Sermon: God-Intoxicated

Date: May 27, 2007

Dee Eisenhauer, preacher

Texts:  Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17

            It looked like a nice hotel, the one we checked into in Edinburgh a few summers back—clean, comfortable, modern.  And it seemed quite peaceful in the afternoon.  But somewhere around 2 or 3 in the morning it became apparent that we were pretty close neighbors with some very popular pubs.  You know, don’t you, how this came to our attention in the wee hours?  Drunk people are noisy people.  Especially drunk people in places like Scotland and Ireland, where drinking and singing go hand in hand.   Oy.  It’s a lot more fun to be with the pub crowd at that hour than to be stone cold sober and bleary-eyed listening to them.

            I expect that the disciples who were overcome with the Holy Spirit on the first Pentecost must have been noisy.  They must have looked totally out of control.  That’s gotta be why the bystanders thought they were drunk.  Some in the crowd who were treated to the spectacle of street preachers “sneered” at them.  Let’s pause a moment and admire that gem of a word “sneered.”  Have you ever been sneered at?  For any reason?  If you have, it’s probably burned into your memory.  Oh, it’s easy to picture the sneerers, with their pinched-up faces and supercilious voices: “They are filled with new wine.”

            Peter didn’t stand still for being sneered at.  Shouting already, he shouted all the louder—“Hey!  Listen!” [That’s the abridged version of his address to the sneerers and other bystanders, including the amazed and the perplexed.]  “These are not drunk, as you suppose—it’s only nine o’clock in the morning!”  Then he proceeds to give them the real reason why they are out there on the street corner, shouting the gospel.  They have been overwhelmed by the Spirit of God, which has been poured out on them and in them and through them as liberally as Guiness in an Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day.

            They are not wine-intoxicated, even though their noisy joy reminds some of the bystanders of the drunks they have seen.  They are God-intoxicated.  “God-intoxicated” is a phrase I think I first came across in the writings of Marcus Borg, a contemporary biblical scholar who used that phrase to describe the Old Testament prophets and also Jesus, who stood in the tradition of the prophets.  In paragraph about why Jesus was crucified, Borg writes, “For me, the most persuasive answer [to why Jesus was killed] is his role as a social prophet who challenged the domination system in the name of God. To make the same point differently, if Jesus had been only a mystic, healer, and wisdom teacher, I doubt that he would have been executed. But he was also a God-intoxicated voice of religious social protest who had attracted a following.”

            I don’t know the origin of that phrase, “God-intoxicated.”  Maybe Borg made it up, but I doubt it because metaphors of intoxication show up in, among other places, some old mystical religious poetry that describes what it feels like to be immersed in a spiritual experience.  What do you suppose it’s like to be God-intoxicated?  Have you ever been God-intoxicated?  How is like or unlike regular old intoxication, which I imagine most of us who are over 18 have experienced at some point?

            The Sufi poet Rumi wrote several verses with intoxication as a metaphor.  This one, translated by Daniel Ladinsky in Love Poems from God is entitled “Okay, I’ll  Do It.”  I don’t know the occasion for writing this poem but it sounds like Rumi is trying to convince an unhappy, hard-shell atheist that God is all around:

Okay, I will do it:

sing longer songs tonight because sometimes

you’re just so damn hard to please, and I guess I am

still courting you, trying to get into

your soul’s knickers.

What makes you like that—grouchy around the edges?

What classrooms have you lounged in;

what nonsense have you traded

your gold

for?

How can you look so needy—

God is growing in fields you own.

He hangs from trees you pass every day.  He is disguised as that

peach and pine cone.

Every sound I hear—He made it.

I have been walking with two canes these days—

guess why?

It is because of His beauty and that blond peach fuzz floating

everywhere like dust—

it has made me

so drunk.[1]

Do you get a sense of God-intoxication from that?  Have you ever experienced anything like that—so overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of God that you can hardly stand up?  So lost in wonder that you want to share it with the world, like a tipsy Scot sharing his glad songs with the neighborhood around the pub?  Ever been so on fire with the Spirit that you couldn’t keep your fizzing joy or your boiling outrage at some ungodly injustice quiet for another moment?

            Maybe so, maybe not.  Maybe being God-intoxicated is something you have sought after or longed for but never experienced.  I think most religious folk would genuinely like to have a powerful experience of union with God that would confirm God’s reality and carry us away in a flood of love that would leave us staggering.  But you don’t just put a mystical experience in your date book and stand around waiting for God to WOW you at the appointed hour.  It doesn’t work that way.

            On the other hand, God’s Spirit is as available to us as the dozens of varieties of beer on the grocery store shelves.  Do you agree?  You can’t induce a peak spiritual experience; but you can, O Beloved Believers, avail yourselves of God’s Spirit.  This poem by Indian mystic Kabir (also in  Love Poems from God) cracked me up:  [Note: you’ll hear the name “Maya” in this poem.  That is a word in Hindu thought that refers to Illusion, specifically to the illusion that we are separate beings and rather than being part of the great unity of the universe.]

From the Ocean I heard a million fish say,

“Give me a beer—quick.”

I replied, “Dears, how can that be?  How can a fish in the water

want a drink?”

Well, that’s exactly how wacky things have gotten.  Who else

but Maya could pull a fast one like that

and get away

with it?

Seriously speaking though:

The fish in the water that is thirsty needs

serious professional

counseling.[2]

This is the way I read Kabir’s poem from my standpoint as a post-Pentecost Christian: If we don’t think we’re completely surrounded by God’s spirit—by God’s beauty, God’s guidance, God’s urging, God’s music, God’s passion—it’s possible we are in need of serious professional counseling.  We are awash in Holy Spirit in this world, if we have eyes to see and courage to take an intoxicating sip of it. 

            It seems to me that we might be a tiny bit afraid of being God-intoxicated, as the disciples were in Jerusalem on that first Pentecost.  If we are, for the most part, unmoved by the Holy Spirit, it’s not because Spirit has not been offered to us.  It’s more likely because we don’t want to relinquish the control we have over our lives.  Most of us, as we mature, don’t really like getting drunk on liquor because we don’t like that feeling of being out of control.  And I think that same reluctance spills over to the spiritual life.  We don’t much like the idea that God might lead us to do something wacky like preach or change careers or give a way a bunch of money or start spending our free time being companions to the poor.  We find the idea that we might be dramatically called to a new way of life all that attractive, frankly.  

            Therefore, many of us who would never dream of taking a temperance pledge when we’re talking about a lovely glass of wine act as if we are teetotalers where availing ourselves of the Holy Spirit is concerned.   Most of us prefer to remain entirely sober where the intoxicating and unpredictable Spirit of God is concerned.  Here’s another of Rumi’s poems, this one translated by Coleman Barks.  It’s called “What Jesus Runs Away From:”

The Son of Mary, Jesus, hurries up a slope

as though a wild animal were chasing him.

Someone following him asks, “Where are you going?

No one is after you.”  Jesus keeps on,

saying nothing, across two more fields.  “Are you

the one who says words over a dead person,

so that he wakes up?”  I am. “Did you not make

the clay birds fly?” Yes.  “Who then

could possibly cause you to run like this?”

Jesus slows his pace.

I say the great name over the deaf and the blind,

they are healed.  Over a stony mountainside,

and it tears its mantle down to the navel.

Over non-existence, it comes into existence.

But when I speak lovingly for hours, for days,

with those who take human warmth

and mock it, when I say the Name to them, nothing

happens.  They remain rock, or turn to sand,

where no plants can grow.  Other diseases are ways

for mercy to enter, but this non-responding

breeds violence and coldness toward God.

I am fleeing from that.

As little by little air steals water, so praise

dries up and evaporates with foolish people

who refuse to change.  Like cold stone you sit on

a cynic steals body heat.  He doesn’t feel

the sun.  Jesus wasn’t running from actual people.

He was teaching a new way.[3]

A new way.  Why, we don’t know what we might do, what we could do, if we opened our hearts and drank deeply of the one Spirit. There’s this teasing little hint of something amazing in the new way in John’s gospel this morning.  Jesus is speaking to the disciples who are anxious about the prospect of Jesus leaving them.  This part of John’s gospel is sort of like Jesus’ last will and testament; here he is willing his ministry to them.  “Very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…”  [John 14:12]  Isn’t that an astonishing thing to say?  How does it make you feel?  Doesn’t it make you feel sort of…inadequate?  How in the world could I do the works of Jesus or even greater works than Jesus? 

            Tony Campolo has a sermon linked at textweek.com in which he says that when we hear that, most of us think immediately of miracles, and rightly conclude that it is unlikely we will be feeding five thousand people off of five loaves of bread or walking on water anytime soon.  But, he says, this verse is not about the miracles.  It’s about the love.  Jesus’ commandment, conveniently summarized in John’s gospel as “Love one another as I have loved you,” is the work Jesus passes on to us, to keep that commandment close to our hearts and demonstrate it in our lives.  Campolo says you can think of what the generations of disciples do as “greater” just in the reach of the millions of followers of Jesus who have extended Christ’s love much further than Jesus was able to in his short ministry. 

            Anyone can love.  Anyone can engage in the most prolific acts of love.  No experience necessary.  Love, the Spirit that is Love, is gushing into the world seeking channels who will drink of it and pass it on.  It is more abundant than the wine at the Cana wedding, more plentiful than kegs of beer at the Tappa Kegga Brew frat party.  There is no drought of Love.  But it will not leave us unchanged, as we receive it and share it with the world.  It may well send us reeling out into the world singing out loud loudly, dancing, hugging perfect strangers, throwing money to the bums, standing up to oppressive powers, refusing to be passive in the face of injustice. 

            Taste it, it’s delicious.  Take a sip.  Take more than a sip.  Slug it down, chug it, drink deeply of the Spirit named Love.  Let it pour out on you and through you.  This is no time to stay sober, my friends.  The world needs to hear the glad songs of the God-intoxicated, loud enough to wake the dead.

[1] Rumi “Okay, I’ll Do It” Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West  Translated by Daniel Ladinsky  New York: Penguin Compass, 2002, p. 73

[2] Kabir  ibid. p. 222

[3] Rumi, “What Jesus Runs Away From”  The Essential Rumi translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, p. 204