May 30, 2004 (Jimmie Johnson)


Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs--in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’





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When preachers start a sermon, they have nothing. Preachers sit down to compose the sermon, and all they have is the thin air. Well, that’s not quite true. We have the clashing gibberish of ideas and beliefs in our head and heart just as you do upon awaking each day. What I mean is we only have the experiences and givens of our humanity: a jumble of ideas and beliefs that we, like you, carry within ourselves to provide a structure of meaning in the face of all that denies there is any sense to life.

The preacher, if she or he is honest, begins with the fear that life is a tale told by an idiot. The preacher starts the sermon with nothingness and only the next breath of air, that is, if all she has or he has are the all too human promises of his or her culture and his or her social class and his or her physical realities. The preacher knows down deep that all he or she believes and feels and remembers and hopes is moving toward being forgotten.

Now perhaps you have a job which protects you from the acknowledgment of such a clear-eyed view of life. Perhaps your job or your own personality simply prevents you from staring into the abyss. The corporate world, the glamour world, and the world of entertainment offer such powerful images of reality that they can indeed produce a feeling of security for years. But one day everyone comes to see the cracks in the illusions which money purchased, beauty delayed, and entertainment ignored. One morning you wake up with nothing but a sense of nothingness.

Preachers begin their work in such a place, a place of barrenness. But the very nature of their work demands they not lie about the reality of life and death and the fearful notion that there is only deafness at the heart of reality. The preacher takes her next breath and wonders if she is inhaling anything other than the air breathed by all the dead who have come before--the breath of the brontosaurus, the same air breathed by Plato or Mozart. That’s all we preachers have--human breath and human hope and fear.

However, in another sense there is something present to the preacher in this locale of barrenness. It is the same reality present to every one of us who realizes we, everyone around us, and everything we have are fading away. That reality is the promise of God. The promised Spirit of God. The breath of God. The Holy Spirit. The Holy Air of God. It is the promise that beckons us to look not to the things that are seen but to the unseen. Preachers begin with a text then, a text born from the experiences of a people called believers who, in spite of the reality of death and decay and defection all around them, see life being offered in the words of what we call God’s good news.

There is no pretending here at First Pres. Oh, there is the pretending born of the desire to be recognized as important or beautiful or wealthy, but there is no pretending about the harshness of belief. We don’t pretend a facile faith. Rather, we say, “Lord, we believe, help thou our unbelief.” At First Pres we know that if our faith claims are to have any meaning and integrity, they must be made alongside all counter claims that would deny them.

Human breath simply doesn’t seem to have the appearance of Holy Air. But the stories like this one of Pentecost tell of the day when God decided to take the Spirit of Jesus and breathe Jesus Air again into the world, and the people called the church tell us we should not be deceived by the bad taste of human breath and air, for God’s Air, God’s Breath, God’s Spirit is a given even in the midst of confusion, misunderstanding and staleness.

There are those who think our religious claims are nonsense, of course. They have taken a deep breath and report nothing of holiness, only humanness. They say then that we are like the description of the believers in this text. Our intellectual critics say we are drunk as skunks, inebriated with illusions and fantasies. They say we are drunk on our God beliefs as a way to deny the oblivion which awaits us and all we love.

Actually I can understand our faith’s critics. Look, alcoholics can wake up drunk. Peter’s response that it is too early in the morning to be drunk only shows Peter hasn’t hung around with many drunks. It is never too early to be filled with one’s illusions, and many of us wake up craving our fantasies for escaping the emptiness of our own private lives. By 9 in the morning the majority of us North Americans are raging drunks, high on the intoxicants of our culture and myths. By 9 in the morning we are 10 sheets to the wind with the power that money, beauty or entertainment offers—by 9 A.M. many are totally wasted on the lies of money, sex, and false pride. And if the truth be told, in some cases we are drunk on some promises of a silly brand of religion, too, with its promises of wealth if we will give enough, health if we will believe enough, and success if we will sacrifice enough.

At First Pres we make no such offers. What promise does this church make? We make only one: with every breath you take, God is breathing within you. The only promise we make is to promise that the kingdom of God is being offered to all who are gasping for a spiritual reality that will not fade away and for a spiritual life that is lived in the full awareness of doubt and questioning. We promise an Intoxicating Spirit that on occasion fills us with such delight in faith, hope and love that we followers of Jesus are actually able to hear and understand the strange foreign language that each of us in our individuality and zaniness is babbling and blabbing. God bless us, sometimes we actually find that someone at church listens to us and hears us, and to be heard and understood is as succulent a drink as we could desire.

The core pronouncement of this assembly is that life is not found through fastidious fascination with rules and regulations, not found through piles of money, not found through cosmetics or achievements, but through the wonderful announcement that God gives the Spirit of Jesus to all and each, that God promises to breathe new life where there is unity without uniformity, where there is gladness in the routine of daily life rather than the fascination over and with the miraculous high and rush, where God breathes an intoxicating hope that causes us to go out into the world in peace, to have courage.....

I am Pentecostal if this is what being filled with the spirit means, a calm, joyous participation each day with life and others and myself all shimmering with God’s presence so that if we are willing, we really are able to hear and understand one another. I am a Pentecostal Presbyterian if the miracle is not the speaking of gibberish but the understanding ear.

At the first Pentecost described in the text, they were all asking how is it that we hear such Good News all in our own experience? How is there this community which is created to share unity in their experience of the Risen Christ yet free of boring uniformity? Why isn’t fear dominating us and forcing us all into the same views on politics, religion, race, gender and social class? How is it we are hearing and understanding each other yet still so different in our life experiences? The answer then and now is the Holy Breath, the Holy Air, the Holy Spirit of God. It brings the things that are out of the things that are not--even sermons out of nothingness. For the heart of reality is not deafness, but Holy Lungs never ceasing to breathe life so that the dead live again and we speak of things we cannot begin to understand.

 

 


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