PENTECOST - MAY 27 - BIRTHDAY OF THE CHURCH

Pentecost is the birth day story of the Christian Church Community. Told in the biblical text of the Acts of the Apostles chapter 2, the story is the theological teaching that God's presence among us (the Holy Spirit) gathers us together and forms us into, teaches how to live, and gives direction and purpose to life in community.

The story of Pentecost is surprising for many of us today. In a time in which we associate everything Christian with red state context, the values and principals of the failed neoconservative worldview and politcal platform, and are told by progressive politicians that Christians are basically ignorant card carrying members of the Republican party, the story in which God is the actor affirming and giving the gift of cultural diversity, the call to life-in-community as meaning-making, recognizing our need for one another, and inviting us to make meaning in life by living meaningfully in the lives of others is remarkably refreshing.

If you've read the blog recently you've heard my ranting and raving about the church in which I live, serve, and make meaning of my life. I find myself frustrated because of the fulfillment and joy that I've been blessed with in terms of how I've been blessed by living for so long and in so many diverse ways in the community of the church and feeling frustrated by what I perceive and experience to be a fascist-monopoly of the church worldview in terms of being so focused on issues of sexuality and sexual oreintation in the midst of a world that is not stuck in an impasse, nor refusing to be flexible in terms of the chaos-like adaptation required and invited by our multinational wired world, nor not fluent in the language of diversity as the means to a greater end, and not just the end in itself. I'm frustrated by a community of faith that finds its meaning and vocation in a story (the Pentecost story) about community yet repeatedly lives from and makes its value statements in terms of a completely consumeristic hyper-individualistic worldview and ethical praxis.

I was struck by an article in last week's Newsweek about Technology and some of the efforts to encourage, empower and equip those who will make the next steps in terms of technological development and the web 2.0. In the article someone was quoted as saying that "anyone over 30 is just too old" in terms of being someone to invest in. Why is it that such innovative, forward thinking is the last thing that we seem to look to in the church community in terms of theological perspective, leadership potential, or worldview formation? We in the church - as a system - as so content and empassioned by what was popular and powerful in the 80s corporate culture that we're stuck with our heads in the sand in terms of what is happening in the world so that we might thus listen for how God is calling us to be present in our world today. So many of my brothers and sisters are so focued on who is having sex with whom and in what position and if they're wearing appropriate heterosexual or traditional marriage rings, that our church doesn't even catch a glimpse of what is happening all around us.

Today in the paper I was struck again by an article about McMansions and how we as a nation keep getting bigger houses despite the reality that the size of our families is shrinking. We're spending crazy money in order to live increasingly isolated lives. Why aren't we as a church tackling that emerging cultural and economically-suicidal ethos, or talking about immigration and how Jesus calls us to love our neighbor as ourself, as opposed to fighting over who can serve in a leadership position in a church community based upon what they do behind their bedroom door?

I joined the church community and stayed because of the refreshing, radical, and ressurectional message of the gospel of Jesus the Christ, the hope that it extends to meaning-purpose-and grace in the human experience, and the promise of peace that I heard in my experience of it. Why aren't we more focused on finding innvotive and theologically imaginative ways to get people out of the emptiness of their vast McMansions than on what they're doing inside them?