“Wind Power”
Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost
June 1, 2009
Dave Russell,
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Communication can often be a challenge. A woman called information and wanted the
phone number for Theater Arts Magazine.
“Sorry,” the operator said after a pause, there is no one listed under
the name Theodore Arts. The lady
replied, “It’s not a person, it’s a magazine.
Theater Arts.” But the operator
again said, “I told you, we have no one listed under the name Theodore
Arts.” The lady was exasperated and she
shouted Theater! T-H-E-A-T-E-R. And the operator replied with a crushing
blow, “That is NOT how you spell Theodore.”
Communication can often be a challenge. It can be a challenge in the church. We are all different people. Men and women are different. We hear differently and do things
differently. We are a church of
different ages – in fact, the church is about the only place where people of
such varying ages relate to one another.
We have different occupations, different interests, different educational
backgrounds, we are introverts and extroverts, scientists and artists, we have
different life experiences, and when you get right down to it, it’s a wonder
that we can understand each other at all.
The scripture for today, the story of Pentecost, is
about how God’s Spirit overcomes such differences to bring understanding. Pentecost was one of the great feasts of the
Jewish religion, and Jews dispersed throughout the world came to
There was something like a great rush of wind, it
was like tongues of fire descending on the disciples, and they began to speak
in various languages. Everyone understood
the message in his or her own language.
The Holy Spirit came in a mighty way.
The crowd was astonished. “Aren’t these people speaking just a bunch of
Galileans?” they asked, which was about the same thing as saying, “Aren’t these
just a bunch of Nebraskans?” What is
going on here? There were some hecklers,
doubters, who saw all that was happening and said, “Those Nebraskans have been
hitting the bottle. These people are
drunk.”
Peter uses this as an opportunity to address the
crowd, saying that “these people are not drunk, it’s only 9 in the morning, for
heavens sake!” Peter said that what was
taking place was the fulfillment of the words of 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 slaves, both men
and women,
in those days I will pour
out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
The disciples were given the
boldness and power to speak, and this was the fulfillment of God’s promise,
said Peter. What is interesting to know
here is that these Jews who came from all over the world already had a common
language – Hebrew. Why didn’t the
apostles just speak in Hebrew? Most
everyone would have understood.
And most everyone there
understood Greek. It was the language of
the culture. If they had traveled a
distance to
Except that there is
something about one’s own language.
Those present that day did not have to hear in Hebrew, the language of
ritual, or in Greek, the language of commerce.
They were able to hear in words most familiar and comfortable to them. There is something about hearing and
understanding in the way that speaks to us most clearly, without having to
translate and filter and interpret. On
the Day of Pentecost, the power was not only in what was said, it was in each
person being able to hear and understand clearly.
So much of the time, we
can’t hear. We don’t hear. Those things that separate us from one
another keep us from truly hearing each other.
Increasingly, the language of the faith, the
language of the church, is like a foreign language to much of our culture. Kathleen Norris wrote a wonderful book a few
years ago, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of
Faith. After being away for a number
of years, she came back to the church, but what she found most daunting and
difficult was the language. In this
book, she reflects on some of those churchy and theological words that can be
dense and off-putting.
In the same vein, Frederick Buechner wrote,
If the language that clothes Christianity is not
dead, it is at least, for many, dying; and what is really surprising, I
suppose, is that it has lasted as long as it has...There are (religious) words
that through centuries of handling and mishandling have tended to become empty
banalities that just the mention of them is apt to turn people’s minds off like
a switch.
Some of the words that have been meaningful to us no
longer speak to the larger culture.
Words and phrases like:
Salvation, sin, redemption, born again
Savior, Lord, repentance, grace,
Trinity, incarnation, Messiah
Sanctification, justification, holiness,
righteousness
Even the word Christian seems kind of up for grabs.
It is possible for our language to become an
insider’s language that is meaningless to those on the outside, and perhaps can
actually turn people away. There is a
growing number of people who have not grown up in the church, and for them,
merely repeating religious jargon is not going to get it. It may be English, but it may as well be a
different language. If they are going to
hear, we are going to have to speak a language they understand. The concepts behind the words are important, and
we don’t necessarily have to abandon meaningful language, but we have to find
ways to communicate so that people can hear.
The Good News is that just as at Pentecost, the Holy
Spirit can take our efforts, meager as they may be, and allows others to hear
the truth of the gospel.
There have been times when I have preached a sermon
that seemed to me a real clunker. I have
preached lousy sermons, and afterwards people will share how much the message
spoke to them and how wonderful it was, and I know that it wasn’t me, it was
the Spirit . And there are Sundays when
somebody will say that the sermon helped them so much with this particular area
of their life, and I didn’t know I was preaching about that at all. That’s the Spirit.
In this place, there are people who have taught you
things you would not know otherwise, and people who have said unpleasant things
to you here that needed to be said, and maybe you have said things to people
here, very deep things, intimate things, that you might not say to your own
family, and you were heard. That’s the
Spirit. The spirit allows us to hear.
We can read and study this passage in Acts and never
be completely sure just exactly what happened that day, or how. But we know it was something wonderful and
powerful and something that transformed the disciples from 98-pound weaklings
into people of unbreakable faith. But
perhaps the question about Pentecost is not so much “What happened back then?”,
but “Do you believe it happens now?” Is
the Holy Spirit powerful enough to overcome all of those things that divide us
to bring us together as one people that we might truly hear one another?
We believe the answer is yes. We have experienced it in moments of
inspiration when suddenly we understand.
We have experienced it when we have connected with another person in a
way we didn’t expect and really heard each other. We have experienced it in this place and with
one another when a word spoken by someone else became a word from God for us,
and we heard.
Terri Pilarski, and
Episcopal priest, tells of a family that arrived on a warm June day: a mother,
grandmother, and five children ranging in ages from 17 to 3. As they scrambled out of the van, it was
apparent just how tired they were. They had
traveled from a refugee camp in
Sunday School rooms
not being used over the summer that had been hastily converted into bedrooms
and a living room. Downstairs was a full
kitchen, and the bathrooms contained showers. The family would be comfortable and have a
relative degree of privacy in their temporary home.
The afternoon of
their arrival, members of the church greeted the family and gave them a tour of
the church. The family spoke a native
dialect of
Over the next week,
the family was usually still sleeping during office hours at the church, their
biological clocks still set several time zones away. Later in the afternoon they would rise and
begin their day. Slowly over the week
their hours shifted. By Sunday they were
able to worship with the
At the lunch that
followed, a few members of both the Episcopal and Methodist congregations were
able to speak with the family in sparse French. It seems French was a common language in the
refugee camp and now a common language shared among this diverse group of Koreans,
Americans, and Rwandans gathered for a meal.
But it wasn’t just the French spoken; the shared meal itself was a
common language of love and hospitality.
Members of the
church dropped by during the week to bring the kids some things to play with: soccer
balls, used bikes, tennis rackets and balls, and sidewalk chalk. The kids were delighted. Laughter filled the air, another common
language.
Soon the house was
ready and the family prepared to move out of the church. A van arrived to take their few belongings: three
suitcases for seven people plus seven beds with linens, two scooters, two
bikes, and a few balls donated by the church. The sum total of their possessions.
As the last of
their things was loaded, a daughter turned and offered the priest a few gifts –
a small wooden picture with strands of colored wheat, and two coasters with
psalms inscribed. They were gifts a nun
had helped them make in the refugee camp in
Despite all the
differences of language, and culture, and food, and customs, a bond was formed.
Regardless of the inability to speak to
one another through words, the church members and the family members were able
to communicate a shared compassion for one another and a common love of God. It was an experience of the Holy Spirit.
It is the Spirit
that brings power to the church.
Pentecost is called the Birthday of the church - when the Spirit came,
the church was born. The Spirit took folks
gathered from all over the world and made them one, and together with believers
from all over the world today, in the Church we are one body of Christ.
Last fall our church
went to the Brown’s farm near Zearing for a hayride. The Browns raise Clydesdale horses, and we
went on a horse-pulled wagon through a beautiful area. I remember that last year Elijah Phomvisay
took the reins for a while and guided our horses, named Dick and Doc.
On our ride, we saw
a whole bunch of wind turbines that had gone up. A huge wind farm. But the blades of these turbines were not
turning. We asked Erik Brown, our host,
about it. He said that the electrical grid
was not able to handle that much electricity and that for now, these wind
turbines were offline.
Both the Hebrew
word ruach and the Greek word pneuma can mean wind and breath and spirit. In our Ezekiel reading, Ezekiel prophesied
and the winds breathed into the dry bones and they lived. God’s spirit is breathing upon us, blowing
like a mighty wind. But we can be like
those wind turbines, disconnected from the work of the Spirit.
We are very
interested in wind power here in
That is why God
sent Jesus, to communicate through human flesh.
(For those keeping score, that is the incarnation, one of those 50-cent
words.) Jesus left us in the body but
sent the Spirit to give us strength and power, to bring new understanding, to
open us to new possibilities, to challenge our preconceived ideas. And despite all those things that would
separate us, it is the Spirit that makes us one as the Body of Christ. Thanks be to God.