Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd Acts 2: 1-21
19 May 2024 Psalm 104:25-35,37
The Day of Pentecost Romans 8: 22-27
10:30am John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
Who are Christians? Christians are drunks, people
who have been inebriated not by wine but by the
power of the Holy Spirit—so “drunk” on Holy Spirit
that they recklessly stand up and speak for Jesus.
from “Everybody’s a Prophet,” in Will Willimon’s
Lectionary Sermon Resource, p. 324.
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we
so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe
a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor
with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill
a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats
and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash
helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal
flares; they should lash us to our pews.
Annie Dilliard, Teaching A Stone to Talk
…the implication for history, and for politics, is not hidden:
it is personal love, personal commitment, personal loyalty
among individuals which is the civilizing moral standard
against which the state, its rulers, its manipulators are
judged by the common people. In the end, we may face a
vast political revolution in this nation; and, if we do, it will
be because we have not been overwhelmed by a moral
revolution.
D.J.R. Bruckner, The Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1971
I.The Day of Pentecost is the culmination of Easter and the beginning of the dramatic story of the formation and expansion of the church. As we know, Acts begins at the time of the Ascension and ends with the arrival of Paul in Rome. It is sometimes referred to by scholars as the “Acts of Peter and Paul, not only because Peter and Paul are the main characters in Acts but because of the fact that the first half of Acts is mostly about Peter and the second half is mostly about Paul. The more we read Acts, the more we see this.
II. It is in the first Chapter of Acts that Jesus concludes his public life by preparing the apostles for the coming of the Holy Spirit and giving them instructions about how to proceed with their ministry, specifically that they are to stay in Jerusalem to await the coming of the Holy Spirit. We note Acts 1:8 when Jesus says very clearly what is ahead for the apostles: “…You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
III. What was difficult for the apostles was understanding what we learn in the Gospel lesson this morning from John, that Jesus must leave and return to the Father “…I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7) What the apostles come to learn, (and remember that in this time after the Ascension and before the coming of the Advocate, the Apostles, at the direction of Peter, elect Matthias as the 12th apostle), is that Jesus’ “going away” is “not a withdrawal” but “an expansion and intensification of presence, both across space and time… and bringing Christ nearer to us than we are to ourselves. The coming of the Spirit is the coming nearer of the Christ…” (From ”Going Away and Coming Closer,” by Robert Saler, in The Christian Century, May, 2024, p. 28)
IV. It is fascinating to recognize how seriously the Apostles—including Matthias—took the counsel of Jesus when they returned after the Ascension to the same upper room in Jerusalem where they had been staying. They were joined by “certain women , including Mary the mother of Jesus as well as his brothers,” and a large number of disciples. Chapter one of Acts suggests that when Peter called for the election of a12th apostle to replace Judas, there were 120 people crowded into that upper room. For much of the time the people were gathered together, they devoted themselves to prayer, a prayer that was likely not without some degree of anxiety as everyone wondered what the coming of the Holy Spirit would mean and how—and whether—their lives would be changed as they were by Jesus. They could not yet imagine and then realize, that the coming of the Holy Spirit would mean the return of Jesus. Robert Slater explains it this way: Beginning with Acts and proceeding through the early church…the story of the Spirit’s coming at Pentecost is the story of this Spirit’s work, taking on flesh across multiple bodies, multiple geographies, multiple contexts. Augustine’s famed dictum that the works of the persons of the Trinity ad extra (that is, in the world) are indivisible is relevant here: wherever the Spirit works, across time and place, is the site of Jesus Christ’s own work as well. When you get the Spirit, you get all of Christ. (Saler, op. cit.)
V. So, as Jesus had promised, on that first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to all those people in the Upper Room. The Spirit—the Advocate, the Paraclete, the Counselor, the Consoler, the Helper, the Intercessor—came with what could be called a gale-force wind, a wind very loud and not a little frightening. And then, as Luke describes, “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” Remember, all this commotion, while happening in the upper room where the crowd was, was loud enough to be heard in the whole house and even in the street. Quickly, it would seem, a large crowd gathered around the house and this is the point when there would seem to have been an explosion of different languages.
VI. In the Jewish tradition, Pentecost is called Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, and it comes 50 days after Passover. We can imagine, then, that there were large numbers of Jews in Jerusalem to celebrate Shavuot. And it is the “explosion of different languages” they heard as they came running to the house where the Upper Room was, having heard all the noise: each person in the crowd heard his/her mother tongue being spoken and everyone understood everyone else’s language. Right away came the “amazement and astonishment,” and the realization that all the people speaking were Galileans. “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language.”
VII. Eugene Peterson’s translation of Luke’s Description of what happened on this first Pentecost is very accessible and helpful:
Parthians, Medes, and Elamites;
Visitors from Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia,
Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene;
Immigrants from Rome, both Jews and proselytes;
Even Cretans and Arabs!
“They’re speaking our languages, describing God’s mighty works!”
Their heads were spinning; they couldn’t make head or tail of any of it.
They talked back and forth, confused: What’s going on here?”
Others joked, “They’re drunk on cheap wine.”
E. Peterson, The Message, p. 1391
VIII. Isn’t it revealing how often, when we experience something new, something important, something unknown, something unbelievable, something different, we respond with confusion, uncertainty, or maybe anger, or with any number of variations on the “they’re drunk on cheap. wine” tune? And isn’t it also revealing that among all the mysteries of our Christian faith, the story of Pentecost would seem to be among the most accessible and least complicated, a story we could enter into, could get inside of because it is a story about US. We know that we know the coming of the Holy Spirit is the story of the gift of breath, of language, of courage, and of discernment. We know that the Spirit is God’s gift to us, a gift we can take or a gift we can put aside. We even know that we know the Holy Spirit is the sustainer of life itself. And, finally, we know that we know the power of the Holy Spirit is the gift of speaking out in any number of different ways against injustice, bigotry, hatred, deception, dissemblance, abuse. discrimination, violence, and war; of speaking out against the madness of the world.
IX. And perhaps the greatest gift of all is knowing that we can go our merry way and pay no attention to the Holy Spirit, and enter into what my Preceptor in Seminary called the “dicey Truth of Pentecost.” This is what he said over twenty years ago, well before we studied together. His words are a powerful way to think about and live out this extraordinary Day of Pentecost.
“If you chose not to enter into the dicey Truth of Pentecost, no one will hold it against you. All are called but few choose to accept, And they will never know what they miss. But if you choose to step into Pentecost—to live into the truth and onto the pathway that faith directs; to live, to speak, spend, forgive, hope, celebrate and serve as God created us to do; to freefall into the Creator’s embrace—and if you choose the presence of God over the idea, reason over tradition, guidance over hope, freedom over security, newness over predictability, change over stability, justice over law, and love over practicality, then you will know the truth of this Day.
From “Choosing the Spirit”—a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Washington D.C., June 8, 2003, Day of Pentecost.
What will the choice be for us?
Amen