WHAT'S GOING ON HERE? -- Pentecost Sunday 2018

Acts 2:1-12
When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.  Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from.  It filled the whole building.  Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks, and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them.

There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world.  When they heard the sound, they came on the run.  Then when they heard, one after another, their own mother tongues being spoken, they were thunderstruck.  They couldn’t for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, “Aren’t these all Galileans?  How come we’re hearing them talk in our various mother tongues?

    Parthians, Medes, and Elamites;
    Visitors from Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia,
        Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
        Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene;
    Immigrants from Rome, both Jews and proselytes;
    Even Cretans and Arabs!

“They’re speaking our languages, describing God’s mighty works!”
  
Their heads were spinning; they couldn’t make head or tail of any of it.  They talked back and forth, confused: “What’s going on here?”
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Today is Pentecost Sunday, the fiftieth day after Easter, the birthday of the church - the day when, according to scripture, a lost and leaderless band of Galileans was hit by a wildfire outbreak of the Spirit and turned into a force that literally changed the world.

Reading scripture is not as easy as it seems it should be – we read the stories and we try to imagine what it was like, but we really don’t have the background to do a very good job.  We simply don’t know enough about that long-ago place or the people who lived there.  So, as often as not, we end up with some Hollywood version which bears no likeness at all to the reality we seek.  We label the whole event a “miracle” and completely remove it from any cultural or historical context from its own time.

On top of that, if we’ve been hearing the same story for years, we probably pretty well tune it out at the reading...because, you know, we’ve heard it all before, blah, blah, blah.

Here’s a secret for you:  even preachers do this.  But we have to try to work past it.

Jerusalem was filled that day with pilgrims from all over, there to celebrate the Jewish Feast of Pentecost – a first-fruits offering of gratitude for new crops and renewed food stores – but it’s likely that most of those in attendance were local Jews – good traditional followers of the way of Abraham and Moses.  Except for a handful of people, Jerusalem had long ago moved on from the temporary excitement that had surrounded Jesus.

But then something happened, and the leader of this small group of overlooked and scorned, “ignorant, backwater” folks, as Galileans would have been viewed back then, started speaking out.  And when this lower-class, ordinary fisherman started speaking, everyone stopped and started listening, because they were hearing something new and amazing – something that touched the deepest places within them.

When we label things as “miracles” we pretend they happen outside any cultural context.  That would be a mistake with the beginnings of the Church.  Upper middle-class and rich people are rarely looking for change.  They are comfortable as things are and change could mean loss for them.  It is the poor, the lower classes, who are most often ripe for change.  I misspoke a minute ago when I said the “everyone stopped and started listening.”  It wasn’t “everyone” – it was the ones with open ears, “ears to hear.”  Those who were tired of being less-than others.  Tired of being told their misery was their own fault, or even worse, that it was God’s plan for them. 

And in the case of the newly born “Christianity” it turned out to be the poor, the voiceless who were most ready to hear the story and accept it.  Not exclusively, but largely, in Jerusalem that day and all around the near east and southern Europe as the story grew and traveled.  The Spirit’s story has always been one of liberation for the less-than, the power-less, the meek – God’s beloved ones.

I said earlier that even preachers can be uninspired by scripture when they’ve already preached on something a couple of dozen times.

This year I was given new eyes to see the Pentecost story playing out right in front of me – in our own time.  I spoke last week about Rev. Dr. William Barber and the Moral Mondays movement and how it has led to the current Poor People’s Campaign that is happening right now.  That moral campaign that is based in the simple belief that “Everybody's got a right to live.”  The movement that has been labeled a “protest-turned-revival-meeting.”

I just received my copy of Dr. Barber’s book, “The Third Reconstruction.”  Even though I am already reading three books right now, as soon as the book came in I stopped what I was doing and read the Prologue.  And reading it, I found Pentecost again.  This book was issued in 2016 and doesn’t discuss the Poor People’s Campaign, which was only an idea, at most at that time.  Instead it talks about all the civil rights campaigns leading up to the Moral Mondays, which would one day lead to the current campaign.

I’m going to read a bit of it here:

"I had been invited to go to Washington because Moral Mondays had gained national attention during that summer of 2013. On April 29, 2013, sixteen close colleagues and I had been arrested at the North Carolina statehouse for exercising our constitutional right to publicly instruct our legislators. We did not call it a Moral Monday when we went to the legislature building that day. In fact, it took us nearly three weeks to name what started with that simple act of protest. But when a small group of us stood together, refusing to accept an extreme makeover of state government that we knew would harm the most vulnerable among us, it was like a spark in a warehouse full of cured, dry tobacco leaves.

The following Monday, hundreds returned to the statehouse and twice as many people were arrested. Word of a mass movement spread among justice-loving people throughout North Carolina, igniting thousands who knew from their own experience that something was seriously wrong. Throughout the hot, wet summer of 2013, tens of thousands of people came for thirteen consecutive Moral Mondays. By the end of the legislative session, nearly a thousand people had been arrested in the largest wave of mass civil disobedience since the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 ..... 
We were caught up by the zeitgeist in something bigger than ourselves—something bigger, even, than our understanding. But we knew one thing without a doubt: we had found the essential struggle of our time. Inspired by nothing less than God’s dream, we were ready to go home and do the long, hard work of building up a new justice movement to save the soul of America."

Can you hear Pentecost happening again in Dr. Barber's story?  This is the work of the Holy Spirit – God’s own Spirit acting in God’s people.  People are hearing something spoken in a language they can understand and they are responding.  And it is spreading like wildfire.

Will there be resistance?  Of course.  There was resistance aplenty 2000 years ago – first from the comfortable traditionalist Jews in Judah, and then in every country to which the word spread.  

And were there complaints against it – accusations that they weren’t being “churchy” enough?  Yes, but did that stop them from listening to the voice of Spirit and doing what they were called to do? 

I saw a wonderful quote on-line the other day.  It said, “literally the church was born amidst accusations of drunk and disorderly.  We were never supposed to be respectable.”

God bless those who care more for being and doing God’s will than those whose biggest concern is being “respectable.”  And God’s Word will continue to reach the ears that are ready to hear.
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Pentecost goes on and on.  Thanks be to God.