Sermon - A Light by which to Understand

Preached on May 31, 2009, Pentecost Sunday, at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Ezekiel 37:1-14 & Acts 2:1-21

Dedicated to the high school graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.

The disciples that we read about in Acts believed that they had met God in the life of this son of Mary from Nazareth. They believed that in the life of Jesus, God was with them. But now Jesus was gone; not dead, but resurrected and returned to the heavenly realm, but not before he’d had the chance to tell them that God would still be with them, and that is what this day of Pentecost is about. The message for us today (and you can forget everything else if you remember this) the message of Pentecost is that God is still with us. God is with us, and the way that God is made real to us is as a Spirit, as a spiritual presence that we call the Holy Spirit.

I think that this day of Pentecost is important because it gives to us a story that helps us to see our own lives in a new way. It helps us to see what God is doing in our lives. I mean, it’s nice for me to get up and say that the message today is that God is with us, but what does that mean? If God is here, then what is God doing?

That’s where the story comes in. Now, this is an old story, told and heard by people in a very different time and culture than ours, so it will take a bit of understanding for us to hear what this story meant to them, and then what it can mean for us. That’s true for any part of the Biblical books, sometimes the language, ideas, and metaphors seem particularly foreign, and this is one of those times. So let us listen with careful ears to hear what God is doing as the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost was an interesting occasion for their first experience of the Holy Spirit, because Pentecost was a Jewish festival held fifty days after Passover, and a time when many Jews whose families had long since moved to other regions and kingdoms to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That’s why we heard that list of all those people and places that are hard to say and don’t mean anything to us, pronounced correctly or not. What that list meant to people in the first century was that a lot of foreigners were in the city that day. They spoke different languages and had little understanding of each other. This is an important list, and we’ll get back to it soon.

So here are all these people together at Pentecost, when suddenly they have an amazing religious experience of the spiritual presence of God. I love the way they it’s described in the book of Acts, because you get the sense that it was too amazing for words, and they just tried their best to explain it. There was “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind,” they said. It makes perfect sense that these words would come to mind, because they grew up hearing the scriptures that always talk about God’s spirit as a wind, or a breath. The Hebrew word Ruah can mean both spirit and wind, and so I’ll tell you what I tell the confirmation class every year: whenever you hear the words wind or breath in the scriptures, you know that they are symbolic of the spirit of God. So when the disciples have their own spiritual experience of God, they say that it was like the sound of wind, and everyone knows what they are talking about.

The next thing we read, as they search for some adequate language to describe the indescribable, is that “they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”
Tongues of fire? Really?
“Well, that’s what it seemed like.”
Fire makes us think of warmth and light, power and energy for those days before electricity. It is as if they felt enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Maybe if the story were told today, we would say that the experience of God is like a light bulb clicking on above each of our heads. Aha! Now we get it! Now we have a vision for our lives, for our community. Now we understand what our lives are all about.

The light bulb went on for the disciples, and they began to share the good news that they had learned from Jesus, and now another amazing thing happens. All those foreign people from that long list understand the good news in their own languages. The Holy Spirit came to people who didn’t understand each other and brought about understanding.

Now, you may be wondering about what the story said about the disciples speaking in tongues. That’s something that gets talked about in the early church, and some churches still talk about it, but not really in our tradition, and so we often don’t know what to make of this speaking in tongues. I’m not going to get into it except to say this. Since we don’t know what it’s about, let’s accept that in the New Testament, they saw speaking in tongues as a gift from God. It was legitimate and it was a good thing when it became the means of producing understanding. Do you remember the beginning of the famous passage in I Corinthians chapter 13? Paul is writing to a church in which some people have gotten out of hand with speaking in tongues, even when no one understands what they’re saying. So he writes to them “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” This speaking in tongues is supposed to increase love, and if it doesn’t, it’s just an annoying noise. That’s true about everything in our lives, isn’t it?

So that’s all I’m going to say about the speaking in tongues because figuring out what that means is not the point of this story. The point is that the Holy Spirit brought about understanding.

Now we are back at our question. If the message today is that God is with us as the Holy Spirit, then what is God doing?

God is helping us to understand each other. God gives us a flame of insight – or a light bulb – which becomes for us a light by which to understand. If we want to look for the presence of God among us, then we should pay attention to wherever people are learning to understand each other. Or, to put it another way, we should look to how we can share the good news of God in a way that others will understand. I’ve never believed that showing up at someone’s door with a pamphlet, or telling people that Jesus is the answer does much good. You can’t say that Jesus is the answer if no one is asking a question.

I remember of St. Francis, who said that we should “preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words.” To me, that means that we might help others to understand the message of God more with our actions than with our words, and this came from a man who showed great love to the poor and the sick, who gave them the comfort of hands-on care. When we act to alleviate the suffering of hunger, homelessness, illness, or loneliness, our actions reach across barriers of language, culture, and creed. People understand the message of being cared for, of friendship and community. I bet you know about this in your own lives, and I hope we know about this in this church.

I remember being a child and hearing in church about a group of missionaries who found out that they would be allowed to work in a foreign nation only on the condition that they could not say anything about their religion to anyone. They thought about it, and finally said “that’s no problem. Everything we need to communicate about our faith is in our work to improve health care, water quality, and education.” And when people would come to them privately, to ask why they did what they did, they would say “because of what Jesus taught us.”

On this day of Pentecost we celebrate that the Holy Spirit of God is with us here and now, giving us light by which to understand. Frederick Buechner described this gift so well, and I will close with his words, which speak so well to our graduates today, as you begin the next part of your lives. And they speak to all of us who wonder what the next part of our lives will be.

“Jesus himself is beyond our seeing, but in the darkness where we stand, we see, thanks to him, something of the path that stretches out from the door, something of whatever it is that keeps us trying more or less to follow the path even when we can hardly believe that it goes anywhere worth going or that we have what it takes to go there.” (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, page 62.)