2025-06-09
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
I LOVE Pentecost! It is one of my favorite days in the liturgical year! I love the drama and vision of it: the great wind blowing, the flames licking up around people’s head and most of all, people speaking, hearing and under-standing other languages. And when the Spirit blows through, Peter offers a great sermon and 3000 people join the church! What’s not to love?!
I’m afraid I have made poor Beth a bit anxious these last weeks after I shared with her my Pentecost worship dream of setting up guide wires that would run from the back of the balcony to urns on the chancel which we would light from the back, watch the flame race down and ignite the urns so that fire would shoot up as we read the scripture. I promised her that I wouldn’t do that on my first Pentecost here. I think she is immensely relieved that it will be my only Pentecost here.
Then I told her about the times that I have dumped 100s of red, yellow and orange balloons from a net strung across the width of the sanctuary as we read the Acts story. She was convinced that I would do this today! So I threw her off with the beach balls, bubbles and party horns instead!
But I love Pentecost not just because I thrive in chaos and love having an excuse to build it into the worship service . . . but because I love the theological implications of the communal nature of the Holy Spirit’s arrival. Listen to the language of the story: “They were all together in one place” . . . “filled the entire house” . . . “all of them were filled” . . . Even when Peter spoke, he did so, “standing with the eleven.”
These ideas run counter to our societal value of rugged individualism where we are taught to look out for ourselves first and foremost. And that characteristic is not only revered in our culture but too often also holds true in the church. One of my biggest pet peeves is when pastors say things like, “My church is doing really well.” Or worse, “My people are really engaged.” There is nothing scriptural about “my congregation’s success” because the church and its people belong to God, not me. It is simply our call to help spread the Good News to the ends of the earth.
I love that the Spirit descended first on the community as a whole and then on all the individuals in it. Although we often speak of the Holy Spirit in individual terms, this communal understanding strengthens and comforts me. The Spirit is not a private possession, but rather a gift shared by all the people of faith who then share it with the wider world.
Take a moment and imagine what would happen if the Christian community saw the Holy Spirit not as a gift to be possessed by individuals, but as something to be shared with the whole community. Picture it spilling out into the streets just as it did when the Spirit came to the disciples millennia ago. Those disciples had been hidden away in a room, praying among themselves until the Holy Spirit came along and they suddenly rushed out into the street to join the crowds who had gathered for Sha-vu-ot, the Jewish festival of thanks and hope for the coming harvest.
Although Federated does this far better than most, imagine how different our faith and churches would be if we all took the teachings of Jesus out of our sanctuaries and shared the good news in the streets! Perhaps 3000 new members in a day wouldn’t seem like just hyperbole!
Because of those 3000 new members, Pentecost is considered the birthday of the church, hence Janine’s party with the kids. Isn’t it interesting that the church was born when people moved out of the place where they had been locked away and into the street instead? And the Spirit is still moving in a similar way today, calling us from the comfort of spaces where we fill content among folks we know into an openness with all kinds of people. Calling us from prayer to action and from small rooms to worlds full of possibility.
When the Spirit arrived on that first Pentecost day, the most amazing thing happened! The apostles, who up until this point, had remained a very insulated group, were now suddenly proclaiming the love of God in each resident’s own native language. Imagine what that must have felt like: people both hearing and understanding in their own language. Imagine if someone reached out to you like that, seeing you for exactly who you are at your core . . . doesn’t that make it so much easier to hear what they have to say in return?
The real power of Pentecost is that it forces us to talk about a mystery we can’t fully understand without starting to squirm in our seats. As people who are used to “faith seeking understanding” as the title of my seminary theology text put it, we struggle with the Holy Spirit that defies comprehension.
What Pentecost challenges us to confront is whether we have the courage to enable the Holy Spirit to transform us from ordinary, imperfect people into the Body of Christ. Will we allow the Spirit to disrupt our humdrum ways of engaging the Divine so that something new and holy can be born among us? Are we willing to cast aside our egos, move from concerns for ourselves as individuals and siloed congregations to commit to the community of the world? I have a plaque in my office that says, “If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.” Pentecost dares us to dream of the expansive ways that God can be in the world that are more monumental than we can even imagine.
Friends, Pentecost wasn’t a one-time event long ago. It isn’t over! In this time of transition, the gift of having a chance to reimagine a sense of purpose, to listen and have the Holy Spirit blow through, setting our faith on fire, is a gift we can claim today. We can get caught up with the cliché of the way things used to be. We can focus on doctrine and rules. Or we can dare to follow where God is leading us into new and exciting places.
My prayer is that this day may be one on which Spirit carries us out of the rooms where we might be holed up with our suspicions, tribalism and fears, and instead blows us out into streets to find radical new ways engaging God and our neighbors. It may be a bit chaotic, but how exciting is that! May it be so! Amen.