You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
Christianity has three major festivals each year. The first is Easter. The second, perhaps surprisingly, is not Christmas but rather Epiphany. And the third is Pentecost. On Easter, we celebrate with lilies and daffodils, more than the usual worship attendance, trumpet fanfares, and “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”. Similarly, we pull out all the stops, if not for Epiphany, then most assuredly for its first cousin, Christmas. As a truly “feel good” holiday, it is overflowing with children’s pageants, loads of proud grandparents in the pews, choir cantatas, and brightly wrapped gifts for poor people.
However, on Pentecost, face it, not much happens. Perhaps that is because Pentecost is too close to Memorial Day, or it competes with too many graduation ceremonies, or the weather is often too darn good to be inside, even for an hour on Sunday morning. Though Pentecost may be one of the three big festivals and may be the designated birthday of the Christian Church in all its fascinating manifestations, Pentecost is often treated as little more than just an ordinary Sunday. Part of that reason, of course, is that Pentecost carries with it some pretty scary baggage for us straight-laced and tight-lipped New Englanders.
I mean, really: Pentecost…..Pentecostal…..As one blogger wrote, “the word Pentecostal usually means that the church or preacher has the ‘Holy Spirit’ in them and they are loud and boisterous. We even imagine a tent revival and a fire and brimstone preacher just a hollering and sweating.” Add to that tales of snake handling, extensive swaying and arm waving, and that weird speaking in tongues business, and it is enough to cause any good Protestant Mainer to turn tail and run, put Pentecost forever in a box where it will never get out, and just get through it – like any ordinary Sunday.
Oh, if folks only knew that all the word “Pentecost” meant, in its original Greek, was fifty – and nothing more - perhaps we would not hold it at arm’s length. And if folks only knew that our Pentecost has its roots in a Jewish harvest celebration that began during Passover with the first grain harvest and traditional offering of barley sheaves and ended seven weeks later with the harvesting of wheat, the last cereal crop to ripen, if folks only knew that Pentecost started out as a kind of first century version of Thanksgiving, perhaps we would embrace the day a bit more.
You see, the original festival of Pentecost is why all those Jews, long dispersed throughout the ancient world, had come together in Jerusalem on the day that we find our little band of apostles still holed up in that upper room down a back ally of the Holy City. There they were – leaderless, probably clueless, waiting as Jesus had told them to wait, eyes cast heavenward as they mumbled something over and over about not knowing what to do next.
Well, maybe it was because God just does not like a straight-laced, tight-lipped, locked in an upper room sort of faith. Maybe it was because God had not done anything really spectacular in a while. After all, Moses and the burning bush and that pillar of fire were well in the past. Likewise, people scarcely remembered how Elijah had out-performed the prophets of Baal with that flaming altar incident.
At any rate, God really shook the apostles up in a most dramatic fashion. All at once, the author of Acts tell us, the whole house seemed to shake and, where a single ray of the morning sun shone across the breakfast table, it began to tremble. Then a hurricane-like wind carried by a mighty sound roared through the place. Bedding was tossed about. Dust swirled. One of Andrew’s sandals flew through the air and knocked over a pitcher of water, and its contents dripped unceremoniously onto the dirt floor. The “I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet” apostles had all they could do to batten down the hatches, so to speak. However, all their efforts could not stop this holy hurricane, which subsided only when the flames started, those little flickering embers that settled just above the heads of the apostles.
This was about the time they all boiled out into the street below where a large crowd was already gathered to see what the ruckus was about. Tradition has it that the apostles were about 120 strong, and they were telling their story like never before, their Gospel words and experience heard in every language possible.
Not surprisingly though, in the midst of the din of passionate evangelizing, there was the inevitable nattering as well. Since every gathering has its naysayers and every community has those who will not condone that which they do not understand – especially if it is out of the ordinary – there were those who pronounced judgment on the whole affair, writing off the apostles’ outlandish activities with a single stroke: “These people are drunk. They are full of new wine.” Hmmm….
Perhaps in response to the accusation but surely because he was filled with something he did not know he possessed, Peter, that illiterate fisherman/disciple, the three time denier of Jesus, the one who had bumbled his words for all the years he had traveled with the rabbi, stood up then and preached the sermon of a lifetime. “These people are not drunk,” he proclaimed. “Get real. It is only nine o’clock in the morning. We are not filled with new wine. We are the new wine.”
And then Peter laid it all out by quoting extensively from the prophet Joel, another book in our Bible. And those open to the movement of the Spirit began to see that a new day was dawning. “‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord."
Such a passionate sermon did Peter preach that, according to the author of this Book of Acts, the number of baptisms skyrocketed, and about 3000 people became believers over the next couple of days – every pastor’s dream. And so, once only a twinkle in God’s eye and then pregnant with possibility, the church was born. The Holy Spirit had arrived. It is Pentecost. Happy Birthday, Church! Welcome, Holy Spirit!
However, as with any birth, all is not easy, neat, and tidy. The birth (and continual re-birth) of the church is downright messy – what with all the varied opinions on what it should be and what it should look like. And as with any birth, the birth (and continual rebirth) of the church is not painless – as we continually strive to bring forth an institution that is at once grounded firmly in the Gospel but also is relevant in our rapidly changing times and to our modern day cultural mores.
However, also like any birth, the birth (and continual re-birth) of the church is sacred. It is God-possessed. It is imbued with the Holy Spirit. The Christian festival of Pentecost recognizes the day the Holy Spirit came to the waiting apostles, the day the church was created. It sounds so simple and a good reason to celebrate, yet we continue to hold Pentecost at arm’s length, and there is a reason for that over and above the specter of fire and brimstone preachers.
The reason is because when we read that story in the Book of Acts, we realize that maybe we have misperceived what the Holy Spirit is all about. We think of the Holy Spirit so narrowly. Our clear bias is to render that slippery, invisible, shy third part of the Trinity as a dove, a comfort, a quiet breath – so civilized and manageable. But then comes Pentecost! This does not compute!
You see, on this day, if on no other in the church year, we are forced to reckon with the Holy Spirit as an uncontrollable wind, as flame, as challenger, as provocateur. No wonder that the Celts in Britain imagined the Holy Spirit as a wild goose – ornery, feisty, unable to be tamed, a bit dangerous, and filled with mystery. On Pentecost, God rushes into our lives and the life of the church as a howling tornado, slamming doors, catching fire. God rushes in like a wild goose, squawking and flapping. And if you have ever been pursued by a goose, you know that can be pretty scary and that is why Pentecost is such a difficult day in the life of the church, and that is why we do our best to treat it just like any ordinary Sunday.
Tone it down a notch, put it in its self-contained little box, and get on with what we are most comfortable with when it comes to church – old styles of worship and education, tried and true projects, steer the old familiar course, don’t rock the boat, good enough is good enough. As the author of the blog, “Magdalene’s Musings” wrote, “A mighty wind blows through, and suddenly (all folks can see are) a mess of downed tree limbs and power lines. Tongues of fire alight on everyone’s heads, and sooner or later someone complains that they’ve gotten burned. You start speaking new languages, and now old friends are acting strange. They shake their heads. They say you’ve changed. We’re left feeling more like the people in the cartoon in which a voice from heaven declares, ‘I shall send down my Spirit, and it will be like a flame upon your head.’ So one person says, ‘Does this mean I can’t wear a hat?’ And another says, ‘We’d better have a fire drill.’ And another says, ‘This is a health and safety nightmare!’ And yet another says, ‘What if I set off the fire alarm?’ And, of course, someone says, ‘But my church is a non-smoking [facility]!’
The Spirit comes. And we are not sure what on earth to do about it. We’re not even sure if we’re happy about it.” Because when the Spirit comes, so comes dislocation, so comes breaking down and breaking up, so comes – day I say it - change. Just as God did not go for that straight-laced, tight-lipped, locked in upper room sort of faith in ancient times, so God does not go for it today either. You see, the bottom line is that the Spirit does not solve problems. It creates them.
When the Spirit comes, so comes a decision point for each one of us about what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be the church in the 21st century. The blogger goes on to say: “Are we willing to be faithful? Are we willing to be punch-drunk with love for God, so much so that people start looking at us a little funny? Are we willing to throw ourselves into new ventures on behalf of God’s hurting people, create new structures from the wreckage of the old— even if we risk failure in doing it? Are we willing to listen for the voice of God in the words of those it is all too easy to ignore or discount.. those who are too old, the ones who will prophesy, and see visions, and dream dreams? Are we willing to listen to them?” Are we willing to grab hold of the opportunity our worship grant offers us and participate fully in the blessings that it holds for us – or have we already decided to hang back and complain about the creativity and how it all seems like too much work and too much change? Are we willing to actively support not only a mission trip to Maine Seacoast Mission again this summer but also one that will take us to the Dominican Republic in 2016 – or have we already decided to insulate ourselves from the needs of “the least of these” and figure those trips are something just a few people do and are not really any of our business – except that, in a detached way, they make us feel good.
The wind of the Spirit is trying so hard to blow through this place. And when it comes – ready or not, it will upset and complicate our lives. The flame of the Spirit wants so much to glow within these walls – but when it does, watch out because our hearts may be set on fire, and we may be remade from the inside out. That is what Pentecost is all about. It is not just an ordinary Sunday – not with the Holy Spirit swirling so frenetically - yet persistently - about. Long ago, Pentecost was the day the church was born. Today, may it be the day this church is reborn. Happy Birthday, Church! Welcome, Holy Spirit!
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
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