Recently I was talking to a colleague who has stepped in to be the temporary pastor for a congregation that whose pastor is on maternity leave. As soon as she started at this church a couple of weeks ago, she learned that they had scheduled Youth Sunday for this week, which is Pentecost. The youth were told they didn’t have to follow the liturgical calendar, and they aren’t, so as my friend jokingly described it, “the church had cancelled Pentecost.”
I wonder if there was a point in the apostles’ observance of the festival at which they wished they could cancel Pentecost. Did they wonder “could we trade this one in for just a normal holiday?”
Pentecost was already Jewish holiday before the Holy Spirit miraculously showed up in a rush of a violent wind. Fifty days after Passover, Jerusalem was bustling with the faithful from all over the diaspora, who were in town for this joyous harvest festival. Celebrating the end of the wheat harvest, Jewish people would mark Pentecost (the Greek name) or Shavuot (the Hebrew name) with a pilgrimage to the Temple to offer sacrifices of wheat and bread, as well as gifts of their literal first fruits, the summer fruits just beginning to ripen.
Having recently chosen a new apostle from among Jesus’ followers to replace Judas, the apostles were gathered all together in one house on Pentecost, when there came from heaven, as Acts tells us, a sound like the rush of a violent wind. This was no spirit, spirit of gentleness. This was a wind storm that came up out of nowhere, and came up right in the middle of the room where they were sitting. It filled the house where they were, and, I have to imagine, it terrified them like the people we have seen in the cell phone videos shot in the storms in Houston this week. This wind was no calm breeze stirring the grasses on a beautiful day; this was the powerful Spirit of God who was stirring something up!
The violent wind and the divided tongues of fire that accompanied it were signs both wonderful and terrible at the same time. They were so dramatic that they were compared to a prophet’s description of the last days. This was more than a simple puff of the wind and a tiny flickering light. This was enough to be compared to a day when the sun would turn to darkness and the moon to blood. This, this…was trouble.
If the apostles were hoping to blend in little after the very public execution of Jesus, this was not going help them at all. The Spirit of God descended on the them, those who were commissioned and sent out to speak for Jesus and minister in his name. The Spirit of God came into their very room and dramatically equipped them for a very important ministry, a very specific ministry. The Spirit of God blew violently among them, knocking the old wind out of them and filling them with a new wind, a new breath, with new words in languages they had never spoken before so that they could go out of that place and bear witness to anyone and everyone of what they know of the kingdom of God that Jesus ushered in. The Spirit of God joined with them that day, dramatically, terrifyingly even, and very publicly, so that they could open their circle to include others.
The reaction from the crowd that witnessed what was going on was mixed. There were Jews from nations all over the known world who could suddenly hear these Galileans speaking in their native tongues. Some were amazed at what they heard, but others were… less than impressed. Some were perplexed and confused about what was going on. Other’s were downright derisive, sneering. “They’re DRUNK!” their accusations came, mocking the apostles.
They dismissed what they heard, apparently confusing it with the slurred, indistinguishable speech of those who have indulged themselves beyond their limit. They disregarded the apostles’ words and uninhibited behavior as those of people who had no control over what they were saying or what they were doing. Facing this kind of response, if the apostles, weren’t wishing they had cancelled Pentecost before, I bet they were wishing it now. They had been waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus, but at first it seemed that all they got was the gift of trouble.
Peter is the one who started to make the connection between the two gifts. Remembering the words spoken by the prophet Joel, he reminded both the apostles and the crowd of the troubling way the pouring out of God’s spirit had been described – “with portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist.” The gift of the Holy Spirit, the sign of God’s presence in the world that moves God’s people to action and to ministry, apparently, brings trouble, and those who are “blessed” in receiving the Holy Spirit are blessed with this holy trouble, as well.
It’s not an easy gift. It’s not a gift you get, you smile at, and you stick on your shelf to look at every once in a while. Instead, it’s a gift that is life-changing, a gift that causes you, forces you even, drives you to do something that looks, at first anyway, irrational, sloppy, and completely, unabashedly uninhibited. It makes you include others.
Before the Holy Spirit blew through the apostles on the Pentecost after Jesus’ resurrection, his followers and his apostles were a relatively homogenous bunch. Sure there was at least one tax collector, but several of them were fisherman. They were all from Galilee. They were all Jewish. They all spoke Aramaic. They had the same or at least similar experiences and expectations. They ate their food with the same spices. They played the same games. They wore the same fashions. They valued the same things. They worshiped God the same way. Birds of a feather, they flocked together.
We can’t help it, right? It’s just the way it happens. I like this one kind of music so I naturally gravitate towards others who do, too. I enjoy these kinds of sports so I tend to find others who do, too. I speak this way, value these things, believe those, worship like this, therefore I naturally want to get together with people just like me. It’s not on purpose, we tell ourselves; it’s just the way it happens. It’s not because I think other ways are wrong; it’s just that those ways don’t appeal to me. They just don’t make me comfortable. I just don’t feel myself, at home, if we’re not doing things the way I’m used to doing them.
But the problem with letting this line of thinking go uninterrogated is that from the very beginning the Spirit had precious little to do with making the people of God feel comfortable. The Spirit of God brought floods to the face of the earth. Not so comfortable. The Spirit of God, as a pillar of fire, led the Israelites around a DESERT. Not so comfortable. The Spirit of God went with people who were exile. Not so comfortable. The Spirit of God brought a baby to an unwed teenage mother. DEFINITELY not comfortable. The Spirit of God has a lot more to do with stretching our understanding of what it means to be the people of God, with leading the people of God into difficult situations, with expanding the circles of our community beyond those who look just like us and speak our same language, than making us feel comfortable. The Spirit of God sure can stir up trouble.
For the apostles gathered in a house on Pentecost that meant they spoke new languages to include those who weren’t among their numbers. For the church today, it may mean something different. We can figure out what our spirit-filled trouble is by asking ourselves some important questions.
Who is missing among our community? Who do we block from being a part of God’s community, even unintentionally? Who can’t hear the good news because we only speak it in the language WE know? Who is left out because we set up spoken or unspoken expectations that bar them from speaking their own language? Who doesn’t even bother to drive, bike, walk, crawl, run, or wheel up to our front doors on Sunday morning because they see our hesitancy or fear in including them? Who do we hesitate to go out and invite in because we fear that our ways will be changed if we let them in?
Over the last several years, we’ve actually been doing a pretty good job at asking these kinds of questions. They have led us to be more forward and vocal about our affirmation of the diversity of gender and sexual identities among God’s people. They have birthed the Disabilities Ministry. They have renewed our commitment to the Community Dinner. They have piqued our curiosity about how we might show hospitality to new immigrants. It may be with the broken speech of a new language learner, but we are learning new ways to express God’s grace, and new ways to include all who are called as disciples and apostles in the name of Christ.
But at the same time, we probably still have work to do. (There’s always still work to do.) The neighbors haven’t yet wondered what has gotten into us. People aren’t peering into our windows disbelieving what they’re seeing, hearing a message of love and welcome so dramatic that they think we’re out of minds. There are still times that we cringe when the new words to an old song don’t roll off our tongues quite as easily. There are times we get frustrated about doing things a new way. We hesitate to speak privately in our friendships and our relationships about God’s grace in Jesus, and most of us can’t even think about doing it publically in our community. We miss opportunities to welcome newcomers, because we are scared to speak a new language and be judged by people watching us.
But this is what Pentecost is about – – letting the Holy Spirit so dramatically cover us, so dangerously fill this room and our lives that we can’t HELP but let people, any people, ALL people, know about God’s love. Pentecost is about reaching out with the languages of the world around us to the people around us, that they might know the radical welcome of the kingdom the draw us together. Pentecost is about speaking the message of God’s grace and inclusion in languages that may be new to us to people who may be different from us, which may just be uncomfortable for us. It may even earn us a raised eyebrow from the neighbors who watch us. Are they drunk? Are they serious? Do they really mean what they are doing?
But the Spirit of God, if the Spirit does ANYTHING, the Spirit of God stirs up trouble. The Spirit of God raises more than eyebrows. The Spirit of God raises up missionaries, evangelists, and prophets; servants, disciples, and apostles from among the people of God, even from among us, to speak recklessly of God’s power, to dream without inhibitions dreams of God’s justice, to see without blinders visions of God’s welcome. The Spirit of God stirs up trouble, and by the grace of God we should find ourselves right in the middle of it.
Come, Holy Spirit, come!
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For Some Reason 