Those of you who were here last Sunday will recall that our scriptures for the day told the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven after his resurrection, and the mandate which he gave to his disciples at that time, to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came upon them and gave them power to be Christ’s witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. In my sermon, I explored the unsettling space which this left in the lives of Jesus’ disciples. Their community was incomplete; their leader had departed; their numbers were small; and they were forced to pause and wait for God’s grace and power to transform their lives and their mission. I suggested that this holy moment in the life of the earliest Christians speaks to our context at Rock Spring during this betwixt and between time, when we pause between our goodbye to Chuck and Anne and our hello to whatever our future holds. I concluded my sermon by saying that my prayer for us is that we use this period to pray and play and find joy in each other’s company, resting in the grace of God while we prepare ourselves for the tasks that lie ahead of us.
I wanted to remind you of the message from last week because it still holds today, even though we have moved to a very different moment in our liturgical calendar. If last week was a period of gestation, today we celebrate birth—a fitting theme, perhaps, for Mother’s Day. Today, we celebrate Pentecost, the dramatic and life-changing moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon an isolated band of Jesus’ disciples and gave birth to the worldwide Christian church. And so, while I don’t want you to lose sight of the message from last week, I invite you to explore with me the story of Pentecost and to glean from this story some harbingers of what lies ahead for us at Rock Spring.
Let us begin in that pregnant moment right before the inrush of the Holy Spirit. We essentially have two Pentecost stories in the Bible—did you notice? We have the traditional Pentecost story from Acts, but we also have John’s version of the coming of the Holy Spirit…which takes place on the very night of Easter, not fifty days later like the story in Acts. In John’s version, Jesus himself appeared to the disciples and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them, whereas in Acts, the Spirit came rushing down upon the disciples like a holy wind and like dancing tongues of fire, after Jesus had already physically left the disciples. But in spite of these differences—different versions of a collective memory that got passed down orally over decades before being written down—these two stories share some elements in common. What are they?
If you look at the stories as a dramatic narrative, you might see this as a drama with three acts, as follows: Act 1—the curtain rises: The disciples are scared and alone—the future is uncertain; Act 2—The plot takes a sudden twist and the unexpected happens: The Holy Spirit descends and changes the course of the story—the disciples are empowered and emboldened; and Act 3—the denouement: The disciples are sent forth to proclaim the good news to all the world. Let’s take each of these in turn.
In John’s version, we read that “the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews”—that is, the religious authorities. Remember who is in this group—disciples who had abandoned Jesus in his hour of need; Peter, who had denied him three times; a group of people who in spite of Mary’s report of the resurrection were frightened and isolated, hiding and waiting until they figured out what to do next. In Acts, the disciples aren’t necessarily hiding, but here also they are gathered in a private room, keeping to themselves, timid, and waiting for the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.
Who could have imagined what would happen next? A holy commotion, that’s what! Jesus himself, who was put to death by the combined forces of Religion and Empire, passes through locked doors and flings open the closet in which the disciples are hiding. Jesus is alive, and his presence electrifies the dejected disciples. In Acts, the Holy Spirit rushes into the closed, private community of Jesus’ followers with the force of a deafening wind and illuminates the disciples with such brilliant light and power that it appears that flames are dancing over their heads. The gift that this Spirit brings is the gift of tongues—not ecstatic tongues speaking gibberish, but the gift of speaking so that all may understand, the gift of proclamation and the gift of being heard.
Now, we may wonder what really happened at Pentecost? Is this story credible to modern ears? We must tread carefully here, because we are approaching holy mysteries, truths that are not irrational but beyond the rational, moving into the terrain of the mystical. As NT scholar William Willimon writes, “We are listening to the account of something strange, beyond the bounds of imagination, miraculous, inscrutable….No flat, prosaic explanation can do justice to the truth of how the church came into being and how the once timid disciples found their tongues to proclaim the truth of Christ.”1
What happened to the first disciples on the day of Pentecost may never be fully explained, but its effects are still being felt today. In fact, the encounter with the Holy Spirit that the writers of John and Acts record is not simply a historical moment, but a present opportunity—an opportunity for the church, and an opportunity for each of us as individuals. In thinking about the meaning of Pentecost, I was greatly helped by reading Marcus Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity. Borg uses the Celtic Christian concept of “thin places” to express how we can encounter the Holy Spirit in the midst of our everyday lives. The Celts understood that behind and beyond the visible, mundane reality that we normally experience, there is another level of reality—the invisible, spiritual level of reality which is permeated by God. In fact, the visible level of reality is entirely held within and infused with the presence of God, who holds all of life, as it were, within the divine womb. Usually, we are blind to the deeper, spiritual reality of life, but as Borg says, “occasionally we do…experience God shining through everything. ‘Thin places’ are places where these two levels of reality meet or intersect. Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, [we] experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us.”2
It helps me to understand the experience of Pentecost as a “thin place,” a place and time when the veil between the sacred and the mundane lifted for a moment and the disciples experienced the power of God’s Spirit in a particularly awesome and vibrant way, a way which cracked open their hearts and transformed their lives.
Each one of us, as individuals, can experience the power of Pentecost; each one of us can experience the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit and find our lives transformed and empowered. To go back to the theme of last week’s sermon, each one of us can find ourselves encircled by God’s grace. Experiences like the birth of a child, or attending the death of a loved one; moments when you suddenly felt the presence of God in the natural world, or through the touch of a lover; moments when you found yourself suddenly able to speak and act with courage and integrity when before you had felt paralyzed and afraid; these are all moments when we experience the Holy Spirit breaking into our lives personally. But there is also a corporate, ecclesial dimension to Pentecost which carries meaning for us today. As we have seen, Pentecost marked the birth of the church—the transformation of the disciples from an isolated and fearful group of Galileans into a very public movement. As Willimon writes, “The Spirit is the power which enables the church to ‘go public’ with its good news, to attract a crowd…and to have something to say worth hearing. A new wind is set loose upon the earth, provoking a storm of wrath and confusion for some, a breath of hope and empowerment for others.”3 Pentecost is the moment when the disciples are empowered to carry out Christ’s mission, to be sent into the world and proclaim the gospel. And this, as you recall, is the third act, the denouement—the working out of the consequences of the coming of the Spirit. What’s worth noticing here is that while the disciples have literally found their tongues, their message meets with mixed results. Some earnestly want to learn more, some mock and jeer at the disciples, and others are immediately receptive. But what’s the message for today’s church, and what is the take-away for Rock Spring?
I think that there is an implicit challenge in this story for progressive Christians, for those of us who don’t identify with the term “evangelical.” Because at its essence, the story of the Christian church is the story of an evangelical movement, and Pentecost is the beginning of that movement. When the disciples began to speak in the tongues of all the nations, it was for the purpose of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. When the disciples went on to feed the hungry and care for the sick, they did so in the name of Jesus Christ. The church, after all, is known as the body of Christ. Sent into the world to continue Christ’s mission, the Spirit-filled church becomes a sacrament of God available to all people—a thin place in which people may encounter the grace and love of God. But what does this mean for progressive Christians living in a pluralistic world who wish to respect, and not trample upon, the beliefs of others? What does this mean for Christians who struggle to find a language to express their faith, when so much of our Christian language has been coopted by the very public religious right? How do progressive Christians “go public” with the good news of our faith, and more to the point, do we even want to? Do we, in fact, believe we have something to say that is worth hearing? It’s so much simpler to stay behind the closed doors of our churches and speak only to ourselves about our faith. What progressive Christians need to wrestle with, in my opinion, is what we are to do with this undeniably Christian and very public message that we are told to share with the world. This is the challenge of Pentecost.
And now is an opportune time to confront this challenge. Because like it or not, the UCC has quite suddenly and unexpectedly found itself in the public eye. We may not have intentionally gone public, but the public has come to us! A couple of weeks ago, I preached a sermon for the spring meeting of the Potomac Association. I began by making the observation that the UCC was in the news—again! The meeting was held the morning following Jeremiah Wright’s interview by Bill Moyers. I noted at the time that the American public seemed to be alternatively confused, fascinated and repelled by what they were hearing about the UCC in the media—and that’s not so different from the reaction of the crowds that heard the first disciples speaking during Pentecost.
Like the disciples in our story from Acts, we have found ourselves quite suddenly thrust into the spotlight, pushed out into the public square, and people are listening. They may not be listening well, and they may have no idea how to interpret what they’re hearing, but we have succeeded in getting their attention. Now, many of us may fervently wish that we were in the media spotlight for other reasons than the incendiary and controversial remarks by Rev. Wright, while others of us may appreciate his boldness in speaking the truth of his community as he sees it. But that’s not the question of the hour. The question of the hour is, now that America has tuned into the United Church of Christ, what do we have to say? What version of Christianity do we want to witness to with our words and our actions?
I hope that, like the disciples in Acts, we can be open to the Spirit and find our voice as progressive Christians who have good news to share about a God that is still speaking. I hope that, as ambassadors to a culture that often experiences Christianity as exclusive and closed-minded, we can find a way to share our distinctive way of being church that is open and affirming to people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, and gender identities. I hope that we can find a way to share our deeply true understanding of the God whom we know through the life and teachings of Jesus, while respecting the deeply true experiences that other people have of God. I hope that we can invite people into a tradition that is not hide-bound but wide open to ongoing revelation from a God who never stopped speaking. Most especially, I hope that we can take up a role as interpreters for those for whom God is most concerned—the poorest, most marginalized, most discriminated against, and most violated members of our human family, even and perhaps especially when they are angry.
Harvard Divinity school has said, “The real challenge to a North American public theology is to find a way—within the social, cultural and religious pluralism of American politics—to influence the development of public policy without seeking to construct a new Christendom or lapsing into a benign moral relativism.”4 But that’s another sermon!
If we can find our voice to share the good news of the God we know in Jesus Christ, we can tell the world about a God who is not distant from human suffering, but who enters into the midst of it in order to transform it; we can share the good news of a God who yearns to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And we can share the good news of the grace which we experience through our faith, not so that others might be saved from hell, but so that they might experience the abundant life in the here-and-now that God desires for each one of us.
The winds of the Spirit that turned the disciples’ world upside down at Pentecost are blowing strongly today. Rock Spring can become a thin place where the grace of God and the good news of Jesus Christ are experienced by everyone whom we touch. We say that we believe in a God that is still speaking….but who will God speak through if not through us? As we pause during this time of transition at Rock Spring to take stock and prepare for what comes next, I pray that we will begin to think seriously about what God wants to say to the world through us. What face of Christianity do we want to show the world? How do we want to “go public” in the next phase of our church’s life? Our answers to these questions will shape our future. May God crack open our hearts to receive the Holy Spirit, and empower us to witness boldly to our stillspeaking God.
1. William H. Willimon, Acts (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 29.
2. Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 155-156.
3. Willimon, 33.
4. Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 173.