The Spirit in Between Times

Text: Acts 2:1-21

The day of Pentecost in the church calendar seeks to tame the story of Pentecost in the Bible. We make predictable an event which is totally surprising.

People sometimes call the reading in Acts the story of the birthday of the church. This makes it seem simple, pleasant, and definitive when it was none of these things at all. Instead, it was complicated, scary, and fragile. We imagine it to be a celebration of diversity, an inauguration attended by people from around the known world, and an installation address by Peter, the rock on which the new church would be founded.

Yet for those involved, if we are to read it from the inside, so to speak, it was an occasion of confusion. Some people—they, it says; we don’t even know who or how many (anywhere from a dozen to 500, depending on where you look)—some people are “in one place.” Is this place a room (as many paintings show it to be), or outside (where the listeners could more easily hear all the various languages being spoken?) And were those languages a new language, as some think, or the natural languages of the time?

What happened in the place? Not a wind, but the sound like the rush of a wind. Not fire, but divided tongues as of fire. Something like a wind and something like fire touched some number of people who were gathered somewhere, and they began to speak in some way.

We cannot fault the tellers of this tale. It has all the confusion of amazing and unexpected events. Crowds gather and something remarkable happens that in the end changes the world. People’s accounts differ. Each is affected in his or her own way. Some think the speakers were drunks, and some think they were prophets. Each person sees and hears things from their own point of view. Each, as it says, in their own language. Their own culture and individual history and hopes.

Imagine how it felt to be part of this event. How did it sound, that sound like the wind? How did it feel to be touched by that tongue like a flame. Was it loud there? Was it hot? What did it smell like? Could they sense the excitement of others, or maybe their fear? What did they see?

Pentecost and events like it are not so much the birth of something new as a time of extreme transition. The forces on the people and the times are like the forces on the crust of the earth before an earthquake, and the event is the earthquake. There was one way. And now there is another way. At the time of this particular Pentecost, things were changing. Judaism was changing as a result of the occupation of Palestine and the destruction of God’s house, the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jesus movement was changing as a result of the crucifixion of Jesus and his ascending departure. And the lives of Jesus’ followers were changing as they went from being disciples—students—to being apostles—people sent by Jesus into the world to do something grand and dangerous.

It is not surprising that the people who were gathered there felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. For times of transition are where the Spirit is both most comfortable and also most helpful. The Spirit, especially in contrast to the other persons of the Trinity, works in what someone called the realm of insubstantial creation.

People in history have had a hard time characterizing the Spirit. There was a time when pictures of the Trinity showed Father, Son, and Mary, thus avoiding the whole issue. And later, the Spirit was shown as a dove (drawn from the baptism of Jesus, where it says the Spirit descended like a dove.) But the Spirit is on purpose vague around the edges. The word for spirit is the word for wind, which is powerful, surrounding, and unbounded. If we were fish instead of mammals, I’m sure the word for spirit would be the word for water. Of the essence and ever-present. Not exactly a thing.

The Spirit is most obviously present in times of change (as in the creation of the world in Genesis, and the creation of endeavors in our own lives). Which is perhaps why it seems so appealing in these days. Change is what it means to be a creature, and probably every generation thinks that its time is the most unstable, but in these times of ours of personal, national, and worldwide change into something who knows what, it is good to have God the Spirit be present among us.

In the face of the people’s amazement and perplexity, Peter explains that this is one of those times. And he mentions the prophets, and quotes Joel who wrote that in these days God will pour the Spirit upon people and that they will prophesy and have visions and dream dreams. Prophets and dreamers and visionaries are our conductors on the train to the future. They tie the past in memory to the future in anticipation. They are always the right sort to have in times of change and transition. But what happens in Pentecost and in Joel’s writing is that everyone touched by the Spirit begins to dream dreams. All the sons and daughters. You and me.

When we are not quite sure what just happened, and when we are not quite sure what is happening now, and when we really not sure about what will happen next, we need dreams to survive. Things are different, and we need a grand vision, going easy on the details. The Spirit is a dreamer of dreams more than a planner of plans.

The colors of the altar today are multi-colored, to signify the variety of people visited by the Spirit on this day in the story and in these days in our city and world. But next week they will be green. The changing colors mark the transition from the season of Easter to the season of Pentecost. We will then be in ordinary time, when we read more about the daily life of Jesus in stories about the daily lives of people.

Our daily lives are full of little Pentecosts. Often not as momentous, but sometimes so. When we do not know what to make of things as they are but we have not yet found out what they will be. When the old order of our lives seems to verge on chaos, and words that we thought we knew lose their meanings. It can be exhilarating or scary, but in either case it is unknowable.

In the end, the story of Pentecost is not the whole story. The Church does begin. The people do go out. Transitions do not go on forever, but are in between times. What is about to happen, does happen. The prophets speak, the dreams unfold, the visions become clearer. And the Spirit leads us, as it led the people who had gathered all together in one place, into something new.

Fear or Faith

Text: Acts 1:6-14

The sudden and unexpected execution of Jesus. His amazing resurrection from the dead. His appearance to the disciples, talking with them and sharing meals with them. Now his being lifted up. Taken from them, the men in white say, up toward heaven. It is a fearful time for the followers of Jesus. Nothing has been what it seemed, nothing has gone the way they had thought or hoped. Still looking for the nation of Israel to be freed and restored—is this the time? they ask—instead their teacher, healer, Messiah last left them, their hopes unfulfilled.

The story at the end of the Gospels shows the disciples gathered, dumbfounded, frightened, uncertain what to do. Shut in a room, safe for the moment. They have a choice: remain huddled, timid, cautious; or to leave, go out, continue the work of Jesus, speaking, healing, confronting and changing the world. Their choice is the essential Biblical choice. I put before you life and death, as it says in Deuteronomy. That is the choice we always must face. Choose life over death, choose love over hate, choose hope over hopelessness, choose compassion over neglect. How shall we live?

Actor Tom Hanks spoke last week to the graduating class at Yale. In his sermon—for that’s what it really was—he talked about fear and faith. He quoted John Paul Jones, who said “if fear is cultivated, it will become stronger; if faith is cultivated, it will achieve mastery.”

We cannot let fear prevail. Fear wishes to rule us. Hanks said that fear lurks in the darkness at the edge of town. Fear captures our hearts and softens our brains. That’s why people who wish to seize or hold power use fear to move us. And why people who wish to possess our time, our money, or our passions—those who wish to sell to us or recruit us—seek to create fear within us.

C. S. Lewis once said that we fondle our hatreds. He might have said the same about our fears. We take our fears out and touch them, keeping them alive. We work on them. When it seems they are subsiding, we wake them up. We keep them excited. We nourish them, as Jones said, so that they might stay strong. It is wicked, but we do it.

Fear is destroying the nation, corrupting and perverting generosity and bravery into greed and violence. Destroying the world. Fear drives us to war. Fear drives us to pull back from helping people in need. Fear drives us into our locked rooms and locked nations, seeking safety, and being diminished.

The sovereignty of fear, its voice, its authority, comes from us. We give it. We do not have to do that.

For against fear stands faith. This is a battle. It is one or the other. Faith is the counterforce, the antidote. Faith puts us in context: remember that we are creatures, that we are mortal, we are small, yet we are blessed. We are children of God along with all other people, making them our brothers and sisters. Our fate is out of our hands; it belongs to God. Everything is possible. The worries that we plot are only fantasies, guesses. New life is possible. Faith makes us free to act surprisingly, with courage. That courage fights against fear.

Courage is not a result of will. We cannot just wish to be courageous. Courage is fed by faith. And faith is fed—cultivated—by two things. One of those is gratitude. The other is forgiveness.

Gratitude is a skill, a tactic, it takes practice. Give thanks for your blessing. Speaking as if you were grateful makes you grateful. Wake up in the morning and say thank you for your life and all the good things in it.

And forgiveness is likewise a skill, a tactic, requiring practice. Speaking as if you forgive others helps you forgive them. Say you are sorry. Accept the apology of others. Tell people you forgive them, even when you are not so sure. You will start to forgive them. Tell God you forgive them.

Thanking God and forgiving others generates courage, nourishes faith and defeats fear.

This past week the yearly assembly of the New England Synod gathered in Springfield. Most of the meeting was going to be devoted to community service projects in this hard-time city. A couple of days before the assembly was to convene, there were as you know tornadoes which destroyed property and took lives. Many people wondered whether the assembly should be cancelled. Tornadoes are scary and dangerous. The city was in disarray. Would we be OK? Perhaps we should all stay home, we thought, where we were safe and things were familiar. Fear spoke to us. But faith called louder, and the assembly was held.

When a disaster like the Springfield tornadoes strikes, people check the news on TV or online. We look at same few dark videos over and over again, and we watch the same slide shows of destruction and suffering. This is not, as I once thought, obscene and voyeuristic. Those pictures and videos and voice recordings call to us because we are trying to figure out how we can help, what we can do. We are built to watch out for each other, to care for each other. In Springfield or Haiti or Japan; in places of famine or drought or disease. The suffering people call to us to defeat our fears and come help. Don’t be afraid, they say, give us some help, they say.

And so in our case about 400 Lutherans showed up this weekend to feed people, raise money, clean up the mess, repair homes, entertain the discouraged. A small victory over fear, but a triumph nonetheless. That’s how it works.

When Jesus ascends to the heavens, the disciples fear they have been abandoned. But Jesus tells them here in Acts, as he also does in the Gospel of John, that the Holy Spirit will stay with them.

And in the end they remember that Jesus has prepared them by praying for them, by teaching them how to pray, how to praise God, how to forgive others. He has taught them how to serve those in need, to heal, and to love even their enemies.

Christians cannot continue to cultivate fear. And we need to resist the world’s efforts to cultivate fear within us and within others. We have been given the tools of faith, instruction in their use, and the power of the Holy Spirit to fight the powers of fear. Before us, as before the disciples, have been set fear and faith. May faith prevail.