Christ Church, Presbyterian

Genesis 2:1-9
Acts 2:1-12

Welcome to Pentecost—I think. As we heard in the Acts reading, it’s the day that the Holy Spirit made a gangbusters entrance with violent wind and tongues of fire. And there was much excitement because people in attendance from all over the Roman Empire could miraculously understand each other. It’ always been one of our favorite passages, especially in Peter’s reporting that, contrary to rumors, they weren’t all drunk “…for it was only nine o’clock in the morning.” Presumably by mid to late afternoon, it would have been a perfectly logical explanation. They must have been early Presbyterians.

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John 5: 1-9
Revelation 21: 10, 22 – 22:5

If you were paying attention to the readings from the New Testament these days, you could be forgiven for feeling a little bit of theological whiplash.  Jesus comes down.  Jesus goes up.  Jesus is coming down again.  The New Jerusalem comes down, even as the old Jerusalem goes up (in flames, thanks to the Romans).  That last bit is not so much theological as it is reality testing—the matrix for all of this up and down theologizing is a world that is coming apart at the seams.  Hard to know up from down, nothing feels secure, and nothing seems very hopeful.

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Acts 11: 1-18
Revelation 21: 1-6

You may have seen this.  A recent article in the New York Times informs us that Trinity Episcopal Church, known as Trinity Church Wall Street, is deeply divided over the appropriate use of its current assets, now calculated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion dollars.  Planted in 1705 within a land donation from Queen Anne of England, let’s just say that Trinity has prospered, and can now boast of being one of the largest landowners in Manhattan.  Of course, some of its members among others believe that the church could do a better job of taking care of people rather than lining its pockets from the rapidly rising value of the real estate it owns.  My attention was given to an ambiguous remark made by Mitchell Moss, an NYU professor commenting on the situation.  Asked Moss, “Who says that the empire doesn’t live on?”

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Acts 9: 36-43

The current issue of The Christian Century marks the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which was to become the manifesto of the people King led in nonviolent direct action in pursuit of African-American civil rights, and the Century was the first large-scale magazine to publish its full text.  As many will recall, of course, the times were volatile and complex, and the winds of change were often baffled by the voices of moderation and gradualism, with many clergy themselves urging King to slow things down, while Black nationalists caricatured him as practically an Uncle Tom. The current issue notes that even The Christian Century itself was at times unhelpful, ignoring the creative extremism that King was really about.  Nothing about those times, to say the least, was easy, nor a better future guaranteed.

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Acts 9: 1-20
John 21: 1-19

I think we can all agree that so far it’s been a pretty remarkable year for us.  It is somewhat the case that as of January 10—the day UVM’s representative came bearing tidings of bad news—the earth rather shifted beneath our feet, quite literally if we think of the earth as the ground under this building that we have been leasing from the university for some thirty-five years.  Since that day our communal life has been very different from other years, and we have been in what I regard as an aggressive mode of addressing our transition away from these premises.  “Premises” is an interesting word, by the way, one of whose meanings has to do with

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