Pentecost Spirit

“Pentecost Spirit”

Acts 2:1-21

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

May 23, 2010

Pentecost

Do you remember what happened on September 11, 2001? Of course you do except that I am not referring to airplanes flying into buildings in New York and Washington and a grassy field in western Pennsylvania . I am recalling the explosion of church services held that evening and in the ensuing days in the wake of that horrific terror. When things get really strange or scary in the world, we seek out religion that is comforting and familiar. When things are new or threatening, we invoke the God who is old and established. When change seems out of control, we sing songs about an unchanging Divinity, like…

Change and decay all around I see,

O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

That is what makes Pentecost so difficult for us to understand because, at Pentecost, we find out that God is a change agent! Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament theologian, puts it in this bad news/good news way: “The world for which you have been so carefully preparing is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.” Bad news because the rules and categories of life we thought we knew and understood and have lived by are changing. Good news because the grace of God portends something richer, deeper, more transcendent.

Pentecost is the church’s affirmation that the Spirit of Christ who so deeply touched Jesus still is being poured out on “all flesh.” “Behold, I am doing a new thing,” is the way that Isaiah quotes God who goes on to say, “Do you not perceive it?” Ah, that is the issue. Because the word “spirit” in both of the Bible’s original languages means “breath” and “wind,” the Spirit of God often is pictured as moving through and among us like the wind. The Spirit wind is blowing. So the question is, are we the church going to hoist our sails? Are you going to hoist your sails so as to be caught and led by God’s Spirit wind who will carry you in the direction of holiness, holiness by the way not meaning “holier than Thou” but faithfulness, full humanity, maturity.

The Spirit of the radical and reforming Christ who makes all things new is blowing across the face of the earth and among the stars and into our souls and too often we resist it. That is why the church needs poets and seers and preachers. It is why Peter, in trying to tell the story of Pentecost and the early days of the Christian church, appealed to a little passage in the Old Testament Book of Joel, to describe the times -

There will be portents in the heavens above

and signs on the earth beneath,

blood, fire, and smoky mist.

The sun will be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood,

before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.

(Acts 2:19-20 referring to Joel 2:30)

These grotesque and grandiose images were used by Joel and then by Peter and are read again by us today to announce that the world and our lives are at risk of calamity. Only poets talk of moons turning to blood, but we all notice the deepening brutality and violence of life today. Only poets speak of smoky mists and of the sun turning to darkness, but many of us suspect that the world is careening into chaos. We are fretful about our lives as the old bromide about things “getting better and better each and every day” no longer seems to be something on which we can count. In strange and anxious times, like those of the early Christians and like ours, it is the poets and prophets who tell us most profoundly the truth we may not want to hear but need to.

How do we respond to bloody moons and darkened suns and precarious times like ours? We can put on blinders and pretend that nothing is wrong in the world that some wars on terror and bank bailouts can’t fix. We can try to create for ourselves an oasis of personal escape with an illusion of security amid the tumult. We can appeal to nostalgia and try to recover the way things were. Or we can seek to discern the Spirit of Christ and commit ourselves to following wherever the Spirit leads us and however the Spirit needs us.

We are off kilter if as Christian people our desire is to make a difference in the world. I have no doubt that every person who claims that he or she wants to make a difference is well intentioned. But there is nothing Christian about that aspiration. The gospel is not about making a difference in the world; it about effecting a whole new transformed world. Wanting to make a difference in the world is like parceling out our gifts in measuring cups so as to leave our lives and the world mostly intact as they are. Prodded and guided by the Spirit of God, Jesus sought to inaugurate a new world in which the ways that we as individuals, communities, and nations relate to each other and all others and even to the natural world create harmony, hope, and peace. “Thy kingdom come on earth, as in heaven” was his mission and also the one we as his followers inherit.

Jesus was the gospel in the flesh, good news for all people for he showed us what it means to be a human being. But he was good news especially to those who are consigned to the margins, the edges, the periphery of life. He did not simply mean to sprinkle the present world with charity that would leave it largely unchanged. He wanted the proud to be humbled, the lowly to be lifted, the crooked to be made straight. He wanted the races to be reconciled, the poor to become prosperous, the lonely to be loved, the lost to be found, the hungry to be filled, the bored to become passionate again. He wanted people to love God because he knew that to really love God whom we cannot see means there is a better chance that we shall love our brothers and sisters whom we can see.

We cannot as Christian people settle for wanting to make a difference in the world. We can do that on our own. We do not really need the gusting wind of God’s Spirit for that. Rather, we are invited, even commanded, to pray and to live, as Jesus did, toward a new world in which it is well for everyone and all. Pentecost celebrates the unleashing, the loosing, the lavishing of the Spirit of Christ on all who will receive it and on the church, this Spirit whose power is mighty but not might, but rather love.

The church of Jesus Christ that is living in the power of his Spirit will not simply seek to make a difference in peoples’ lives and in the community of which it is a part. It will live in the community as an embodiment of Christ no matter how costly it is for us to do so. It means that those of us who are the church will break open our lives as Jesus broke open his life, an act we remember in our celebration of the sacrament today, so that a new world may be birthed into being. It is not nearly as important for us to have crosses mounted on the tops of our steeples as it is to have them staked in our hearts.

Be not afraid. God is with us. In every change, in every fearsome circumstance that confronts us, in all our moments of uncertainty and transition, God is with us by the presence and power of God’s Pentecost Spirit.

On Friday, Janita Byars shared with me some pictures of her recent trip to Turkey and, as she was showing me scenes from Ephesus , she told me that St. Paul was reputed to have walked up and down the streets of that city asking people he encountered, “Have you been touched by the Spirit of God?” That really moved me and it has made me ask myself that same question all weekend. I think my honest answer is that I have allowed the Spirit of God to touch some of my life but not all of it because I do not want to face the all of the changes, challenges, and truth that doing so would entail. The church needs to ask itself the same question. “Have we been touched by the Spirit of God?”

Pentecost often is called the birthday of the church. But that only matter if we do not relegate Pentecost to a time gone by, to the annals of history, to a once-upon-a-time status. For the Pentecost Spirit of God still is being poured out on a church and a people who always are in need of being reborn, re-birthed or, in this computer age, maybe the term is re-booted. God’s Spirit is living and active and here and now and is the power by which God touches us and sets us on fire so that we are free in God, by God, for God.

The moon is getting bloodier these days. The sun is getting darker. Thus, there is nothing more liberating for us than to receive the Spirit of God into our lives with all its attendant and renewing power. Do you dare to hoist your sails to catch the Pentecost Spirit?

Amen.

Return to the Sermons and Articles Page

Return to the Sermon Archives Page