Acts 2:1-21
Typically, I write my main sermon,
and then I consider how I can take something from it and make it accessible to
children. For this Pentecost Sunday, I
came up with the children’s sermon first and that informed my main sermon. The reason I was thinking so much about my
children’s sermon was because I was worrying about how people would handle singing
Hot, Hot, Hot. If you loved it, it was
my idea. If you hated it, it was still
my idea. I realize that some people
might find it a little weird for church.
Pentecost is one of the three major feasts of the church year. It’s bigger than Christmas in terms of
theological significance. Because it is
such a sacred day, we should take worship seriously. We should be solemn and stoic like good
Episcopalians. But then I kept coming back to this reading from Acts. I kept thinking about what a ridiculous and
wild scene this must have been.
The disciples were all in one place---they
heard and saw the same thing. They were
somewhat prepared for this event. Jesus had told them that after he left, the
Holy Spirit would come to them.
However, the huge crowd gathered outside of the disciple’s small enclave
were not prepared in the same way. They
were prepared to some extent as they were there for their own holy feast, the
Jewish feast of Pentecost. In the Jewish faith, Pentecost marks the end of the
spring harvest. It was when people
gathered together to present their first fruits of the harvest. It was a time to praise God and show
gratitude for all God had given. They
were there for a spiritual experience, but the same one they had every year,
not something they did not recognize.
However,
something got their attention. They
heard a loud noise and felt the strong wind. They heard the disciples speaking
in their own language, even though there were people from many places with many
different languages. Thus all the people in the crowd knew something was happening. But
they all discerned what was happening in different ways.
Some people asked, “What does this mean?” They were astonished and amazed. They wanted
to understand. They wanted to believe. Others heard the same thing, but they sneered
and accused the disciples of being drunk.
Different people had different experiences with the Holy Spirit. Those
who were open to the newness of it all ended up being baptized that day. 3,000 people were baptized--which is remarkable. But not everyone was. Some left thinking that these people were
idiots or charlatans. They were faking
this holy experience to get attention or power.
Peter
knew what they were thinking. He took this opportunity to preach a sermon. He started by saying that they were not drunk
as it was 9am (apparently had it been 5pm, it would have been a different story---yet
it was 9am). He then quoted the prophet Joel.
It’s an odd choice for a happy and spirit filled moment. Joel was a
prophet who had lived about 500 years before and spent a lot of time telling
the people of Israel to repent as the Day of the Lord was near and the Day of
the Lord was full of destruction and judgment.
It was not a day to look forward to. For Joel, it was almost as if the presence
of the Holy Spirit was a bad thing.
Peter
was taking this text and reframing it. Peter
was telling people that the Holy Spirit was not just providing salvation from
something bad, but new life through the life, death, resurrection and ascension
of Jesus Christ. Jesus had brought
something new to the earth. Instead of
taking it back with him when he ascended to heaven, he left the Holy Spirit
with the people of God. It was up to the people of God to decide how they were
going to respond to the Spirit and this new life, this changed life. Would they
scoff because it was different and incomprehensible? Or would they open
themselves to this new experience of God’s wonder?
Please
do not misunderstand me. I am not comparing
Hot, Hot, Hot, with the flames of Pentecost.
I am not saying that if you did not feel the presence of the Spirit, you
were clearly not open to it. What I am
saying, is that we all experience the Spirit in different ways. We even experience this Spirit in different
ways as we age and go through the phases of our lives. Sometimes it is in moments of utter misery—a small
light of hope in the darkness. Sometimes
it is a moment of silliness and joy.
Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere.
When I was working on this sermon, I wrote down my spiritual
experiences. It is hard to describe what I mean when I say spiritual
experience. For me, it is a moment when I can feel the presence of God in a
very tangible way.
It
is an interesting exercise and I commend it to you all. In about 10 minutes, I came up with 16
experiences. Some of these moments were sad and even embarrassing. Others were light and joyful. Most I could
not really put my finger on what the emotion was, it was just a moment of
fullness. It was like a small light inside me burst through. Yet there was one theme that kept popping up.
Of all those moments, only two happened when I was alone. Some were with small groups of 2 or 3. The majority were with crowds, crowds of
people worshipping God.
We
often associate the Holy Spirit with mystical and contemplative times. Some
people might even think that they have not experienced the Spirit because they
are not a mystical or contemplative type of person. That is what is so amazing about the Holy
Spirit--it comes to all people, at all different times, in all different
places. While this unpredictability can
be lovely, it can also be frustrating as sometimes we crave that experience and
we don’t know how to find it. In looking
for the mountain top experience of transcendence and nearness to God, we think
that we have to literally climb a mountain.
If you can, then absolutely, go for it.
But perhaps… you can also have that mountain top experience here at sea
level worshipping God with other people who are sharing that joy or that sorrow…or
just the pew. You might be thinking,
well this is the 3rd time I have been this year and I have not felt
it once. You have to give the Holy
Spirit more opportunities to work in you and around you. The Holy Spirit does not appear on command.
When
we had our youth pilgrimage in Ireland, we hiked to the top of a small mountain
in the middle of the sea. The view was breathtaking.
If you were to have a mountain top experience, it would have been there. We had
communion at the top where monks had worshipped and lived for centuries. I knew
it would be this amazing experience.
Yet there were seagulls trying to get the bread, bugs in the wine, and
tourists walking in and out of our sacred moment. Plus, I was pretty sure we were not supposed
to be having communion there. It did not feel holy or Spirit filled. When we were
walking down, I said to one of our leaders, “That was not really the sacred
moment I expected.” He replied, “I bet
the Last Supper was kind of like that, people interrupting Jesus, a bunch of
people not really paying attention. It
probably did not seem so holy at the time.” That resonated with me. The
Holy Spirit (the presence of God) rarely looks the way we expect it to
look. I am sure that the scene we heard
about in Acts was absolute chaos. Many
people walked away thinking, “Those people are fools. God could not possibly be present in such
foolishness.” Perhaps even the
disciples, upon whom the spirit had descended thought, “This can’t be what
Jesus was telling us about. We need
something more real, more permanent.” When we are stuck in our own expectations, we
miss the fresh expressions of the Spirit.
We miss opportunities for transformation. I was not there on that spirit filled
Pentecost 2000 years ago. I think if I
was, I would have been pretty annoyed. I
like order and predictability. But I
hope that I would have at least tried to be open to the crazy beauty that
surrounded me. I hope that you will all strive for that
openness as well. I love our liturgy and
music in the Episcopal Church. But the
Holy Spirit is far too big and unwieldly to be confined by our
expectations. Thank God for that.
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