Scripture Reading: Acts 2:1-13
Pentecost, the setting for the story told in Acts 2, was a spring harvest festival. Every year Jews and God-fearing Gentiles from all over the known world gathered in Jerusalem, to celebrate the first harvest of spring wheat. It was a way of giving thanks to God for sustaining life on Earth and making it good, in spite of crises, setbacks and fears along the way.
This time, the followers of Jesus experience a new kind of harvest as well – in themselves.
Jesus has only recently been put to death and buried, and then experienced by them as risen from the dead. They are not sure what this means for them. But as the Feast of Pentecost unfolds in the city around them, and they begin to feel the Spirit of Christ coming to life within them, they begin to understand that they are God’s new harvest. Jesus was sown by God like a seed into the life of the world, and now they who follow him are the fruit of that planting for the ongoing well-being of the world.
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Gathered here from all parts of the world, we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.”
Reflection
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound … came from heaven, and filled the whole house where they were sitting … they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
I can never read this story without remembering the one summer when I was in high school, and I attended a weekly Bible study in a large, old house on a far side of the city. Every Tuesday night 50 or 75 or maybe even more, mostly high school and university students – squeezed in and filled every square foot of sofa, chair, table, rug, floor, and stairs in the front hallway and living room, the adjoining dining room and a side sitting room – almost the whole of the first floor of the house. (You have to remember, this was the time – late 60’s, early 70’, of the Jesus Freak Movement.)
The study began at 7 and would go for 2 or even 3 hours. There was prayer and singing. A Bible reading, a talk about it, and discussion. More singing and prayers of praise and thanks, and of longing, intercession and lament.
At some point, a sound would begin in a corner. An exotic, beautiful, quiet lilt of a sound – words but not words, song but more than song. It would quietly enter into the room, slowly grow a bit in volume, invite the silence of other talk, catch up a few others in its flow, rise and fall, and rise and fall again. And again, until we all were entranced by its beauty and mystery. Until slowly, peacefully it would come to an end.
I needed that at that point in my life, and I am grateful for it. My home church experience and my own faith seemed dry, moralistic, rigid and judgmental. This experience of glossolalia spoke to my need for something joyful, mysterious, beautifully engaging and transforming about God. It spoke to something in me that needed to be touched and awakened.
About this same I also heard the rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar” for the first time. (And yes, the two are related!) On Easter weekend 1971, a local radio station played it in its entirety. I closed myself in to my bedroom at the appointed time, turned on my plastic table radio, tuned in and sat transfixed.
It felt like I was hearing the Gospel of Jesus for the first time ever, because it was in a language and a medium that I understood and loved. I had been told in some sermons that rock music was of the devil. But this, too – and as much as the charismatic Bible study, was a spiritually transforming experience. Something in me felt like I felt like I was in church – a church I could love going to, where I felt closer to Jesus than I had known before.
Some years, to make Pentecost special, we try to create a decorative or liturgical extravaganza in the sanctuary. We focus on the spectacular in the story – the great wind, the fire, the foreign tongues, the strangeness that led some outsiders to think the disciples were drunk. We bring in balloons, wind machines, fire, streamers, wild and chaotic liturgy.
This year, though, things are a little calmer. More measured and steady. A red cloth coming down gently from the cross, flowing towards the table. Gathering there in a quiet semblance of flame – not wild passion that left unattended might burn everything down – but more a quiet groundfire, a warm glowing that invites folks to come near and gather, to take in the warmth and the light themselves, and then let it flow through them beyond the table and into the world.
And … I notice now, without the pulpit and the minister getting in the way! But with pulpit and minister off to the side, just kind of on the sideline, witnessing what’s happening. Isn’t that a sermon in itself!!
Anyway, this quiet way of being invited into knowing and sharing God’s love for all, reminds me of how I’ve also been touched and spoken to, at times, by Taize worship. In Taize worship the mood is quiet and meditative by design. The music is simple songs of few words -- simple prayers or Bible verses, sung as quiet chants maybe six, or seven, or eight times over, slowly and calmly. With long silence between them, to let them sink even deeper into mind and heart.
After a while there’s a Bible reading. With no talk after it. Again, just silence to let the heart, the mind and the soul be opened and filled with what you’ve just hears of God’s love, and promise and presence.
Candles are all around, lending an aura of warm embrace. And at the front of the gathering place there is always a large cross laid down on the floor or on the ground, to which near the end of the service, people are invited to come, if they wish, to kneel, light a candle, and kneel or sit for a while at the cross, before rising to leave and to return to the world once again, shaped and filled by the love of God poured out into all the world in Christ on the cross, and now known in and through us.
And that’s what Pentecost is about. It’s about the love of God for all, made known and acted out in the one person of Jesus, expressed most clearly and perfectly in the cross, now flowing in a hundred million different ways into the life of the world through those who are rooted and growing in him. In varieties of languages. By varieties of acts. Through diversity of programs. In as many new and novel ways of reaching out, as there are people to be reached and to do the reaching.
Just think about it -- about Pentecost itself, the way the first disciples
and the people around them would have experienced and understood it. Before we got our hands, our doctrines, and our agendas on it, and made it into something it wasn't originally.
Pentecost was a harvest festival. It was a celebration of the first harvest of wheat gathered in the spring – new grain good for the ongoing life of the world, that grew up fifty- and sixty- and hundred-fold from the single seeds sown into and buried in the ground the season before. “A seed is no good,” Jesus said, “unless it dies and is buried, and brings forth new fruit – some sixty, some eighty, some hundredfold … but always reproducing, raising up, and multiplying its life and its effect through the new growth that comes after.”
Jesus had only recently died and been buried. Only recently had he been raised to new life, and they had seen him again. Only recently had they seen him leave again, ascending to heaven, leaving them on Earth and telling them to stay where they were until they were clothed with power from on high. They weren’t sure what this meant, until on the day of Pentecost they found themselves doing what they had seen Jesus do – and even more, as he said they would, speaking and bearing witness to God’s love for all, in tongues and languages and ways that all those others could understand, even if the disciples couldn’t.
Jesus – true human being and incarnation of God’s love for all was the good seed of God sown into the life of the world and buried in the soil of their life. And they now are the fruit of it – the first harvest of many. Jesus was one, and now in them the life that was in him is raised up, reproduced and multiplied twelve and a hundred and a thousand-fold – they now are the new crop of God’s grain for the ongoing life of the world.
Pentecost is about us knowing and acting out our place and our purpose in the life of the world, as the fruit of what God sowed into the world in Jesus. It’s about growing up to be here in all our numbers and variety for the good of the world, as he was in his singularity. It’s about acting in all the ways we are able in our time for the well-being of all, as he did in the ways available to him in his time. It’s about helping others, as he did, to know and to feel God’s love for them, in whatever ways make sense to the other.
And it starts right here. It starts with letting God sow Jesus into the soil of our lives, so we can then be used by God to speak and act out God’s love for others. When we let ourselves be rooted in Jesus, let him be sown dep down into our lives as a seed, how can we not become the good grain that God raises up in our time for the well-being of others?
Thanks be to God.
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