Seasons Change
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday May 19, 2002
***
I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about the notion of a “season.” And not just for the obvious reason, although it is obviously getting harder and harder to ignore. But we are also approaching the culmination of professional basketball’s so-called “Second Season,” the National Basketball Association’s sixteen-team, first-to-fifteen-victories, win-and-move-on/lose-and-go-home playoff tournament; and it’s down now to four surviving franchises: Boston vs. New Jersey here in the East, Los Angeles vs. Sacramento out West -- there’s a lot of exciting basketball yet to be played in the next five weeks, and I for one can hardly wait. To my way of thinking, the only real drawback about living on Nantucket this time of year is that the West Coast games generally don’t tip-off until around 10:30, which means they often aren’t over until well after midnight...which is a pretty big adjustment for someone accustomed to living his life according to Pacific Daylight time. But of course, as any seasoned basketball coach will tell you, adjustments are what the “second season” is all about, and what make a best-of-seven playoff series so exciting in the first place.
The word “season” comes from a Latin word which means “to sow [seeds],” and from this etymology we can easily discern the agricultural origins of the notion of a “season.” We plant in the spring, cultivate all summer, harvest in the autumn, and then try not to starve to death over the winter so that we can begin the cycle all over again. The odd notion that the seasons actually begin and end on the solstices and equinoxes is merely an attempt to impose an astronomical symmetry on what in reality is often a very tenuous progression; we all know what it’s like to experience a long, hot summer, an early autumn, a mild winter, and a late, wet spring. Yet the progression of the cycle itself is inexorable; winter inevitable follows the autumn, and so on through the year. Of course, in the part of the world where I grew up, the Pacific Northwest, we really only have two seasons: the rainy season and the boating season, with an occasional Indian Summer thrown in to spice things up right around my birthday in October. I’ve learned to track the progression of the seasons not by the stars or even by the weather, but by being aware of when my “winter blues” give way to “spring fever,” and when they return again. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, to every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to read, and write, and think deep thoughts; and a time to sail, and celebrate people’s weddings, and to shop for fresh, local produce grown in someone else’s garden.
But the word “season” is not just a noun referring to “a period of time characterized by a particular circumstance or feature,” or “associated with a particular activity or phenomenon,” it is also a verb which means “to give something a distinctive quality through advanced preparation.” Thus we season our food by adding spices or savory ingredients, season the pots and pans we cook in by rubbing them with oil, season the firewood we cook over by allowing it to dry and age...we become seasoned ourselves, through experience and the self-knowledge that accompanies it. And it is this sense of “seasoning” that I’ve been thinking about this past week, as I’ve been observing the ever-increasing bustle of activity as the Island gears up for the start of “The Season” on Memorial Day weekend. How many “seasons” must an individual experience before they can consider themselves “seasoned” Nantucketers, and how does that “seasoning” transform the quality of their experience? I pose these as rhetorical questions, by the way; I don’t really intend to try to answer them today. This will be my first Season on the Island, and frankly I’m looking forward to it with the kind of naive enthusiasm that only an unseasoned Rookie can possibly display. Ask me again in October how my experience has transformed me, and maybe I will be able to give you a more insightful response.
Within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, today is Whitsunday -- the first Sunday of the Season of Pentecost. Pentecost is the longest of the liturgical seasons -- it lasts approximately half the year, which is to say 27 Sundays (longer than the other four liturgical seasons combined) and thus will not conclude until the first Sunday in Advent sometime in December. Pentecost is not exactly a major High Holy Day in the minds of most Unitarian Universalists; I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it myself if my next-door-neighbor, the Episcopal Rector, hadn’t happened to mention it in passing as we were talking over our back fence. You can read about the first Pentecost in the Second Chapter of the Book of Acts, where it is written: “When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” [Acts 2: 1-4] And later on in that same chapter we read about how, when the disciples went out in public a little later that morning, still speaking in tongues, people assumed that they were drunk on new wine, but the Apostle Peter made a short speech, and informed them what they were really witnessing was something spoken of by the prophet Joel: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.” [Acts 2: 16-18]
Pentecostalism is presently the fastest-growing religious movement in the world. It’s growing faster than the Baptists, faster than the Mormons, faster than Islamic fundamentalism; and the places where it is growing is among people who have historically been marginalized and oppressed -- approximately 19 million new adherents a year, in sub-Saharan Africa, South Korea and Southeast Asia, and especially in Latin America, where in some countries as much as one-third of the population now practice some form of “Charismatic” Christianity. Pentecostal religion is traditionally associated with “gifts of the Spirit” like faith healing and speaking in tongues, so you can understand why it tends to make rational religious liberals like Unitarian Universalists a little nervous. But if you look carefully at the Scripture, you’ll see that the real miracle of Pentecost was NOT that some people spoke in tongues, but that OTHER people understood them. It’s like the start of a new season of spirituality, where both men and women, the young and the old, even slaves, will all become prophets, will all “speak for God,” on behalf of those God loves -- the poor, the downtrodden -- will speak the truth to power, in a language that everyone can understand.
The manifestation of God’s Spirit in the world is one of the central themes of Luke’s theology. In the Gospel of Luke, and in the Book of Acts (which is essentially its sequel) we read about how Jesus of Nazareth is born in Bethlehem a human being, and is adopted as God’s Son at the time of his baptism, when the Spirit of God physically descended down upon him in the form of a dove. During his brief ministry, Jesus embodies that spirit, and carries it with him from the relative backwater of Galilee to the Sacred City of Jerusalem, where Jesus himself is executed, but the Spirit of God naturally lives on, and eventually at Pentecost is experienced by all the remaining disciples, like tongues of fire driven before a powerful wind. And from there, of course, it ultimately spreads to every corner of the inhabited world, including the Imperial City of Rome itself, the very center of earthly power in ancient times.
There are just a few more things I would like to say about Luke’s gospel while we’re still on the subject, before moving on to something else. And the first thing I’d like to point out, just in case you hadn’t noticed, is that Luke’s theology is basically an early form of Unitarianism. I’m speaking specifically now about the story of Jesus’s baptism in Chapter Three, in which the heavens open up and the Holy Spirit descends upon him “in bodily form, like a dove” while a voice from heaven proclaims “You are my beloved Son; today I have begotten you.” Eventually this doctrine of the Incarnation, known as “Adoptionism,” is determined to be heretical, and so the manuscript had to be cleaned up a bit, but in its earliest version the Gospel of Luke appears to be saying that Jesus only becomes the Son of God at the moment that the Spirit of God descended upon him, in much the same way that all of us might be said to become Children of God whenever the Spirit of God touches our lives. And that opinion, that theology: the belief that God is One, and that we are all God’s children to the extent that God’s spirit lives in us, is Unitarianism plain and simple.
The second thing I would like to point out is that Luke is generally considered by New Testament scholars to be the most self-consciously “literary” of the four canonical gospels, and this sometimes needs to be taken into account when reading it in order to avoid mistaking literary eloquence for literal truth. Wind and fire, for example, were both familiar metaphors for manifestations of the spirit, which Luke weaves together along with a clever allusion to Jesus’s proverb about New Wine in Old Wineskins in order to convey a deeper truth about the experience of Pentecost, and the nature of the early Christian community. Pentecost follows Easter the way that Summer follows Spring; God’s Kingdom “is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” [Luke 13:19] Pentecost isn’t really about tongues of fire and speaking in strange languages -- it’s about a radical message of hope and compassion and justice and equality that is comprehensible in ANY language, and which spreads like wildfire whenever people hear and understand it. That’s the real Gospel, the real “Good News.” And when we trust it enough to act on it, out of hope for a better future and with love for all our neighbors, we eventually reap the fruit of the seeds that we have sown.
Finally, I just want to point out that this whole issue of spiritual gifts was very controversial even in the early church, which brings me back to the passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that I read earlier this morning. “There are varieties of gifts, but...it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given a manifestation of the spirit for the common good.... For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” Let me put it another way. Some of us are sweet, and some of us are sour, some of us are hot and spicy, and others of us are simply salty. But it takes all of these flavors, all of these seasonings, in just the right proportions, to cook the perfect feast: a feast where everyone will have a seat at the table.
By now I imagine some of you may be thinking, “well, this is all very interesting, but what does any of it have to do with me?” So let me just say that it is also written in Scripture that it only takes a little bit of yeast to raise the whole loaf, and this is also part of the message of the Season of Pentecost. Like many of you who were here in church last week, I was very inspired by Judit Gellerd’s sermon about Unitarianism in Transylvania, and the Partner Church program which she created in order to bring together Unitarian Universalists from here in the United States and Canada with our co-religionists in Eastern Europe. The Partner Church Council has been described as “the most significant grassroots movement among North American Unitarian Universalists in the 20th century,” but it all began with one woman’s vision, and her own tireless efforts to make that vision a reality by inspiring others to join with her in a spirit of cooperation: one community with many gifts. And the fruit of that seed has been a season of rejuvenation for Transylvanian Unitarianism, and spiritual revitalization for many North American Unitarian Universalists as well.
Next Sunday is Memorial Day Weekend -- the traditional beginning of “the Season” here on Nantucket, and the day that this congregation has traditionally moved our worship service back upstairs to the main sanctuary as well. And on that Sunday we are going to do something a little different: we are going to celebrate something called “Flower Communion,” and I’m going to need all of you to help me make it happen. Next Sunday, before coming to Church, I would like all of you to go out to your gardens, and collect some freshly-cut flowers to bring with you to the service. And be sure to bring some extras, to share with the folks who aren’t here today and who won’t have heard this message. It’s a lovely service, and I think you’ll all like it quite a bit. See you next Sunday, upstairs, for Flower Communion....
***
READING: [1 Corinthians 12: 4-13]
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 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 discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.....For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday May 19, 2002
***
I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about the notion of a “season.” And not just for the obvious reason, although it is obviously getting harder and harder to ignore. But we are also approaching the culmination of professional basketball’s so-called “Second Season,” the National Basketball Association’s sixteen-team, first-to-fifteen-victories, win-and-move-on/lose-and-go-home playoff tournament; and it’s down now to four surviving franchises: Boston vs. New Jersey here in the East, Los Angeles vs. Sacramento out West -- there’s a lot of exciting basketball yet to be played in the next five weeks, and I for one can hardly wait. To my way of thinking, the only real drawback about living on Nantucket this time of year is that the West Coast games generally don’t tip-off until around 10:30, which means they often aren’t over until well after midnight...which is a pretty big adjustment for someone accustomed to living his life according to Pacific Daylight time. But of course, as any seasoned basketball coach will tell you, adjustments are what the “second season” is all about, and what make a best-of-seven playoff series so exciting in the first place.
The word “season” comes from a Latin word which means “to sow [seeds],” and from this etymology we can easily discern the agricultural origins of the notion of a “season.” We plant in the spring, cultivate all summer, harvest in the autumn, and then try not to starve to death over the winter so that we can begin the cycle all over again. The odd notion that the seasons actually begin and end on the solstices and equinoxes is merely an attempt to impose an astronomical symmetry on what in reality is often a very tenuous progression; we all know what it’s like to experience a long, hot summer, an early autumn, a mild winter, and a late, wet spring. Yet the progression of the cycle itself is inexorable; winter inevitable follows the autumn, and so on through the year. Of course, in the part of the world where I grew up, the Pacific Northwest, we really only have two seasons: the rainy season and the boating season, with an occasional Indian Summer thrown in to spice things up right around my birthday in October. I’ve learned to track the progression of the seasons not by the stars or even by the weather, but by being aware of when my “winter blues” give way to “spring fever,” and when they return again. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, to every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to read, and write, and think deep thoughts; and a time to sail, and celebrate people’s weddings, and to shop for fresh, local produce grown in someone else’s garden.
But the word “season” is not just a noun referring to “a period of time characterized by a particular circumstance or feature,” or “associated with a particular activity or phenomenon,” it is also a verb which means “to give something a distinctive quality through advanced preparation.” Thus we season our food by adding spices or savory ingredients, season the pots and pans we cook in by rubbing them with oil, season the firewood we cook over by allowing it to dry and age...we become seasoned ourselves, through experience and the self-knowledge that accompanies it. And it is this sense of “seasoning” that I’ve been thinking about this past week, as I’ve been observing the ever-increasing bustle of activity as the Island gears up for the start of “The Season” on Memorial Day weekend. How many “seasons” must an individual experience before they can consider themselves “seasoned” Nantucketers, and how does that “seasoning” transform the quality of their experience? I pose these as rhetorical questions, by the way; I don’t really intend to try to answer them today. This will be my first Season on the Island, and frankly I’m looking forward to it with the kind of naive enthusiasm that only an unseasoned Rookie can possibly display. Ask me again in October how my experience has transformed me, and maybe I will be able to give you a more insightful response.
Within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, today is Whitsunday -- the first Sunday of the Season of Pentecost. Pentecost is the longest of the liturgical seasons -- it lasts approximately half the year, which is to say 27 Sundays (longer than the other four liturgical seasons combined) and thus will not conclude until the first Sunday in Advent sometime in December. Pentecost is not exactly a major High Holy Day in the minds of most Unitarian Universalists; I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it myself if my next-door-neighbor, the Episcopal Rector, hadn’t happened to mention it in passing as we were talking over our back fence. You can read about the first Pentecost in the Second Chapter of the Book of Acts, where it is written: “When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” [Acts 2: 1-4] And later on in that same chapter we read about how, when the disciples went out in public a little later that morning, still speaking in tongues, people assumed that they were drunk on new wine, but the Apostle Peter made a short speech, and informed them what they were really witnessing was something spoken of by the prophet Joel: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.” [Acts 2: 16-18]
Pentecostalism is presently the fastest-growing religious movement in the world. It’s growing faster than the Baptists, faster than the Mormons, faster than Islamic fundamentalism; and the places where it is growing is among people who have historically been marginalized and oppressed -- approximately 19 million new adherents a year, in sub-Saharan Africa, South Korea and Southeast Asia, and especially in Latin America, where in some countries as much as one-third of the population now practice some form of “Charismatic” Christianity. Pentecostal religion is traditionally associated with “gifts of the Spirit” like faith healing and speaking in tongues, so you can understand why it tends to make rational religious liberals like Unitarian Universalists a little nervous. But if you look carefully at the Scripture, you’ll see that the real miracle of Pentecost was NOT that some people spoke in tongues, but that OTHER people understood them. It’s like the start of a new season of spirituality, where both men and women, the young and the old, even slaves, will all become prophets, will all “speak for God,” on behalf of those God loves -- the poor, the downtrodden -- will speak the truth to power, in a language that everyone can understand.
The manifestation of God’s Spirit in the world is one of the central themes of Luke’s theology. In the Gospel of Luke, and in the Book of Acts (which is essentially its sequel) we read about how Jesus of Nazareth is born in Bethlehem a human being, and is adopted as God’s Son at the time of his baptism, when the Spirit of God physically descended down upon him in the form of a dove. During his brief ministry, Jesus embodies that spirit, and carries it with him from the relative backwater of Galilee to the Sacred City of Jerusalem, where Jesus himself is executed, but the Spirit of God naturally lives on, and eventually at Pentecost is experienced by all the remaining disciples, like tongues of fire driven before a powerful wind. And from there, of course, it ultimately spreads to every corner of the inhabited world, including the Imperial City of Rome itself, the very center of earthly power in ancient times.
There are just a few more things I would like to say about Luke’s gospel while we’re still on the subject, before moving on to something else. And the first thing I’d like to point out, just in case you hadn’t noticed, is that Luke’s theology is basically an early form of Unitarianism. I’m speaking specifically now about the story of Jesus’s baptism in Chapter Three, in which the heavens open up and the Holy Spirit descends upon him “in bodily form, like a dove” while a voice from heaven proclaims “You are my beloved Son; today I have begotten you.” Eventually this doctrine of the Incarnation, known as “Adoptionism,” is determined to be heretical, and so the manuscript had to be cleaned up a bit, but in its earliest version the Gospel of Luke appears to be saying that Jesus only becomes the Son of God at the moment that the Spirit of God descended upon him, in much the same way that all of us might be said to become Children of God whenever the Spirit of God touches our lives. And that opinion, that theology: the belief that God is One, and that we are all God’s children to the extent that God’s spirit lives in us, is Unitarianism plain and simple.
The second thing I would like to point out is that Luke is generally considered by New Testament scholars to be the most self-consciously “literary” of the four canonical gospels, and this sometimes needs to be taken into account when reading it in order to avoid mistaking literary eloquence for literal truth. Wind and fire, for example, were both familiar metaphors for manifestations of the spirit, which Luke weaves together along with a clever allusion to Jesus’s proverb about New Wine in Old Wineskins in order to convey a deeper truth about the experience of Pentecost, and the nature of the early Christian community. Pentecost follows Easter the way that Summer follows Spring; God’s Kingdom “is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” [Luke 13:19] Pentecost isn’t really about tongues of fire and speaking in strange languages -- it’s about a radical message of hope and compassion and justice and equality that is comprehensible in ANY language, and which spreads like wildfire whenever people hear and understand it. That’s the real Gospel, the real “Good News.” And when we trust it enough to act on it, out of hope for a better future and with love for all our neighbors, we eventually reap the fruit of the seeds that we have sown.
Finally, I just want to point out that this whole issue of spiritual gifts was very controversial even in the early church, which brings me back to the passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that I read earlier this morning. “There are varieties of gifts, but...it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given a manifestation of the spirit for the common good.... For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” Let me put it another way. Some of us are sweet, and some of us are sour, some of us are hot and spicy, and others of us are simply salty. But it takes all of these flavors, all of these seasonings, in just the right proportions, to cook the perfect feast: a feast where everyone will have a seat at the table.
By now I imagine some of you may be thinking, “well, this is all very interesting, but what does any of it have to do with me?” So let me just say that it is also written in Scripture that it only takes a little bit of yeast to raise the whole loaf, and this is also part of the message of the Season of Pentecost. Like many of you who were here in church last week, I was very inspired by Judit Gellerd’s sermon about Unitarianism in Transylvania, and the Partner Church program which she created in order to bring together Unitarian Universalists from here in the United States and Canada with our co-religionists in Eastern Europe. The Partner Church Council has been described as “the most significant grassroots movement among North American Unitarian Universalists in the 20th century,” but it all began with one woman’s vision, and her own tireless efforts to make that vision a reality by inspiring others to join with her in a spirit of cooperation: one community with many gifts. And the fruit of that seed has been a season of rejuvenation for Transylvanian Unitarianism, and spiritual revitalization for many North American Unitarian Universalists as well.
Next Sunday is Memorial Day Weekend -- the traditional beginning of “the Season” here on Nantucket, and the day that this congregation has traditionally moved our worship service back upstairs to the main sanctuary as well. And on that Sunday we are going to do something a little different: we are going to celebrate something called “Flower Communion,” and I’m going to need all of you to help me make it happen. Next Sunday, before coming to Church, I would like all of you to go out to your gardens, and collect some freshly-cut flowers to bring with you to the service. And be sure to bring some extras, to share with the folks who aren’t here today and who won’t have heard this message. It’s a lovely service, and I think you’ll all like it quite a bit. See you next Sunday, upstairs, for Flower Communion....
***
READING: [1 Corinthians 12: 4-13]
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 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 discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.....For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:35 PM
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