Pentecost Sunday May 31st, 2009

Pentecost Sunday
May 31st, 2009

In our Confirmation classes for teenagers this year and in years past, here’s one of their favorite exercises:
We stand in a circle, preferably outside. Each person in turn lights a match and as in burns down says whatever comes into their heads about God, Jesus, their faith.
On a windy day outside, you may not have long. It’s amazing what gets blurted out. This year as we stood shivering in a circle in the parking lot up at the CLC, I remember one boy shouting out: “God wants me to make the world better!” before the flame blew out.
The point of the exercise? So that when someone suddenly turns to you and says, “So, why do you believe in God?”, or “Why do you bother to go to church?”, or “What do you Christians believe, anyway?,” you can answer with spontaneity and integrity.
These questions hardly ever arise after you walk out of church fresh from sermon and Communion or as you drive home after a church adult education class.
Nope, in my experience these questions pop up when you least expect them. And since people these days don’t have very long attention spans, you’ve got to whip out some response right then and there. In those situations you don’t usually have a lot of time to compose an answer.
That’s why the match exercise is so helpful. It’s amazing how a “tongue of fire” burning down to your fingers focuses the mind!

The feast of Pentecost—our special feast since we’re the Church of the Holy Spirit—is all about fire.
“Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”
A tongue: of course that’s a description of the shape of the vision of fire above their heads. But the Holy Spirit knows what She’s doing! Because those “tongue-shaped” flames loosened the apostles’ tongues.
They rushed to the windows and began to shout down the news that had been burning in their hearts for 50 days: “This Jesus we knew and loved has risen from the dead, and we have witnessed it ourselves!”
As if the matches were burning down in their fingers, they couldn’t wait any more. They had to shout out the good news.

Their words sparked answering flames in the strangers in the street who turned up their faces to see what all the fuss was about.
In fact the apostles’ shouts bypassed the listeners’ normal brain circuits and burned right through into their hearts and souls.
The language patterns that divided them, each from another—the diverse languages of Persia and Mesopotamia, Judea and Egypt, Israel and Libya—toppled before the fiery words of these ignorant Galilean fishermen and tax collectors. The Book of Acts quotes the hearers’ wonder: “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power!”

God has a flair for the dramatic! And the disciples needed a bit of fire.
Notice that until the Holy Spirit came, Jesus’ friends, men and women, were waiting, isolated in their own safe little community, for whatever Jesus had promised was going to happen.
They prayed together, they told stories of when and where and how Jesus had first looked into their eyes and said, “Come, follow me.”
Each one had a different story of how the presence of God in Jesus Christ had changed their lives—in some cases, like his friend Lazarus, had given them back their lives.
But reveal what God, what Jesus had meant to them to the people outside that house?
No way. Too scary. Look what had happened to Jesus! So they agreed they’d wait until the time was ripe, until they’d practiced more, until they were really ready..
I’ll bet if Jesus’ followers had been left on their own, they would have grown old together in that little house in Jerusalem and never made a peep outside it.
But God had other ideas: One morning tongues of fire licked their heads and the Spirit of God said, “NOW!!”
Because there were just too many other people out there in the scary world outside who needed the fiery words of new life.

The “gift of tongues” on Pentecost means this:
Not the whole foreign language translation-without-dictionaries business, although that’s pretty neat.
But the real gift of tongues happened when Jesus’ friends poured out to other people what his life and death had meant to them, and other people felt a yearning for what Jesus’ life and death could mean to them
Each person who spoke spoke their own truth in the Spirit; each person who heard, felt their own longing for a more meaningful, more abundant, life.

We are living in the age of the Holy Spirit. We are all “Pentecostals”!
And when we speak our truth about our faith to another person, the Holy Spirit speaks through us.
I want to be clear that by “our truth about our faith” I don’t mean doctrines or dogmas. I don’t mean hammering abstract truths into people’s heads.
I mean fire! Our truth about our faith is whatever warms us—sometimes like a gentle fire in the stove on a cool evening, sometimes like a bonfire on the verge of veering out of control.
When you or I speak to someone out of that truth, our truth, they’ll feel the Pentecost fire. If they’re ready—and the readiness is God’s business not ours—an answering spark will spring into flame.

Match, please! [light] “God in Jesus Christ loves me. I am enough. I don’t have to be anything or anyone else”.-----------------Amen.