sermon
pentecost
sunday – year b
“fired
up!”
acts
2:1-21 / may 24, 2015
Let us pray: May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to
you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.
Amen.
You may have had occasion to listen to ‘tapestry’ on cbc radio one,
Sunday afternoons. This radio show features
documentary and interview programming related to spirituality, faith, and
religion. The program’s host Mary Hynes,
not too long ago, interviewed Sara Miles, about her unexpected-and
inconvenient- conversion to Christianity when she entered a church on impulse
one Sunday. Miles was raised as an
atheist and she was happily living an “enthusiastically secular life” as a
restaurant cook and journalist, indifferent to religion at best. As she says in the prologue to her book, “take
this Bread,” “I was certainly not
interested in becoming a Christian....Or, as I thought of it rather less
politely, a religious nut.”
But as she entered the doors of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal church in
San Francisco on a whim, she ate a piece of bread and took a sip of wine and
found herself radically transformed.
At the age of 46, this was her first communion and it changed
everything.
And recall that John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism, on this exact
date - may 24th 1738, had an
experience that changed his life when, at a service of worship, heard the
speaker tell of the change which God works in the heart through faith in
Christ. In his words, “ I felt my heart
strangely warmed.”
and I’ve shared with you how, in my own life, at a time when I was most
cynical of organized religion and would have nothing to do with the church, I
went to a service at a friend’s request, to hear my friend sing, and had that
very same experience of a strange, powerful warming sensation in my chest –
after which my life was dramatically changed.
I share these stories with you because on this Pentecost Sunday we focus
on this biblical story in acts in which God’s spirit – God’s presence with us –
encounters ordinary human beings and wonderful and unexpected things begin to
happen. Pentecost is, in a sense, the
birthday of the church; but it was an important Jewish festival before it
became a Christian one. It was one of
three ‘pilgrimage’ festivals that were ideally spent in Jerusalem and it
occurred fifty days after Passover – which was the commemoration of Israel’s
liberation from Egypt. It recalled, not
only the giving of the covenant to Israel at Mt. Sinai, but also the creation
of a new kind of community –
A radically different way of living after Egypt. And the early Christians incorporated these
themes into their understanding of Pentecost as well. For instance, the late, great biblical
scholar Marcus Borg said, “the central affirmation of Pentecost is that the
spirit promised by Jesus is now present among his followers and in the
world. The spirit is the spirit of God,
the holy spirit, the spirit of Christ.”
Borg concludes, “The claim is foundational to the new testament and
early Christianity.”
Of course, most Christian people are familiar with the story of
Pentecost that we find in acts, chapter two, written by Luke, where the symbols
of wind and fire represent God’s presence in powerful and dramatic ways to the
disciples of Jesus, who engage a diverse group of spiritual pilgrims – who
speak a variety of different languages from various parts of the roman empire
and who have made their way to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of
Pentecost. These same pilgrims are
enabled by the arrival of the lively, creative, unpredictable and
uncontrollable spirit to comprehend a universally understood language. It’s a reversal of the story of the tower of
Babel that we find in genesis, where the narrator says, “God confused the
language of all the earth.”
So Luke is saying in his story that Pentecost is the beginning of the
reunification of humanity – the creation of a new kind of community – which
became the church. And a once timid,
frightened, and discouraged group of Jesus’ followers became forceful,
confident, and unified advocates for their experience of the risen Christ, and
a new faith movement – and community – was born. This spirit of God works in and for the
world as history moves toward the future fullness of god’s good purposes for
the world. So whenever we see signs of
the coming age – in works of love, peace, and justice – we know God’s spirit is
at work.
But, of course, we also know the church has not always lived up to this
high calling as recipients of the spirit for the good of the church community
and the wider world. In the engaging
book, “living the questions: the wisdom of progressive Christianity” we
read: “in many faith traditions, it is
tradition itself that is worshipped, held up as the whole purpose of the
religious enterprise. Be it infatuation
with ‘smells and bells’ or resistance to inclusive language, many faithful
people have confused defence of their understanding of right practice and right
thinking with what they call faith.
They insulate themselves from the unpredictable, demanding, transforming
nature of the spirit with a fierce, pious, unbending commitment to the church
and its traditions.
They practice what Richard Rohr has called a ‘cosmetic piety’ intended
to look good on the surface, but lacking any real depth or complexity. Defence of the changeless nature of their
revealed truth becomes a virtue to be aspired to, regardless of how lifeless
and rote the practice itself becomes.”
Pentecost, as Peter tells us in the book of acts, is a fulfillment of
the prophecy of Joel, ‘in the last days, God said, I will pour out my spirit
upon all people.
Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young people will see
visions, and your old people will dream dreams.....” There have been times here at Augustine
where that has happened – for individuals within the congregation – and
collectively as a community of faith.
The fire of the spirit blew among you, fired you up, to become mighty
prophets declaring that this community of faith would be an affirming
congregation where people of all sexual orientations and gender identification
would not only be welcome but would be brothers and sisters in Christ for and
with one another.
The fire of the spirit blew among you, fired you up, as those actively,
compassionately caring for the homeless and the impoverished as you established
and grew Oak Table community ministry.
The fire of the spirit blew among you, fired you up, many times and in
many ways throughout the history of this congregation. and once again, the fire of the spirit blows
among you, firing you up, as your young people see visions, and your old people
dream dreams and all of you receive the power of the spirit to lead you to
consider a building project on part of the church property that will give you
new life and open up new possibilities for mission with and for your
neighbours.
Work at thinking of the Holy Spirit, not so much as a source of
supernatural phenomena, and ecstatic experiences, and more as the energy of
love, God’s love, among Christ’s people.
The holy spirit is the fire of God that warms our cold hearts toward
each other and toward all of humanity, all of creation. Within our depths as people of faith the
Holy Spirit is the fire that stands over against the ice of our
small-heartedness, and selfishness and deadness. Within our depths the fire burns, and our
greatest sin is that we try to quench it.
I spoke earlier of the Pentecost experience of Sara Miles. How did her encounter with the spirit change
her life? Well, she started a food
pantry and gave away literally tons of fruit and vegetables and cereal around
that same table where she first received communion. She then organized new pantries all over the
city to provide hundreds of hungry families with free groceries each week. The Holy Spirit, described in scripture by
the symbols of unpredictable, uncontrollable wind and fire transformed Sara Miles’
life – and her community. When the
spirit is active and present, it’s not just about ‘me’, but about, ‘we.’
It’s about the creation of a new kind of inclusive, welcoming community
based on love. And for sure it’s not
often easy. Sara Miles discovered this as she trudged in the rain through bleak
housing projects, sat on the curb wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man,
struggled with her atheist family, and doubting friends. The spirit brings change. Some of it is welcome, some not, but always
directed to the neighbour in need.
Christianity is not so much about things we should or shouldn’t do, or
about just being nice. it’s revelling
in the beauty of creation, about taking part in the wonderment of it all by
living, loving, and being.
It’s about embracing the pain and the suffering of the world and
transforming it into new life.
It’s about harnessing the creative spirit that is so much a part of what
it means to be truly human.
One final story: about a confirmation class of three young persons. In one session, the teacher was instructing
them about the festivals and seasons of the Christian year, and when they came
to the discussion of Pentecost, he asked if they knew what Pentecost was.
Since none of them did, he proceeded to inform them that Pentecost was when the church was gathered
together and the Holy Spirit came like tongues of fire upon their heads. Then he told how the disciples began to
speak in all the languages of the world.
Two of the youth took this information in stride, but the third looked
astonished, her eyes wide. Finally, she said,
“Oh my, we must have been absent that Sunday.”
The beauty of that moment was not that she misunderstood Pentecost, but
that she understood the church. In her
mind, there was the possibility that the event of Pentecost could have happened, as it could happen, as it does
happen, even in our, Sunday service. May
it be so. Amen.
Major
Sources:
“The
Sermon: An Approach,” by Dr. Robert S. Crilley in Preaching: Word and Witness, Vol. 00:4 (Year B), pp.
140. Editors: Paul Scott Wilson and John M. Rottman. Liturgical Publications, Inc.
New
Berlin, WI. 2000.
“Fire
and Ice,” by C. David Matthews in Pulpit Digest, May/June 1996,
p.48. Editor: David Albert Farmer.
Logos
Productions Inc. Inver Grove Heights,
MN.
