Day of Pentecost
Numbers 11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21
May 11, 2008Pentecost
In case you might not have noticed (and if you haven’t, we should call the paramedics for you right away) today is the Festival of Pentecost. Some refer to Pentecost as the "birthday of the church," which is not quite right. The church began with God’s call to Abraham and Sarah. But on such a festive day what’s the point in quibbling? Today is the day in the church calendar when even we Presbyterians can let our guard down and rejoice in the unpredictable blowing of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit, as you Bible scholars know, does not have its debut in the Book of Acts. Our forbears in the faith knew that the Spirit has been on the scene from the very beginning. According to Genesis the "wind" or "breath" –the ruach – of God was brooding over the face of the waters from the very start.
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,
the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1)
According to the notations in the family Bible, whenever God needed to raise up a prophet to speak God’s word, God sent the Spirit. And when God needed to appoint a king – King David, for instance – God would send a prophet to anoint that person with oil – oil being, of course, a symbol of the Spirit. We do the same thing when we baptize. We ask the Spirit’s presence. We lay hands on the baptized and pray the Spirit’s seven-fold gifts – wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, awe, and joy in God’s presence.
No, the Spirit is no stranger here. If it weren’t for the Spirit, you and I wouldn’t be here today. Without the Spirit, there is no Church of Jesus Christ.
The Church has a problem with the Spirit, however. It has a way of blowing where it will, without consulting us. Shocking as this sounds to Presbyterians, it even works outside committee structures and established lines of accountability. This, too, is well documented in our scriptures.
Our first reading recounts a particularly egregious example. Moses had just gotten the children of Israel organized into subgroups governed by 70 elders. It was a bit like herding cats, but he managed somehow to pull it off. He’d never have managed without the help of Joshua, son of Nun, who apparently had a degree in business administration.
The organizational chart Joshua came up with was a work of art. If she had been available at the time, he could have given it to Nora Lloyd, and she’d have put in on her computer with circles and dots and colored lines. Then Christy Williams could have run it through the laminating machine to protect it from coffee stains. Just think – it might have survived the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity.
But just as the ink was dry on the chart, a young tattletale ran over to Moses and cried, "Moses! Moses! You’ll never guess! Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp." Joshua looked at the chart. The names of Eldad and Medad were not in the square boxes denoting elders. They were not in the blue circles denoting elders-elect. They were not even in the green triangles denoting substitutes to be called in case of emergency. Eldad and Medad were not on anybody’s list.
"Moses," Joshua cried, shoving his mechanical pencil into his pocket protector, "You’ve got to stop them. We can’t have just anybody prophesying! It will ruin the flow chart."
And do you know what Moses said? "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!" (Numbers 11:29)
The Holy Spirit, you see, is not a proprietary property. The Spirit doesn’t belong to Moses, or to Joshua, or even to the Church. The Spirit energizes the entire Biblical narrative, from Genesis to Revelation.
So, what we celebrate today is not the sudden appearance of the Spirit, but a particularly blustery example of its blowing. The scene opens with the disciples assembled in one place like airline passengers stuck a terminal with no place to go. Then, all of a sudden, all heaven breaks loose, and it’s Katie bar the door.
The disciples stumble down the stairs and out into the streets of Jerusalem, sounding like a group of U.N. interpreters on steroids. Now Jerusalem, you will recall, was the hub of the universe, Jewishly speaking. The pilgrims in the crowd couldn’t believe what they were hearing – Galileans speaking perfect Parthian, Galileans uttering elegant Elamite, Galileans proclaiming God’s mighty deeds in melodic Mesopotamian. "What does this mean?" some asked. "It means they’re drunk on new wine," others replied.
And I suppose they were drunk in a way – but not on wine. They were drunk on the intoxicating joy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They were tipsy with the good news that God in Christ is once again redrawing the organizational chart. Now there’s a green box for Parthians with a dotted line running to Libya and another over to Judea and Cappadocia. And around the whole thing God has inscribed a great big fat circle. Now nobody’s outside the circle of God’s love. Nobody is left off the map. The walls have come down. The old boundaries have dissolved.
Pentecost is not so much the birthday of the church as it is the commissioning of the church to communicate the inclusive love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. In our day, as on that first day of Pentecost, moving with the Spirit means hustling to catch up.
There was a time when the church defined "mission" as something we paid other people to do, usually overseas, on our behalf. Missionaries were people we sent "over there" to convert and save folks who hadn’t heard the gospel.
Nowadays it’s dawning on us that that was never an adequate definition of "mission." Mission is what God does in the world, by the power of the Holy Spirit. The church’s call is not to save the world with the gospel. Salvation is God’s business. The church’s call is to look for the Spirit’s moving in the world and to join in God’s mission for Christ’s sake. In the process, we share the gospel. It’s not our mission. It’s God’s mission. We have to agile to keep up with God.
Peter learned this the hard way when, to his utter disgust, the Spirit invited him to a picnic with Gentiles. There on the picnic blanket was lobster tail, fried oysters, ham fitters and boiled shrimp.
"Lord," Peter said. "I’m kosher, remember? I can’t eat this stuff. It’s not clean."
"What God has called clean, you must not call unclean," the Spirit said.
Paul learned the same lesson when he, the former persecutor of the church, became its chief ambassador to the Gentiles. And so he wrote to the Galatians, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Gal. 3:2)
Even on a people seemingly stuck in their ways, even on a church that is, by the world’s standards, in decline, the Spirit blows with intoxicating vigor. Let me tell you a modern story of Pentecost.
There once was a church in inner city Milwaukee. It was a Reformed congregation, but not Presbyterian. United Church of Christ. Kissing cousins to Presbyterians.
The church was called Mt. Tabor and it was composed of all white, mostly white-haired people who had watched the neighborhood around the church change to mostly African-American. We aren’t up to this challenge, they decided. Let’s give our building away and let another congregation use it. Maybe God will do something new with our tired old buildings.
So they did. They gave all their property to the Wisconsin Conference of the UCC. The new church established in that old building would be named Grace.
A few months later, David Moyer, the executive minister of the Wisconsin Conference went to see a pastor on the South Side of Chicago. He told that pastor that his Conference wanted to start a new congregation with an African American flavor, but that, being who they are, they didn’t know how. "We aren’t asking for money. We’ve already had a capital campaign and raised money for the new church. What we need is guidance and leadership."
After chatting for more than an hour, the Chicago pastor handed David a card with the name of his senior associate pastor, Wanda J. Washington, on it. She’d make a great pastor for that church, he said.
Not long after that meeting, David met with Pastor Washington, and she came to Milwaukee to have a look. She felt the call. Next a letter came from the leaders of the Chicago church. "We’ll pay Pastor Washington’s salary and benefits for the first year," the leaders said.
From that point on, a carload of members from the Chicago church came every weekend to paint and repair the church building to get it ready for the first worship service. That was Palm Sunday, 2006, and 300 people from that Chicago church drove to Milwaukee just make sure there was a good turn-out. The delegation included 20 deacons to serve Communion, a team of trained ushers, and 15 cooks to prepare and serve a feast following the service. The brothers and sisters in Chicago also sent one of their many choirs and continued to send musicians every week for a solid year.
Today, as I speak, Grace Church in Milwaukee is a going concern, sharing the gospel, serving the community, and transforming lives by the power of the Spirit.
By the way, just so you’ll know, the name of the Church on the South Side of Chicago is Trinity United Church of Christ. And the pastor’s name is Jeremiah Wright.
You see, the Spirit doesn’t wait for the church to get itself completely sorted out before using Christ’s disciples as agents of God’s mission. The Spirit works in and through fallible people and fallible institutions. I can tell you from personal experience that the Spirit can even use a pastor who with some regularity sticks his foot in his mouth.
That’s because it’s God’s mission, and God is not limited by our limitations. Let the Spirit move. Let it blow where it will. Watch for God at work in the world, for there lies the Pentecostal mission of the church.
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