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I preached tonight. Below is the sermon text. Folks seemed think it was alright. Hope you do to.
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Title: Disruptions
Author: Isaac S. Villegas
Date: May 15, 2005
Place: Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship
Lectionary Texts: Num. 11:24-30; Ps. 104:24-35; Acts 2:1-21

I spent my teenage years in Tucson—a city in the Sonoran Desert. Now, when most people think about the desert they think sand dunes with a cactus here and there. Well, that is not entirely the case. In my desert you could find trees and flowers and bushes (and, yes, an occasional tumble-weed wandering across the horizon like those Western films—but no Clint Eastwood). What is most interesting about the desert is the way all these plants are able to grow without much rain. In the Sonoran desert there are only two rainy seasons: one toward the end of the summer called the Monsoon season, and the other during winter. It doesn’t really rain many other times than those two. So, how do the plants survive? How is there still anything left to bloom after those deadly 120-degree summers? How do those huge Saguaro cacti live a few hundred years, and stay bright green?

Now, let me push this image into our texts for Pentecost: How are we still green with life after a couple millennia since this One who waters our souls died on the hills of Golgotha, rose from the dead through the power of the Spirit, and ascended to the Father in heaven? That was a long time ago, but we are still here… why? Because of the promises Jesus made to us—to be with us always, to the very end of the age, as Jesus says in the last verse of Matthew (28:20).

In John 4—a few chapters before the passage we heard this evening—Jesus tells a Samaritan woman about the promised living waters that eternally bring forth life. He says, “Whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give will become in [you] a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn.4:14). Jesus names himself as the well-spring of living water that bubbles forth from the depths of those who choose to drink him, to find their life in his.

In the passage from John we read today, Jesus says, “If anyone is thirsty, let her come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within her” (7:37-38). Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, wants to water God’s people with new life; he wants to provide a living stream that lasts forever, that pours forth life in the midst of parched deserts—that gives life to those whose hope has faded, whose leaves have wilted from the scorching sun. In the deserts of Palestine, under the constant squelching eye of the religious authorities, Jesus offers Israel the hope of resurrected life, an oasis in the desert.

As he told the Samaritan women, Jesus begins a time when the true worshipers of God will no longer go to the Temple in Jerusalem, but find God’s presence wherever believers offer themselves as wandering wells in the desert, springs that pour out God’s eternal life of love—the love revealed to us in the way God gave himself in the Son for our eternal life, the love that frees us from the fear of death, the fear of dying of thirst in deserts.

But I want to be careful to guard against a poor reading of this passage. A misread, I think, will say something like this: “I don’t need anything or anyone else because I got my own well of eternal life inside me.” I think that misunderstands the Christian life and our passage about the waters of life bubbling from our depths. Think about a fresh water spring. The point of the spring isn’t just to make a little pool at that opening in the earth where water pours out from the depths. No. There is no refreshment there. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think about how wonderful it would be to jump into a stagnant pond covered with green slim on a hot summer day. What I want is a cool flow of water. I want waters that emerge from the ground and constantly overflow its bounds—a pool that escapes into a stream or a river, waters that are always on the move, always pouring and never hoarding.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying access to your own personal Jesus—someone who cares, someone who hears your prayers, someone who’s just there with you. But I want to give you someone more personal, more tangible, something that you can’t mistake for a dream or fantasy or opiate. Jesus, your personal savior is present to you and me in that person sitting across the room, someone with whom you can exchange a gaze or a word or a touch. You can find your eternal life there because you believe you can find pools of Christ’s refreshing water in me, and because you believe you have rivers of life for me to swim in.

Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior? Do you think Jesus gives you eternal life? Well, part of the way we have to answer that is to look at the one sitting next to us and believe that Christ is present there for you—in all the ways that person is personal, the way that person entangles you in a relationship. To receive the living water this or that person has to offer involves waiting—a pause, a hesitation before following those desires that direct my life—those dreams and destinations that you think hold the promise of the good life, of happiness. In that pause in our life journeys—it could be a short break at a rest stop, or a detour that leads to surprisingly beautiful landscapes—in those places you and I may discover distractions, disruptions, that reveal new springs of life, ways of seeing somebody anew, maybe even seeing how that someone can offer you a love that shows you what Christ’s eternal love feels like.

This is the sort of pause we feel as the storyteller of Acts makes us wait with Jesus’ followers in that upper room in Jerusalem. Remember, Jesus commissions his disciples to spread the gospel “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). But this goal doesn’t involve the traveling that you or I, nor the disciples would assume. The narrator halts our journey to fulfill the great commission in ways that seem apparently obvious to us. The story of Christ’s redemptive work for the world, that starts in Jerusalem and flows into every corner of the world pauses in that upper room. The story waits for something, a something that is foreseen but yet comes totally strange and unexpected.

Peter tells us that the prophet Joel expected this moment hundreds of years before. But neither he nor anyone else would have thought it would look like this. Joel’s prophecy expects dreams and visions and prophecies. But the people gathered in Jerusalem find people babbling like drunks…and in the morning! That’s not in Joel’s prophecy. The event bears just enough familiarity for Peter to remember what his forefathers predicted and see how this movement of the Spirit fulfills that, yet at the same time, exceeds it in wonderful ways that disrupt everyone’s expectations.

There, in a flash something new comes onto the scene of history, a bolt of lightning, a flow of electricity from which we still feel aftershocks. The power of the Spirit breaks open doors, disrupts the normal state of affairs, comes down like those monsoon rains in the desert. At Pentecost we see heaven’s floodgates open and pour forth rivers of living waters into those who linger in Jerusalem because Jesus told them to, and also those who may have been on a trip but decided to wait around for whatever reason. The waters flow like wine; but this wine is new, new wine that bursts the old wineskins flowing through and beyond previous boundaries.

The monsoon rains come to the desert after long, dry summers. The heavens hear the parched gasp of the land; God sees our sweat from the beating sun, and answers with over-abundance. Jesus’ followers who waited in Jerusalem got more power then they could handle, more wine than they could tolerate responsibly. They couldn’t keep their composure. God answers Israel’s cry for a redeemer, for the Messiah who will renew a meaningful existence for the people of God, with an explosion of the Spirit who sustains the flow of Christ’s everlasting waters. God’s answer exceeds the cry, gives more than we even know how to ask for.

So, the Holy Spirit flows into us in ways that make us pour into someone else. It is not there for us to protect or bottle up for later. The gathered disciples receive the Holy Spirit and share with others the “wonders of God” (Acts 2:11). When the Spirit comes, the disciples can’t keep the flow inside their established boundaries. They are thrust into encounters with others where they operate as passive vehicles for that Holy Spirit that bubbles out from their depths like champagne. Christ becomes the river of living water within our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit in order to move us with flow of the Spirit that supplies others with Christ’s refreshing waters, a drink of perpetual satisfaction. Through the power of the Spirit you and I are transfigured by Christ’s love into witnesses that speak eternal life to our neighbors. Our bodies are the site where God’s love dwells, where the Love of Jesus Christ is offered. We become the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Now, I have to admit what you probably already know: I don’t see any tongues of fire coming down from heaven and resting on your heads. That’s pretty obvious. Our lives don’t really look like those in the story of Pentecost, at least mine doesn’t. To return to my desert analogy: the Monsoon rains don’t happen all the time. And where I can count on the rains to come every August, the Holy Spirit is not that predicable—the seasons don’t necessarily follow one another.

But I don’t want to give up on my desert just yet; I want to use my image to say one more thing about the Holy Spirit. After four or five summer months of no rain and plenty of dry heat, I am shocked to see mesquite trees and other plants still green. How? Well, in the desert the water hides just below the sandy surface. The water table is high enough that plants can touch the flow of submerged streams. I know the water is there because I can travel anywhere around the city and find wells. The water is in hiding, waiting for someone to tap into currents and drink deeply.

It seems to me that most of the time the waters of the Holy Spirit are also hidden from our eye, lying just below our horizon of vision. But this is the playground of faith, the landscape that invites hopeful discovery. We are now in a position similar to those followers of Jesus who wait for the movement of the Spirit. Or we find ourselves sometimes among those foreigners in Jerusalem who for some reason stumble upon the power of God in unexpected places. But, no matter where we find ourselves in the story, the call is to hope for what is unseen—believe that the Holy Spirit moves underneath the surface of things seen and may irrupt in springs of living water at any moment.

So, back to the question I started with: how do we stay green with eternal life when Jesus seems so distant and Pentecost happened so long ago? The gospel speaks an answer here that councils us to continue to wander in the desert, like those Israelites, and wait for God’s timing to bring us into the Promised Land, the Heavenly city where the river of eternal life flows from the throne of God where, as the book of Revelation says, “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Rev.22:17).

But God does not leave us without reason to hope while we wait on this side of the Jordan. What is our hope? We believe that Christ’s river of eternal life flows in the desert wherever we dig down into that other person. You come here or meet there and wait for that surprising work of the Holy Spirit to create something new between you and another—maybe someone familiar, or one who is still to come. The Christian life names our decision to learn how to flow with the Spirit who joins our spirit to the life of our neighbor. From deep within our being flows rivers of living waters inundating a life of a neighbor with the love of Christ—a love that gives all for the sake of friends, and even strangers and enemies. It is a love that is willing to risk everything in order to follow the flow of those hidden waters waiting to gush forth into another’s life.

Eating together, worshiping together, talking to one another—that network of practices are the ways we learn to see the living water flowing in one another and name it as the work of God for us. The hope of the gospel is that we can tap into those streams of the Spirit in our dry lands by turning to a friend, or even a stranger or companion. Here, we gain access to the gift of life God has given to each of us, those rivers of living water poured out into us through Christ’s Spirit who inundates us with the divine affirmation of love; and, here we learn to see the infinite worth of the one we turn to and show them that we need them and all that their humanity can offer. Because in that humanness we can see the flames of the Spirit igniting the coals that make us glow like Jesus Christ in whose image we are created.

Now, it seems, the more difficult task may be to learn how to seen even those people who feel like slimy ponds as possible places where, one day, those guarded waters escape barriers and flow in unimaginable ways. At this point it feels like this flowing-water analogy I’ve been playing in breaks down, and possibly points in a direction that washes away all the foundations I have been trying to lay—about how life is found in the flow of the Spirit. Because, it seems, the stagnant waters of the pond actually abound with life—but a life that I have a hard time enjoying. That bounded pond is flowing with organisms appear to me as contaminants, pollutants, types of life that makes me want to leave and find another watering hole.

But that is no reason to leave. Just because I can’t see how that person flows with life, isn’t any reason why I should turn away and find new waters to play in. As the writer of Hebrews says, “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Heb.11:1). That means, maybe, that we have to look harder, see with a steadfast gaze that there are living waters within those who seem to restrict the flow of the Spirit—and the promise of those unseen waters await our discovery. There is life there too, but it is fugitive, it hides itself, it takes eyes that only Jesus can give, eyes that pierce into the depths and say, “I see life in you, life that I need.” Even those who come to us as disfigured still bear the figure of Christ, somehow—and that is a mysterious invitation to discover how he or she may offer the streams of living water.

Here, at church, you and I arrive and we learn what it means to make those hidden rivers of living water flow into one another, where we find the perpetual satisfaction of eternal life. And, here, we hope to see glimpses of the Kingdom of God that promise abundant life—always more to explore and more to see.

The story of Pentecost teaches us to look forward to the moment when the Holy Spirit may surprise us by offering the everlasting life of Christ in our neighbor, and maybe even a stranger. And the story teaches us to see in the disruptions of our journeys places for us to wait and see how the Spirit moves—to take a posture of prayer and expectation founded upon the hope of new flows of living waters.

We never know where the wandering Spirit of God may lead us. Who knows, we just might find ourselves drawn into the ecstatic love of the divine life of the Trinity. But that path passes through the ones in whom Christ appears—the neighbor, the stranger, the friend, the enemy.

(If you want to read some other sermons, look at this page )