Play the Wild Card

John 20:19-23

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said,

“Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Pentecost is the second holiest day of the Christian year.  Easter is first and Christmas is third, but among the three, Pentecost is the only one that the world hasn’t been able to capture, domesticate, commercialize or tame.  It is the Holy Day that came neither with a simple word nor meek and mild in a manger.  Instead it came racing over the face of the earth, overtaking the world with a blazing inferno fed by a violent wind.  It blew the disciple out of hiding and made them sound drunk to the rest of the world.  Because of that we have, as the Church, done our very best to hide that Holy Spirit well away… because… well… scary!  

We happily play the card of the life giving, world creating power of God the Creator.  We love the card that tells the story of God the Son who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  But when it comes to playing the card of an untamed gale force wind, that drives the inferno of uncontrollable flame we call the Holy Spirit… well, we’ve all too often shoved that card right back up our sleeves.

But the day is surely coming, says the Lord… In fact I would say that the day has surely COME… when the luxury of the Church only playing those comfortable cards alone will no longer do.  To faithfully address the horrors of THIS world… a world plunging ever deeper into darkness… we are being called, on this day of Pentecost, to do what we as the Church have been afraid to do for over 2000  years… to boldly and unashamedly play that untamed and completely wild card called the Holy Spirit.    

Just one of the many ways I think we are being called to play that card is in the way that we Lutherans and Episcopalians address Gun Violence.  We’ve been at it for over 30 years!  It’s been a faithful journey led by incredibly passionate and dedicated people… and still… when we ask the hard question:  How’s it going?  The truthful answer is that Gun Violence is now worse than it’s ever been.  It is now the leading cause of death for people under 20.  There are more mass shootings than ever before.  And so on this Pentecost, I feel like I need to ask, isn’t THIS the time for the Church to genuinely and boldly play that untamed wildcard called the Holy Spirit that we’ve had hidden up our sleeves for all this time?  Isn’t this the time for us as the church to call her hurricane-fed inferno down into this horror and into this crisis in a way that we’ve frankly been afraid to do before because, let’s be honest… that Holy Spirit… She’s wild and completely untamed!  Isn’t it time for us as the Church to call on the Holy Spirit to blow us out of our safe upper rooms where we’ve been doing what we’ve always done?  Isn’t it time to be blown into the streets and call out this demonic plague with the words of the prophets of old?  Language that we will find uncomfortable and will convince those who hear us that we are drunk, high, and completely insane? 

On this Pentecost, driven by that Wild Card Holy Spirit, what would happen if we began to boldly call the gun what it has genuinely become for so many… A god.  A demonic, false god for sure, like Baal or Moloch from the Old Testament... gods who promised safety, security and power in exchange for the lives of some of their children.  What might happen if, with the untamed and wild power of the Holy Spirit, the Church began to say out loud and in public, that THIS Gun of yours is a false god.  It promised you safety and security and it has utterly failed to deliver!  Yet in spite of it's failure it still demands more and more and more of our children’s blood!  What would happen if we called those who have been mesmerized by this false god… this lying god… this god of horror and death to abandon that demonic god before it leads our nation any deeper into destruction? 

Well, it wouldn't sound very Lutheran or Episcopalian... that's for sure and as the guy up here in this dress, I have to say it scares the bejeebers out of me!  But the truth I just can’t seem to shake any longer is that we have marched, made resolutions and social statements, proposed and advocated for legislation, visited legislators, listened to victims and literally pounded guns into plowshares.  We’ve proclaimed the sacred nature of the lives of all people created by God the Father.  We’ve preached the path to abundant life shown to us by God the Son.  We’ve done all of that work for all those years and yet... here we are.  

But what we have NOT yet done is to unleash upon it the cyclone powered blaze of the Holy Spirit so that worshipers of that false god called "The Gun" might be converted from their false god, a god who brings only death and TOWARD the ONE TRUE GOD who raises the dead to life!  Preaching a God who loved the world into being… that’s in my wheelhouse.  Preaching Jesus raised from the dead to show us how to live an abundant life of love, grace, compassion, forgiveness and care... I can do that too.  But pulling out this wild card called the Holy Spirit with her strange, powerful, untamed, and ancient language that names demons and denounces false-gods right to their follower's faces... that scares me to death!  And still the terrible truth persists.  The cards we've played so far aren't working and it is time to do something new.  So, on this day of Pentecost I say with fear and trembling, Come Holy Spirit, Come!  Amen.