|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Acts
2:1-21 |
104:25-32 |
Romans
8:22-27 |
John
15:26-27, 16:4b-15 |
The
story of Pentecost would have made an exciting drama. Undoubtedly,
there was a menagerie of sound from people milling about, many of
them from distant lands who had come to Jerusalem for the holidays.
[If we were to stage this today, the menagerie would be played by
the choir, divided into an eight-part chorus.] Among the crowd were
some of Jesus’ followers anxiously looking around to see if
anyone was viewing them with suspicion. This would have been an
excellent opportunity to tell visitors about Jesus, but Jesus’
followers were understandably hesitant.
Later it was reported that a sudden wind
had caused the change, but whatever it was, the story of Jesus
suddenly began to be disseminated among the crowd with unbelievable
energy. The disciples were completely transformed and filled with
confidence. Total strangers began to ask, “Who is this Jesus
and why are people taking about him?”
Pentecost is when the disciples found their
courage. That is what the message of Pentecost is really about.
It is not about unintelligible language. Rather, it is about the
Good News of the Gospel becoming intelligible to other people,
to people who heretofore were shut out. The lesson of Pentecost
is that The Holy Spirit continually works to make Jesus more accessible.
The lessons today are chronologically
backward. We first read in Acts about the giving of the Holy Spirit
to the disciples some days after the resurrection, but it is in
the Gospel lesson that follows, that Jesus promised that the Holy
Spirit would come to them. During on one of those terrible nights
in Holy Week, Jesus met with his disciples, when they were virtually
paralyzed by fear, huddled together in a secluded room, and not
knowing what was going to happen. I doubt Jesus’ words made
any sense at the time, but fortunately the disciples remembered
them later and said to one another, “Oh yes!” They recalled
Jesus had assured them that no matter what was to happen in the
next few days, that they all had a future together, a future difficult
to define and understand, but a real future nonetheless. They
would not be cut off. Jesus would remain connected to them.
Jesus told them what every baptized person
regularly needs to be reminded of. “The Holy Spirit will
guide you and will prove many of the world’s cultural assumptions,
wrong.” The world loves to use all its accruements of power
to control the parameters of reality and anyone who suggests or
offers an alternative, is a threat. The world may have power,
and may think it can always control reality. People of faith will
prove the world wrong. The world says that you will get ahead
and find yourself by doing your own thing, looking out for number
one, remaining uncommitted and loosely attached, because you never
know when something better for you will come along. People of
faith prove the world’s wisdom wrong and discover that remaining
in relationship, even bearing each other’s pain and confusion,
forges a far stronger bond than the world can ever give. The world
says you are, what you can buy. People of faith know you are revealed
in what you give and share. The world will claim speed is critical,
people of faith learn that it is depth. The world will try to
convince you that how you package something to make it popular
is all that matters, people of faith know that it is truth, not
packaging that is the standard, and that trust not popularity
is a higher value.
There is an old story about a traveler waiting for a bus, and
to pass the time put a quarter into one of those old fashioned
spring scales which promise to tell you your weight and fortune.
The traveler stood on the scale and out came a small piece of
paper with his fortune. “Your name is Harry. You weigh one
hundred ninety pounds; you are on the way to visit your sister
in Macon The bus to Macon has been delayed. Have a nice day.”
The traveler was just amazed. How could this old machine be so
lucky? So he waited fifteen minutes and put another quarter into
the slot, and the little piece of paper came out which read “Your
name hasn’t changed, Harry, your weight is the same, you
are still on the way to visit your sister in Macon The bus to
Macon is still late. Have a nice day.” Well, this made Harry
quite uncomfortable and a little annoyed at these disclosures
so he walked down the street out of sight of the bus terminal
and went into a convenience store and bought a baseball cap and
a pair of dark glasses. Then he went down the alley behind the
buildings, and approached the scale from a different direction,
put another quarter in and gave it a good kick. Sure enough, the
fortune came out, and it read “your name is still Harry,
you still weigh one-hundred ninety pounds, you are still on the
way to Macon to visit your sister, but while you were down the
street fooling around and buying that silly cheap looking disguise,
you missed the bus!”
That is what so often happens today. The world
loves to get us to put on masks, to dress us up in disguises,
and implying if others really knew us we wouldn’t be acceptable,
we wouldn't be valued and certainly we would not be loved. The
world loves to create diversionary tactics over here, while what
is rally important is happening right before us. Humanity does
have value. Masks and disguises usually do not. Part of the responsibility
of us as a community of faith is to look out for each other in
the world so that we don’t miss the bus by being so caught
up in the distractions, disguises and diversionary tactics of
the world. People of faith are called to expose the faulty and
deceptive vision of the world and prove the world wrong.
Hence Pentecost is about responding to the Holy
Spirit among us now, right here, in our homes, schools, and in
the challenges of our professions and work. Pentecost came to
the disciples because they were there and they accepted God working
among them. The world would have sneered at the suggestion that
a few disciples could talk to the world, or be so bold as to believe
that the vision for the Gospel was worldwide. After all, most
of Jesus’ followers were country folk from Nazareth. Can
anything good come out of Nazareth? the world would have teased.
The disciples proved the world wrong!
We will be baptizing Clark today, before
he and his family leave for London. May he and his family know
that the living Jesus awaits them in the world. The Holy Spirit
will be there in London when they arrive. Wherever our journeys
take us, the Spirit will lead us into truth also. It will make
the Gospel clearer and more accessible. It will stretch and grow
our hearts. Therefore we go forth rejoicing.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living
Lord, Amen
