Pentecost--2020

Pentecost—2020

Acts 2:1-13

So, we’ve reached the end of the handful of weeks when the risen Jesus appeared to his followers.  If you’ve ever lost someone that you loved dearly, you may be able to identify with this experience.  You experience that loss but for a while it feels like that person is still right there with you.  Things happen that feel like signs of their presence.  Other things happen that trigger memories.  During that same time, you are approached by others who tell you about a dream or about a moment that they had when that person felt inexplicably close.  Then, somehow, in a way that you hardly notice, that presence begins to give way to something else.  At first, you are not sure what is next…

That’s where we are this morning with our ancestors in faith.  We are gathered together in a room in Jerusalem.  None of us are sure what’s next.  We are all aware that it is “Shavout,” the Jewish Pentecost, a celebration of the moment when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, the rules for how the community should live in covenant with God.  Now, it’s been fifty days since Passover.  Surely, Jesus had come to show us the way to live and to create a New Covenant.  However, not a person in the room knew what in the world to do next.  So, we just sit there together and wait… And there may be nothing harder for a bunch of people to do than sit and wait…

That’s precisely the moment when everything begins to change.  First, there is a mighty rush of wind that rolls through the room.  Because our ancestors in faith would have been steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, they would have made the connection between the wind in that room and the “ruah Elohim,” the breath of God, the wind which moved across the formless and void and chaotic face of the unformed world in the first creation story in Genesis.  It would not have been surprising if someone had cried out, “My God…this is the new creation!”  God was present in that first moment, bringing order out of chaos.  God is about to bring order out of this chaos, too.

Next, tongues of fire appear in the room, one over each person’s head.  Again, this might seem strange to us but to our ancestors in faith, this would have provoked another whole set of memories.  What are those memories?  Here in this room there are tongues of fire but no one and nothing is consumed.  This recalls one of the most sacred moments in the Jewish tradition, when Moses was tending sheep while hiding from the Egyptian authorities and something caught his eye.  He wanders off the path toward what drew his attention and what he finds is a burning bush that is not being consumed.  A voice speaks to him from within that bush, the voice of God, which is calling him to rise and lead the slaves out of Egypt.  The difference now is that there is a fire burning over the head of every person in this room.  In the new creation, there is a calling for every person. 

In the next moment, every person in the room is filled with the Holy Spirit, something which had happened previously in Scripture but had always occurred only for a very special person or two at a time.  Now, every person in that room is filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered.  And the very first thing that the Spirit empowers them to do is to speak in other languages that they were previously unable to speak.

Now, we might think at this point of the time when we saw some Pentecostal pastor on t.v. begin to twitch and shake and convulse around the stage and then start to speak in tongues.  It was a kind of gibberish to us but Paul would write about this experience as one of the gifts of the Spirit.  Here’s the thing, though:  that’s not what’s happening here.  What’s happening here is that people who didn’t speak Greek can now speak Greek.  People who didn’t speak Hebrew can speak Hebrew.  

The question is, “Why does this matter?”  The answer, again, can be found in Hebrew Scriptures.  What would have been provoked are memories of the Tower of Babel, the ancient story of a time when all human beings were coming together, speaking a common language and building a giant tower into the heavens.  In the ancient story, God takes offense and in order to keep people from getting all full of themselves and forgetting God again, God fractures humans into smaller groups and every group has their own language.  Languages were thought, in the most ancient of days, to be God’s way of keeping human beings in their place and separated. 

So, powerfully, what happens in this room is a reversal of Babel.  God fills people with the Holy Spirit in an act of new creation.  Every person has a calling.  Every person is filled with the Spirit.  And the first thing that the Spirit does is empower people to speak languages that they couldn’t speak a moment before.  The Spirit acts to remove the barriers which make foreigners incomprehensible.  The Spirit connects previously unconnected people.

The point, though, is not to just give people these languages as some “parlor trick” that they can roll out to impress their friends.  The point is to go out into the world and connect and be understood.  This is the story that unfolds.  A crowd of folks from all over the known world gathers to find out what all the commotion is about and they are amazed that, no matter where they are from, they each hear these people—mostly “hicks” from Galilee—speaking their languages as if they were natives.  What are they saying?  They are speaking of God’s amazing works.  This leaves everyone involved pretty overwhelmed and amazed, asking themselves, “What does this mean?”  Everyone asks questions like that except for the cynics in the crowd, who say what someone always says when all they want to do is just dismiss the people around them, “I think they’re hammered…”

Let’s pause for a moment.  As Christians, there is no question that Christmas matters.  We prepare for weeks to remember the day when God became one of us—Emmanuel.  There are wonderful traditions and family moments and far too many commercials and sales for us to miss this day.  As Christians, there is no question that Easter matters.  This is the day when we celebrate that not even death can separate us from the love of God.  Again, none of us have ever woken up the day after Easter and slapped ourselves on the forehead and thought, “Darn…I missed Easter!”  God became one of us to show us how to live, including showing us how to die.  Here’s the thing, though, Pentecost matters just as much as Christmas and Easter and it gets overlooked all the time.

Understand what I’m saying here… Of course, studying what Jesus taught and preached and what he did is incredibly important.  Of course, coming to grips with both the reality of death and the reality of a God who loves us beyond this life matters terribly, too.  However, the ongoing relationship that we have with God in our day- to-day lives is—I’m convinced—primarily grounded in the presence of the Holy Spirit.  We can meet Jesus over and over again and meeting him can provide all sorts insight into our lives.  Yet, when we pray in the course of a day for energy when we are tapped out or for peace when we are feeling disturbed or for patience when we are running low, it is the Holy Spirit who empowers us to do what we otherwise would not be able to do.  

Maybe it helps to think of this in this way…  There was a time when our ancestors in faith talked about God as the one who intervenes in history, who has a chosen people, who tips a battle field in favor of the good guys, who punishes the wicked.  For the most part, the Bible tells us that all of these interventions really didn’t have a lasting impact on people.  More often than not, a few minutes after God intervened, people took their eye off of God and returned to their old ways.  Even when God gave the people prophets to remind them of their faith, mostly the people just got angry at the prophets.  Even in Jesus’ day, do you remember the story of the ten lepers who were healed?  Their lives were transformed and only one comes back to thank Jesus.

I suspect that even if you have a moment in your own life when something miraculous happened—you asked for God’s help to kick an addiction or you asked for God’s help to discern the next step or you asked for God’s help to forgive someone or to be forgiven by someone else—you probably forgot about that or dismissed it pretty soon.  Human nature seems to be to forget about the things that work out, even the things that work out against all the odds, and cling instead to the disappointments. 

So, when intervening didn’t work out, God became one of us in order to be able to show us how to live.  Again, Jesus, out of compassion, did still intervene.  He healed people in ways we can’t explain.  Not too many who were healed cared to demand an explanation.  Generally, though, Jesus told folks not to tell anyone.  Instead, he told stories and preached sermons and led by example.  He worked to reveal to us what the world would look like if it worked the way that God intended it to work.  And then, he looked us in the eye and said, “Wouldn’t you like to live in that world?  You can…if you learn to forgive, if you learn to be humble, if you learn to follow, if you learn to love.”  

The problem, of course, was that most people weren’t interested in doing what they didn’t want to do or loving who they didn’t want to love.  Most people wanted to follow a leader who just told them to do whatever they already felt like doing.  Most people were focused on the most important question of all, “What’s in it for me?”  It’s not easy to make it all the way from “What’s in it for me?” to “God, get me out of the way and work through me!”  We’re only human, after all, right?

Well, we are until Pentecost. This truly is a day of a new creation.  What happens on Pentecost is that God makes God’s final move.  God had been outside the world, occasionally intervening.  Then, God became one of us.  On Pentecost, God moves inside of each of us.  God moves into our hearts.  If we are willing to listen, we can be inspired and moved to a level of compassion and care that we could never have discovered on our own.  God moves into our minds.  If we are willing to listen, we can discover a depth of conscience that can channel our otherwise scattered thoughts toward a higher end.  God also moves into the people around us.  If we are open, we may discover the joy of strangers being turned into our brothers and our sisters and a whole community being turned into our family of faith.  We may discover the peace that passes all understanding and what it means to feel whole.

The Holy Spirit does not overpower us.  It empowers us.  In a time when we can’t worship together, it reminds us how bound we are to one another.  In a time when we are being asked to do what challenges us, the Holy Spirit helps us rise to the occasion. In a time when fear and anxiety are real, the Holy Spirit moves us past cowering to ask the question, “Who needs my help and how can I help them?”  In a time when everything seems strange, the Holy Spirit reminds us that God is right here.