The Spirit is Moving
(A Pentecost Sermon preached on the occasion of gathering face-to-face outdoors for the first time since COVID-19 closures in March of 2020, while we continue to worship with those who feel safest online.)
What a gift it is to gather – in this space and online – to celebrate the rushing in of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.
It is fitting. It is fitting that we would be somehow in different places, experiencing slightly different things, all the while surrounded by the same power of the Holy Spirit on this day.
Let me unpack that a little.
You see…Pentecost was (and still is) a Jewish religious festival. Jews from all over the Mediterranean were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate. Imagine the bustling city streets awash in all different languages…for the casual listener it might have felt like the low level song of the cicadas around us today. Not quite intelligible but a constant buzz.
The disciples are gathered in the city on this day because as Jesus left them, he promised to send them a guide. In Luke’s gospel, written by the same author as Acts – Jesus promises this – “I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high…”
And so as described in Acts, when there is a rushing in of a violent wind and the appearance of tongues of fire, the disciples gathered in a room are suddenly and miraculously speaking the Good News of God’s power through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in many tongues. Tongues that can be heard and understood and received by the diverse crowds gathered that day in the city.
These are people who would have been living in various contexts or spaces of life - different social structures, different economies, different realities about how they were able or willing to practice their religion. They just happen to be all together in one place for one reason on this day.
In that in-breaking of the Spirit, they were able to share understanding in spite of their differences. They heard about God’s deeds of power in a language they could fully comprehend.
Of course there were skeptics and doubters in the mix. But Peter turned back to the prophet Joel, whose words would be familiar to the Jews gathered for a religious festival. He offers a scriptural backdrop for what they were experiencing.
You see, the disciples, in their walk with Jesus, had experienced God in flesh and come to understand the power of God through Jesus’ teaching and his miracles and the way he interacted with people.
But now, something powerful has showed up that is not Jesus in flesh and not just with the disciples and the followers of Jesus’ earthly – this Holy Spirit power that had been experienced through Jesus was suddenly in a moment available to all – as Joel writes:
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’
Ah, so then this Spirit is not falling on those that we with human minds and hearts might choose, but is instead available to all who will receive it, all who will believe, all who will call out.
Across class lines, across religious differences, across differences of gender expression, across different sins…the Holy Spirit is available to all…poured out for all… and there is not a thing that you or I can do about that.
Wow.
That would have been a revolutionary understanding, then.
An understanding that the gathered came to as they all experienced a miracle of revelation and comprehension and hearing.
That they didn’t all speak the language was not an issue. That they didn’t all come from the same place was not an issue. In fact, their differences of experience and location were vital for what would happen next.
Those gathered folks wouldn’t stay in Jerusalem after their experience, but rather they would take what they heard and understood out with them back into whatever their life setting.
They would go and tell about what they had experienced, seen and heard. Living from whatever their home reality was, whatever their social position, their geographical position, their economic position, their ethnic position, they would NOW live knowing about the power of God – and about how it was present for them. Even them.
As they returned to their “home base,” they were not the same because they had experienced something that changed them.
Right now, in so many ways, we’re living in a strange season of being dispersed.
Just by nature of how we are gathered today, some of us here in this parking lot, some with us live online right now, others who will get online and access some part of our worship at any point in the future... we are a dispersed community. We’ve lived as a new kind of dispersed community now for more than a year.
Even as we are dispersed, we are receiving the Word.
The Holy Spirit is with us.
If we let it, we are all changed by the experience, and because we are changed individually, and we are changed collectively, we will never be quite the same. We will never return to the place of before in the same way.
In our ongoing journey with Brian McLaren in We Make the Road by Walking, McLaren notes this:
In a world full of big challenges, in a time like ours, we can’t settle for a heavy and fixed religion. We can’t try to contain the Spirit in a box….when we open up space for the Spirit and let the Spirit fill that space within us, we begin to change, and we become agents of change…Let us dare believe that the Spirit that we read about in the scriptures can move among us today, empowering us in our times so that we can become agents in a global spiritual movement of justice, peace and joy.
In spite of being dispersed and now changed, if we invite the Holy Spirit, if we work with the Spirit to hear how we are being called, we will find a shocking unity of love, peace, faithfulness, joy, goodness, gentleness, patience, self-control and kindness. (I can only hope for that gift of patience. How about you?). In spite of being dispersed. In spite of being at different points on the journey. In spite of being of different minds and backgrounds…we may be one in the Spirit.
I want to end today with the “rest of the story” from Acts 2:
First, Peter ends his preaching with a challenge:
“Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
May it be so.
Amen.
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