The Day of Pentecost Year C 2010

"What Was Spoken"

Pentecost C 10
May 23, 2010

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

Romans 8:14-17

John 14:8-17, (25-27)

"God declares" is the classic phrase of prophecy. Throughout Israel's history, the Old Testament tells of certain men and women who received God's Spirit. The prophet's job in the drama of history was to bring God on to the stage.

All our little dramas proceed along, you know, our household struggles and our family tragedies and our political conflicts and our international disasters and our oil spills and our recessions and so on, and what the prophet does is play the part of God. In the prophet, God just walks into the scene and starts talking.

Now it might be about the future or it might be about the present, but usually it has to do with a warning or a promise, and not so much fortune-telling. Not "You will meet a tall dark stranger," but more, "If you do what I tell you you will meet a tall dark stranger, but if you don't, you will only encounter short, pale people you've known for years." Do you hear the difference? There is something of a prediction here, but there is also a choice offered. In many cases, there are multiple futures out there and God is saying, "OK, you've done thus and such, and so that leaves you these two possible futures, one that I'd like you to have, and one that you will have if you don't listen to me."

Yes, sometimes the future God announces is a fixed thing, like with his message to Noah. "It's going to rain, buddy. Therefore, build the boat." But even there, the idea is that Noah has a choice. Maybe not much of one, but a choice. Build the boat or drown. And in Joel, the passage Peter quotes to help everybody understand what's happening, well, it would seem this was a fixed future, a certain thing, not dependent on human choices.

But it wasn't really. Joel was asking for Israel to remain faithful. He was granted to see this vision of the future to encourage everyone to keep on being faithful, even though being faithful didn't seem to be getting them anywhere at the time. That's the thing about faith, you know, the thing about faithfulness. The main thing about it is not giving up, even though it might not appear to be working. Why? What Joel says is, at the end of the day, finally, when all is said and done, God's going to do this amazing thing, and if you give up, you'll miss out.

Presumably, all the Jews who were present, all those people who lived scattered all over the Roman Empire, a people who were broken and oppressed, but who struggled to remain faithful to their heritage, presumably all of them knew that Joel passage and others like it, and that's why they were there in Jerusalem. They'd most of them been there since Passover, and most of them had either seen or heard about the crucifixion of Jesus, and the strange rumors that some of his followers had seen him risen from the dead. They were all there to keep the faith, even though it was expensive and inconvenient to drop everything and make the journey to Jerusalem, even though belief in their God apparently hadn't delivered them out from under the Romans, they were there to keep the faith. Their priests were corrupt, the Jerusalem Council was self-righteous and hypocritical, the king Herod was a murderous monster, but they came anyway, they came for the festival, because they were keeping the faith, hoping against all odds that God might someday do the things he promised he would do.

And what had he promised to do? Well, he promised that instead of just one person here and there becoming a prophet, one big-shot per generation, a Moses here, an Elijah there, an Isaiah and then a Jeremiah, everyone, his whole people, would become prophets. From King down to dishwasher, from daycare center to nursing home, the whole shebang. God's people, what we now call the church on earth, would become one big prophet. And the church would then take on the job that Moses did and Elijah did and all the prophets had done. Whatever was going on in the world, whatever was going on wherever the church was, the church would be God walking into the scene, making warnings and promises, and doing various miracles.

And what's going on? Portents, Joel says. I think of portents as the terrible things that drive us to our knees before God. It interested me that people did not flock to church when the economy went south. Actually the trend has been in the other direction. People have been leaving church. Now no one has studied this or figured out why. My take on it is that we are still trying to fix this thing ourselves. We haven't been driven to our knees yet. But we're getting there, I think. We'll be on our knees sooner or later, and probably sooner.

Blood and fire and smoky mist. Crucifixions and oil spills and old friends suddenly dying, bloody wars and terrorist bombings and parents getting Alzheimer's, political stalemates and rampant dishonesty and a son or daughter who's addicted, blood and fire and smoky mist, the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood. Things that are just wrong. Things that just aren't supposed to be.

But there are the very things, old Joel is saying, these are the very things that should give us hope, because these are the things that set the stage for our longing, our calling, our shouting out for God. These are the very things that prompt us to open ourselves, to give up and ask for help.

What was spoken was a prediction that we would someday come, my friends, we, the church of Jesus Christ. Waitresses and doctors and store clerks and contractors and farmers and therapists and soft drink salesmen and professors and boatyard workers and bank tellers, that we as one body, filled with the peace of God, would walk on to the world stage, the world full of darkness and blood, to speak and act for God.

This is why the church building stands here, why we gather each week, why we collect our resources at this table, why we listen to the word of God each week. This is a last day thing, the ultimate purpose of God, to be his presence in a broken-up and frightened world. Through us and through the whole church on earth, we are each of us being saved, and are each of us also be drawn into the saving work of God for all the world.

Today is our day to pray for God's Spirit. To cry out to God in our powerlessness, to turn to God with our incapacity to make right what is clearly wrong, or even understand which is which. It's our annual day to ask God for his Spirit. We are not asking that certain of our members receive it, that we lift up this one or that one, we are not asking that the pastor receive it, so that the rest of us need not be bothered by it, we are asking for what was spoken by the prophet Joel. We are asking that we all receive the Spirit, and not only us, but everyone worshipping at Zoar, and everyone worshipping at Clarksbury, and everyone worshipping at churches in Bali and South Africa and Germany and Japan. We are asking for the one Spirit of God, the one voice that we all understand, that makes us all one child of God.

In my last long conversation with Mrs. Miller, she was telling me a good bit about what used to be at Philippi. But then she stopped and paused and thought a moment. Then she smiled and said, "But Mr. Used-To doesn't live here anymore."

There's a book we'll all be studying at the Regional Assembly called Reaching People Under 50 While Keeping People Over 60, and one of the studies it reports says that people under 50 tend to look into the future, while people over 60 tend to look into the past. And that has been true in my experience.

I remember a woman named Hildegarde. She was in her early eighties when I met her while serving her church, Faith Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was thinking of her this morning. She's long since passed on, but she was my Liz's godmother when I baptized Liz in 1998. Most of the members of Faith were over 60, and most of them talked more or less all the time about the way it used to be.

But Hildegarde wasn't like the other older people at Faith. Mr. Used-To was really of no interest to her. Right up until she died, she was a visionary at Faith. She saw what God had in store for that church. One Sunday she came into my office and talked with me about her dreams for the future of her congregation, and at one point tears began to run down her face. I asked her what was wrong. And she said, "I just wish I could be here to see it."

But of course, she was there, and she was seeing it. She was living it. She was living what was spoken by the prophet.

"In these last days I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, so that your young people shall see visions, and your old people will dream dreams."

Amen.