Today is the day of Pentecost.
The story we just read in Acts reveals a chaotic scene:
Jesus has ascended into Heaven, and the disciples are hunkered in a house, not sure what to do next. Suddenly, violent wind and flames of fire invade every room.
Down below, in the streets, Jews from all over the Greco-Roman world are gathered in the capital city for the Feast of Weeks, This is a time to bless the wheat harvest, and remember God’s gift of the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sanai.
The ruckus in the house seems to have compelled the disciples over the threshold and out into the street. There, the crowd meets them with alarm.
Something strange is happening. The disciples, who should be speaking their native Aramaic, are somehow understood by festival goers from all over the Greco-Roman world. The chosen people of God – torn apart by centuries of displacement and war – are brought back together in this moment, united in common understanding.
United, also, in confusion. Desperate to make meaning of the event, many in the crowd dismiss the disciples, as we might have done:
“They are filled with new wine,” they said.
In other words, they’re drunk.
And then, perhaps the biggest surprise of all: The timid, bumbling Peter, who denied Christ three times at the crucifixion, steps forward, without fear, and begins proclaiming the Gospel.
Wind and fire, and wild chaos in the street. Pentecost had the trappings of a natural disaster. But instead, it was an act of God.
The after-effects of this spiritual storm were like nothing the world had seen before. Within months, Christian communities started cropping up everywhere. And they certainly weren’t drunk, but they were acting pretty strange.
They were caring for rich and poor, tending to the sick, sharing in communion, giving their money away, and even dying for the Truth. And they were spreading infectious joy along the way.
These first Christians were changing people’s lives, because their own lives had changed. They had become fearless.
That day, the church was born. And the Holy Spirit has been keeping us on our toes ever since.
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A funny thing about preaching is that you start to mentally file away stories in case you need to use them in a sermon someday.
As I was going through my mental files this week for a story about Pentecost, various natural disasters kept coming to mind.
Here’s one: In 1997, my little Indiana town was readying itself for a tornado. My parents tucked my sister and me into sleeping bags, and lowered us into the crawl space through an opening in the coat closet. The tornado hit a street over, and we were spared.
Here’s another one: In 2005, my coastal Florida town was supposed to get hit with five hurricanes, but all of them diverted at the last minute. The high school senior t-shirt that year read: “I survived 2005.”
Then, last week, my friend’s daughter was driving home when a tornado ripped through her apartment complex in Houston. She said that the wind came like a solid wall, going 80 miles per hour. My friend’s daughter and granddaughter escaped, unscathed.
I’m thankful for my brain for trying to help. But none of these stories even come close to paralleling the after-effects of Pentecost.
These aren’t the kinds of cataclysms that set new things into motion. They are simply natural disasters. A bad thing you try to avoid.
It seems that, when I try to think of moments of profound disruption in my life, my head doesn’t jump to positive transformation. Instead, it jumps to stories of survival. These stories are about safety, near-misses, and that final, heaving sigh of relief.
The best thing I can say for them is that they hint at “the calm after the storm,” which is maybe something like “peace.” But, given the liveliness of Pentecost, it doesn’t seem like the Holy Spirit came to bring us peace…
In the musical, Rent, which takes place in the context of the AIDS epidemic, one line that has always stuck with me is: “The opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.”
I think Pentecost reveals the Truth of that statement. While there is an alternative to the brokenness and discord we see all around us, it isn’t the temporary relief of “the calm after the storm” – it’s the new creation. It’s new life, bubbling over, spreading out, and unstoppable.
In the Pentecost story, we finally see how the saving love of Christ is not only available to all, but actively growing and putting its tendrils out into the world.
- The Spirit of God calls to each of us in our own language, and from our own experience. We are known.
- The Advocate calls us home to Jesus, and to one another. We are loved.
- The Divine Wind burns away the chaff in our hearts. We are becoming fearless.
Like Peter, once afraid to speak, we are emboldened to rush out into the world and proclaim the Good News: Love is here, for everyone! Love, trivialized in pop songs and scorned by politicians, is not a trivial thing after all. Like wildfire, if given a chance to spark, it will cover the world.
It’s not a natural disaster, but a creative act of God.
As theologian Will Willimon puts it, Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit is not “an exotic phenomenon of mainly interior and purely personal significance…the Spirit is the power which enables the church to ‘go public’ with its good news, to attract a crowd and…to have something to say worth hearing” (Interpretation Commentary on Acts, 33).
In all this, Pentecost offers us revolutionary hope.
But hope is hard to hold onto.
- It is more sensible to decide that survival is all we can hope for.
- It is more expedient to resign ourselves to “good enough.”
- In the face of the world’s grief, and our own, it is more comforting to stay hunkered down inside that house in Jerusalem.
But, our Scriptures testify that we are Pentecost People. We are possessed with the Holy Spirit, who calls us to be sober, but strange: caring for rich and poor, tending to the sick, sharing in communion, giving our money away, dying, and living, in the Truth.
The Spirit calls us to defy the status quo, by living as though hope is our birthright.
And, we can live in hope, because we know that Pentecost is True. Because, 2,000 years later, 7,000 miles from Jerusalem, living on a continent the disciples didn’t even know existed, we are worshipping God and sharing in Christ’s communion.
The Holy Spirit set the world on fire.
And we, Christ’s disciples, are the still here, carrying – within us and among us – the flame of love that lights up the world.
(The Paschal Candle is blown out.)
Amen.
Leah Wise 