A Spiritual Party
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
The Christian faith is often associated with rules. You can do this, but you can’t do that. We say that good Christians don’t do X, Y, and Z. I remember a certain phrase I heard growing up, but I don’t remember where I heard it. It went like this: “I don’t drink, smoke, or chew, or go with girls who do.”
Christians, more than anyone group, want to say, “We have absolute moral clarity on every single issue of our day, and you (the rest of the culture) must live by our moral vision.” Self-assured Christians today are known for speaking hatefully to those who differ from us morally, and we “baptize” that hate by calling it love with non-sensical logic like “It’s not unloving to warn someone forcefully that they’re about to run into a fire,” i.e. it doesn’t matter how angry and hateful I’m being because it is always loving to warn warn someone about the fires of hell.”
Ask yourself this question. How is it that some Christians, including whole denominations, have decided that Christians don’t drink alcohol, even though, as we heard this morning, Jesus’ first miracle in the Gospel of John was to turn water into wine? To be clear, I’m not talking about those who have decided to practice abstinence for themselves. That’s a completely legitimate choice for many reasons. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about those who decided that Christians or even all people should never drink? How do we read a book in which our Lord turns water into wine and then decide that drinking wine isn’t appropriate for disciples of our Lord?
Let me tell you how. The morality priorities of many if not most Christians comes not from the Bible but instead has been hijacked by the politics and culture of their day. That is how you end up deciding that Christians shouldn’t drink wine even though Jesus turned water into wine. And let’s be perfectly clear about this. Before Jesus turns the waters into wine, the people at the wedding had already drank through all the other wine. This isn’t: “Well, it’s okay to have a glass of wine before bed or if you’re celebrating something, but that’s about it.” These people have been drinking for days. We can assume this because the typical Jewish wedding at the time lasted for seven days. At some point along these seven days, the party had run out of wine. The guests had drank this family out of house and home. Mary, Jesus’ mother, and the servants bring to Jesus six stone water jars, each of which held 20-30 gallons. So we’re talking about approximately 120-150 gallons of water turned turned instantly into wine so that the party can keep going. And yet somehow, some followers of Jesus can say with moral certainty that it is inappropriate for Christians ever to drink alcohol.
The Christian faith isn’t about rules. That’s not to say that there isn’t a moral vision of the New Testament or even a moral vision of Jesus, but the Christian faith, at it’s core, isn’t a religion of rules. But the problem is, people love rules. We want to be told what to do. We want to have a checklist of dos and don’ts, and we want someone to put a gold star next to our name every time we do the right thing. We want laws. We want rules. We want someone to tell us what to do. Except Christians live not by the law but by faith, and Christians don’t receive a law book when they come to faith, they receive what? The Holy Spirit.
This is a brief aside, but the New Testament is unambiguous that the law has been replaced by the Spirit. And it’s not even subtle. The day that the Jewish people celebrated the giving of the Law was the Feast of Pentecost, but on that day, instead of a new law, the disciples of Jesus were filled with the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit blows where it wishes.
Does the Spirit blow wherever it wishes? Yes, but not entirely. The Spirit blows between the two great pillars of Christian morality: namely, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Because the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit will never lead you outside those two truths. They are the boundary markers of Christian morality, and so if you are morally certain about something, or if you are certain the Holy Spirit is leading you in a particular direction but that direction is outside the confines of those great two truths, you are not being led by the Holy Spirit.
What happens between the confines of those two moral markers is complex. Within these boundary markers, there is a place for fasting, abstinence, and deep repentance, but there is also a place for joy and celebrating – and yes, even a place for partying. This is what biblical freedom looks like. In Christ, through the Holy Spirit, we have the freedom to give up something for a time (like in Lent) and the freedom to indulge in something for time (like in Easter), and to do so without forcibly and angrily imposing our morality on other people.
It boggles my mind that so many Christians want to extrapolate from their own experience of the Christian faith, or even worse, from their own subjective reading of the Bible, as if there’s was the only one that counts, and impose that on other people. If on Pentecost a new law had come down from heaven, maybe I could make sense of that. But we didn’t receive a new law that day. We received the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit does not gift every Christian or make every Christian’s experience of the Christian faith the same.
Paul writes:
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit;
and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord;
and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.
To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
God gifts individually and uniquely for the common good of the church and of the world. That truth is beautiful, but it also can be confusing because it means no two experiences of the Christian life are going to be identical. What each of us are called to, how each of us are gifted, in what ways each of us experience God is going to vary from person to person, so the one thing that we cannot do is insist that my way or your way of being Christian is the only the only way.
Let me read the rest of what Paul writes here:
For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit,
to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit,
to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
Where Paul goes from here is directly into his metaphor of the Church as one body made up of many members, but that’s next week’s reading. For today, I want us to remember that the Christian faith, or even better, that the experience of the Christian faith, is not monolithic because the Spirit “apportions to each one individually as he wills.” It is not our responsibility to impose our experience or understanding of the Christian faith onto anyone. It is our responsibility, with genuine love and compassion, to lead people into a relationship with Jesus Christ. We are not called to make disciples of me, you, or anyone other mere human – and certainly not of any one political party. We are called to called to makes disciples of Jesus Christ. We will not accomplish this by berating people with our morality. We will not accomplish this by beating people over the head with laws that we ourselves do not and can not keep. And we will not accomplish this by pretending that the Christian faith is either only fasting or only feasting. We have freedom in Christ through the Holy Spirit, and it is inappropriate to deny others, especially other Christians, that freedom as well.
There is a party going on. It is the Messianic banquet, and the Holy Spirit has gifted each of you uniquely for that party. Judging each other for gifts that do not look like our own gifts will only make you the Debbie Downer of the party. Rather than judging, we should be celebrating, for our good, for the church’s good, and for the good of the whole world.
Amen.
