All Along The Watchtower

Notes from a Sojourn
May 31, 2020
The Day of Pentecost

All Along The Watchtower

A Sermon for Pentecost Day

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief…  

~ Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

After five nights of protest on the streets of Minneapolis and in cities across the United States - a demonstration of outrage toward the police abuse and killing of George Floyd - I am searching for words to express my pain and anger, and the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness I feel in the face of such abuse. Abuse of power, abuse of privilege, abuse of law, abuse of people.

“There must be some way out of here.” These were the words that finally came to my mind. They are the opening words of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, and they give voice to exactly what I am feeling: “There is too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.”

I don’t know about you, but after 2½ months of pandemic social distance, of a generalized anxiety hanging in the air, of uncertainty, apprehension, mixed messages, and constantly changing standards, I’m coming to this year’s celebration of Pentecost pretty drained. I need the Spirit’s comfort. I need the Spirit’s counsel. I need the Spirit’s wisdom and truth to be spoken again into my life.

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For the past five days, myself, Patrick, Jon Martin, and Mark Lewis, have shared reflections on our website blog, each based on one of the five petitions we pray annually in our litany to the Holy Spirit this season:

Come, Holy Spirit, Creator…
Come, Holy Spirit, Counsellor…
Come, Holy Spirit, Power from On High…
Come, Holy Spirit, Breath of God…
Come, Holy Spirit, Wisdom and Truth…

These petitions invoke both the power and the person of the Holy Spirit, asking her to show up in our life.

Experienced as God’s power, the Spirit has always been God’s gift to history in the community of those who listen for God and obey him.

  • It is the Spirit’s power that creates out of the ancient bodies of Abraham and Sarah a newborn child whose offspring will bless all nations.

  • It is this power from on high that cracks the hard heart of Pharaoh and divides seas and rivers before Moses and Joshua.

  • It is this power leading Israel to Canaan by cloud and fire.

  • It is this power at work in judges like Deborah and prophets like Elijah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, who speak truth to power and call anyone who will listen to right-relationship with God and neighbour.

Yet we also invoke God’s Spirit in personal terms. As Christians have experienced her, the Spirit is something more than “an impersonal energy or force,” and we speak of her as “knowing and willing in ways that only persons can do” [1]. The Spirit is the Person of God who counsels, breathes and speaks divine wisdom and truth:

  • It is she who leads Jesus out into the wilds of public ministry.

  • It is she who bears witness to Christ in Philip’s testimony to the Ethiopian and in Peter’s to Cornelius the Italian, and in people like Paul’s friend Priscilla, and Timothy’s grandmother and mother, Lois and Eunice.

  • It is she who counsels Peter in a trance and Paul in a dream, who equips them both with the wisdom to speak intelligently before rulers like Felix, Festus, and King Agrippa.

  • It is this Holy Person of God’s being who touches the lips of the apostles on that first Pentecost Day to speak in the languages of the whole world in order that every person under heaven and earth can hear the truth of God revealed in Jesus.

It is the power and person of the Holy Spirit by which the Risen Jesus remains present to this day in the history of our world and is, in fact, the principle by which this world is made new [2].

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At the end of Dylan’s song, two horsemen come into view for “all” along the watchtower to see:

Outside in the distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
The wind began to howl

The watchtower and the horsemen are images pulled straight out of the prophet Isaiah.
Dylan knows his scriptures.

In Isaiah’s prophetic poetry, the two horsemen bearing down on the watchtower are messengers, and as they gallop we hear them say, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the images of her gods lie shattered on the ground…” (Isaiah 21.9).

Babylon – the stand-in for all kingdoms of this world propped up on the backs of slaves, armies, banks, and kings who play god – has fallen. And in Dylan’s song, the moment we see two horsemen approach he sings, “The wind began to howl.”

Today on Pentecost, I can’t help but understand that wind as the Holy Spirit rushing in on the heels of those first Easter messengers to fill the life of everyone who testifies to the Love that is stronger than Death – the Risen Christ! Like those first witnesses to the Resurrection, our spirits, filled and transformed by his, will be gifted the ability to know and love the world as God knows it and loves it. In other words, to embody that mind and love of Jesus so that this world can be made new again by it.

To answer the Joker of Dylan’s song, “Yes,” there is “a way out of here,” so to speak - out of our human history of violence and hatred. Not into despair. Not into our will to power. But into a new history opened and begun at the Resurrection - through the presence of the Risen Lord at work in you and me through the power and person of the Holy Spirit.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Colin+

P.S. for full lyrics to All Along The Watchtower, you can follow this link: http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/all-along-watchtower/

[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters, 221.
[2] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 332-333.