Pentecost Life

Pentecost Life

May 19, 2018

Pentecost

Christine E. Burns

“In the Last Days,” God says, “I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people: Your sons will prophesy, also your daughters; Your young men will see visions, your old men dream dreams. When the time comes, I’ll pour out my Spirit on those who serve me, women and men, and they’ll prophesy. Acts 2:16-18

Hello, my name is Christie Burns, and I am addicted to Facebook. Seriously, it’s a problem. Ask my children; I can be found sitting in the car when we arrive home at the end of the day Facebooking. I avoid entering the chaos of dishes, cooking, cleaning, caring for all the needs of my people, the church, the emails, by Facebooking. Why? Well, Mark Zuckerberg was brilliant when he created an algorithm and social media platform to help him and his less than socially adept male friends meet women at Harvard. Facebook eases the conversation, Facebook puts me instantly in contact with a Newsfeed that is constantly being updated with a complex algorithm aware of who my friends are, what they post, that I love babies and puppies. Facebook knows my political leanings and that I like news items about religion, the world and positive thinking, the Elephant journal and National Geographic, Humans of New York and the New Yorker. According to Facebook and its critics, the algorithms designed by the computer scientists at Facebook may be better at predicting my behavior and mood then my own family. Why? Because they use science and big data, not personal opinions.

You will not be surprised to hear that on Wednesday evening, when I found myself home alone with nowhere to go until I headed off to pick up my youngest child in Marion, I had some free time to kill and I logged onto Facebook while listening to the nightly news on NPR. And yes, I’m super guilty of multi-tasking to the point of distraction. I hope this is not something you do as well, but with all of our hand held computers, laptops, radios, TV’s and constant connectivity from our work and families demanding immediate response times to emails and texts, we are hyper connected and over worked. Can I get an Amen? This needs to slow down. And yet, most everyone finds their needs hyper important and wants an immediate answer, the other requests can wait, but they want immediate attention.

A live Facebook story was on my feed from the Rev. Traci Blackmon, the Executive Director of Justice and Witness Ministries for our national denomination and the Senior Pastor at Christ the King UCC in Florissant, Missouri. A brilliant speaker and preacher, she is one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement and has spent more than 25 years as Registered Nurse, leading public health work focusing on improving healthcare in underserved areas. She studied with the Rev. John Dorhauer, our General Minister and President of the UCC when she was a student at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. In her video, Traci was stirring and narrating how she makes caramel icing. It takes her almost two hours to make a proper caramel icing, with constant stirring at medium heat over a gas stove, moving her spoon in careful strokes through the butter and sugar as they become a beautiful golden brown caramel.

At the same time, I was making some homemade banana bread. I longed to make Mother Meredith’s recipe taken from the Cooking of the Caribbean with my childhood memory of the flavors of bananas and pecans, but my children hate nuts. So, I chose dark chocolate chips. I also know my children are a little lazy and cutting slices of bread is too much work before dashing to the car for our daily commute to school, so I jumped up on a chair to reach into the back of the tallest shelf in my baking cabinet and retrieved some gorgeous brown and gold tulip baking cups that I have never used. I pulled out my fancy popover pan and used that for my first set of banana chocolate chip muffins.

Why am I still telling you about baking? Well, Traci did something brilliant in her live feed. She paused it and captured glimpses of the process so that the entire stirring was released in a time released collection of snippets of stirring revealing a golden brown caramel icing for a cake she was baking with love and time stirred into it. Later, she changed her profile picture to show her embracing the Associate pastor of her church, Christ the King UCC, as they celebrated his ministry and blessed him as he goes on to his next challenge. Traci has a relentless travel schedule. She is on the road speaking and preaching 60% of her time. She is rarely home, as she splits her time between the national position, visiting our national office in Cleveland and serving her home church in Florissant. She is the first person on the national staff to not move to Cleveland. As a condition of her call, she told John that she needed to stay in Missouri, where her mother lives with her and her children live. As a black woman, as a pastor and leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, she needs to be connected to her people and not living far from her community in the isolation of the strange city of Cleveland. I love that she changed the script. She flipped the story and her visionary preaching and teaching is modeling change for our denomination and our nation.

Go slow.Stir the sugar and butter.Caramels take time.Brown is beautiful. These were all her messages last night. Bake cakes from scratch. Lift up the ones you love.Celebrate the memories. Hold each other up. Have each other’s back. Don’t forget where you came from. Remember that your mama taught you how to cook and she still lives with you. Don’t forget that you are a motherto your children even if they are grown.

So, where are we today in our story of faith? I suggest we begin with the good and bad of Facebook, with the realities of our relentlessly busy lives, with the complications of what it means to be human, especially if we are listening toand speaking up withthose who have been ignored, pushed down, oppressed and forgotten. Even if you don’t see yourself in this category, your mother, your brother, a sister who is not white, a cousin from another mother who is undocumented and cleaning your home or washing dishes at the nice restaurant you celebrated Mother’s Day brunch at who does not speak English, these people are all part of our human family, part of the fabric of our nation or our world. And so, we come to our lectionary reading for the day from the Book of Acts in the second chapter where we hear about the celebration of Pentecost, the birthday of the church.

On Pentecost, a Jewish, not Christian, spring holiday of planting and celebration of rebirth, we hear of some 120 people who had either met Jesus the Jewish man or heard about him, and they were confused. So much of our stories from the New Testament remember men who were confused. Is it because they were men and maybe not listening, or more likely, is it because the radical message of love and inclusion that Jesus was teaching was counter-cultural to everything they had learned from their tribal homes and religious leaders in the temple and synagogues. Much of what he said was the fulfillment of other prophets like Isaiah, but his take upped the stakes quite a bit because he preached about INCLUSIVITY. This wasn’t a special, insiders, Jewish-only cult, no this was a faith where everyone, Jewish, Roman, Greek, infidel, strangers, everyone was welcomed. His welcome was so wide that in our story for today with Peter, I love Peter, is trying to control the chaos of the crowds.

A strong wind, a gale-like force, blew through the area and wildfire spread, the Holy Spirit is depicted as flame above the heads of the 120 people. This gathering of people was a diverse collection of humans, many spoke different languages and had different shades of pigmentation. Many had different faith backgrounds, and yet the Holy Spirit changed chaos into connectivity. Everyone understood what was being said at the same time. This story throws out the chaos of the Tower of Babel and at Pentecost everyone understood at the same time. There were people with dark skin, and olive skin, pale skin that burned in the sun and dark as Ebony skin, and everyone was beautiful, everyone was welcomed, and everyone was in on the birth of the church. What does this mean? There are no outsiders in Christianity. There is no God that looks like just one race, the white race. God belongs to everyone and respects the beauty of each of our humanity. It is in the fact that we are all God’s creation, beloved, made in the image of the God, that the immensity of the fiery storm of Pentecost matters.

Peter doesn’t know what to make of this party. Some joked, “They’re drunk on cheap wine.” (Acts 2:13) Peter tries to explain it away, “Fellow Jews, all of you who are visiting Jerusalem, listen carefully and get this story straight. These people aren’t drunk as some of you suspect. They haven’t had time to get drunk—it’s only nine o’clock in the morning. This is what the prophet Joel announced would happen, “In the last days, “God said, “I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people: Your sons will prophesy, also your daughters; Your young men will see visions, your old men dream dreams. When the time comes, I’ll pour out my Spirit on those who serve me, men and women both, and they’ll prophesy. I’ll set wonders in the sky above and signs below, Blood and fire and billowing smoke, the sun turning black and the moon blood-red, Before the Day of the Lord arrives, the Day tremendous and marvelous; and whoever calls out for help to me, God, will be saved.” (Acts 2:15-21)

Dearly beloved congregation, I draw hope and terror from our text today. Why? Well, it is set in Jerusalem. A city so loved, so beloved to three religions: Christians, Jews and Muslims. It is so hotly contested that as I preach the skies are filled with signs of blood and fire and billowing smoke as Palestinians burn tires and tear gas reigns down from the skies from Israeli held territory. There are no winners in God’s vision for all when we have the city of God, the city of Jerusalem burning. When the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is filled with the prayers of faithful Jewish people and pilgrims from across the world wedged carefully into the wall, built into the ancient walls of an ancient city built by ancient people of Jewish and Muslim origins. Mohammed may have come after the Jews, and after the Jewish man named Jesus who started a global faith called Christianity, but each religion claims a piece of this tiny fractured city of Jerusalem that is divided by concrete walls and concertina wires with armed soldiers separating the people. Where is God? Does the Holy Spirit weep when we kill one another over land? Over power?Over control of a city? Where does our own nation, the United States of America, which has shifted our embassy to Jerusalem on a day when over 50 Palestinians were killed including an 8 month old baby girl who inhaled tear gas stand? I believe that we all lose, Muslims, Christians and Jews, when we are at war with one another. The Holy Spirit, she is a mother spirit, a Spirit, who God gifted us with after Jesus ascended into heaven. She is the one I pray to “with groans too deep for words” when the situation I am in is beyond my ability to frame with rational or irrational words.

A cry rises up in Ramallah. Doctors without Borders and the United Nations decry this situation. I heard of one doctor at the field hospital, an Israeli Jewish doctor, who told of the unknown Samaritan, who gathered the body of a Palestinian youth who had been shot and applied pressure on the severed artery from the field, rode in the ambulance, still applying pressure all the way from the stretcher into the operating room, he never stopped applying pressure. After the surgery, where the victim was saved, the surgeon went out to find the Samaritan, and he had quietly ghosted. This Samaritan saved the young man’s life, and asked for neither compensation or even confirmation that he survived surgery. He only asked to be present to save his life until he handed him off to the field doctor.

Where are you in this? I am not asking for winners or losers, a show of hands on political views, because I believe we must respond to Jerusalem, to the site of our first Pentecost, the site of the birth of the church of Christianity, a movement that included Jews from Jerusalem and people of all sorts of religious and political backgrounds to build a faith we now call Christianity. At that time, they called it the Way. What is the Way for you today? This is a deeply personal question. It is also a deeply political question. Not a partisan question. I do not care what political party you vote for. I ask that each of us pray, to our God, and consider what ways we can be faithful to the Earth, to the people who suffer today, to the people who inhabit the small city of Jerusalem and the surrounding area which include Gaza, and consider where God is in all of this. Where does the Holy Spirit spread her wings? How can we spread our wings of faith and live out what it means to be Pentecostals? That is a scary word for many old-fashioned, traditional Congregationalists worshipping in a church founded in 1616 and using a 1717 Meetinghouse, but we are part of the Pentecostal sweep of the Good Book, the Bible and if we believe that God is still speaking, what is God speaking to you today?

My professor of preaching and homiletics at Harvard, the Rev. Peter Gomes, taught me and countless undergraduate students and divinity students at Harvard about how and why we read the Bible. His most famous book, The Good Book, insists that we read the Bible as a living text.

“This means that behind the letter of the text is the spirit that animates it, the force that gave it and gives it life. Thus there is something always elusive about the Bible. This fixed text has a life of its own, which the reader cannot by some simple process of reading capture as his or her own. The dynamic quality of scripture has to do with the fact that while the text does not change; we who read that text do change; it is not that we adapt ourselves to the world of the Bible and play at re-creating it as in a pageant or tableau “long ago and far away.” Rather, it is that the text actually adapts itself to our capacity to hear it. Thus we hear the same texts that our ancestors heard but we hear them not necessarily as they heard them, but as only we can. Thus the reading and the hearing of scripture are for Christians in each generation a Pentecostal experience. That experience is described in the Book of Acts as the great moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon the great and diverse crowd of believers in Jerusalem. The writer of Acts goes to great lengths to describe the diversity of that crowd, people from all over the known world who had little in common with Jerusalem as the object of their pilgrimage. They are filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues.

(P. Gomes, The Good Book (New York: William and Morrow, 1996, 20-21)

If the Bible is a living text, if we should read it as the Spirit blows, if the story of Pentecost still matters, I invite you to listen to the great theologian and former dean of Howard Divinity School, Howard Thurman famously said, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Detail from a stained glass window featuring Howard Thurman at Howard University'sAndrew Rankin Memorial Chapel

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