Descend, O Spirit, purging flame, brand us this day
with Jesus’ name! Confirm our faith, consume our doubt; sign us as Christ’s
within, without. Amen.
One
theologian said, “It is not that the Church has a mission to fulfill; but
rather that God’s mission has a Church.” Too often though, we reverse it and
obsess about finding our mission. Our Prayer Book states that “The mission of
the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in
Christ.” I think that pretty well covers it. You might point to some passages
from the Bible or quote Augustine or CS Lewis to further explain what the
mission of the Church is. But however you explain it, the “what” of mission
really isn’t that hard to figure out, it is the “how” that leaves us searching
for answers.
And
that is what the celebration of Pentecost is all about- the power of the Spirit
to enable mission. As Christians, we view the Holy Spirit as the equivalent of
God, being a part of the Trinity. We ask God, through the Spirit, to bring
peace to the world, to bring healing to our loved ones who are ill, to bring
guidance to us when we are wandering, and to bring comfort to us when we are
lost.
The
reading from Acts is the go-to passage for information about the Spirit. No one
was quite sure what was going to happen. Just before Jesus ascended to Heaven,
he tells the disciples, “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with
power from on high.” What in the world could that mean? Until the Spirit came
and descended upon them, they didn’t know what they were waiting for. But they
trusted that when it happened, they’d know it.
If the Bible were made into a movie,
this scene might be one of the most powerful- as it would enchant us. Whether
it is a Disney movie, Harry Potter,
or Star Wars, our culture loves to be
enchanted and drawn into stories where the impossible becomes possible. And
isn’t that what Pentecost is about? A fierce wind blows through the entire
house- rattling the rafters and giving them all goose bumps. And then a tongue
of fire fell upon each of them, giving them the ability to speak in other
languages. Acts is making it clear that the Spirit is manifest with the power
of God.
What
happens next is often misunderstood. You’ll often hear people that talk about
speaking in tongues- uttering unintelligible words and phrases. I’m not sure
what that is, but it’s not the Holy Spirit. The miracle of that day wasn’t that
people could speak in foreign tongues, it was that their doing so allowed God’s
word to be proclaimed to others. The crowd was confused, the text tells us,
because they heard in their own languages.
Scholars sometime cast this
Pentecost event as the resolution of what happened at Babel. When humanity
forgot its place and sought to build a tower to achieve the throne of God, they
were scattered and thrown into disarray by their inability to understand each
other. And here, that division turns to unity. Speaking in tongues that no one
else can understand was the curse of Babel; what Pentecost celebrates is the
gift of understanding. St. Francis understood this when he prayed that God
might grant him “not so much to be understood, but to understand.” The gift of
Pentecost enables the unity that comes through understanding the ways that the
Spirit moves in the lives of others.
What happens next is that those
observing these happenings assume that they are drunk on new wine, which wasn’t
a bad guess. Those gathered in the house were in fact drunk on the Spirit, full
of power and joy. They must have thought quite the party was going on in that
house- only nine o’clock in the morning and it looked like fire was coming out
of the house, with wind slamming the doors and shutters, and shouting in
various languages. There was no other conclusion- these people are crazy. The
Holy Spirit, when it dwells within us, will indeed make us seem crazy.
Will Willimon is one of my favorite
preachers and he wrote about Pentecost that “the Holy Spirit descends,
disrupting our patterns and configurations, thrusting us into some wild, new,
and uncharted territory. We are drunk with new possibilities in a world where
God is active.” Despite all of the evidence, despite all of the fears, doubts,
and anxieties, Pentecost loudly proclaims that God is present and active. But
some will find that hard to believe.
There is an old Apple commercial that
showed images of Einstein, Earhart, Ali, Ghandi, King, Lennon, and Picasso that
said “Here’s to the crazy ones… The round pegs in the square holes. The ones
who see things differently… They have no respect for the status quo. You can
quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing
you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things… They imagine… They
create. They inspire… Maybe they have to be crazy... Because the people who are
crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Pentecost took a ragtag bunch of Galilean peasants who often missed the point
of Jesus’ parables and turned them into world-changers, into builders of God’s
Kingdom who, from that day forward, were heralds of the Good News.
And when we seek to follow in their
footsteps, there will always be those who are the naysayers. That day they said
“they’re drunk,” but today they might say “God is a fairy tale” or “you’ll
never be able to change the world.” In Numbers, when the Spirit descended on
Eldad and Medad, people complained “this isn’t how it’s supposed to work! Make
them stop!” The Spirit is disruptive to the status quo, to life as normal, and
so people will call it crazy. But that’s exactly the point, it is crazy.
And if we also consider John as a
retelling of this Pentecost event, while acknowledging that the details are
wildly different, the Spirit comes with peace, as Jesus says “peace be with
you” before breathing on them. But what sort of peace is this? After the
Pentecost event, they will be flung to the corners of the earth, often facing
persecution and rejection. In Acts, when Peter quotes from the prophet Joel, he
says “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.” That doesn’t sound like peace to me.
Jesus was wishing them shalom, the Hebrew word often translated
as “peace.” But that word has a much deeper meaning of “completeness” or “the
way things should be.” One of my favorite verses from the Hymnal says “The
peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod, yet let us pray for
but one thing: the marvelous peace of God.” The coming of the Spirit into our
lives and our world isn’t going to necessarily bring smiles and rainbows;
sometimes it brings portents and darkness. But it will always lead to the peace
of God- to the fulfillment of God’s dream on earth as it is in Heaven.
So we’ve seen that the Holy Spirit
is about power, unity, craziness, and God’s peace, but I don’t think those are
the most important things to understand about Pentecost. Again, the “what”
isn’t nearly as important as the “how.” It’s wonderful that there is a Holy
Spirit to guide and comfort us, but how do we catch hold of it? How do we know
when it is speaking to us? How do we let it transform us? Well, we should take
a look at the Pentecost event for clues. And a valid question at this point is
“which Pentecost event?”
With every fiber of my being, I
believe that God, through the Holy Spirit, is continuing in the ministry of
Jesus today. I believe it because I have felt that Spirit in my own life, I
have seen Pentecost with my own eyes. One of the great blessings of being a
priest in God’s Church is that I am often a witness to moments when the Spirit
is manifest in people’s lives and when God’s mission is accomplished through
the work of many dedicated people.
Perhaps you have seen a Pentecost
event here at St. Francis. If you’ve participating in our Listening Groups, you
likely felt the Spirit’s movement. Our Book Sale is a Pentecost event. The
Spirit blows through choir rehearsals and youth group events. And what all of
these Pentecost moments have in common is a trust that the Spirit will be with
us as we embark on the crazy journey of being God’s Church to the fulfillment
of God’s mission. It takes an openness to the Spirit to be taken to new places
on new adventures. The disciples gathered in the room that day never could have
predicted the ways that their lives would change after that Pentecost event. So
perhaps the “how” of Pentecost isn’t a list of steps to take, but rather a
willingness to push off from the shore of the known and trust that the Spirit
will be our guiding wind.
David Brooks recently wrote a piece
called The Problem with Confidence,
in which he argues that self-confidence isn’t nearly as important as
competence. He posits that competence, which is task-oriented instead of
self-oriented, is a better measure of our true value. He contrasts the two by
saying “The person with the self-confidence mind-set starts thinking about his
own intrinsic state. The person who sees herself as the instrument for
performing a task thinks about some external thing that needs doing.”
Even if we’re not confident of our
abilities to change the world, we can be sure of our competence because of the
Spirit’s work through us. We don’t need to fear failure or being called crazy,
because this isn’t about us, but rather about God’s mission. The Spirit enables
us to be instruments for God’s mission.
Instrument is an interesting word to
use. What if the “how” of Pentecost is opening ourselves to being an
instrument? In John, most translations say that Jesus breathed on the
disciples, but that’s actually a poor translation. The word is actually
“breathed in,” as in Genesis- “then the Lord
God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life.” Breathing into an instrument is how you get life out of it. The
Spirit is blowing, the question is will we let it into our lives and souls so
that God might use us to be an instrument of God’s peace.
In his letter to the Corinthian
church, St. Paul writes about the fact we all have various gifts. Some are
healers and others prophecy. But his point is that “in the one Spirit we were
all baptized into [the body of Christ].” This morning, I’d like to introduce a
new Evangelism opportunity for you all to consider that concerns these gifts of
the Spirit and our use of them.
Hopefully,
you all have heard of Bishop Curry’s Galilee Initiative, through which he
invites us to consider how, as Christians, we are called to thrive in the
pluralistic and post-Christendom culture of 21st century America.
One of the goals recommended by the Galilee Commission is to have every
Episcopalian able to clearly articulate their call as a disciple of Jesus. That
really excites me. We’ve fallen into a trap where the only time we form a
discernment committee for ministry is when someone wants to be a priest or deacon,
ignoring the fact that all of the Baptized have a call. Just imagine how our
Church and world might be different if we were on fire with the Spirit as those
disciples were on that day of Pentecost.
Towards
that end, I propose that we focus on what Pentecost might look like in our
lives. What is your Christian vocation? How do you live into that? How is the
Spirit manifest in your life? How might you be an instrument of God's peace? These are important questions to consider, and we
would do well to consider them not in isolation, but in community. The Quakers
have a wonderful model for discernment known as “Clearness Committees.” Through
our Evangelism Task Force, we hope to facilitate ad-hoc discernment groups for
Franciscans who are interested in further exploring their calling.
At the
heart of this discernment work is the wisdom that “the only answer that counts
is the one that arises from your own inner truth.” The group would meet one or
two times to focus on someone who wants help finding their inner calling,
realizing that we need others to clarify and amplify the Spirit’s voice in our
lives. It is not a time for defending or analyzing decisions, but rather
listening to the Spirit. Each of you has a gift of the Spirit. You have a
calling. And the world will be richer by you using that gift for building God’s
Kingdom. So please consider and pray about this opportunity to discern your
call and let me know if you’d like to proceed.
Pentecost
shows us that the Holy Spirit comes with great power, uniting us for mission,
disrupting us from the norm, and calling us towards God’s peace. We are invited
into this peace through opening ourselves to the Spirit’s movements. Let our
prayer today be, through the power of the Holy Spirit and in the words of St.
Francis- “Lord, make us instruments of your peace.” Amen.
