Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from June 4, 2006

“Some Assembly Required”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost is a uniquely church holiday.  It is un-fooled around with in every way.  Unlike the relentless competition Christmas and Easter have with oversized elves and chocolate bunnies, Pentecost remains the purview of the church.

It was comforting this week to make my way through the grocery store without being accosted by 10-foot plastic flames to illuminate the front lawn.  I received no cards with cartoon characterizations of wind expressing the hope that all my Pentecost dreams might come true.  There were no marshmallow clouds or chocolate flames and no expectations of a Pentecost basket for our son.  Our wider family did not draw names out of a hat and gather for a gift giving party. And, mercifully, Breathe on Me, Breath of God was not blasting through the Muzak at Stop and Shop.

Pentecost belongs entirely and uniquely to the church.  I’m not so sure the church knows quite what to do with it but, nonetheless, the Feast of Pentecost belongs to the wide and weird amalgam of folks like us who call themselves Christians.

Across the spectrum of Christianity, Pentecost gets a mixed review.  The folks who call themselves Pentecostals, you may be interested to know, for the most part just ignore today. The rest of Christendom celebrates in varying degrees.  Red stoles and parapets, a few balloons here and there, a birthday cake for the church, a few polite hymns about this mercurial person of the Trinity and that pretty much covers it. 

For the most part, Pentecost gets short shrift from the Church.  It may, in part,  be the worry that if we really celebrate it, we will be prone to raising our arms at strange times during worship, waving our hands to the beat of the music, and drowning out the preacher with “Amen”, “Preach it, brother” during services that last for 2 or 3 hours.  Or, even worse, that we may be plagued by that fearful thing called “speaking in tongues”.  If that’s what Pentecost is all about, most of us would just a soon skip it, and I include myself in that group.

Gratefully, that is not what Pentecost is all about.  Like all Christian feasts and celebrations, this one is rooted in rich history and vibrant tradition.  The word Pentecost comes from the Greek pentekostos, meaning "fiftieth," from which one of the most important feasts in the Jewish calendar derives its name. We think we Protestants invented Pentecost but we didn’t.

Fifty days after Passover, the Jews celebrated Pentecost.  It was the "Feast of the Harvest" (Exodus 23:16) when they collected the first wheat or "Feast of Weeks" (Leviticus 23:15–21). Many centuries later, after their exile to Babylon, Pentecost became one of the great pilgrimage feasts of Judaism, a time when Diaspora Jews returned to Jerusalem for worship and celebration.  In the evolution of their tradition, it also came to include the celebration of Moses receiving the law on Mount Sinai.  Today, it is known as the feast of Shavuot by our Jewish sisters and brothers.

Since about the second century, Christians have celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit fifty days after the death and resurrection of Jesus, coinciding with Shavuot.  It marks the coming of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the church and, after Christmas and Easter, it is the most important celebration of the Christian calendar. (Clendenin, Daniel:  Journey with Jesus Foundation, Notes to Myself, “Hardest to Bear, Easiest to Forget.” June 2006)

It is here that the church gets its marching orders, here that a community is established for all time to carry forward the mission begun in and by Jesus.  It is here that the fear and timidity of those who pinned their hopes on Jesus and now hid behind closed doors for fear of a similar fate begin to find their voices and trust the message that first stirred their hearts.  It is here in the Feast of Pentecost that all that was scattered by fear begins to assemble in faith, all that was silenced by timidity is galvanized to proclamation, all the dreams that dissipated in the scattering of followers is gathered together in community.  It is nothing less than the wholesale transformation of believers into the prophets, dreamers and missionaries that Jesus intended for his followers to be.  Pentecost unleashed a courageous power that set Jesus’ followers loose on the world to make bold proclamation about who God is and what God desires for all creation.

John Cavanaugh writes, “The Spirit brought unity, not only in a shared sense of poverty and smallness, but in the common experience of one God in Jesus, one faith, and one baptism.  It was and remains a faith that also put believers in touch with their deepest humanity.  It was in one Spirit that all of us, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, were baptized into one body.  All of us have been given to drink of the one Spirit.  Our deepest union relativizes all distinctions that we are so quick to draw and eventually makes them relevant.  No longer is being Jew or Greek the primary distinction of life. No longer is being slave or free the dominant criterion of worth.” (John Cavanaugh,  Not a Spirit of Timidity)  No longer do the distinctions of male or female, gay or straight matter.  What matters is that we are now one in Christ.

The unity of faith in Jesus is a subversive power that overturns any particularist claim to supremacy.  Since Christ is our primary reality, his Spirit is a force that liberates us from any bondage other than our bond in faith.  We are empowered by the Spirit to resist. (Ibid)

Perhaps it is little wonder that we ignore Pentecost.  It’s a pretty risky proposition.  God’s intent in sending the spirit upon the church goes far beyond our tendency to domesticate the third person of the trinity into someone more manageable and a little less threatening.  Oftentimes, we embroider the Holy Spirit into our language as a way of expressing the hope that we are on the same page with God, but my guess is that most of us aren’t expecting to be overcome by a vision or power that shakes up our life too much.

Of all the persons of the trinity, the Holy Spirit is the hardest one to define.  God the creator, we get that;  oftentimes viewed as father but not only exclusively so is the one who cobbled the universe together and kicked back on the seventh day to enjoy the view.  God the creator who desires nothing less than deep relationship with all that he has created.  God the Redeemer, Jesus the son, the one who is made like us, the one who is our savior, teacher, friend and helper. (Taylor, Barbara Brown:  Home by Another Way, p 145)

But get to God the Holy Spirit.  Uhhhh … words don’t come nearly as easily.  Even Jesus had a hard time with it.  In John’s Gospel he says, “The spirit blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (3:8) (Ibid)

It may be that the Holy Spirit is best known by what she leaves in her wake.  Yes, of all the persons of the trinity, the Holy Spirit is undeniably and completely biblically feminine.  Ruah in Hebrew and Nephesh in Greek both call for the exclusive use of a female pronoun.  We may quibble about whether God is father or mother and we know for sure that Jesus was a man but there is no mistaking the Holy Spirit is anything but feminine.  What the Holy Spirit leaves in her wake is us, the church.  In the feast of Pentecost, the church’s mission is forever entrusted to all of Jesus’ followers, not just the apostles. 

Sarah Dylan Breuer notes, “The Holy Spirit is the person who empowers those called by God to participate in God's mission.  That mission is reconciling all the world with one another and with God in Christ.”  That's the grand arc of what the Spirit is doing—empowering participation in that mission. (Breuer, Sarah Dylan:  And Sarah Laughed, Lectionary Blog)

Acts 2 describes a community gathered from all nations—people divided by language and culture brought together on pilgrimage and sent forth in mission.  Prior to Acts 2, this assortment of pilgrims were not a people.  They gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of Shavuot.   And just as the giving of the law transformed the Israelites from a bunch of shmoes wandering in the desert into a people of faith and purpose, so Pentecost transforms all of us shmoes into a community of people who share a passion, purpose and mission.

Just as Ezekiel sang over the bones of a people who were all but dead in their faith, hope and purpose, so the Holy Spirit comes into our midst to sing new life into the church that has become so much less than God calls it to be.

So a sub-theme of Pentecost is courage.  The earliest church was made bold in its proclamation of the truth.  Filled with the good news of Christ, they were set on fire with love and zeal.  The fear that kept them behind closed doors diminished and they stepped out in faith once again.  As you read the rest of the New Testament, it is clear that believers continued to struggle.  The Holy Spirit did not remove all anxiety, quash all doubts or make life easy.  Indeed, by the end of the first century, the early desert fathers and mothers counseled believers to “expect trials until their last breath.” 

But, like them, we can also expect, in the midst of those trials, the bolstering of the Holy Spirit to keep our witness faithful and our purpose clear.   As citizens in a culture of enlightened self-interest, selfish consumption and fear-based judgment, nothing less than the full power of the spirit can keep us grounded in the ministry of reconciliation which is the heart of all we are called to. 

“So how do we do that?  We look for places in ourselves, in our communities, and in our world in need of reconciliation and we plunge into the healing and wholeness that by God's grace is bringing into being.  We participate in racial reconciliation, in sharing resources and passing laws that narrow the gulf between rich and poor.  We stand in and beside those who are marginalized because of the color of their skin or what they don’t know or who they love and we acknowledge them as children of God no less than ourselves.” (Sarah Dylan Breuer) 

Just in case we forget who we are and whose we are, we are invited to gather at this table and share cubes of bread and thimbles of grape juice and remember a body broken and blood poured out for us and for all people.  As we take that into ourselves, we become one bread, one body, acknowledging one God of all. 

Above all, we keep looking for and bearing witness to signs of reconciliation happening around us, growing in those who are like us, in those who look nothing like us because we are not so different in the one thing that matters, in whose children we are, and in God’s call in our lives to mirror and to be God’s people at work in the world. 

Alleluia and  Amen.