FCC Winchester

The 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, otherwise known as Rumi, wrote words that speak beautifully for what happened on Pentecost to the disciples of Jesus.  He wrote:  “There is some kiss we want with our whole lives:  the touch of spirit on the body.”  This kiss of the spirit is what the disciples received that day and it transformed them from a frightened huddling band of misfits into a community of God, inspired by Christ, to share His Spirit of life and healing and love.  It has been said that Christ did not come to make bad people good but he came to make dead people alive. We in the church often frame the Christian faith as though it was essentially about moral progress, about becoming better people through moral improvement. But Christ was much more about spiritual transformation, about bringing deadened people to life, awakening the numb and sleep walking, helping them to feel again, love again, see clearly by tethering them back into God, from whom they had become lost.  

The Apostle Paul who wrote and passed on the first words written by the followers of Jesus, when it was still a Jewish sect, was not one of the 12 Jewish disciples of Jesus who accompanied Jesus through his earthly life but rather he was a devout conservative Jew who believed Jesus and his followers were a danger to the tradition and needed to be stamped out, especially as the Jesus followers seemed undeterred by his execution.  Paul oversaw the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr of the faith, holding the jackets of the people who threw the stones. Paul was on his way to find, capture and persecute more followers of Jesus when he had a profound religious experience that knocked him to the ground, blinded him, and he heard a voice say - “Paul, Paul, why do you persecute me?” Paul asked who it was - “I am Jesus the one you are persecuting. Get up off the ground, go into the city, and you will be told what to do.” So Paul goes into the city to the very people he was looking for in the first place but blinded and vulnerable. The disciples of Jesus who received him were not a little stunned because they knew exactly who this dangerous man was, but they received him nonetheless, prayed over him to give him his sight back and Paul became one of them… and not just one of them, but in fact the most vocal, the most influential of all the followers of Jesus

Listen.
Do you hear that? Do you hear the quiet? Do you hear how for this moment you are not being bombarded with data and information and images and opinions and noise and... Doesn’t that feel good? It’s like a momentary little massage of the spirit, isn’t it? Listen.

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” Mark Twain supposedly quipped. No, it’s that very common human tendency, that none of us are free from, where instead of facing a reality that’s unpleasant, painful, hard or unpleasant about ourselves, we deny it. Sometimes we are conscious of our denial as an outright lie to protect or promote ourselves but more often it’s an unconscious psychological mechanism that does its work of the distortion of reality behind the scenes so we don’t even recognize it as false. It’s almost like we fall asleep to reality, to the truth of the matter, and have no motivation to awaken from that dream.