Thoughts on Sermon 05272012 Acts 2:1-21 - Clover Sites



Sermon 05272012 Acts 2:1-21

An elder of a charismatic rural Appalachian church was once inviting a friend of mine to their church services. When asked what time the service started, he replied, “Well, we start whenever the Spirit moves us.” When asked what time the service ended, he replied, “Well, we finish whenever the Spirit leaves us.” Well, my friend visited that church a few times, and he told me, “It's the darndest thing – the Spirit shows up right at 9:30, and leaves right at 11 o'clock, every single Sunday!”

It's dependable like that, isn't it? The Spirit? According to people in some faith traditions, the Holy Spirit truly is that punctual and accessible. It's like Spirit on tap. Little kids receive the Holy Spirit as a certain age, like a rite of passage. Some worship services aren't complete unless the worshipers have seen evidence of the Holy Spirit at work. If you look at these strains of Christianity, then the Holy Spirit's job is basically to make worship more emphatic, to demonstrate God's power in changing people into something else, into ecstatic vessels of glory. Certainly Scripture is full of ideas like that – in the book of Judges, the Spirit of the Lord is said to fall upon all sorts of people, giving them amazing abilities – superhuman strength, wisdom, charismatic leadership.

What about at the Pentecost? What about that big moment of Spirit, when the tongues of flame descended and rested on the heads of the apostles? What did it do then?

As a matter of fact, what about this Holy Spirit thing in the first place? Have we seen it before now?

Turns out, this Spirit thing has a pretty long history. If we just look for the phrase, “Holy Spirit,” then it only shows up twice before the Gospels – it’s mentioned once in the Psalms, and a couple of times in Isaiah. Isaiah uses the Holy Spirit to describe what God did for Moses and the Hebrews before the Exodus. It was the power that enabled them to leave, that lifted up Moses to lead them. The power to set a people free.

But if we expand our search a little bit, and look for other similar phrases, a whole new world is opened up. This thing is everywhere! So let’s start at the start: Genesis. Chapter 1, verse 2 – and the Spirit of God hovered upon the face of the waters, just the moment before God said, “Let there be light!” So, there it was, at the beginning. Not doing much, it seems. Or perhaps it was the Spirit that prepared the universe to be created – it was floating over the abyss until God saw fit to form the abyss into Creation – it seems like the Spirit paved the way. So here you have it – the Spirit of God prepares the world for God’s amazing work.

Let’s move a little farther in history. The prophet Ezekiel, in the 37th chapter of his book, tells of a Valley of Dry Bones. He is shown a vision of a valle of dry bones, and the Lord commands him to prophesy. To speak to the bones, and command them to live. Flesh grows on them, and they stand there, formed but not living, and Ezekiel speaks to the Spirit, or the Breath. It enters them and fills them and they live again, a metaphor for the Hebrew nation rejuvenated by righteousness after it has faced so much darkness. So there you have it – the Spirit of God brings life where there is death, for a human being or for a whole population of lost people.

In fact, how did Ezekiel get to that Valley in the First place? The Spirit of the Lord lifted him and brought him there. The Spirit is very closely linked with the prophets, their words and their calling. Most of the prophets in Scripture had a call story, recounting the moment when God grabbed them and said, “You work for me now,” and in most of these call stories, they recount being lifted or transported or filled by the Spirit of the Lord. The Spirit is what fills up the prophets so that they can speak. Remember – prophecy is not future-telling; prophecy is speaking truth to power, calling governments and authority figures, the rich and powerful, to enact justice and mercy throughout the land. They even called the fairly comfortable majority, like the middle-class white folk of their day, to build a more just society. This is a significant part of what prophets did, and the Spirit was their starting point.

In fact, consider the bit that Peter quotes in our passage today, taken from the prophet Joel: “'In the last days, declares the Lord, I will pour out my Spirit on everyone. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams. In those days I will even pour out my Spirit on my slaves, men and women alike, and they will prophesy.

According to Joel, the Spirit is the source of prophecy, yes. It’s the source of visions of God, those ethereal experiences within our hearts that shape us. It’s the source of invisible beauty inside of us. So there you have it – the Spirit of God empowers people to speak Holy Truth, to whomever needs to hear it most. That’s why you get things like speaking in tongues – a word inspired by the Spirit is so powerful and important, that a silly thing like language cannot be a barrier to it. Spirit-words must be heard and will be heard, whether those words are woe and judgment to a King, or whether they are Gospel and life to a scattered people.

Let’s recap a little bit – what tasks have we decided that this Spirit-thing does? It prepares the world for God’s work. It empowers people to speak Holy Truth. It frees people from bondage and brings life in the midst of death. If we put that all together, what image do we get? It looks to me like we get this entity that takes a human being and transforms it into a force for good. Into a force whose goal is to bring life and justice to the world.

Before Christ left earth, he charged his followers with building the Kingdom of God. He knew what opposition we would face in that task – from Rome, from the Jewish authorities of their day, and from every person who seeks their own comfort and power above the well-being of other people. And so he promised that he would leave with us an advocate, a helper, a comforter. A divine presence that would be on our side in this work, that would help us when we struggle and comfort us when we are beaten. In John’s Gospel, before Christ ascended, he breathed on his Disciples and told them to receive the Holy Spirit, to show them just how much a part of him this Spirit, this Advocate, had always been.

In the ancient world, belief in “spirits” as a general thing was common. But what differentiated this spirit from all the others was that it was a Holy Spirit. A spirit of the Lord. The Spirit that had powered Christ. The way I see it, this whole Holy Spirit thing is the way that we describe those times that God works inside a person to improve the world. Spirit of the Lord is the phrase that we use to describe those times when God takes raw material, be it the abyss of the universe or an open soul, and transforms it into an amazing tool for good. This is the God-Spirit. Its work is Christ’s work. It’s words are God’s words. And when it takes hold of a person, when it rests inside a human heart, it can be an unstoppable force for transforming this world, a bit at a time, into the Kingdom of God.

For Peter, and those first apostles, fifty days after Christ ascended? They were through grieving for a lost Teacher. They were coming to terms with who they now were, with what lay before them. They knew that the world had fundamentally changed, as a result of this Jesus person, and they were ready to build. So God granted to them, and those that believed after them, this Spirit of creation and re-creation. For Peter, and those first apostles, the first step was getting the word out. The work that needed doing was to let as many people know, as quickly as possible, about the Good News that God was working, God was transforming the world, and God had conquered death forever in the person and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Gathered in Jerusalem for their Feast of Pentecost, the day commemorating when humanity received the Torah, the apostles had the ears of thousands of far-flung God-seekers, “ Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs,” – the text gives us this huge list of nations to show us the importance of getting the word out as quickly as possible to as many diverse, different people as possible.

I think that job has mostly been done. Of course, we will continue to proclaim Gospel out loud as long as there are people who want or need to hear it, but the word has already been spread. If we are to live in the Spirit, if we are to let this living force from a living God transform our lives into vessels of righteousness, then we can no longer simply tell the story and demand converts. Our prophetic power, now? Our task in the Spirit now? It’s to focus not on converting people as on changing the world. To focus not on the miracle of tongues of flame over apostles’ heads, but to take that fire and burn from within against the pains and the injustices of our world. To focus not on the gift of speech in foreign tongues, but to actually use our tongues to speak to people foreign to us, to people different from us, to seriously address their thoughts and their needs. We have been granted an amazing gift by Christ, who would not leave us alone, but granted us an advocate, that we would be be so focused on building the Kingdom, on enacting Christ’s love and mercy in our world, that people would say of us, “They saw visions, and they dreamed dreams.”

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