Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.27.12; Rev. David Williams
It was fire that brought you here.
Most of us don’t smell too strongly of smoke, and aren’t visibly singed, so that reality is easy to miss. But it is, without question, true. That’s an easy reality to miss as you’re cosily ensconced in a bucket seat, or zoning out with your iPod touch in the third row of a van. Fire? There’s no fire. There’s just a faint purring as you motor along.
But given the absence of any electric cars or Amish buggies in the parking lot this morning, it was fire that brought us here. We rode here, all of us, on the back of hundreds of thousands of tiny little explosions. The reality of the carefully constrained violence of the internal combustion engine is just the dull and muffled background noise of our lives.
For me, not so much, because having those explosions right up close and personal on the bike is hard to miss, as is the muffled racket as I open ‘er up on River Road. For the nine-hundred-thousand participants and spectators who’ve gathered for Rolling Thunder in DC today, the presence of those undamped straight-pipe Milwaukee-Iron explosions is as hard to miss as the 1965 carpet bombing campaign that gives the annual Memorial Day motorcycle gathering its name.
But when we’re in our vans or tooling along in our cars? We just don’t notice. It just seems so normal. We miss it. And we’re missing a great deal. It is far more intense than we realize. How intense?
This being Poolesville and all, most of y’all have been around horses. If you ride a horse, or even stand alongside a horse, you get a sense of them as living beings. You can place your hand flat against the great firm stillness of their neck, and though they’re beautiful creatures, you can’t help notice just how powerful they are. Even behind those gentle eyes, they are so much swifter and stronger than we, and standing by one, you feel a little small. Or a lot small.
Perhaps that’s why we still use the horse--after a hundred years--as the measure of power. Horsepower. Am I the only one who thinks this is a little odd? Our measure of power is not some abstraction, or something that relates to some scientific progress. It’s...horsies. And if being around one horse reminds us of our smallness, why are we so oblivious to the tremendous forces at work every time we inch forward in the McDonald’s drive-through?
If we’d all ridden here in wagons drawn by teams of twenty horses, there’s no way you’d have missed their presence. I’d also expect that the sanctuary would have a slightly different fragrance. If you were crossing the One Oh Seven after church for a nice little lunch and refreshing beverage at Bassets and you looked to your left and a hundred thoroughbreds were thundering past St. Peter’s towards you at full gallop, the earth shaking beneath their hooves, that might possibly catch your attention an/or require a change of undergarments.
But you rode to church this morning on fire, fire with the power of hundreds of horses, and you probably barely noticed. That energy was quiet, contained, and out of sight. The energy on the first Pentecost was not quiet. It was not contained, and it was not hidden away.
The Pentecost story in Acts 2 is an important fulcrum in the story being told by Luke. Having told the story of the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection in the Gospel of Luke, the same historian begins the narrative of the movement that would rise up in response to Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles.
Chapter one of the Acts of the Apostles was mostly transition and housekeeping. We hear about the previous book, and get a few verses describing the post resurrection Jesus. Then we get some organizational housekeeping, as they select someone to replace Judas, who for obvious reasons...he’d either hanged himself or just spontaneously exploded, depending on which gospel story you read...was no longer on Session.
It is with chapter two that the story of the early church begins. It starts on a day of noise and hubbub in Jerusalem, with the disciples gathered into a room by themselves. Pentecost means, in the Greek, “The Fiftieth Day,” and the crowds that were in Jerusalem had gathered for one of the many festival celebrations that defined the life of that city.
The Jewish celebration of Pentecost marked fifty days following the celebration of the Passover, and the festival was often called either the Festival of the Weeks or the Feast of Harvest. Traditionally, this festival was also assumed to remember the giving of the law to Moses.
Whichever way, the city was full of life and noise. With the disciples gathered all together, we hear that “..suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.” We hear that “..divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” This is not actually fire, of course, nor is it actually a violent wind, or some combination of the two. If you’re trying to start a movement, opening up on your followers with a flamethrower is usually not the best way to get them motivated. The Creator of the Universe knows this, fortunately for us.
As with most language describing our interaction with God, it’s metaphor. It has to be metaphor. It is “like” a violent wind. It is tongues “as of” fire. Both images are intended to evoke the immense and transforming energy of God’s presence, but in slightly different ways. The word for wind used by Luke is pnoes, derived from the word pneuma, which in Greek means wind, breath, and spirit. It’s the same word used to describe the Holy Spirit in verse 4, and throughout the Bible. It speaks to the life giving and ordering presence of God.
And fire? The term for “fire” used here is puros, the Greek word for fire that gives us the word “pure” and “purify” and that highly flammable alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Each and every one of the gathered disciples are brought into a relationship with their Creator, as the presence of God’s lifegiving breath and cleansing fire rests upon them.
From the creative and transforming energy of that moment, the gathered disciples find themselves able...depending on their gifts...to take those tongues of fire and speak to the world around them. What they are not doing is babbling, or speaking in some ecstatic language that only they can understand. That’s an entirely different thing.
The great gift of Pentecost is the ability to speak and be understood, conveying the truth of God’s grace and Christ’s love across the boundaries of culture and language.
It is for that purpose that both breath and fire mingled on Pentecost, and it is towards that purpose that we Jesus folk are called every year. What does that look like in our lives? How do we make that happen? It goes beyond suddenly being able to speak Xhosa or Tagalog. The Spirit’s power is seen through two things. First, we are called to breach boundaries. Second, we’re called to recognize those countless moments of the Spirit’s fire in our lives.
To breach boundaries, we are shown the actions of the disciples, a rag-tag band of notoriously poorly spoken Galilean country-folk. They are given both the competence and the gifts to communicate with those who are radically different from themselves. That capacity...the ability to connect with those who are different and those who are strangers...is an essential component of any Christ-gathering that wants to live into the intent of Pentecost.
You encounter those boundaries every day. Every day, you’re confronted with difference, with those who see the world through different cultural or political lenses. Our ability to live as people empowered by the Spirit’s fire is measured by our capacity to articulate God’s transforming love to those who aren’t us. That person who you are not like, who does not look like you or talk like you? That’s another soul, beloved of God, worthy of your love. The measure of your life in the Spirit is your capacity to reach across, and to listen, and to be present to those souls.
Then there are those moments of fire. The movement of the Spirit isn’t always like a mighty flame hurricane. Sometimes, yes. But not always. Mostly, it’s surprisingly subtle. Over and over, day by day, moment by moment, choice by choice, that flame rises in us. At each point of decision, each instance where we choose a kind word or a caring hand or to take time for that stranger or not to feed that monkey on our back, that fire is fed.
And as subtle as they are, those moments in each of our lives are the tens of thousands of tiny Pentecost explosions that drive the Christian life.
It was that Pentecost fire that brought you here. And if we attend to it, it is fire that will carry us where God’s best grace intends.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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