*The bishop and his wife arrived at Trinity unannounced for the 11am service today. I was so unhappy with how the end of the sermon turned out, I preached extemporaneously for the last five minutes so what you see here is not the entirely what I preached*
June 12, 2011
Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost
I wanted to start my sermon this morning by asking all of us to pause for a moment. Now take a deep breath in…and exhale. Another deep breath in…and exhale. One more…breathe in…exhale.
Congratulations, you have just participated in a conspiracy.
Pentecost is the perfect day for us to participate in breathing together, for it is a day in which we celebrate the birthday of the church and commemorate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in wind and flame, in the speaking of various tongues…and yes, even in water. It’s a day in which we look back at the history of the church and see the ways in which the Spirit has been at work, but it is also a day in which we look forward towards where the Spirit is moving us in the days ahead. And it’s a day to which I have attached a conspiracy theory…which I will explain later.
The feast of Pentecost is not a creation of the church. As we hear in the book of Acts, Pentecost was already going on before the church was born. The word Pentecost is something that the Christian church borrowed from Greek speaking Jews who used that word as a renaming of sorts of the festival of Shavuot, or the feast of Weeks. In the Jewish tradition, Pentecost is an observance of the day that Moses received the law from God on Mount Sinai. It is also end of the celebration of the grain harvest, a seven week season of gladness that began with the harvest of barley and ended with the harvest of wheat…we read in the book of Exodus that folks were to observe the feast of weeks with the first fruits of the wheat harvest. This feast got the name Pentecost because it falls 50 days after the end of Passover.
It was on this feast day that the disciples were all in the same place in Jerusalem and were probably out observing the festival. We don’t know how long it had been since Christ’s ascension, but it had probably only been a couple days…depending on how reliable you believe Luke’s historical analysis of things to be. What we do know, though, is that they had obeyed Christ’s command to remain in Jerusalem until the arrival of the Holy Spirit. We also know that during that time, they decided that it was unsuitable for there to only be eleven disciples so they cast lots and voted Matthias in as the twelfth disciple. Then, probably a few days later, the Holy Spirit decided to show up and do something incredible.
While the disciples were out, all of a sudden, from heaven came sound like that of a violent wind and tongues of fire appeared on the heads of each of the disciples. Then each of them, filled with the Spirit, began to speak in different languages so that those around them could understand them speaking in each of their native tongues. And here is where a question comes in…there were only 12 disciples, but there were at least 16 different languages represented. So how did that work, specifically? Did a couple get to speak in more than one language? or did they think that they were speaking in Aramaic but the Spirit was deciphering what they were saying so that everyone could understand what was being said? The details don’t seem to matter to Luke but, however it happened, it is no wonder that a crowd gathered and became puzzled by what they had seen…and it is no wonder that the folks who hear this chaos wondered if the disciples had had a little to drink that morning.
What the people in Jerusalem witnessed that day was the fulfillment of what had been spoken by the prophet Joel, a pouring out of the Spirit upon all flesh. It wasn’t just the disciples upon whom the Spirit was coming to, but everyone…all flesh. There was, in that moment an increase in understanding between the disciples and those who gathered around them through the speaking in different native tongues by the twelve from Galilee.
And in this was a reversal of an event that occurred in the beginning of scripture…an event that resulted in confusion and scattering. In my mind, the story of Pentecost is a reversal of the event that happened at Babel. In Babel, human pride instigated the building of a tower that the men who were constructing it thought could be built tall enough to reach up into the heavens. The pride of those who built the tower, and their belief that they could be like God, resulted in the tower being knocked down and the languages of the people becoming confused so that they would not be able to understand each other.
Where at Babel, there was a great scattering because of human pride…in Jerusalem on the festival of Pentecost, there is, in a way, a unification because of the work of the Spirit. And we might want to stop there and sing and rejoice at the work of the Spirit and the formation of the church in this gathering and unification…but that’s not the end of the story and to stop there would be far too easy and ignores the fact that there is still pride and still confusion and scattering. We must keep going because the Spirit keeps going…it did not stop on Pentecost and neither do we.
The great conspiracy of the Holy Spirit is not that our lives will be made easier because she has come, but rather, in the coming of the Holy Spirit, a monkey wrench is often thrown in our plans and our paths sometimes change course from where we think they should go. If the Holy Spirit had not been poured out upon the disciples, I’m sure James and John and Peter and Andrew could have easily gone back to their career as fishermen. I wonder if in those days of waiting they thought about that possibility. It would have been easy, they knew what they were doing, they had done it all their lives in the family business…Zebedee and Sons could very well have been restored. But in the pouring out of the Spirit and the giving of the ability to communicate to people outside of Galilee, the idea that they could go back to commercial fishing was gone. They had a new mission, a mission to go out and spread the good news of the Gospel to the people of different nations and tongues. The Spirit had been poured out upon all flesh and now they had to go and awaken people to the presence of that Spirit.
And just as it was for the disciples, so it is for us. The Spirit wasn’t just poured out on that one day of Pentecost, it continues to be poured out. The Spirit is the one who calls us to the waters of the font, enlightens us with unique gifts and strengthens us for the work of using those gifts to awaken the Spirit in other people. There is one function of the Spirit that Martin Luther forgot when he was writing his Small Catechism, however. Luther writes that the Spirit calls, gathers and enlightens…but he forgot another task, the task of sending forth. Though we may not always like it, in order for the work of God to be done, the Spirit sometimes needs to light a fire under us and send us out. And through the gifts that we have been given, we follow in the footsteps of the disciples, going out and through our actions and our words, spreading the good news about our risen Lord and Savior, the one who sent the Spirit to be with us, to call us, to gather us in to community, to enlighten us with various gifts and finally to send us out into on our different paths to spread the good news.
The path on which we have been sent and in which we are now being sent may not be the paths that we may have imagined ourselves on. The Spirit might have thrown a monkey wrench or two into our plans for where we have seen ourselves going…as the Spirit is one to do. But Jesus never said that being his disciple would mean an easy path…any path that follows the one who endured the cross and was resurrected is sure to be anything but a straight road without any bumps, pot holes, or roadblocks in the way. But in the pouring out of the Spirit, there is a calling…a calling to follow the lead of that Spirit, to go out in to the world and conspire with that Spirit to see God in the faces of those we meet, to engage the Spirit living in those around us through our actions…and if necessary, our words…as St. Francis of Assisi would say. Come, Holy Spirit, And let the church say “Amen”
