Pentecost 2021
Pentecost 2021
Acts 2:1-4
The three central days of the Christian life are Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. With Christmas, we prepare for weeks (now, in our stores, for months) ahead of time. The whole culture marks the coming of the day with movies and Hallmark specials and Black Friday sales. And despite all this, there is that moment during the pageant or in a quiet moment on Christmas Eve when the authentic notion of “God With Us” somehow comes to life. Who doesn’t love Christmas, right? Who has ever missed it?
When it comes to Easter, it’s hard to miss, too. Spring is coming! Bunnies and eggs begin to randomly appear. Charlton Heston holds the two tablets over his head and we think, “Oh, ya…it’s Passover, too!” Sooner or later, we run into “Jesus Christ Superstar” and can’t stop ourselves from watching. (Judas is amazing, after all.) Palm Sunday comes and reminds us, “One week to go…” Then, again, there is that moment when the good news of an empty tomb, of the notion that not even death can separate us from God’s love, comes to life. In our mind’s eye, we can see this truth come to life in the glowing faces of the faithful women as they run to share the good news. Nobody forgets Easter.
That’s the strange thing about Pentecost. Have you ever seen a great Pentecost movie? (For that matter, have you ever seen a Pentecost movie at all, good, bad, or indifferent?) As far as I can tell, there are no traditional Pentecost sales. There is no Pentecost animal or elf like figure. Just tell me this, yesterday did you think, “Wow…tomorrow is Pentecost!” I didn’t think so.
Honestly, though, if there was not a Pentecost, the Christian faith wouldn’t be the Christian faith, which is pretty interesting because, before there was a Christian faith there was, in fact, already a Pentecost. You heard me correctly there. Christians had a tendency to line their holidays up with existing holidays in order to “fly under the radar” of the eyes of the authorities. If the majority of people were already celebrating then you could celebrate and sort of “fit in.” So, Christians lined up Easter with Passover and lined up their Pentecost with the Jewish holiday which was already known as “Pentecost.” (We didn’t even come up with a new name?) Jewish Pentecost was a harvest festival that always happened seven weeks and one day after Passover (literally: “fifty days.”) Christians basically said, “Okay…50 days works for us, too.”
As Christians, we are not celebrating the first fruits of the harvest, like our Jewish brothers and sisters. Instead, we are celebrating the arrival of the one whom Jesus said would come after him. This is the guide. This is the counselor. This is the one who would “clothe the disciples in power.” This is the one who would inspire us and empower us to live our lives as followers of Christ. This is the Holy Spirit. And, for a lot of Christians, this is hard to wrap our heads around. And, for our culture, there’s never really been a way to cash in on Pentecost. So, the most popular question around Pentecost is… “Is this weekend Memorial Day weekend?”
So, I want to pause and give Pentecost it’s due. Here’s the bottom line that I suggested to you last week. Our earliest ancestors in faith talked about a God who liberated us and taught us how to live in relationship with each other and with God by giving us rules to live by. God was remote and had spokespeople and people who took action on God’s behalf. Occasionally, if necessary, God would intervene. However, people failed to live up to the rules, either in how they treated one another or how they treated God
Much later, God became one of us in order to show us just how much God loved the world and just how much God wanted us to live loving lives. So, Jesus of Nazareth showed us what a faithful life would look like—feeding the hungry and caring for the sick, bringing the kingdom of God to life in the choices that we make. The vision of God here is less about justice and fairness and more about love and mercy and forgiveness, which, perhaps, was an indication of God knowing just how much we needed such kindnesses.
When that example proved to be too much for the world to tolerate, a third vision or experience of God’s presence came to the foreground. God had been beyond us and all powerful. God had been beside us and calling us forward into faith. Now, God was moving inside of us—in our hearts and minds—and all around us through the intimate, immanent presence of the Spirit.
The surprising thing is that Spirit makes sense. It’s not what the disciples were expecting but, looking back, the Spirit had always been present. Indeed, this is the framework within which the Book of Acts is presenting the arrival of the Spirit. Come and take a walk with me through the text.
Those of you who have read the Bible will know that it begins with a world that is “formless and void.” Everything is chaos. God’s presence moves in that chaos to bring order to life. This story, written relatively late in the life of the kingdom when the people were in exile, would have reminded them that God always works to bring order out of chaos. God has from the beginning of time. This was still true in the days of waiting for the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection. This is still true in our pandemic torn world today. Just when it looks like chaos might win, faithful people’s dig in and hold on because we know that the chaos and the darkness never win.
In the creation story, it is Spirit that moves across the face of the dark chaos. Literally, it is the “breath of God” which sweeps like a mighty wind across the earth. So, when we hear in our Pentecost text that, “Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,” what the original audience would have heard in that moment was the beginning of a new creation. This is the moment when oder defeats chaos. This is the moment when all things and all people are made new. This is the power of God moving across the face of the earth once again.
Think of the hottest day of the summer, when the air is stale and humid and still. The sweat just pours off you. You are parched beyond belief. The sun cuts you to the bone. Then, you feel it. Out of some unimaginable place, a cool breeze is blowing. It reaches you and it is like you have just stepped straight into a room-sized refrigerator. You can breathe again. You are refreshed. You are made new.
This wind enters the upper room and sounds like a violent wind but nothing is destroyed. This is creation, not destruction and yet it is a mighty power. All of which fits with what happens next. If creation, itself, was marked by a powerful wind which created rather than destroyed, then another pivotal moment was marked by fire which burned but did not burn out. Fire had such a capacity for destruction and yet, one day, centuries before fire led one man, Moses, to rise and lead people into a new life. Moses, who was on the run from the law, was walking through the wilderness, tending his father-in-law’s sheep, when he saw a bush that was burning but was not consumed. He was curious enough to go take a closer look. When he did, the voice of God spoke to him and told him to go and tell the most powerful man in the world that it was time to set the people free. Knowing this story by heart, our ancestors would have recognized God’s touch in the tongues of flame hovering in the room.
The instant this scene unfolded, our ancestors would have been way ahead of us, connecting the dots. “Hold it, here. When the burning bush appeared to Moses, there was one flame, in the middle of nowhere, burning for Moses alone to discover it. This is the private way that God approached and called the great prophet—in a form that was for his eyes and ears only. Now, look at what we have here. In the middle of Jerusalem, in a room filled with people, God becomes present. And this time, there is a flame for every person in the room. Just as God empowered Moses, now every person in the room is being empowered. Everyone is being invited and empowered to speak God’s truth and to do God’s work. God is now speaking and working through all.”
To put the matter bluntly, we hear this text and struggle to find our connection. At Christmas, we have the universal love we feel as human beings for a baby At Easter, we have the universal human experience of suffering and mortality and mystery. At Pentecost, at first glance, it just seems like a “Raiders from the Lost Ark” movie, like the later ones, where the effects were good but they forget to tell the story. The thing is that this is our problem, not the text’s. If we were steeped in the tradition like our ancestors would have been, we would see that the point isn’t the special effects—the wind and the fire. Rather, the point is the way that powerful moments of the past are invoked and twisted and expanded to tell a whole new story of a whole new ordering of things. The story used to be of a God who was removed from the world. The story used to be of a God who would occasionally single out a person for contact. As of Pentecost, the story is of a God who is available to every believer.
We can even go a step further than that. The faithful people in that room are reminded on Pentecost, as are we today, that when things are feeling chaotic, we should watch for God’s presence, alive and at work in our world, bringing order back to life. When we are not sure what’s next or what to do, we should be aware of the burning that is deep inside of us, the energy that moves us and inspires us to work for change. When the tasks before us seem insurmountable, we should remember the incredible energy of the Holy Spirit which can still move through us today.
Here’s the third and final lesson. The very first thing that the Spirit empowers those believers to do is to speak other languages. Let’s be clear. This is not people speaking in tongues. This is people all of a sudden being able to speak Hebrew or Greek or Assyrian. The people are not empowered to overpower one another. Instead, the Spirit empowers them to understand one another. The first order of business, in other words, is to bring people together. This is the dismantling of the old Tower of Babel story, where the answer to why there were so many languages was because God was afraid of what people would do if there were no such barriers. On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit knocks down those barriers. As far as I can tell, people filled with the Spirit of God have been working to knock down the things which divide people ever since.
Why does Pentecost matter? We all can connect with God, the creator, simply by learning to walk in this world with gratitude. We all can connect with Jesus, the Christ, by learning to respond to the needs of others with love and compassion. However, perhaps most amazingly, we all can live in relationship with the living God, the Holy Spirit, by opening our hearts and minds and praying, “Okay, God…you lead. I’ll follow. Burn within me, like one of those flames. I’m ready to let that mighty but gentle wind move me in your direction.”