Scripture: Acts 2:1-21
I’m going to guess that not too many of you were thinking, as you walked into the building this morning, that today is Pentecost. We don’t pay a lot of attention to the liturgical calendar at Sojourners other than Christmas and Palm Sunday and Easter, although there have been some years when we have paid a little bit more attention to Pentecost than we have this year, in our low key Sojourner-ish sort of way. Some years we have at least announced a week or so ahead of time that Pentecost was coming and suggested that people might want to wear something red that day in honor of the occasion (red being the liturgical color for special occasions and appropriate for Pentecost because of the tongues as of fire referred to in the scripture). A few years we have tried to do something in worship that sort of highlighted the scripture, such as maybe reading a psalm or having the Lord’s Prayer read in several different languages, reminding us of the different languages that the scripture describes as having been spoken on that day of Pentecost described in Acts. Or, I think maybe we still have in the back here somewhere some red pieces of felt that we handed out for people to pin somewhere on their bodies to show that we at least knew it was Pentecost.
None of that this year. But I did decide, once I realized myself that today would be Pentecost, to pull out a red stole, and to let my words this morning be suggested by the occasion. Thus the title, Pentecost 2009, which I admit doesn’t give you much of an idea as to what the sermon is going to be about, which is not an accident since when I came up with the title I didn’t know what it was going to be about. I suspected, as has in fact turned out to be the case, that it would be sort of a hodge podge of thoughts based on Pentecost. So here are some thoughts pretty much without a theme but loosely held together by the idea of Pentecost.
The first word that comes to mind is “church”—because Pentecost is often referred to as the “birthday of the church”. That’s not something I learned in seminary. Historians and Biblical scholars would find lots of reasons to quibble with the idea that Pentecost was the birthday of the church. I learned that Pentecost was the birthday of the church somewhere early on from people in the churches I worked at, probably from people who had themselves been taught that in Sunday school.
I had to figure out why it was called that so I went back to the scripture and came to the conclusion that the reason Pentecost is referred to as the birthday of the church is because of the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is what Jesus promised the disciples at the time of his ascension which I talked about last week. He told the disciples to just wait and pray for a while and that then the Holy Spirit would descend upon them and would send them out to be witnesses to the gospel in Jerusalem and Judea and to the ends of the earth. The Holy Spirit would come and would transform this little group of grieving disciples into a small but powerful and quickly growing band of people who would be sent out into the world to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God and would be filled with a sense of purpose and with passionate faith.
The implication is that that’s when a bunch of people become “the church”, when they have a sense of purpose and when they are filled with a passionate faith that takes them out into to the world to—what?—to spread the faith, to share the good news, to make disciples of all nations, to bring the love of Christ to a love-starved world. That’s how I came to understand the idea that Pentecost is the birthday of the church. That’s pretty much how I still understand it. And it’s not a bad message, all in all. A group of people all huddled together for comfort is not the church. A group of people who have been given some purpose and urgency to bring the spirit of God in some way out into the world is a better definition of “the church”. So you can say that the story of Pentecost is a story of bringing the church to life.
However, one thought in response to that. A simple thought. Upon reflection, I’m not so sure that it’s not part of the purpose of the church to huddle together for comfort. Even at a place like Sojourners where we see ourselves as committed to seeking social justice in the world beyond the church and where we know that we would be spirit-less if we didn’t do that, nevertheless a significant part of our life is huddling together for comfort.
I’m not sure that would be a preferred way of putting it for many of us, but however we put it, there is a point to our coming together for comfort, sharing joys and cares, waiting, praying, doing pretty much what the disciples were doing before they were visited by something like the rush of a mighty wind and tongues like fire. I’m not so sure that the Holy Spirit wasn’t already there. I’m not so sure that the Holy Spirit is all about getting people all fired up, if you will, to go out and change the world. Isn’t it just as much about coming together in an upper room, coming together in some space set aside, where the harshness of the world can be left behind, where the need for solace and renewal and some kind of mutual strengthening can be attended to? I’m not so sure that the Holy Spirit is all about activism, any kind of activism. That’s one thought I have as I reflect on the story of Pentecost in Acts.
A second thought though is that I feel a little strange saying what I just said. I would typically argue just the opposite. Quite often the natural tendency of church people seems to be to think that they are being most spiritual precisely when they are huddled together for comfort and doing things that seem sort of obviously spiritual: praying, singing hymns, listening to scripture. Even at Sojourners I know numbers of people have sometimes felt like the spirit can get lost or neglected when we devote too much attention, especially when we devote too much in worship, to our various individual or collective activities in the way of social justice or community service. We can do those things outside of church, even apart from church. The church is really being the church when it is attending to matters of the spirit, which may be a different way of saying that the church is being the church precisely when it is gathered together for comfort or worship where worship is imagined as a kind of renewing retreat from the world.
And I agree with that too. We can lose the spirit by inattention and neglect. We can lose the spirit by losing ourselves in programs, causes, and activities. No doubt about it. But we can also lose the spirit by thinking we are being spiritual just because we are doing things most people think of as spiritual, like praying and singing songs with religious words in them.
All of this is to say, I guess, that there is a real tension in the life of the church about where the Holy Spirit is to be found and where it would lead us. And my thought, again a simple one, is that it is never as obvious as we might think where the spirit is to be found and how we are best to be in touch with it. When we think we are being spiritual, maybe we are not so much. And when we think we aren’t, maybe we really are. And in any case, the challenge as best I can see it is not to designate some part of our lives as spiritual or to locate the holy spirit here or there but to tie our worldly concerns, our care for the world to our worship life without giving up our worship life and to let our worldly pursuits be guided by and infused with a prayerful heart and a thirst for God.
And so here’s another thought that in my own eccentric mind is sort of a continuation or a branching off of the line of thought I have been engaging in already. If, as the Acts scripture suggests, the gift of the holy spirit is all about filling the church with a kind of unifying passion and purpose in the world, if it is about filling the church and the individual Christians who are part of the church with enthusiasm and vitality and holy zeal, well at first that sounds right, sounds like something I would be in favor of. Nobody wants the church to be sort of a lifeless blob. Nobody thinks that faith should leave a believer unmoved. I certainly want to feel energized and inspired by my faith; I hope other people will feel energized and inspired by their faith in ways that are appropriate to them. But then…on second thought…I’m not so sure about all of this.
There’s a lot of passion in the Christian church these days. Not all of it, to say the least, is constructive passion. Not all of it is passion I am proud of or want to be associated with in any way. If we’re talking about Christians being more passionate, for instance, about racial justice, especially white Christians who have the white privilege of being able to claim to have good values without having any real passion for racial justice, if we’re talking about the need for passion in that context, I’m there. I want the church as a whole to have more of that kind of passion. I want to find more of that kind of passion in myself. I’m willing to have us all held accountable on that score.
But if we’re talking about the kind of passion that insists that being a Christian means being pro-life where pro-life is defined as being anti-abortion and where anti-abortion is defined as being anti-Roe v. Wade, if we’re talking about the kind of passion that makes that one issue the test of whether one should hold public office or whether one has a right to call himself or herself a Christian, if we’re talking about that kind of passion, and from where I sit there’s plenty of that kind of passion around these days, if we’re talking about that kind of passion, then I’m not there. And if we’re talking about the kind of passion that is devoted to preventing same sex couples from being married, or indeed having the full range of rights and privileges supposedly accorded to people in our society, if we’re talking about the passion that wants to prevent the church from treating everyone equally, and again from where I sit there’s a lot of that kind of passion around, if we’re talking about that kind of passion, then I am certainly not there either.
All of that is to say nothing about other longstanding issues in the church. Over the centuries many people have been sincerely and unselfishly passionate about bringing Christ to people in distant lands, believing that the welfare of their eternal souls depended on their receiving Christ. I’m not there either, having never found myself being very passionate about turning people into Christians whether in distant lands or the neighbors next door. There are a lot more examples. I’ll forego them. You get the idea.
From where I sit passion is a kind of a mixed bag. It comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. There has been way too little passion in the church about some things, way too much about others. There is lots of passion these days in the Episcopal Church over homosexuality, and in the Presbyterian Church, and in the Methodist church, and in the United Church of Christ. Like the description in the book of Acts there are many languages being spoken in the church these days; unlike the description in the book of Acts there is little understanding. My thought is that in some respects, in many respects, we don’t need more passion in the church; we need less. In some respects we don’t need so much passion. We don’t need people willing to loudly proclaim the righteousness of their cause but need much more of a quiet spirit, a listening spirit. I say that even as I know that I will need to continue to find ways to speak out for the inclusive church I want to see come about. Still, less passion more listening, less passion more mercy, less passion more thoughtfulness is what I am thinking today. If the Holy Spirit is all about people who speak different languages being able to understand each other in spite of their differences, if the Holy Spirit is all about overcoming differences and transcending differences, I have to think that there is a noticeable shortage of the Holy Spirit in the Christian church these days. Just a thought.
But another thought. There is a lot of turmoil in the Christian sphere these days, and not just because of the intramural fighting that is going on. Mainline denominations, like ours, which have been gradually losing members for forty years or so, have been threatened by the growth of evangelical, Pentecostal, and megachurch kinds of religions, threatened by their own internal divisions, and now more recently threatened seriously by the financial crisis affecting everyone. It is unclear what the future of the major denominations will be five or ten or certainly 25 years from now. Might be time to slim down, reassess, redefine who we are or want to be and how we go about being church.
Meanwhile significant portions of the evangelical community are not willing to be content with the designation of “Christian right” and all that goes along with that and are looking to focus more on peace and poverty as their central social concern, are moving away from the mega-church model and moving more toward house churches and small face-to-face faith communities where people talk and work out their faith together, emphasizing a Christianity that is much less a system of beliefs and is much more a way of life. I am not rooted in the evangelical church tradition and Sojourners in general is not rooted in that tradition (though I know some of us are as individuals), but I am not, we are not, really in a position to assess the movements of change in the more evangelical branches of Christianity but they are there. And I say that because looking at the Christian church as a whole, I see a lot of conflict, and I see a lot of just downright chaos. From one perspective a person could look at all this and think, as I just said a moment ago, that there is a serious shortage of the Holy Spirit in the Christian church these days. From another perspective, you could look at the chaos as a sign precisely of the Holy Spirit being at work among Christians in our time, troubling the waters of the church, if you will, helping all of us to break free from past ways of being church and struggling toward something different and more authentic. It may be that the unsettledness of the church is a sign of the spirit’s presence. I hope and pray that is so.
In any case, just a few thoughts, for what they are worth, on the day of Pentecost 2009. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 31, 2009