Acts
2:1-21 (Gen 11:1-9)
The
Spirit-Gift to Community for Mission
Thomas G. Long, professor of
homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary, tells of teaching a confirmation
class in which he was discussing the major festivals of the Church Year. The Children knew about Christmas and Easter,
but no one in the class could remember the significance of Pentecost. Dr. Long explained that the day of Pentecost
was the day the Holy Spirit came from heaven with the sound of a rushing wind,
and fire rested on the heads of everyone gathered in Jerusalem, and they all
spoke in different tongues. At that
point one girl raised her hand and said, "I don't remember that. My family must have been out of town that
Sunday."
Pastor Long’s story exposes one of
the major difficulties which confront us on Pentecost Sunday: how do we bridge
the gap between the events recorded in Acts and the experience of the church
today. Many of us are troubled and
confused by the circumstances surrounding the birth of the church. If anything resembling the events in
Jerusalem ever happened in our church, it had to have happened on a Sunday
that we were away.
The timing of Pentecost increases
the likelihood that we were away. Today
is Pentecost Sunday on the liturgical calendar; on the calendars we carry in
our pockets, it’s one of the early summer Sundays. College is out, summer sessions are yet to
begin. Our congregational calendar is
also slowing down. What do we have one
more week of traditional Sunday Church School classes? Our service at the lake is in two weeks. With all that comes the general expectation
that worship attendance will be lower from now until sometime in August.
Confusion and calendar location - is
it any wonder that the mention of Pentecost is met with blank stares?
The story of the rushing wind and
the tongues of fire is one of the best known stories of the bible. Unfortunately, its popularity is not
accompanied by a high degree of understanding.
All too often, the second chapter of Acts is the source of major
misunderstandings about the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian
community. The events recorded here are
too often used to bolster the mistaken view that the gift of the Holy Spirit is
a reward for special righteousness, that the Spirit is concerned only with
individual believers, and that the primary manifestation of the Spirit's
presence is the speaking in tongues. In
fact, the text itself makes three very different affirmations:
1 - The Holy Spirit is a gift,
given by God;
2
- God gives the Holy Spirit to the community of faith;
3 - God gives the Holy Spirit to
the community of faith for mission.
First, Luke proclaims that the gift
of the Holy Spirit is God's gift.
It is not and cannot be earned; and it is not deserved. It is simply a gift. This point is missed or misunderstood by too
many of our contemporaries. While none
blatantly insist they have a right to an outpouring of the Holy Spirit,
they speak of spiritual discipline in such a way as to imply that one
positions oneself for the Spirit's arrival.
The pure, the chaste, the pious - - such members of the community carry
themselves in such a way as to suggest that they are more deserving of the
Spirit's visitation. The author of Acts
has no such illusions.
Those who were gathered in Jerusalem
were not seeking the gift of the Holy Spirit, they could only accept it. They did not create the Spirit's power, they
could only claim it. They did not
program the Spirit's arrival, they could only respond to it. The Holy Spirit is God's gift, freely
given to those whom God chooses.
The second affirmation within the
biblical text is the affirmation that God gives the Spirit to the community
of faith. In Jerusalem, the coming
of the Spirit created unity were there had been division. That long list of difficult names read for us
are a reminder of the variety of nationalities and peoples present in
Jerusalem. The Spirit comes, and diverse
people become the one people of God.
Congregationalism among the modern
church has eroded our ability to see the diversity of those who assemble in
God's name. It is our tendency to join
congregations where folks look and act and talk in the same way we do. At Pentecost, the Spirit swooped through the
crowd, as with an out-stretched arm.
Gathering together all those who had once been individuals; making of
them children of God.
The events described in Acts 2 are
set in juxtaposition with the events in Genesis 11. This is another well-known, but often
not-so-well-understood biblical story.
Genesis 11 is the story of the Tower of Babel. On first reading, the
story of the Tower of Babel seems to show human pride destroying human unity -
resulting in God's punishment of scattering the people of the earth literally
(geographically) and symbolically (linguistically). But a second reading reveals a more complex
plot and deeper meaning.
The people who settled on the plain
of Shinar were unified. They shared a
common language and a common purpose.
They wanted to make a name for themselves and keep themselves from being
scattered to the corners of the earth.
The unity they sought, however, was contrary to God's instruction -
given in Genesis 1.28 - to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The Tower of Babel is a warning against all
attempts to establish unity on the basis of human autonomy and
self-sufficiency. The unity desired by
God is based not upon common language or common goals but on a common
commitment to do God's will and to live according to God's purposes.
The Holy Spirit is given to the community
of faith. The spirit comes to the
individual believer only in the larger context of restoring proper
relationships in the community of faith and empowering the community of faith
for service.
The third affirmation present in the
story of Pentecost is that God gives the Spirit to the community of faith for
mission. The Spirit is God's active
presence in the world.
When the Spirit is considered an
individual gift; when the Spirit is considered a reward for pious living; it
ceases to be active - rather it becomes a trophy, held with great pride and displayed
for all to see, but never used in the accomplishment of an even greater
task. God's gift to the community of
faith - the Holy Spirit - is given to us so that we might be about the work of
God in the world.
Here again we can learn something
from that story in Genesis 11.
God
punished the people by confusing their language so that they did not understand
one another. The word rendered
"understand" is the Hebrew shema, the same word that appears
in the affirmation "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." (Deut 6.4)
This connection is important because it focuses attention on hearing as
an essential ingredient in the divine-human relationship and in relationships
within the human community. Whether
between parents and teenagers, husbands and wives, men and women, or God and
humanity, when hearing fails, relationships fail.
This emphasis on hearing, not the
speaking in tongues, is the link between Genesis 11 and Acts 2. The word “hear” appears at several
crucial points in the Pentecost narrative in Acts (2.6, 8, 14, 22, 37). The events of Pentecost do not, as is usually
assumed, reverse the punishment given to the builders of the tower but rather
results in a "fresh capacity to listen." (W. Brueggemann, Genesis,
Interpretation, John Knox Press.)
In spite of all the speaking in
other tongues, those who gathered in Jerusalem heard the gospel in their own
language. God did not restore a single language or one homogeneous
community. Instead God enabled the
diverse and scattered peoples of the earth to hear one another. On Pentecost every nation under heaven is
embraced. It is that same Spirit which
empowers and sustains the church as it seeks to give voice to God's word of
salvation and become a channel of God's work in the world.
God gives the Holy Spirit to the
community of faith for mission. When we
lack an understanding of the mission God has given us; when we consider the
Spirit an individual prerogative; when we link the Spirit's arrival with our
own faithfulness - it is highly likely that we will be away, should the Spirit
ever descend. Let us open our hearts and
our minds, receiving this gift of our God's, allowing it to unify us in Christ
and setting us forth to proclaim the Good News.
Amen.
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