Hang On

Acts 2:1-21

We call Pentecost the “birthday of the church” and in fact, some churches go all out and have cake to celebrate the day.  It is indeed the church’s birthday today.  Because Pentecost is when the disciples got their act together and took the show on the road, as it were, infused with the Holy Spirit.

That account we all just read together is an important narrative, so important that, as you saw, artists throughout the ages have been attempting to recreate this event on canvasses, in sculpture and even in quilts.  It’s filled with movement and excitement, isn’t it?  It’s a story that grabs you and even that long list of where everyone was from builds in anticipation.

That list, by the way, serves a function:  It lets the original readers and hearers of this book know that everyone was there.  It covered the known world and even a few countries that no longer existed.  The list runs the gamut and Luke, the author of Acts, was letting us know.

Luke fills this account with fulfillment: “they were all together;” “it filled the entire house;” “a tongue [of fire] rested on each of them;”  “all of them were filled with the Holy Sprit.”  And that’s just the first paragraph.

Luke, who wrote his gospel account of Jesus’ life as well as this book of Acts of the Apostles, uses an interesting word choice too in this account.  Remember his narrative of Jesus’ baptism, when God’s voice tells him “you are my beloved son.”  Well Luke chooses the same Greek word for voice when he talks about the sound like the rush of a violent wind.  That’s God’s voice we’re hearing as the Spirit rushes in.

If you’ve ever been in a major wind storm, you understand how the sound of the rushing wind could be mistaken for God’s voice.  There amongst the flailing tree branches and objects blowing about, if you listen closely you can hear God’s voice.

But I’m getting distracted.  We’re talking about the birthday of the church which may not actually be the best metaphor.  I was reading online about this particular holiday and one preacher said that she thought that graduation was a better way to describe it.

And if you think about it, it’s true.  Since Easter, it’s been six weeks of sightings of Jesus and the Disciples fumbling about trying to make sense of what’s happened.  Now they’re equipped to go forth into their world and proclaim that good news that needed to be heard then and still needs to be heard now.

And it’s true: if one thinks of graduation as we call it as a commencement rather than a conclusion, it is the start of a new period of time.  And Peter knew exactly what he was talking about in his commencement address.  No one is drunk--it’s too early for that.  But watch out because things are going to get worse before they get better.

Before the Lord’s great and glorious day arrives the sun will turn to darkness and the moon will become like blood.  And that’s exactly what the folks gathered in the year 33 or so needed to hear.  And it’s exactly what the folks gathered in 2010 need to hear.  Things are going to get worse before they get better and we’d better just prepare for that and hold onto our faith through the roller-coaster ride that’s coming.

We have car bombs in Times Square and an ecological disaster of huge proportions in the Gulf of Mexico.  Terrorists remain tenacious in their attacks and an unending war grinds on.  Immigrants live in fear and good people lose their homes and their savings daily.  The sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood before it’s all over, we’re told.

But Peter, in his sudden burst of wisdom and clarity, doesn’t leave us bereft.  Peter quotes Joel, a prophet who spoke to another age of dis-ease and turmoil.  And both Peter and Joel remind us that all sorts of people are going to have dreams and visions that will guide us out of this mess.  We just have to listen and hang on as the roller-coaster speeds along the tracks and we’re tossed about.

There in the midst of the wind storm, as we wake up daily to fresh distress, we are called to be the people God would have us be and do whatever it is we can.  We can listen to the visions of today’s dreamers and we can act to change our own lives.  We can seek out the modern day prophets while keeping a close eye on the sun and the moon. 

Pentecost is a time of beginnings, indeed.  Our church is begun over and over, for two thousand years; amidst the wind and the seemingly drunken ones speaking in languages for everyone on earth.  According to Walter Brueggemann, a Biblical scholar, our call is “to stand free and hope-filled in a world gone fearful…and to think, imagine, dream, vision a future that God will yet enact.”  As we grasp our faith, all the while imagining, dreaming, visioning, we know we aren’t in charge; God is.  And with that thought on this Pentecost Sunday, we can face the future free and hope-filled.

Sermon, Sunday, 31 May 2009 -- Pentecost Sunday

Acts 2:1-13

April in New England can be an iffy affair. Some in that section of our country joke that there are really only three seasons: summer, winter, and mud. April can be a part of that mud season with one day filled with spring sunshine and the warming of winter out of one’s bones while the next can bring a drop of many degrees and several inches of snow on the flowers doing their best to begin the growing process.

So it was in April 1934. There were some wonderful days of sunshine and then a terrible storm arose. Of course, on the tops of the White Mountain Range in New Hampshire, those changes in weather are only accentuated to the extremes. And the summit of Mt Washington, the tallest of the White Mountains and one of the highest on the eastern seaboard is no exception.

It was there, atop that treeless apex, that on April the 12th of 1934 that the fastest wind speed on earth was recorded, a measurement that stands to this day. Does anyone know what the speed of the wind was in that wild storm? There was a gust of 231 miles per hour.

Since that’s the fastest recorded wind speed, and because I sincerely doubt that anyone here today was there on top of Mt. Washington some 75 years ago, I imagine none of us have really experienced such high wind speeds. But who’s been in the midst of a hurricane? Or a wind storm sweeping across the plains? Or been atop a high, unprotected mountain in the midst of a storm.

I experienced the high winds of a hurricane while in seminary and those winds only got to 80 miles per hour or so. Still, from my dorm room window, we watched several of the tall pine trees on our campus lose their branches, one entire tree giving into the relentless pressure of those winds and toppling over. And those winds were only a quarter of those from the top of Mt. Washington back in 1934.

We’re told that on that day when the disciples gathered to celebrate the first Pentecost after Jesus’ death and resurrection, that besides the tongues of fire that appeared and the miraculous speaking in languages which everyone understood, there was a violent wind that rushed from heaven and filled the house in which they were gathered.

Let me be clear: this was not a puff...not a breeze...not a wafting zephyr. No, this was a VIOLENT wind. A wind that would knock your socks off, though I doubt they wore socks yet by this point in history.

In the original Greek, the word used here is biaios and it is not found elsewhere in the New Testament. The King James Version translates this word as ‘mighty’, but the translation of the word biaios is closer to forcible or violent, which is how the New Revised Standard Version translates it.

Too often we want to think of the Spirit as moving among us in those puffs and wafts and gentle zephyrs. Too often, we invite the Spirit into our midst and expect a breeze to blow through; nothing too strong or anything that would disturb our carefully coiffed theological stances. Our prayers often seek a kinder, gentler Spirit to blow around us.

But that’s not the Biblical precedent. If we are to read the Pentecost story and believe that nothing has changed since then, we should expect major, mighty, violent wind to accompany the Spirit. It’s not a wind that we can control like an oscillating fan in a too warm bedroom. It blows where it will and as strong as it will. And we’d just better be prepared for it not only to undo our tightly curled, perfectly in place hairstyle that we call church, but to blow us right along with it to places we may not want to go. This violent, forcible Spirit will move us and shake up everything we think is already right in place, and just where it should be.

I’ve been on the top of Mt. Washington. (Don’t think I got too athletic and hiked up or anything--there’s a road and a van that takes you there.) Like the top of most high, unprotected mountains, it is a very windy place, even on the best of days. I have a feeling though those winds, and the winds of that hurricane I experienced, are nothing to what God has in store for us when the Spirit is unleashed among us.

Photo of the Pentecost Dome at Basilica San Marco, Venezia, Italia; photographer unknown