May 27, 2007: LIGHTS, ACTION, POWER!
Acts 2:1-21, John 14:8-17, Psalm 104:24-34
Eileen Parfrey  ---  Springwater Presbyterian

That bit about the flame over the disciple's heads always raised questions for me: did it follow the disciples when they moved, was it hot, did it singe their hair? What must they have thought? As it happens, flames above heads weren't unheard of in the 1st century. In fact, the coin of the realm showed Caesar with a flame above his head. That flame meant Caesar had absolute power, that he was not only imperial but divine. So a bunch of nobodies with actual flames above their heads were a threat to Caesar's empire.

What would you do if you had a flame over your head? Maybe it would give you the creeps, but what if you possessed what the flame signified-absolute power and divinity. Want it? It's already yours. Don't take my word for it. Check out what Jesus tells his disciples in John. They will do what he did-and then some!-all because the Spirit herself lives in them. In us. If that's not power and divinity given to humans, I don't know what is. And it's the message of the Pentecost story: power and indwelling of God in humans. This is just not something ordinary mortals can wrap their heads around. No wonder we've gotta have a story to explain things. Because the Pentecost story isn't about "what happened," it's about "what was the result."

We just saw the movie, Big Fish. In the movie, a son hounds his story-telling father to just tell him "the truth" about himself, when in fact, as preposterous as the stories have appeared, they are the truth as the father knew it. The movie's point is that the story of your life is more important than the facts, because story tells the truth much better than facts. In the end, as his father is dying, the son comes to understand that his father has become the stories he told all his life.

Luke does something similar. He gives us the pattern of the whole plot of the book of Acts in this account of the constituting of the church. The rest is details. Unconventional, outrageous events occur. The not-church dismisses them out of hand or explains them away. Some perceive the events as threats to their personal power base, but others accept the message, embracing the Jesus Way and find their lives changed. It's not "what happened" but "what resulted." And the result today and all through Acts, is that the church is impelled to go out, to claim and proclaim what happened to them.

It seems so simple, doesn't it? God shakes things up, you believe it was God who acted, so you tell others about what happened, and pretty soon you have a community of the recipients of God's action. I heard about community of Christians on a Washington reservation that started because one woman thought her family needed a spiritual base. They decided to read the Bible, and after a couple of years, she announced to her family, "We're Christians, because we follow Jesus." That made sense to all of them, including the extended clan that had by now been coming to read the Bible with them. It was a natural step, then, to help folks on the Rez who have addiction problems. When they realized they needed a mentor with more experience, they invited a nearby Quaker minister to share his experiences with them. The addiction ministry is Christian faith-oriented, but there are no institutional expectations. They worship together when the time seems right, but there are no committee meetings, just people worshiping, helping others, because they have been empowered by God's activity in their lives. Simple.

I was in a medical waiting room this week. I must have been wearing my "You can talk to me" sign, because everyone who came in certainly did. One man was in for a procedure he hoped would alleviate his pain. The accent he apologized for revealed he was from the southern Sudan. He was wearing a cross around his neck, so I said, "And you are a Christian! That's unusual!" He looked so sad, I was afraid I'd offended him or reminded him of family lost in the brutal religious wars there. He was sad, he told me, sad for people who don't know about Jesus. Then he told me about his experience of the power of God's love. This is a temporary world, the man from Sudan said to me and every other person who came in. We acquire things here, he said, but we bring none of that with us when we die. God's love is bigger and more lasting than what we have here. He was on fire, telling about God's love through Jesus Christ.

The miracle of Pentecost is not, as some would have you believe, the miracle of people hearing, the babelfish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Pentecost is the Sudanese man stumbling with his English to tell the family from Fiji, the lady from Carver, the medical technicians and all the other Anglos that God's love lasts forever. Acts clearly says the disciples were filled with the power to speak. That would even be a miracle today. This so-called gift of "tongues" isn't just remarkable for giving the ability to speak. What is more amazing is that the Spirit gives us something worth saying. Assuming you could speak in another language that someone else understood, would you know what to say?

It's the Spirit's role to form a community whose purpose is to continue Jesus' work. Rob Bell says in Velvet Elvis, that spreading the gospel isn't about transporting God from one place to another. It's about identifying the God who is already there. Or, put the way the Acts story might put it, spreading the gospel is not the gift of hearing, that is, expecting others to figure out what we're saying. Spreading the gospel is the gift of speaking in such a way that others can understand us. Spreading the gospel is acknowledging you have received a gift worth sharing. Like that Sudanese man in the waiting room, Bell seems to think that we follow Jesus, not because it's a nice way to live, but because Jesus brings us to the ultimate reality. Like the message in the movie, Big Fish, if we keep telling this Jesus story long enough, it becomes who we are. We become the story. The story that God's love lasts forever, that God's love can't be bought, earned, or accomplished. We come with nothing, and we are given the world.

If the power of the Spirit came upon you today, would it be with the gift of hearing or would it be the gift of speaking? William Willimon believes that the miracle of the Spirit given at Pentecost is that the church is enabled "to 'go public' with its good news . . . to have something worth hearing." What would it take for ordinary Oregonian Christians such as yourselves to go public with your faith? Would you have something worth saying?

Return to Sermons