"Our Next Pentecost"
Acts 2:1-21
Today is Pentecost Sunday, when we
celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit by fire, wind, and word.
Pentecost — from the Greek pentekostos, meaning
"fiftieth," was a Jewish festival celebrating the spring harvest, and
the revelation of the law at Mount Sinai.
In
the second chapter of Acts, Luke tells us that 120 disciples are gathered
together in Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost-- 50 days after Jesus was raised from the grave. They’re waiting and hoping for the
fulfillment of Jesus’ promise: “You will
receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in
all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
By
any stretch of the imagination, it's an amazing story, full of riveting
details. Tongues of fire. Rushing winds. Accusations of
drunkenness.
So… What was it that happened on that first Day of Pentecost? Although this holy day is often called the
birthday of the church, we’re not celebrating the birth of an organization
today. Pentecost is the story of how the
church came alive by the power of the Holy Spirit. On
that day, followers of Jesus Christ received the power to take the gospel to
the streets there in Jerusalem... and
eventually throughout the earth.
What happened that day was such a
powerful experience that the people who were there had to turn to dramatic
metaphor to describe what happened. They
said it was like a fire falling on them.
A sense of community and understanding transcended the differences of
language of those who were gathered there.
On that day a mighty wind from
heaven blew the fire of the Holy Spirit onto those followers who were gathered
together. When things like tongues of
fire danced over the heads of the apostles, they seemed to be quickened by
unseen forces. They were shouting... preaching...
speaking in a variety of languages...
and generally making such a commotion that the people of the city had to
stop and wonder what on earth was going on.
The Spirit blew into the apostles an
awareness that-- just as Jesus had
promised-- the presence of the Holy
Spirit was with them… and was at work in and through them.
The sound that came from
heaven-- that rushing violent
wind-- was the exciting sound of old
barriers being broken and glass ceilings shattering. The divisions within humanity were being
overcome. The church was empowered to
take to the streets with the good news.
On the day of Pentecost, the
disciples acquired a holy boldness that they’d never had before. The difference in them after Pentecost was as
dramatic as those before-and-after pictures that weight loss programs use in
their advertisements.
Before Pentecost, on the night of
Jesus’ arrest, Peter cowered away from a servant girl’s questions and refused
to admit that he even knew Jesus. After
Pentecost, Peter preaches the first Pentecost sermon to the confused and
questioning crowd. The Spirit gives him
the power to witness to the crowd.
Before Pentecost, many of the
disciples felt doubt and despair. They
may have felt, like their ancestors had, like “dry bones.” After Pentecost, the apostles went out into
the streets and into the community...
and people’s lives were changed.
They touched the lame and they walked.
They were imprisoned and flogged...
yet they showed no signs of doubt or fear. The once disheartened disciples moved
out-- prodded and enabled by the Holy
Spirit, which accomplished in them what
the human spirit could not.
Who will be in this new
community of faith? Jews, of
course. That's what the first disciples
believed. After all, Pentecost, was a
Jewish festival. The promises of God
were clearly promises just for Israel.
But, not long after the story of
Pentecost in Acts 2, there are other stories.
Peter has a vision in which he sees a great sheet being lowered with all
kinds of animals. He heard God's voice
saying, “Don’t call anything I create
unclean.”
Peter came to understand that the
vision wasn’t about unclean food, but about unclean people. He met the gentile Cornelius and baptized
him. The church could have become a sect
within Judaism-- a gathering place for
disgruntled Israelites. But no-- the promise of God was sent even to the
Gentiles-- to the outsiders. The early church struggled with the issue of
who to include, just as we do today. But
the Holy Spirit prevailed.
Fifteen hundred years later, the
church that began at Pentecost languished.
There was widespread corruption and abuse of
power by the
church. Would the movement begun at
Pentecost go the way of so many other organizations that mature and then
die?
An Augustinian monk in Germany,
Martin Luther, nailed 95 theses on a church door and called the church back to
its biblical roots. You know the rest of
the story of the Reformation: the Holy Spirit prevailed.
Eighteenth-century England was going
through the trauma of urbanization and the first industrial revolution. Alcoholism was a plague upon the land. Poverty degraded the lives of millions. The church seemed far removed from these
tragedies-- remote, privileged, and
cold. A priest in the Church of England
named John Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed.” He began a dramatic revival that swept
through England and transformed the hearts and minds of millions. What
was it that strangely warmed Wesley’s heart and revived the church in that
time? It was the Holy Spirit. The Spirit prevailed.
The New Testament tells us that women
were once key leaders of the church. But
they’d been pushed aside as the church fell back into the patterns and mores of
the surrounding culture. There were
notable exceptions over the centuries.
But mostly the gifts of women for leadership in ministry were ignored or
repudiated.
Finally, in our own time, the gifts
of women began to be affirmed once again.
Around the middle of the twentieth century, the church struggled through
a controversy which I’ve been told was as intense as the issues that divided
our denomination in more recent times.
Eventually, that controversy was partially resolved when our mainline Protestant
churches began ordaining women.
Today we are
living in a time of huge change… and cosmic shift: technological, cultural, political, and
religious. According to Harvey Cox, we
are now experiencing the biggest shift in Christianity since the 4th
century. The research tells us we’re
living in an increasingly pluralistic society, populated by members of a
variety of religious groups and those we know as the “nones”—no religious
affiliation—as well as the “dones” and the “spiritual but not religious.” So
it’s no wonder if we feel bewildered… disoriented… and afraid.
But
I think we’re in a time when God is trying to do amazing new things. The Spirit is on the move!
Harvey
Cox has been saying that we’re living in the “age of the Spirit,” which began
around 1900. Whatever we call it, it’s
a time when we need to open ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit to guide
and empower us.
The
Spirit empowered the first believers to testify to God's great deeds,
emboldened the apostle Peter to preach to a bewildered crowd of Jewish skeptics,
and drew three thousand converts in one day.
The
feast of Pentecost reminds us that the Holy Spirit still blows into our lives
and messes with a lot of the things we’ve been comfortable with.
"All
of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages,
as the Spirit gave them ability." "At this sound the crowd
gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native
language of each."
I believe the Pentecost story is a story for
our time. As Debie Thomas writes:
“We live in a world where words have become toxic, where the languages
of our cherished "isms" threaten to divide and destroy us. The
troubles of our day are global, civilizational, catastrophic. If we don't
learn the art of speaking across the borders that separate us, we will burn
ourselves down to ash.
“For those of us living in America
this election year, the temptation to retreat into our political enclaves is
especially strong. Why bother to understand — much less to
speak — the languages of those whom we disagree with? Why not sneer? Isn't sneering
easier? Isn't it more fun?
“Maybe,” Rev. Thomas says. “But
it is no small thing that the Holy Spirit loosened tongues to break down
barriers on the birthday of the Church. In the face of difference, God
compelled his people to engage. From Day One, the call was to press in,
linger, listen, and speak.
I agree with my colleague when she
says, “Because here's the thing: no matter how passionately I disagree with
your opinions and beliefs, I cannot disagree with your experience. Once I have
learned to hear and speak your story in the words that matter most to you, then
I have stakes I never had before. I can no longer flourish at your
expense. I can no longer make you my Other. I can no longer abandon
you.[1]
By the time Luke told the story of
Pentecost, he already knew that the Christian faith had spread to the edge of
the known world and to its very center in Rome.
The Jesus movement had already transcended tribe and tradition. Jesus inspired a religion of the poor and the
powerless without an enemy or enmity, a religion that included everybody.
As another
colleague puts it, “the story of Pentecost shows the Spirit of God out of the
box, prancing about in the town square and intoxicating the people with the
sheer beauty of her audacity.”[2]
Luke’s
Pentecost story contradicts the tribalism exemplified in the story of the Tower
of Babel. The story of Pentecost that
declares that in Christ there is no longer different tribes, because all are
one as Christ is One. In Christ, there
is no East nor West, no South nor North, no Jew nor Gentile, no man nor
woman.
Today,
in the 21st century, I believe we are called to find ways to build
bridges with our sisters and brothers who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist,
Sikh, atheists, agnostics, as well as those who are poor, powerless, or
marginalized.
We
Presbyterians tend to be comfortable with doing things “decently and in
order,” but I hope that we will be open
to the leading of the Spirit, even when that means moving out of our comfort
zone and into new and unfamiliar relationships and endeavors.
Imagine
a 21st century Pentecost where we begin to listen to those who we’ve
failed to understand before, where we experience together the miracle of
understanding.
Imagine
a 21st century Pentecost where Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those who follow
other religious or spiritual paths find ways to listen to one another and find
ways to work together for a better world.
The Holy Spirit that gave birth to
the church continues to prod, cajole, and urge us forward. It’s been this way since the beginning of
the church. Just when we get settled down,
comfortable with present arrangements, our pews bolted securely to the floor,
all fixed and immobile, there comes a
rush of wind or a still small voice… a breath of fresh air… tongues of
fire-- and the Holy Spirit comes to us,
crashing our parties and inviting in the people we were hoping to avoid, and
then bringing us all together, forming and molding us into one Body of Christ.
May it be so!
Amen!
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
May 15, 2016
[2] I’m indebted here to Rev. Dawn Hutchings, “Beyond
Tribalism: Preaching a 21st Century Pentecost.” https://pastordawn.com/2013/05/14/beyond-tribalism-preaching-a-21st-century-pentecost/ Rev. Hutchings credits some of the ideas in
this sermon to Clay Nelson, John Shelby
Spong, John Dominic Crossan, and Marcus Borg.
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