June 12, 2011

I’ve said before that I am sometimes curious about your response to the scripture readings. I know that many of you pay close attention during the readings, but I wonder what you are thinking as you listen and read. What images come to mind? What connections do you make between what is being read and what you see as you look up from the service bulletin and look around you? Do you even ponder the vast distance that separates our lives from those about which we are reading? Do you wonder whether the events recounted in the Book of Acts have any relevance to Grace Church? Well, I do.

To state the obvious—The experience Luke describes in Acts 2 has very little in common with our worship this morning. We do worship the same God, we acknowledge the same Lord, Jesus Christ, but that’s about it. Certainly, none of the experience recounted in the familiar story of the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples bears any resemblance to what we do when we gather together to worship God. But it’s more than that, the experiences recounted in Acts, and the charismatic experiences which lie behind Paul’s vision of the church as the body of Christ, seem unconnected to the life we share together as members of Grace.

There are times, I suppose when such experiences seem more accessible. For many of us who try to nourish a rich spiritual life in ourselves, have developed techniques for making such experiences more likely. We may meditate or pray, we may seek out places in nature where the presence of God seems closer, and in those moments, usually, when we are all alone, we may taste something of what the disciples tasted at Pentecost. There might not be fire or flame, or miraculous speaking in tongues, but in the vivid beauty of a sunset, or as we sit on top of a mountain, or at the edge of the sea, and encounter the vastness of God’s creation, we may be overwhelmed by God’s presence.

It may even happen in church—when the beauty of the organ or choir wrap us in their mystery, we may sense God’s presence and welcome the divine breath in our hearts. Such moments, for they are always no more than fleeting moments, leave us panting for more and sometimes at their end, we are bereft when it seems we have been abandoned by God. Such experiences can be watersheds in our lives. They can give us a taste of the transcendent that we will thirst after again and again. They can help us know God’s presence in our lives and put in us the desire to shape ourselves, more and more, in God’s image and likeness. But they are notable in another way. Such experiences are almost always individual events. It might only be when we find time and space to be alone, that we are able be still and know that God is God. It’s not unlike the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who said, religion is what we do in our solitariness.

Yet here we are. We have come to worship together in community and each of the lessons in some way underscore the importance of community. For Luke, who wrote the book of Acts as well as the gospel, the story he is telling is carefully structured both thematically and geographically. In the gospel, Luke tells the story of Jesus and his followers who come from Galilee to Jerusalem, where Jesus is crucified and raised from the dead. Where Luke differs from the other gospels in putting all of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in and around Jerusalem, and also has the ascension take place from Mount Olivet, just outside of Jerusalem. The disciples, as we saw last week, remained in Jerusalem after the ascension, waiting for what would come next. Luke picks up the story in Jerusalem in Jerusalem, but in the rest of the book, Luke tells the story of the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to the world, ending with Paul in Rome.

There is also a careful thematic or chronological structure in Luke and Acts. The coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples ushers in a new age, the age of the church or the spirit, but it also is a reminder of both the continuity and transformation of the work of God from the story of the Hebrew Bible. There are two ways in which that continuity and transformation are highlighted here. First, Pentecost, where people from every language and country come together and hear the good news in their own language, is an undoing of the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, when humans tried to build a tower that would reach the heavens, and God punished them by giving them a myriad of languages that would divide them. The other point of continuity and transformation is the use of the words from the prophet Joel. In their original context they were part of a larger prophetic statement about a day of judgment. Here they become a message of hope and promise.

I bring all of this up because to understand the meaning of Pentecost, we need first to understand Luke’s reasons for telling the story in just this way. We are tempted to take the story at face value, and seek its meaning for us by trying in some way to imitate it or hold it up as a model for our own life as Christians, individually and in community; but to do so is to run the risk of ignoring our contexts, lives, and mission.

To show how a different author deals with the same central event, the coming of the Holy Spirit, we need only look to today’s Gospel reading. In the story from John, the risen Christ appears to the disciples. Chronologically, this occurs on the evening of Easter Day. Jesus appears in their midst, breathes on them the Holy Spirit, and gives them power to forgive sins. In its own way, it is as spectacular as the tongues of fire and the cacophony of languages in the Book of Acts, but at the same time, neither of those phenomena appears. In spite of the differences, John’s story of the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples is as transformative and empowering for them as is Luke’s version.

And that is the point. We are inclined to interpret such events or phenomena, spiritual experiences of this sort, whether they happen to us or whether we read about them, as being primarily about personal transformation and meaning-making. But that’s not what Pentecost is about. Pentecost is about mission and ministry. It is about empowering the followers of Jesus Christ to go out into the world, sharing the good news, making new disciples and reaching out to those in need.

Looking around this place today, we see the beauty and stability of the building, an institution that has been here nearly as long as Madison itself. We can imagine, without too much difficulty, the survival of this building for another fifty or hundred years. We look around and see many familiar faces, a few not so familiar, looking very much like the church has looked for decades, and we can imagine, without too much trouble, a congregation in fifty years looking very much like it does today—although some of us might wonder whether there will be a congregation in fifty years. The image of stability and permanence is appealing, even seductive.

But that’s not the church of Pentecost. Those are not the Christians of Pentecost. A Pentecost Church, Pentecost people, trust that the wild Spirit of God is at work not only in the familiar and stable, but also in an increasingly chaotic and unfamiliar world, breaking through the boundaries that we set up in order to limit and confine God. A Pentecost Church, Pentecost people, rejoices in God’s creative and transformative power, and rejoices that God empowers us to share God’s grace and love with the world. Amen.