Tongue
Acts 2:1-21

May 31, 2009


Today is Pentecost, the fearful occasion of tongues of fire descending with the Holy Spirit upon that still frightened and intimidated group of apostles, disciples and hangers-on. Then, like most days, Pentecost ended and everybody went home.

Few, however, forgot. For a long time, that first wild fiery day was considered the model of the way it should be for Christians. The Holy Spirit is nothing to be fooled around with and when it takes possession of you, who knows where you are going and what you are going to do? In fact, if you are going to be truly Christian, you better have one of those ecstatic experiences; otherwise, you are just reciting dead creeds and going through the motions.

There’s the rub, of course. Many Pentecostal denominations insist upon the gifts of speaking in tongues of angels, prophecy, faith healing, shaking and quaking, being slain in the Spirit as entrance requirements to become a real member of the church. Many other Christians are convinced that the Holy Spirit works in a more gradual manner. Besides that, speaking in tongues just seems phoney. We are still in the Age of Pentecost, not Aquarius. The Spirit moves in mysterious ways, not always according to the Biblical script.

In early colonial America, before there was a Canada and a United States, the settlers in the small New England towns considered themselves British citizens, for after all, this was “New” England. The church was the principle institution in society, no separation of church and state then. A Puritan Church. You know, Puritans, the ones who are always on the alert and suspicious that somewhere, someone might be having fun. Don’t look at anyone else, we are the direct descendants of the Puritans, even if we are no longer quite that pure.

Although the term comes a little later, Puritans were the original “Non-Conformists” in English religious society. They just did things differently in their own way. On their errand into the wilderness of New England, carving out a new God-centred life in a hostile climate and environment, the Puritan leadership had to develop new strategies. The church was the centre of town life, political as well as religious, the minister was the most educated person in the town. To become a member of the church was critical, not only for being a part of the most important institution, but also in terms of property and social status. If you were not a member, you could not own property. And if you did not own property, you could not vote. That’s simple, what do you have to do to become a member of the church? Can’t be too hard.

You were required to be examined by the minister and elders regarding whether you had had an authentic religious experience, a “born again” narrative. You had to supply dates and times, the full range of emotions and thoughts, and how well you had followed up this ecstatic experience with sober, upright living. The early colonial church was full of pioneers who had survived, not unscathed, some difficult conditions and personal and community tragedies. Life demanded a lot of you, and so did your religion.

Periodically, there would be “spiritual harvests” in which a number of people would experience publicly a conversion, often fearing that they were destined for the fires of hell. The Spirit would move through the church and community like the swine flu, and it took a stubborn soul - some would say demonic - to resist becoming infected. The effectiveness of a minister’s tenure would be judged by the number and extent of these harvests. The Spirit blows where it will, but most Puritans believed that you had to be constantly vigilant and lead a rigorous and disciplined life to be a worthy receptacle. Only such “visible saints” were permitted to be baptized, become church members, and receive communion. It was a tough, demanding standard, but so was life. The swine flu could swoop into town tomorrow and you would die and where would your soul be?

Give any church system time and there will be problems. We are not alone, says the United Church Creed, eventually we too can join our Christian sisters and brothers in not acting like the best of Christians. As the Puritans moved into their second generation, fewer of the children of the original pioneers could testify to an authentic religious experience. They had been baptized, but could not gain admittance to the Lord’s Table. Then the children started having children and the elders realized a crisis was at hand: should we allow a whole new generation to go largely unbaptized? Then they won’t come to worship and they will start spending way too much time at the tavern and that will be before long the most important meeting-house in the town!

Necessity is the mother of invention. A gathering of New England divines met to discuss what to do. Hard-liners insisted upon not letting up one iota on the old standards for fear the church would be full of less than enthusiastic and righteous members. The practical types said, in essence, the more you keep preaching that stuff, the fewer people you’ll be preaching it to!

Eventually, they came to a compromise. The Puritans don’t do “mission statements,” they own “covenants.” They decided to allow the children of an original “Visible Saint” to have their own children baptized, even though the parents had not had a proper conversion, as long as they had led a moral and upright life. It became known, a bit cynically, as the Half-Way Covenant.

Solomon Stoddard had been the minister of the Northampton church for eight years. The Puritans insisted upon keeping minute records of everything in church life, and the ministers were expected to record dutifully the pertinent details in the church register. As I mentioned before, we still are the Puritans - our church register is in the office. After eight years Stoddard stopped making distinctions of members, noting who had been baptized, who had been converted, who received communion. All listed were described as members in full communion. Stoddard made this decision without comment, no elders were consulted. Years later he observed that communion had been reserved only for the visible saints, only for those who had been saved. He recognized, however, that communion should be in its original intent “a saving ordinance.” In other words, you didn’t have to be saved to receive communion; you received communion and it saved you. The Table was open to all to nourish all.

Once parishioners and particularly other clergy had figured out what Stoddard was doing, or not doing, there was considerable complaint and backlash. Going to hell in a hand basket of libertine thoughts! How would anyone now be converted to the true Gospel when any Tom, Dick or Mary could be admitted to the Lord’s Table?

In the next several decades Stoddard’s open communion helped generate more spiritual harvests than any other church in New England. Even the Pentecostals do not know how to read the spirit of Pentecost and get all wrapped up and entangled in a net of their own making, a web of human assumptions about the way God is supposed to behave, of assumptions about how the church must properly go about its business. Looking the wrong way, you miss the breath of the Spirit when it comes to kiss you.

Does this sound at all familiar to you, with some of our contemporary dilemmas regarding the way we do church and the way God moves among us? I am convinced that the Spirit kissed Solomon Stoddard in his study filling out once again the church register on an anonymous night in the year 1677. The Spirit does not always end up making sober men and women appear drunk; for most of us it is a still small voice that insists we listen.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan