Pentecost
Scripture: Acts 2:1-11
I promised that I would return sometime to the question a young man asked in worship several weeks ago: How do you become a Christian? Sometime is going to be today. When Basil was baptized a few weeks ago, I noted that baptism was certainly one way a person becomes a Christian. In baptism a person takes that symbolic step inside the circle which constitutes the Christian community, which of course is what Molly has done today. So I thought today was the appropriate time for me to fulfill my promise to make my own response to the question of how one goes about becoming a Christian.
Another reason it’s an appropriate time is that today is Pentecost, the day set aside in the Christian calendar to remember the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, the day on which Jewish people in first century Palestine celebrated the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai, the day sometimes referred to as the birthday of the Christian church because it was a day, as described in the scriptures, when some grief-stricken former disciples of Jesus became disciples once again, in other words were changed from mourners into Christians. In a way Molly shares her baptism with those baptized by the spirit on Pentecost, which includes some well-known early Christians.
So O.K. How do you become a Christian?
If you thought about it for a moment, you might very well be able to guess one of the things I would say in answer to that question, and to some people this might be obvious. But on the theory that even things which maybe should go without saying sometimes need to be said anyway, I want to start by saying something pretty basic. There are lots of ways of being Christian, and therefore lots of ways of becoming Christian. So obviously anything I have to say about this is just one take on the matter. It’s not only my approach as opposed to someone else’s. It’s my approach this week, as compared to approaches I might take some other week. But that said, here are some things I think about becoming Christian.
Becoming a Christian is not something you do all at once, or once and for all. Becoming a Christian is something that takes a long time, a long time as in a lifetime, if you stick with it that long. This is so because being a Christian is not a matter of wearing a title, joining a group, having a check list of things you subscribe to, or anything else you can decide to do or not to do. It is more involved and more elusive than that and to some extent escapes definition. And so it’s not just that it’s a process that takes a long time. It’s that being a Christian, by definition, is something that one is constantly in the process of becoming, and if a person’s Christian identity is not constantly changing and growing, then one cannot lay claim to being a Christian.
So I, as someone who didn’t grow up as a Christian, in one sense became a Christian when I decided to hook up with other people who saw themselves as Christians but also understood that they were on a journey, and I would not have been able to decide to be a Christian any other way, for instance just sitting somewhere by myself and thinking about it. But more accurately what I did at that point was to decide to begin becoming a Christian, a process that is still going on. Sometimes your parents give you a shove into that process, but of course Molly will one day decide for herself, not whether she’s a Christian, but whether she wants to continue becoming a Christian.
There are some things that go along with this approach to becoming Christian. It’s important to have people to travel with, not only to overcome the isolation and the loneliness we may feel sometimes, or much of the time, not only because we all need the support of friends, but because the only way I have of knowing what Christianity is, is by seeing it and experiencing it as it is embodied in people. As I suggested a moment ago, if I had sat by myself in a room reading about Christian beliefs, and dreaming up definitions of what Christianity is and trying to decide whether I was “that”, I’m almost certain I would have never become, or begun to become, a Christian. It was because I saw it being lived in other people that I began to see how this was possible for me, and was able to say to myself that this is a journey I want to make too. It’s not so much that we are supposed to be Christian role models for each other. That would be a scary thought if we thought we were going to have to be model Christians for Molly. It’s more that we all have things to learn from each other about being a Christian, because Christianity has so many facets, so many faces. Becoming a Christian is too big a job for any one person. We need to do that together.
Among the people we will need to have along on our journey is Jesus. Although that may seem like a rather obvious thing to say, given that we are talking about how to become Christian, not just well-intentioned spiritual people, I suspect that even saying just that much sounds a bit overly pious or evangelical to some. And the reason it does, I think, is because so many people have used the name as though it necessarily implied certain beliefs about Jesus, and as though the more you say the name of Jesus, the better Christian you are. People have spoken the name of Jesus in unjust and unloving ways. People have spoken the name of Jesus in unthinking ways. People have used the name of Jesus, and the way you say the name of Jesus, as measurements of how pious or evangelical you really are. There is no doubt that Jesus has been used illegitimately, as a test to separate “good” people from “bad” people, the saved from the unsaved. And there is no doubt that Christianity has been modeled in some ways that could well make a person decide that this was something they didn’t want any part of.
And of course one possible thing to do is to abandon the term Christian and the name of Jesus to people who use the terms in ways that others of us find objectionable. But there is no need to do that. In fact, for those who care about the figure of Jesus and the term Christian, there is a need not to do that, not to abandon the words to people who have other ideas about they mean.
But to get back to having Jesus as one of our traveling companions on the journey, I explicitly do not mean by that, as I think you know by now, that this necessarily means holding any particular beliefs about Jesus. It may. For some people it will. For others, Jesus may be a figure to live with, without any particular need to attach titles or labels to him or describe in some permanent fixed way what his relationship to us is. All that is less important. What is more important is that those who are on this journey of becoming Christian be in conversation with him, that his vision of God’s reign not disappear from our view, that his words not cease to find some place in our minds and spirits, that his story not cease to inform ours.
And a word about the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. The traditional reading for Pentecost is the one from Acts where thousands of people are gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish celebration of Pentecost. This is not a day of Christian origin. For Jews Pentecost was a time to celebrate the giving of the law, the Ten Commandments, on Mt. Sinai. As described in Exodus, on that occasion there were a bunch of spectacular events, a big storm, howling wind and thunder and lightning and fire and smoke, and out of this maelstrom, Moses emerges carrying the tablets with the law written on them. In Acts the gift of the Holy Spirit occurred in much the same way. There was a rush of a mighty wind and tongues of fire that came to rest on the disciples and set them on fire and filled them with energy and urgency and gave them the ability to speak languages they had never spoken before and thus the ability to understand those who were miraculously speaking the language that was their own. The day of Pentecost that gave birth to the Christian church according to Acts was a day filled with miraculous things, a storm of God sweeping over people and changing their lives suddenly and dramatically. It’s a rich story and I’ve always found things in it that are worth thinking about and that can lead in all sorts of directions.
But there’s another story about the gift of the Holy Spirit and it’s in the gospel of John. It’s about Jesus appearing to the disciples, who had locked themselves in a room—this was after the resurrection, now—out of fear, the story says, maybe fear that the same thing would happen to them as happened to him, maybe just fear because they didn’t know what would happen to them now. And what did happen is that Jesus appeared—no wind, no fire, no smoke—just appeared, and spoke. “Peace be with you.” Appeared, and breathed on them, not like Moses at Mt. Sinai, but more like God at the beginning of creation, like God bending down, as James Weldon Johnson says, like a mammy bending over her baby, and breathing into that lifeless form, so that that lump of clay, and those as good as dead disciples, and you and me, could become living souls. This story also reminds me of the story of Elijah at the foot of Mt. Sinai. We don’t have time to go into the whole background now, but let’s just say Elijah found himself at a not very good place in his life. He was feeling pretty deserted by God. And he could really have used a sign from God, some word from God. And Elijah in his desperate state is visited by an earthquake, but not by God, and then by a huge windstorm, but not by God, and then by a burst of flame, but not by God. Elijah is sitting at the foot of the mountain where God used all those things with Moses, and Elijah is aware of that, so all these tricks just seem to emphasize that for Elijah, God is not going to be present. But just then, when it seemed like God was nowhere, God was right there, in the form of a still small voice, or as some translations say, in the midst of a sheer silence.
God doesn’t always come to us in life changing events. The spirit of God doesn’t always work miraculous or even very dramatic changes in us. It can be a much quieter thing, working in us silently but steadily, to help us become Christians. One thing that means to me today, is that the spirit is what nurtures some necessary belief in us so that we are not just doubters or seekers but also believers. You know that I believe it is important to always leave room for questions, within the church and within ourselves, without seeing our faith questions as in some way faith deficiencies. There always needs to be room for questions, for challenging accepted orthodoxies, for not just going along, for not giving up on growing. There always needs to be room for questions, but there also needs to be room for belief to grow, which I believe is the work of the spirit. It’s our work too. We can help one another with it, but it’s also the work of the spirit. Not so much in the sense of bringing us to the point of making formal statements of belief but in the sense of bringing some spark to us that allows us to say, maybe with words or maybe in other ways, this is what I believe.
I have other things I’m thinking of about the Holy Spirit this morning, but I need to finish and I have something else that I need to say before I do. The image of God bending down over a lump of clay and breathing into it the breath of life is an image not of becoming Christian but of becoming human. It’s a good and important question how one becomes a Christian, but it’s not the only question. And it’s a question that maybe we shouldn’t ask unless we ask it in the spirit of becoming Christian in order in a more fundamental sense to grow into being a human being.
It can be easy sometimes for people, even those who don’t mean to, to fall into talking about becoming a Christian as though this were some advanced stage of human being. We’re all human after all. To be Christian, the assumption may be, is to be something more—more moral, more enlightened, more saved, more spiritual, more whatever. We’re all human but we’re trying to become…Christian. But if we’re going to ask the question of how we become Christian, we need to reject that way of thinking.
Maybe it would be better—not maybe—it would be better if, instead of talking about becoming Christian, as though that were the goal of our journey, we talked of Christian becoming, as though Christian were nothing more than a way, a path by which we are seeking to be as fully and as lovingly human as we can be, and not the only one at that.
It’s not as though we are walking along this path, making a journey that is filled with trials and temptations and enriching experiences and learning experiences and that at the end of this journey we will finally walk through some door, walk across some stage, or cross some finish line where we will be proclaimed at long last a Christian. Christian refers not to what we aspire to as an end result but to the path we walk, and becoming Christian is simply a matter of trying to walk that path faithfully. What we are really trying to become are human beings, which means that our journey of Christian becoming always involves trying to make that path wider, so as to accommodate more people, not narrower so as to restrict or exclude. Our journey of Christian becoming, while trying to be sincerely and faithfully Christian, also makes room for and welcomes all who are willing to think of themselves as fellow travelers. It’s great to welcome Molly this morning to the journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 19,2002