When God Comes Near

  

Acts 2:1-21; Philippians 4:4-7

 

It started as a simple question in a confirmation class:

Can you be a follower of Jesus all alone—just you and God—a kind of lone ranger Christian?

 

The students were invited to physically place themselves along a spectrum—disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, agree. It didn’t take long before the room held a range of responses, and even more interestingly, a range of reasons.

 

It’s the kind of question that seems simple at first. But the longer you sit with it, the more it begins to open up into something deeper—something about what we believe faith actually is.

 

So I wonder where you find yourself in that question.

 

Can you be a follower of Jesus all alone?

 

And I wonder what happens when we let today’s scriptures speak into it—not just in a surface way, but deeply enough that they begin to reshape how we imagine life with God and with one another.

 

Today is the Feast of Pentecost in our Christian tradition.

 

Pentecost is often remembered for its drama.

Wind. Fire. Noise. Movement.

 

 

It’s the kind of story that almost feels cinematic. But before we stay there—before we let it remain drama and intrigue—it’s worth noticing something that could be easy to miss:

The Spirit does not arrive to individuals scattered on their own.
The Spirit comes to people who are already gathered.

About 120 of them.
Not large. Not powerful. Not polished.

 

Just a group of followers, most of them from the backwater region Galilee—far from the centers of influence—waiting together in Jerusalem during a festival that already remembers God showing up in powerful ways.

 

The Jewish festival of Pentecost remembers God’s giving of the covenant on Sinai.

 

And into that moment of remembering what has been, something new happens.

 

There is the sound of rushing wind.
There is the appearance of fire.

And then there is this quieter but perhaps even more profound part:

They begin to speak.
And people understand them.

 

Not because everyone suddenly becomes the same.
Not because differences disappear.

But because somehow, across language and culture and experience, meaning is carried.

Understanding happens.

 

 

My heart keeps coming back to that.

 

Because it would be so much easier, in some ways, if Pentecost were a story about sameness. If the miracle was that everyone suddenly spoke the same language, believed the same things, shared the same background.

 

But that’s not what happens.

Difference remains.

What changes is the possibility of connection within the differences.

 

And that feels important—not just for understanding Pentecost, but for understanding what kind of life the Spirit makes possible.

 

It also pushes gently against the way many of us have been taught—implicitly or explicitly—to think about faith.

 

We live in a time and place that highly values independence. Competence. Self-sufficiency.

 

We are, many of us, very good at managing our own lives.

 

And it’s not hard for that way of being to shape how we think about God.

My faith.
My beliefs.
My relationship with God.

 

 

And of course—those things matter. They’re real. They’re meaningful.

 

But Pentecost suggests that they are not the whole story.

Because when the Spirit comes, it does not simply deepen individual experience.

It creates a people. A collective. A community.

 

That’s what begins to unfold in Acts.

Not uniformity—but shared life.
Not erasure of difference—but connection across it.

 

People are drawn in, not because everything becomes predictable or controlled, but because something about what they encounter feels like life—like something more whole, more human, more grounded in God’s presence.

 

And that shared life begins to take shape in tangible ways:

Resources are held differently.
Relationships are reconfigured.
Barriers that once felt permanent start to loosen.

 

There’s something about that that feels less like accident and more like intention. Like this is what the Spirit does.

 

And then we hear Paul’s words to the Philippians, which feel so different in tone—and yet somehow aligned in meaning.

“Rejoice… let your gentleness be known… the Lord is near.”

 

 

The Lord is near.

Not distant.
Not abstract.
Not removed from ordinary life.

Near.

 

And Paul is not writing into a calm or easy situation. He is writing to people navigating anxiety and conflict and uncertainty.

 

Which makes his words feel less like denial and more like invitation. An invitation to notice that God’s nearness does not remove us from real life.
It meets us within it.

 

Sometimes that nearness is unmistakable.

Sometimes it feels like disruption.
Like wind, like fire—like something that shakes us out of what we thought was stable.

And sometimes it is much quieter than that.

A steadiness.
A breath.
A kind of presence that doesn’t solve everything but reminds you that you are not alone in it.

 

 

Both of those, disruption and steadiness, are part of how I believe the Spirit works.

 

And neither is meant to leave us isolated.

 

Even the quiet moments—the inward ones—have a way of drawing us back toward connection, toward relationship, toward shared life.

 

Maybe that’s part of what it means to say that Pentecost is not just something that happened once. It’s a pattern. A way the Spirit continues to move.

 

That feels especially meaningful this weekend.

Memorial Day invites us into remembrance. Into honoring lives given in the context of conflict and service, in ways that are often complex and difficult and not easily resolved.

 

And in a community like ours, we hold that complexity. We don’t rush past it.

We ask questions.

Whose stories are remembered?
Whose are not?
What do we mean when we say “we”?

And what kind of future are we participating in shaping?

 

Because if Pentecost tells us anything, it’s that the Spirit is not contained by borders or categories we might prefer to keep in place.

 

 

“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,” the prophet Joel says. All.

 

Which is both beautiful and, at times, unsettling.

Because it stretches our sense of belonging.
It asks us to widen what we might instinctively keep narrow.

 

And it suggests that faithfulness might look less like certainty and more like openness—like a willingness to be drawn into life with others, even when it’s complicated.

 

So maybe we return, again, to that original question:

Can you be a follower of Jesus all alone?

 

And maybe the most honest answer is… sometimes we try.

Sometimes it feels easier. Safer. Less messy.

And sometimes community does disappoint us.

 

But if we take Pentecost seriously, it becomes hard to imagine that isolation is the place where faith is meant to fully live.

Because the Spirit seems to keep moving us toward one another.

Toward lives that are intertwined.
Toward relationships that matter.
Toward a shared way of being that reflects something of God’s justice and mercy and love and wildly diverse creativity.

 

 

There’s a line from Annie Dillard that lingers with me—

 

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. 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.

 

Her observation is that we may not fully understand the kind of power we are invoking when we speak of God. That perhaps we’re playing with something far more alive, more disruptive, more transformative than we tend to admit.

 

And Pentecost certainly leans in that direction.

It is not neat.
It is not controlled.
It does not leave things as they were.

It draws people into something new.

Something that is, at times, risky—but also deeply beautiful.

 

So I find myself wondering: What would it look like for us—as a congregation, as a community—to live as if that were true?

As if God is not distant, but near.
As if the Spirit is not absent, but at work—here among us, and beyond us.

 

 

What would it look like to trust that understanding across difference is not only possible but the Spirit’s work?

To stay with one another even when it’s hard?
To let our life together reflect the kind of world we hope for?

 

Because Pentecost is not just about what happened long ago.

It’s about what continues to unfold.

The Spirit is still being poured out.
The invitation is still there.

And we are still being drawn—not into isolated faith—but into shared life shaped by God’s presence.

 

So today, we remember.

We remember those who have died.
We remember this story of the Spirit.
We remember the promise that the Lord is near.

 

And in that remembering, we are invited—not to go it alone—but to step more fully into this life we are given together.

A life that is imperfect, yes.
But also alive with possibility.

A life where, when God comes near, we are changed—
not just individually,
but together.

Thanks be to God. Amen.