Pentecost Acts 2:1-21
Acts 2:12 is on my car's license plate. I used to write it on my college papers. People look at Acts 2:12 and ask, “What does it mean?” and I agree with them, “Exactly”. For the verse is the question: “What does this mean?” There at least three explanations for the meaning of spiritual events on that Pentecost and the spiritual events throughout time including our own.
Confusion
Folks are confused with the spirit breaks out into new ways. There were faithful and good Jews, people of God, who saw the spirit being given to people of all languages and nationalities in a way never experienced before. They didn't know what to do with a God that did work the way they were used to God working.
When we have contemporary service in the fellowship hall, I see this confusion on the good folks. They cannot imagine God reaching out to folks in a place other than a formal sanctuary, where God has reached them and their friends for decades. These good folk are good sports, they volunteer to bring the pulpit, the baptismal, I suspect if I asked them they would bring the pews down into the hall, for that is the way God is worship, how people meet God. These new ways for meeting God are as confusing as the tongues of fire and the joining of languages was to the first century folks on that first Christian Pentecost.
We need to help link the new to the old. We need to calm the confusion with references to our purpose and God's promises. Like Peter did that confusing day long ago, when he read from the familiar prophet Joel to illustrate how what was happening, even new and confusing, was a part of God's loving and familiar plan.
Amazement
All were amazed, saying to one another, “what does this mean?” We have a lot of amazed people who don't know what to do about the work of the spirit. They know there is something, but don't know what. We had pre-teen in the sanctuary recently, she called this place “the wedding place”. There is something about this place, something amazing, but we don't have words like church or congregation or worship or even God to name the amazement that we fell.
These folks know something profound should be going on and they thrash around trying to find it on their own. In the Bible there are “God-fearers” those who were interested in the Jewish religion enough to follow some of the laws and practices but not enough pursue conversion. Maybe that would be a more kind descriptions of the ones who are amazed and wonder what all this means without knowing or joining in.
We need to be ministers to the amazed God-fearers as Peter was in this scripture. For such people, funeral services are no longer witness to the resurrection of Christ, but a celebration of the person's life. It has to be personal. The minister has to know the person, but there is something else needed…they don't know that the minister needs to know Jesus Christ as well as their loved one. These folks need to get up and speak at the funeral. (This is part of the modern mindset, the need to be participates, co-creators of the service) Yet, they don't know what to say, for they are in awe, and worship of God becomes groans too deep for words.
One of the ways we are moving to be helpful and relevant to these Godfearers is to help them in their confusion. Here are some of the questions I included in a service last month where the folks were not church folk. The service is at a funeral home instead of a sanctuary set apart for Christian worship: Now, during the service, or later during reflection, family and friends are invited to share with others the faithful witness contained in the life of Georgia guided by these questions: What story or teaching about Jesus reminds you of Georgia? What was good, kind, and faithful about her? How has Georgia encouraged your faith and inspired you? Why is the world a little different because of her? How will you remember and be faithful to Georgia's values & faith?
We need to be guides to the unknown for folks who are raised free of any religious experience other than the distorted fun house mirror of media religion. Not reject their efforts to be holy as naive and annoying, but welcome their amazement as evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit, just like at Pentecost.
Ridicule
Another is ridicule. Some say, “They are drunk.” They make no sense. There is nothing rational in their witness. This is the loud cries of the rationalists, the proud atheists and unconcerned agnostic. Where the God-fearers see the amazing without the grace behind it; the God-deniers throw out the amazing with the grace. If it isn't scientific, rational, logical, predicable, repeatable, controllable, provable is of no value.
For me the struggle between proofs of religion, is like asking “How much does love weigh?” “What is the color of faith?” or “What is the average speed of hope?” and when the faith, hope, and love folk don't have answers dismissing them as illusions and unimportant.
Everything depends on faith. Even mathematics, Godel proved that in mathematics, items could be true but not provable. Sounds like faith.
In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn't be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms … of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules.
–Jones and Wilson, An Incomplete Education, quoted on www.miskatonic.org/godel.htm
Those who take refuge in science and rationality to avoid uncertainty and mystery are thrust back into the abyss of unknowing if not by Gödel's Theorem then by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that we knowing a particle's absolute position means we cannot know it speed and visa versa. We cannot even measure with certainty. Quantum mechanic depends on light and all matter in being at once both a wave and a particle! Just like Heisenberg the more we know, the less we are certain.
Trying to prove faith, to have controlled double blind experiments in prayer, to carbon date the wood of the ark, to map the Garden of Eden is doomed for it sucks us into the false promise of knowledge, certainty, and control that rationalist tempts the faithful since the dawn of time. We cannot build a tower to the heavens any more than we can fly by pulling our own hair.
Instead, we have to invite the members of our folk that worship proof, certainty, and rationality to join us in the realm of faith and mystery. Of truth that is unprovable but true, by faith. Of realities that cannot be caught and measured such as love and hope. Of things that are both-and, like God with us in Jesus Christ fully human and fully divine.
Spirit
The explanation of the very own language is in Acts from the prophet Joel. We need to lift up our reality. We need to speak it in the mother tongues of all those. We need to speak the language of those whose mother's tongue is the beat of modernity and see the world interpreted by media of the moment more than message of the messiah. We need to give voice to those groans too deep for words, for the mystery they feel but cannot grasp.
We need to speak to those who fear and flee mystery and uncertainty only to find an ever deeper mystery in the very foundation of the tower of science they have built to be like Gods. We need to abandon fighting for proof and certainty, as the greatest thinkers in science already have, and reintroduce the materialist to the inescapable mystery that we know as God.
For those whose dreams are confused…we need to link God's larger dream to the ones we have cherished so long.
For those who are amazed by Spirit…we need to reveal to them God's spirit in the life and work of Jesus Christ for humanity
For those whose vision stops at the surface mechanics…we need to introduce them to the deep mystery that our faith and their tower of science rests upon. The one true God, the creator, redeemer and sustainer of all.
We need to dream dreams and see visions. Where young and old, men and women are together in God's dream of saving all those who call out for help to God, the giver of Spirit to all people.
Advanced permission is given for non-profit, for-prophet use of the above at no charge as long as it is reproduced unedited with notices and copyright intact. Written copies are provided after they are preached as a courtesy for the personal, private, appreciative use of the congregation of Goodyear Heights Presbyterian Church, their families and friends to support the ministry of Goodyear Heights Presbyterian Church and its pastor the Rev. J. Christy Ramsey. Join us Sundays! 8:15 Traditional Worship and 10:15 Blended. Mingle in our Gathering Room between services and take advantage of Christian Education opportunities.
