Crash helmets and life preservers!

 Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17

Today, Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate the coming of God’s Holy Spirit into the world. This doesn’t mean God’s Spirit wasn’t present before, because we see signs of God’s Spirit throughout the Old Testament. But on this Sunday, the reading from Acts is remarkable in the way Spirit made herself known.

There are, of course, varying scriptural witnesses to the coming of Spirit. The first happens the night the disciples see the risen Jesus, in the upper room, Easter Evening. He breathes on them, saying “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This is the same Spirit Jesus promised during their last supper together.

This Spirit is sort of peaceful, unobtrusive. For weeks, we’ve been reading stories in Acts where Spirit guides the disciples, opens prison doors, frees people from demons, and so forth. This Spirit helps us pray, connect with God, meditate, and so forth.  We think of Spirit working rather like this  video

Let’s give our video friend an American name: Dan. In this video, Dan discovers a lot about himself and his neighbors through simple acts of kindness to others. The woman with the food cart counts on him, and they begin to have fun with each other. The little girl gets to go to school. Dan has a flourishing garden that started with one dry plant. The old woman hugs him, and apparently shares her bananas with him. He has a dog who follows him and eats from his hand. And the vendors shake their heads in wonder. God’s Holy Spirit works like this, slowly, in almost imperceptible ways changing lives.

But this is not the only way Spirit works. It’s been 50 days since Easter. Jesus has ascended and no longer appears to the disciples. They are meeting to figure out what to do next, while they wait for the Holy Spirit Jesus promised would come to them.

And outside the room where the disciples are meeting, a sound like violent wind and tongues of flame appeared in the plaza. A crowd forms, as Jews from all around the Mediterranean Sea come to see what is happening. [Pastor’s note: I realize this week that these folks are not visitors, in town for the celebration. These are foreigners who live in Jerusalem! It says so in verse 5.]

The disciples rush outside and begin to tell everyone about Jesus. They speak Aramaic with a Galilean accent, but everyone hears in their own languages. It’s a miracle of hearing, of simultaneous translation through Spirit. After a while, Peter gets everyone’s attention and gives a message linking this present moment to the promise made by the Prophet Joel
hundreds of years before.

… As I was preparing for this sermon, this quote caught my attention. The poet Annie Dillard once wrote about Christian worship, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, HarperCollins, 1982, p. 58). We invoke God’s name Sunday after Sunday, but do we expect the sudden rush of the Spirit, people on fire for God, new proclamations spilling out everywhere?

Are we actually ready for God to show up? The quote made me think about the “normal” Lutheran congregation. Lutheran Church traditional worship is silent appreciation of the sermon, reverently bowed heads, and singing hymns in four-part harmony. I have been in churches where the folks smiled as loudly as they could when I said something funny.

While that is not true here, it is still hard to get you to clap your hands in time to the music. It's as if we think Jesus didn’t have a sense of humor, and God doesn’t have rhythm. If Jesus’ coming among us brings us joy, if a song or hymn is about praising God’s goodness and holiness, let’s make some joyful noise. 

Instead of quiet reverence, what if we expected Spirit to be so active among us, we needed crash helmets and life preservers? What if we allowed ourselves to be so aware of Spirit’s presence within these walls, we took her with us wherever we went outside the building? What if we listened to her give us ministry ideas and some of them actually worked?

Being church is not just about what happens inside the building. Like the first disciples, we are called, charged, to leave the safety of our building, to take the good news and share it with those who need to hear it, with those who are curious about the Spirit within us, with those in our immediate neighborhood, with those in our various communities.

Today, this week, I hope you will pay attention to the activity of Spirit. How does she help you connect with your neighbors? How does she challenge you to be kind when you’d rather not be bothered? How does she help you share Jesus’ love and forgiveness with someone who needs to hear some good news? Amen!