring of the Spirit upon the 15,000 at the Montreal Forum. I am convinced that, in the days that followed, those among us who acted upon that revelation of love and evil by doing something to confront apartheid, or oppression in some other form, left themselves more vulnerable to the Spirit. Those who remained humble, remembering that most of their preoccupations were diversions from the true life, were more likely to be seized again by grace and carried to the depths.

Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector is worth repeating here. '10Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' 13But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' 14I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.'

If you come to this place truly seeking to have Spirit poured upon your flesh, if you come to this place truly seeking to have your flesh that around you and to lose yourself to the body of Christ, then come in humility. If you desire to go from this place with the blood of the Body of Christ continuing to flow through your veins, then go in humility. If your longing is to be held by grace beyond the hour spent here, to be held for the 167 hours of the week you spend 'out there,' then go in humility. Go with your priorities set aside for the priorities of the Gospel. Go with self-service set aside for the service of others. Go with self-assertion set aside for the assertion of the love that is given to you and can flow through you. Go with a new story to guide you: not a story about how well you are doing in this life, but about how well the life of the Spirit is doing in you.

Go also with this knowledge: even when you cannot feel it, the Kingdom of Heaven is there, waiting to reclaim you. Even when you feel infinitely removed from the deeper, truer stratum of life, it is there waiting to reclaim you. You will be humbled in this life, we all are. You will be made vulnerable no matter how much you resist it; when this happens, the Spirit will be poised for pouring.