Gene McAfee
Faith United Church of Christ
Richmond Heights, Ohio
Pentecost
May 24, 2015
May 24, 2015
“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other languages,
as the Spirit gave them ability.”
-- Acts 2:4
and began to speak in other languages,
as the Spirit gave them ability.”
-- Acts 2:4
...If this were an adult education class and not a sermon, I’d ask all of you at this
point to open your study Bible and turn to the maps at the back, and we’d locate the
places all those names [in Acts 2:9-11] refer to. Once upon a time, what are just names to us were real
places with real people, and some of the people from those places had gathered in
Jerusalem, according to Luke, perhaps for Passover, which had been observed fifty days
earlier. Fiftieth, in fact, is what the word Pentecost means in Greek – the fiftieth day after
Passover.
Now, obviously – or perhaps not so obviously to many people – both Pentecost and
Passover are Jewish holidays, so the first thing we should note about Pentecost is that
this outpouring of the Holy Spirit is an entirely Jewish affair. Luke says as much in verse
five, when he says that amazement fell on “devout Jews from every nation under heaven
living in Jerusalem.” It is those devout Jews who were the recipients of the gift of
Pentecost, and we Christians tend to forget that. In fact, you’ll often hear preachers say –
and I’m one who used to say this – that Pentecost is the breaking out of the Holy Spirit
from its Jewish roots, or, to reverse the metaphor, that the Holy Spirit is now bringing in
non-Jews to the Jewish fold, the beginning of that grafting of the Gentile branch onto the
Jewish stock that Paul writes of in Romans. We Christians tend to get a little confused
about this when we hear all those names.... We
think that a Parthian or a Mede must be a Gentile, that is, someone who’s not Jewish, but
that isn’t the case at all. After the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the
Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., and the southern kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the
Babylonians in 587 B.C.E., the Jewish people were scattered everywhere, which was the
beginning of what we call the Jewish Diaspora.
So when Luke mentions those devout Jews from practically the entire known world
living in Jerusalem, he’s telling us that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost was
on Jews and for Jews. Pentecost is so that the message of one group of Jews – Jesus’s
followers --- can be understood by other Jews who haven’t yet heard their message. This
is what we might call proto-evangelism, the earliest stage of spreading the good news,
and that’s why we appropriately consider Pentecost the birthday of the church. The
church is in the business of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ; that’s what we do.
It’s who we are; it’s our raison d’être. Pentecost isn’t the birthday of the church because
Gentiles are flocking to the Jesus movement, but rather because the Holy Spirit is
allowing that most outlandish of tales – the story of Jesus – to be told and understood and
believed by people just like us who happened to be Jewish.
Now, if we’d continued reading the rest of Peter’s sermon, we would have seen
Peter connect the dots between what those Diaspora Jews already knew and affirmed of
their own tradition and what the Jews who were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah
had experienced with him. Pentecost is the story of experience speaking to experience,
and it’s the Holy Spirit who makes communication like that possible.
Some of you may have read the article in last Thursday’s Sun Messenger about the Gathering Place. A few years ago, a group of us from Faith visited the Gathering Place,
which is in Beachwood. The Gathering Place is for people whose lives have been touched
by cancer. People with cancer gather there. People who have had cancer gather there.
People whose loved ones are living with cancer or who may have died with cancer gather
there. All sorts and conditions of people gather at the Gathering Place, drawn together by
one fact, and that is the experience of cancer.
The Gathering Place does wonderful work. It allows people to speak, to be quiet, to
weep, to laugh, and to love. The Gathering Place is a place of hope, of recovery, of
dreams, of new undertakings, and, above all, of support. But it became that only through
the power of the Holy Spirit. Cancer by itself does not form people into communities of
caring and hope. It takes more than a frightening disease to do that. It takes the grace
of God, working in the hearts and minds of people willing to be shaped and led by that
grace, to create a community from what, for many people, feels like a calamity. When
people can reach out to each other, across the myriad differences that we turn into
barriers, community has a chance and peace has a home.
We all know, of course, that calamity does not always lead to community.
Sometimes brokenness begets brokenness. Look at the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore
and the fear here in Cleveland at the violence that may follow the verdict in the Brelo
case.... We’re more connected than any people in history, and yet our communities
are as fractured and fragile as they’ve ever been. The great illusion that keeps the
telecommunications business humming is that technology creates community. It doesn’t.
Technology simply makes it easier for people who want to be in community to
communicate with each other. The desire to be together, however – to be in community
– never comes from the technology that allows us to do so. That desire comes from the Spirit that hovered over creation, that makes us living beings, and that quickens our
consciences to confront injustice and work for peace. Or, as the prophet Isaiah put it six
centuries before Jesus, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. . . . He has sent me to
bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to
the captives, and release to the prisoners.”
To what ministry is the Holy Spirit calling you? We can’t all be Isaiahs, with the
genius for sacred poetry that has made his words inspiring to so many for so long. Most
of us don’t have the gift to heal as Jesus had it, working cures that were nothing short of
miraculous in the eyes of his contemporaries. And few of us have the insight and the
missionary zeal of the apostle Paul.
But every one of us who claims the name of Christian for ourselves has the one
indispensable gift that can change everything, and that’s the gift of the Holy Spirit, the
Advocate, the Comforter that Jesus promised his disciples. Jesus told his anxious disciples on the eve of his crucifixion that it was to their advantage that he go away so
that the Spirit of Truth could inspire those often bewildered and befuddling followers to
achieve a greatness none of them could have dreamed of. Not one of those disciples –
Peter, Andrew, James, or any of the others – not one of them could have imagined what
the Holy Spirit would do with their lives, their movement, and their witness to the reality
of their crucified and risen savior. They changed the world, and they did it with the
Spirit’s help. Indeed, they changed the world only with the Spirit’s help. Nothing else
explains the transformation of time itself into before and after Jesus Christ. It boggles the
mind and staggers the imagination to consider the odds those unlettered and
unremarkable women and men overcame to make the story of Jesus compelling
throughout the ancient world. Born of a virgin, possessed of miraculous power, raised
from death to deathless life – it’s all so implausible, no wonder people sneered and
accused the disciples of being drunk at 9 a.m. on Pentecost.
But those untutored Galileans suddenly speaking Parthian and Phrygian and
Egyptian and Elamite were not filled with new wine; they were possessed of and
possessed by a Spirit that allowed God’s impossible truth to triumph over all the world’s
plausible lies; and the body of Christ, the church, was raised from a blood-stained cross
and an empty tomb. If that isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.
We’re Midwesterners, you and I, sensible people wearing sensible shoes, and we’re
skeptical of extravagant claims and embarrassed by self-promotion. So I suspect that
none of you thought of yourself as a miracle when you walked into the sanctuary about
an hour ago. If I weren’t preaching this sermon, I wouldn’t have thought of myself that
way, either.
But you and I and all our Christian sisters and brothers are just that – a miracle.
The miracle of the living, breathing body of Christ that is the Christian church. We’re not
perfect – as individuals or as a group – and we have many sins and weaknesses to answer
for. But despite all the odds, despite our wildly improbable foundational story, and
despite even our own self-destructiveness, here we are, “a serious house on serious earth” as Philip Larkin called us. And sometimes, as Paul says, “with sighs too deep for
words,” the Spirit intercedes for us and we find ourselves in unexpected places doing
unexpected things, and we know that the realm of God is among us. That, my friends,
really is good news.
