Pentecost
Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Acts 2: 1–21
Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on us.  Melt us, mold us, fill us, use us.  Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on us.

Every year, on Pentecost, churches try to dramatize the event that took place long ago in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit of God fell on the disciples and filled them with joy.  They ask everyone to wear red and orange and yellow and blue – all the colors of the flames that flickered over the heads of Jesus’ disciples that day.  Or they wave a silken banner on the end of a long pole in a procession — to simulate the rushing mighty wind the disciples experienced that day.  Larger congregations recruit readers who can read the Gospel in some foreign tongue — to remind themselves of those early disciples who suddenly, miraculously, could proclaim Christ “to the ends of the earth.”  More modestly today, we are providing a birthday cake with candles at Coffee Hour – because Pentecost is, in fact, the birthday of the Church.  But even better than all those efforts is the joy I think we all feel at being able to come together again, to worship freely, to sing praise openly, to greet and hug one another.  This joy in one another is maybe the best celebration of Pentecost I can remember.
For the truth of the matter is that the secret of Pentecost – which is the indwelling Holy Spirit of God — lies within each one of us who has accepted Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives – not because we are intrinsically holy – but because we have taken all kinds of steps to welcome that Holy Spirit in.  The process – for it is an ongoing process – began when we were baptized.  But it continued as we learned to pray, as we came to church on Sundays to praise God and be fed by Him, as we began to read our Bibles regularly, as we did the things our Lord showed us to do in this world – love one another, care for one another, pray for one another.  Maybe it took hold within us to an even greater measure when we were born again.  But one way or another we have learned to keep the love of God, the Presence of God alive within us.  And we have learned that when we cease to do these things, the joy of God’s Presence within us slowly fades.
But for those early disciples in Jerusalem the experience was brand new.  For this was the gift, the mysterious new gift Jesus had promised them as he ascended to the Father.  The indwelling Holy Spirit was his Presence with them.  And the miracles they had seen him do now flowed through them.  Ordinary people like us – who had also accepted Jesus as Lord of their lives — became his Body, the Church, here on this earth.  This was the gift that suddenly animated them, to the astonishment of all.  In fact, it animates you and me too — right here, right now.  That’s what we celebrate today.  Yet many people – even people who think of themselves as Christian – haven’t learned this yet.
Years ago, I read a wonderful account of how the Holy Spirit of God, inhabiting ordinary Christians like us, could touch others and move them from skepticism to faith, from a sense of disconnection to a sense of belonging to the Body of Christ.  It was written by an Episcopalian in Leadville, Colorado named Amy Frykholm.  In that account she wrote of never quite feeling like she belonged in church, despite being baptized as an infant by her father, a Presbyterian minister, and then being raised in that church.  Later, she said, as a teenager, she tried again. She joined some her friends at a Baptist church and was baptized by full immersion.  But once again, she says, she hardly felt connected.  So she declined to take the next step and join that church.
Over the next twenty–five years, she says, she drifted from one church to another, finally ending up at St. George Episcopal Church in Leadville, where she became more active – learning to chant the psalms, cooking at the community meal, serving on various committees.  And here, finally, despite her ambivalence, she began to attend a confirmation class.
Our class of 15 [she says] was instructed to choose one reading from the Biblical passages that are part of the Easter Vigil and select the story that was most “ours.”  Which one of the stories of salvation history – from the story of creation, to the journey in the wilderness, to the words of the prophets, to the final gathering of God’s people – spoke most to us?  Where did we enter the story?  The plan was that we would tell about our choice when the bishop came for the ceremony of confirmation.
Still wrestling with my reluctance, I chose the story of Ezekiel about the valley of the dry bones.  I felt that the question, “Can these bones live?” was my question, and not one to which I had an answer.  Sometimes I felt I was in that valley, not knowing where to begin to put the pieces together.  I wondered about joining myself formally to Christianity.  Was I joining a tradition whose cultural relevance was dying?  Was I joined to a dead body, the hip bone connected to the thigh bone?  Can these bones live?  Can this action bring life to me and to others?  What meaning did resurrection have in my own life?  I didn’t know how I was going to express all this to the bishop, and I wondered if he would reject my “entering place” as insufficient for confirmation.  I imagined him staring at me puzzled, and saying, “Not good enough!”  But it was all I had.
[On the day the bishop arrived] the first person to speak about a Bible passage was Floyd.  He sat in his metal folding chair with his long, white beard and overalls, hands in his pockets, nervously jingling his keys.  His eyes were bright blue and exaggerated by the lenses of his glasses.  His life had been defined by a mental breakdown he had suffered in the Vietnam War.  Ever after, his claims on sanity had been tenuous.  He fixed cars and lived quietly, eating breakfast at the Golden Burro and going to West Central Mental Health Center for antidepressants.  At the community meal our church hosted, he often brought the latest commentary from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
“Well,” he said to the bishop, “I picked Genesis 1, the story of creation.”  He stared down at the plastic tablecloth in front of him and then looked around the room.  “Before I came to this church, I was formless and void.  Darkness was all around me.  Then God moved over my waters, and there was light.”
The pause that followed was long.  Floyd had shifted the ground under our feet.  In just a few words, Floyd had all but made a mockery of my convoluted speech about the dry bones of Ezekiel.  Did I have anything that honest that I could say?  My cynicism looked petty – as did my speeches about the church in America, about culture and agnosticism, and my own peevish doubts.
We continued around the circle.  Linda, the woman sitting next to me, had come to St. George through the church’s community meals.  She was well-known for her anger that often seemed larger than her thin frame could handle.  One day when both our children were playing at the park, she asked me, “What can I do when I get so angry?” It was not a rhetorical question.
When it was Linda’s turn to speak, she said, “I chose Psalm 122, especially the part where it says, ‘May there be peace in your towers,’ because that is what I need.  Peace in my towers.  I never knew that an old book like that one could say exactly what was inside me.”
Then it was my turn. I felt everything I had wanted to say had already turned to sawdust.  There was no place for intellectualizing, for holding myself apart.  I stumbled through my choice of the dry bones story, with a big stick in the back of my throat.  Then I said, “Everything you all have said is so beautiful. That’s what I mean.  I am grateful to have found you.  Grateful to be a part of you.  That’s all.” ¹
That story of someone joining a church, finally connecting to the Body of Christ, is the best one I know to illustrate what happened at Pentecost in Jerusalem.  The Holy Spirit of God doesn’t speak just to this or that single individual, here and there, now and then.  She communicates to many, who then pass the love and joy along to others.  Maybe that’s why Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I among them.”  For Christian spirituality is always a spirituality of relationship.²  You and me with one another.  Both of us with Jesus Christ.  It’s where God happens in our midst.
That’s what I’ve missed most in this year of pandemic isolation.  I’ve missed all of you, the love of God through each one of you.  Sending out a sermon via email, following a service with the help of a bulletin – even watching a service on YouTube – none of these activities add up to Church.
It’s through you that I experience Church, a communion of souls with the Holy.  And for that I am profoundly grateful.  Thanks be to God.
Amen.
¹ Amy Frykholm “Belonging or not; My life as a nonjoiner”  The Christian Century, September 8, 2015.
² Margaret Guenther  Toward Holy Ground: Spiritual Directions for the Second Half of Life (1995)
 
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