Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost: May 23, 2010
I have heard many people, including fellow pastors, say that, of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is the hardest to understand and relate to. It’s too ethereal, too nebulous, too much like a Halloween character. But, I actually find the Holy Spirit to be the easiest member of the trinity to understand.
God as Father is, for me, very difficult. I love my father…I do. But imagining him, only bigger and better, does not, I think, reveal much if anything of God. Perhaps the problem is that my imagination is particularly pathetic. I know some people don’t have the same problem with the Father part of the trinity. For them it is expansive and opens them to understanding God in new ways, but for me, it is distressingly limiting.
And, I like Jesus. His life is a guide for me…a plumb line. I do believe Jesus was a living Word of God. But there are limitations here as well…Jesus is historical, particular, and ultimately his life eludes me because he, the human Jesus, is not here now. He’s not here to show me what to do in the face of ethically questionable technology, military drone planes that allow us to kill from afar, mass communication that alienates us from one another as often as it connects us, and so many other ethical questions the authors of the bible could never have imagined. Jesus is situated in a time very different from ours, and so we have to extrapolate to apply his life to ours; that is not straightforward and sometimes seems downright impossible.
The Holy Spirit on the other hand is a very helpful image to me. Understanding God as a power, a movement of energy and life all around me, in and through us, pulling us in the direction of life and love really captures something with which I resonate. I can pray in order to connect with that movement and energy more easily than I can pray to God the Father. I can trust that the divine spirit moves in my context and if I can connect, God will be guiding me, nudging me here in our complex world.
I also find the metaphors the bible uses for the spirit to be particularly helpful…like the metaphor of “wind”. I mean, I live in the Midwest, for goodness sakes, and it’s spring and I have no difficulty at all relating to the idea of spirit as wind. I know wind. I can describe what wind is like. Sometimes it’s pleasant, sweeping the mosquitoes away and dissipating, at least for a moment, the humidity. And, sometimes it’s more than a little bit uncomfortable, blowing my hair across my face so I can’t see…carrying the cold that pierces me…nudging my car, and the 18 wheeler in front of me, this way and that as I drive on the interstate.
In describing what that Pentecost day was like, in trying to convey what it was like to receive the Holy Spirit, Luke, the author of Acts, turns to the wind. And I’m grateful he does, because I think it gives me a way to understand some of what might have happened that day.
In the early Christian church, this story was about the genesis of God’s Holy Spirit in our world. Jesus had been promising its arrival since before his death, and now that Jesus is gone, in comes the spirit. And Luke says this was like the coming of the wind – a violent wind, to be exact. That may seem a bit harsh and at odds with our sense that the spirit is gentle and good, but Luke is working very hard to make sure we have a sense of what they experienced that day. It wasn’t just a gentle comforting presence, it wasn’t just all good…it was challenging, and it was powerful.
The Greek word we translate as “violent” only appears as an adjective once in the bible – that’s not how you “normally” use this word. Luke used it this way for the sake of hyperbole. It’s meant to emphasize how significant this day was. Sort of like when we say “dead serious” to emphasize that this is not just the normal mode of being serious, but serious with an added graveness, and soberness.
The coming of the spirit is a major highlight for Luke. Unfortunately, I think we’ve lost this sense of occasion in our modern day Pentecost celebrations. We don’t put it in anything close to the same category as Christmas and Easter, but for Luke it WAS just as significant. This is the third part of a three-part story: the birth, the resurrection, the coming of the spirit to the whole world. Look at your book marks – look at what it says: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh!” This is as miraculous and meaning-filled as the two other occasions we celebrate so thoroughly in the church.
There are other bible translations that, instead of “violent wind”, read “mighty wind” or “strong wind”. But given how Pentecost gets short shrift in the Christian church today, recovering the jarring metaphor of “violent” is maybe not a bad idea. The very fact that it is a shocking and disturbing word is reason enough to keep it. If we’re surprised when Luke compares the spirit to a violent wind, then I’m not sure we understand the magnitude of what God’s spirit really is. I’m not sure we can really imagine what it would look like if someone was filled with the Spirit of God. Pentecost is a good time to stop and ask what we, as individuals and the church, would look like if the spirit of God was working in us like a violent wind. Our churches today, filled with spiritual descendants of those people first gathered in the house when the spirit came, should be “violent wind churches.”
What would a church look like if it were filled with this Holy spirit Luke describes? Are we a violent wind church? Barbara Brown Taylor, a priest and author, gives a pretty good description of what a violent wind church looks like. She says it’s a place “where there is such a strong wind blowing toward the open doors of the church that people would have to lash themselves to the pews in order to stay inside”…but they don’t. “Sure,” she writes, “they come back one day in seven to rally, to rest and reflect,” but then the wind starts up and it’s back into the world again.
I don’t think you would get much argument from anyone if you called our church a “quiet” church. We are people quietly going about our work and mission that we believe God is calling us to do. We don’t draw attention to ourselves, we don’t blow our trumpets and tell everyone “look at us, be like us, believe like us!!” I suspect you would agree with this – and I would go so far as to say we value being a “quiet” church. Quiet may be a good word to describe us in some ways, and I share the values it implies, but I’m not sure it captures the volume of what we really “say”. I’m not sure it gets at our “violent wind” nature.
For Luke, the spirit causes the disciples to speak in languages people can understand, even though they only knew how to speak Greek. The disciples presumably don’t speak an iota of Cappadocian and they never took Arabic 101. Yet the people there said they could hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power. I think in this context, the word “speaking” needs to be in quotations. They were “speaking”, but not with their mouths, not with words like we use in normal communication. They were speaking in some way that transcended language barriers, that bridged chasms of distances and reconciled massive differences. We all know that if we really want to be heard, words are not always the best tool to get our point across – in fact sometimes they get in the way.
I think our church speaks in ways that transcend language – our witness can be understood by all. We use very few words, which makes sense. Often the words Christians use to try to tell about the Good News divide, they cannot be “heard” by others; they do not make sense; they certainly do not help show the Spirit. One person in our church was recently wondering out loud about how we do or don’t tell others about the good news, because it seems like when some Christians try to do that, they just end up “turning people off” or upsetting them or alienating them, or making them feel bad. I think that’s because too often, the words people use draw attention to themselves, their lives, their beliefs, their expectations, their ideas. And it’s not about drawing attention to ourselves. A violent wind church is never seen, heard or felt as much as the wind carrying it into the world.
I think we are a violent wind church. We are not loud about who we are, we do not draw attention to ourselves and our beliefs, we don’t tell people what’s wrong with them and how they can fix it. Instead, the wind in this church is so strong that it blows us through the open doors and out into the world to live spirit-filled lives. We ride the wind into the world, let it push us where we are to go, and the wind does all the speaking for us. We act like people filled with the Holy Spirit Jesus promised to his disciples – the one that would allow them to do greater things than he did, that would guide them in ministry and compassion and justice. And those “words” of action speak to people, no matter what their language is, no matter what they believe or what they have experienced.
When Luke described what happened when the spirit filled the room the disciples were in, he said it looked like there were tongues of fire resting on the heads of each of them there. It’s a great picture, and it worked especially well at a time when “tongues of fire” was a widely recognized sign of power – something usually associated with rulers and kings and the gods. When I think about how it looks here and now, I think that when you all participate in the work of the Spirit, the spirit pours out of your eyes, your ears, your fingers and toes as you go about your daily lives. You radiate God and Good News. You may not say anything, but your life shouts – the spirit cannot be quiet. You may not get up in front of hoards of people and tell them about your faith in God, but the light pouring out of your body is deafening.
The spirit is at work in the world. There is a lot of grey out there, and a lot of loud voices speaking something other than God’s word, but the spirit can drown those voices out. The spirit speaks in acts of love, compassion and justice. The spirit speaks hope and reconciliation, without even saying one word about what someone else should do.
We are, I believe, a violent wind church – a violent wind people. When people look at your lives, they understand something of God’s goodness and hope even if you say nothing of Jesus and they know nothing of Pentecost. And today, we celebrate this. We celebrate the gift of the spirit – a gift from God that gives us permission to go out and live loudly. This gift is here, it’s all around us. If we connect to this violent wind – this amazing, sometimes scary, power, what a ride it will be.
We also celebrate the spirit of this church, and all churches filled with the Spirit of God. We celebrate because to say that the spirit is here, moving us, living in and through us, blowing us out of this church into the world, shining out of our eyes and ears and fingers and toes, is to say that God is not only present in this world, but is shouting out good news and hope for all. The wind is whipping through our church, our town and our homes, our work places and our world. And we celebrate because we get to be a part of the party! We get to participate in what none other than Jesus himself started – the bringing about of God’s realm into this time and place.
There are times to be quiet. There are times the spirit is gentle, comforting and peaceful. There are times the spirit is like a pleasant, breezy wind on a warm summer day. But, the spirit of God cannot be quiet for long – it does not blow gently for long. The spirit that came at Pentecost rushes through our sanctuary like a violent wind, and it lifts us right out of our seats and whooshes us out the door. It fills us with its energy and its power. Then we, in turn, hit the world like a violent wind – bringing refreshing air to people locked in stale rooms, at times we make a mess of the status quo and we break open the systems that oppress and ignore. We might blow the roofs and doors off of institutions and communities that discriminate or marginalize.
We are a violent wind church, because God has poured out the divine spirit upon all flesh. And that spirit is what makes us who we are: disciples radiating the love of God in all we do. Amen.
