“What Does This Mean?”
Pentecost Yr. C
Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-27
5/23/10
Lorraine Ljunggren

        This past Thursday I sat around a table with a group of area clergy. Each one of us represented a different denomination or a different faith tradition. We were female and male, black and white, younger and older. We were having a conversation about how we clergy can best be of service to our local community, a community struggling with questions about race and class, about who has access to what services our state provides, about how we can remain civil in discourse among people with whom we energetically and theologically disagree. We asked ourselves to what lengths we are willing to go to be witnesses for justice – to point to injustice – particularly as injustice, once it gains a local foothold, can spread across our state or nation. We asked ourselves what are we willing to do, how far are we willing to go to keep or create local public policy which I would describe in the words of our Baptismal Covenant respects the dignity of every human being and works for justice and peace among all people?

        We also acknowledged that there is a type of depression going about that isn't clinical depression – it's what some are calling 'situational depression.' Oil is coming ashore in the Gulf of Mexico and is likely to make its way to North Carolina beaches. Much of the shrimping industry in the Gulf is destroyed and it will take an indeterminable amount of time for the eco-system to recover. Membership in hate groups has increased since the election of a President whose lineage is multi-racial. A candidate for the U.S. Senate says it should be okay for private businesses not to serve people of color. The state budget before our own legislature is causing teachers to be laid off and cuts to be made in all manner of services for the most vulnerable of our citizens. Members of our congregations are experiencing tough economic times while demands for help increase. We never even got to other national or international concerns.

        After verbalizing the list of problems a silence fell over those of us at the
table.

        I then said, “But Pentecost is coming. The giving of the Law to Moses on
Mt. Sinai. The coming of the Holy Spirit on the followers of Jesus.” I looked around at my colleagues. I think everyone was nodding in the affirmative. I said, “And, here we are – clergy called to preach justice and hope to our people.” Again there were nods in the affirmative around the table. Shortly afterward, we adjourned.

        As we were leaving, I walked to the parking lot alongside a Baptist colleague. I told her I was headed home to work on my Pentecost sermon. She laughingly said that if it got one would I send it to her! She said she had been thinking about the question in the Acts reading when the crowd asks, “What does this mean?” And I knew that is the presenting question – that is what we are to ask ourselves today. “What does this mean?”

        One hundred and twenty or so followers of Jesus, women and men, are gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks -- a feast which began as a spring agricultural celebration fifty days after Passover which, by the first century, also marked God's giving of the Law to Moses and the Hebrew people at Mt. Sinai. To those Jewish people who were from Greek speaking locales, the feast was known as Pentecost. This particular Pentecost, though, was about to have a remarkable layer of meaning added to it.

        The one place, the house must be large where the one hundred and twenty women and men, and my guess is their children are there as well, all gathered together. We rely on the written account of their memory of the experience – the story of which they probably told over and over.

        But, whatever happens literally, suddenly everything changes! There is a rush as of a mighty wind. There is brightness as of a visible fire. Something beyond words happens, so they have to use images to help us understand what they experience – what they identify as something powerful – as something which could only be of God – as something beyond a person to something that is Spirit – something that is Holy Spirit.

        We can identify with what it feels like to have wind push on us as we walk across an open space when a storm is coming. We know what it feels like to have our faces glow with warmth in front of a roaring fire. We know what it feels like to have life suddenly change – to realize that who we were a few moments ago is
now a new us – to wonder how it is we have this knowledge – to wonder could the new us be inspired by a Spirit we cannot see – a Holy Spirit which is of God.

        “What does this mean?” this Pentecost.

        Whether or not we have had an experience like the followers of Jesus at that first Pentecost, we are, like them, people of God, formed and shaped, called and loved so fully and so deeply that, if we're willing to open ourselves to the possibility, we can be new and renewed people.

        Like the followers of Jesus we are individuals, unique in our gifts and talents, each with something to offer the world around us. Like the followers of Jesus we are part of a community of faithful people seeking understanding, altogether with something to offer the world around us.

        The world around us is longing for us all to be bearers of hope – not just in the words we use to speak or to write – but in our actions – our everyday, day-in- and-day-out actions. For those of us in school: How do we treat a classmate who seems to have no friends? How do we truly welcome a new grade-schooler or teenager into our Sunday school programs? How do we move beyond the cliques that form everywhere we go – to open our hearts and our activities to those who are new or shy or different?

        How do we adults treat our co-workers, those who have authority over us
and those over whom we have authority? How do we treat those family members whose personalities or habits tend to drive us to distraction? How do we react, not only outwardly but inwardly, to people who are of different skin colors or ethnic origins or – just fill in the blank with the differences which abound among us human beings? How do we adults decide whether or not to come to church on a Sunday morning when our beds are warm and the coffee is hot?? How do we discern whether or not our lives and the lives of those around us are made better or worse by our choices?

        How far are we willing to go for this Spirit, this Holy Spirit, this Holy Spirit of God who does still swirl around us, seeking to inspire our hearts and minds, our knowledge and love of God? How far are we willing to go to nurture the faith that is in us or the faith for which long?

        I confess there are days in which I long for the experience of a rushing wind and fiery warmth to rekindle in me beyond a shadow of a doubt the truth that the Spirit of God is alive within me, calling me to be a witness in St. Mark's and in all the surrounding community. And I confess there are days when I know intellectually and in my soul that the Spirit of God is alive within me encouraging me to be a witness with you here at St. Mark's, but more than here – to those whose lives unfold outside our doors.

        You and I, as unique individuals and as a community of faithful people, are being blessed with the same Holy Spirit who forms and shapes, calls and loves us so fully and so deeply that we are a renewed people, ready to help renew the world.

        So, in words adapted from a prayer by Edward Hays in his book Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim:
“Come and awaken us, Spirit of the new.
Come and refresh us, Creator of green life.
Come and inspire us, Risen Son,
you who make all things new:
we are too young…
to be stagnant in spirit.
Come, O you who are ever-new;
wrap our hearts in a new skin,
ever flexible to be reformed by your Spirit.
Set our feet to fresh paths this day:
inspire us to speak original and life-giving words
and to creatively give shape to the new.”

Amen.


©2010 Lorraine Ljunggren