We Got Spirit

http://www.touchtalent.com/painting/art/PENTECOST--257540

Pentecost May 20, 2018
Romans 8:22-27; Acts 2:1-21
First Presbyterian Church, Sterling, IL
Christina Berry

Romans 8: 22-27

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
For in hope we were saved.
Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is in the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.


Acts 2:1-21
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked,
“Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?
And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?
Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—
in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”
All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”
But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them,
“Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

You may remember this story, because I’ve told it before, but it has been a while, and Nan says it’s worth retelling. At the end of third grade at Lincoln Elementary school, Mrs. Rose came around to visit us our classes to tell us about band and orchestra.

I wanted to play the drums.
Mother said no, no drums.
Definitely NO drums.

Then Mrs. Rose called my mom. “We have an oboe here,” she said, “But the reeds cost two or three dollars, and most families can’t afford that, Especially at the rate that fourth grade oboists break reeds.” So I became an oboist.

I grew to love playing the oboe, but I never learned to love playing in the band. Mostly because, during marching season, I had to go to every football game. During halftime, I had to march around and play the cymbals because you can’t march with an oboe. There I’d be, with the boys in the drumline, wearing my band uniform that was too big, and a cowboy hat that blew off frequently in the Kansas wind. I was required to twirl those cymbals when we played fight song after a touchdown, and of course twirled them at the end of the Star-Spangled Banner.

And what you need to know about those cymbals is that one of them was cracked.
Not a small crack, but a big one, right where the handle was.

Sometimes the handle would work around in that crack and slip out so that one cymbal would just drop to the ground. And there I’d be, with the handle in one hand, and over my head, in my other hand, one cymbal. The band director told me, and I believed him, that if that cymbal ever fell off while we were marching, that he expected to hear me yelling “CRASH” whenever the cymbals were supposed to sound.

I grew to hate football games, and I dreaded touchdowns.
I cringed when the cheerleaders would start up with their cheer:
"We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit, how 'bout you?"

I knew that, inevitably, I would be called upon to crash those cymbals together and run the risk that one of them would fall apart, and there I’d be, holding one cymbal up in the air, yelling “CRASH!” I couldn’t understand what people got so worked up about; what made Gentra Abbey’s dad so mad he would cuss at the refs; why the cheerleaders would cry if our team lost a game; what made the other kids scream and yell,

"We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit, how 'bout you?"

I was like those onlookers at Pentecost,
saying, “What is the matter with these people?
What are they so worked up about? Are they drunk?”
It’s a reasonable question, if you think about it.

Imagine going into town one Friday night, and as you drive by Roscoe Eades stadium, there’s a huge crowd gathered, thousands and thousands of people. You park and go on in to see what’s going on. In the stadium, instead of the Sterling Warriors, there’s this weird religious sect whose leader was recently executed for treason.

Like the Jews who were living in Jerusalem, they are all immigrants. They came to the city from many other countries, following this strange fellow. After the government had him executed, they claim he was resurrected, but you doubt that. They are a very peculiar, alien bunch of people. A lot of people are saying that these immigrants are not even human.

So you’re standing there watching them, and they start getting all worked up. There’s this noise like a wind and just when you’re expecting a tornado warning, flames appear over their heads, and they begin to speak in tongues.

You look at the guy standing next to you, a Guatemalan immigrant, and on the other side of him, a kid from Syria. There’s a little Mexican girl and her baby brother. There are people from Iraq and North Korea, and Russia; from Haiti, and El Salvador, and all over Africa. There’s a crowd of oddly dressed teenagers with blue hair and black clothes and what looks like fishing tackle in their eyebrows, lips and noses. You catch the eye of the Guatemalan fellow, and raise one eyebrow and smile. He smiles, and you smile back, and you both shake your heads.

But then, as you watch a guy steps forward from the group, their spokesman. He starts to tell the crowd what is going on. He tells of new signs and portents, of visions and dreams, dreams of a people who live in the Spirit of God, of people who love their neighbors and love their enemies, people who welcome the stranger, care for the needy, bind up the brokenhearted.

As you listen to his words, they start to make sense to you.
You start to feel hopeful.
You move closer, along with everyone else, and they are nodding in agreement

Now, you are a good person. You love your country and you are a little bit uneasy about these alien people. Recently someone told you that they are terrible people – murderers, animals. But this guy, this religious nut, what he is saying makes sense. Somehow, you have a new understanding. 

On the other side of the stadium, you see a person from your neighborhood, a person you have been mad at for years. Ever since the two of you voted on opposite sides of an issue you’ve never been able to talk with them without getting mad. The two of you haven’t spoken in a long time. You voted with the majority, and it seemed like they couldn’t get over losing. But now, something is happening. It’s like a wind blowing through the crowd while the religious fellow is preaching about visions and dreams.

Everybody is coming closer together and joining hands and singing. The blue haired teenagers with the fishing tackle faces have taken the hand of your neighbor and they are coming toward you, and you can’t remember why the disagreement seemed so important. So you embrace your neighbor, and the teenagers laugh and cry, and the children are dancing around, and later, you can’t even really describe what happened, but you know that you have been changed. That everything has changed.

It was like a wildfire went through your soul
and burned away all the worn out old stories,
the useless dead branches,
all the dried up clippings of old bitterness collecting there,
reduced all that resentment to ashes,
singed the edges of your certainty.

It was like a wind swept through your heart,
and blew out all the cobwebs and dust,
and all the curled up yellowed scraps of paper,
on which you had written notes to yourself about everything that was wrong.

Pentecost.

The moment when the Spirit overcomes all divisions between people:
nationality, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation,
doctrine, denominations, who gets ordained and who doesn’t.
worship customs, how we dress,
how we serve communion, or to whom we serve it,
age, intellectual capacity, carpet and buildings and money.

Pentecost.

When Phrygians sit down with Mesopotamians and Galileans,
Palestinians sit with Jews, Republicans with Democrats, natives with immigrants.
The Spirit breaks through the all the walls built by hatred,
and lands on the church,
crackling over our heads,
swirling around us,
between us,
among us,
within us.

Quite few years ago, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA appointed a task force to work out disagreements in the church. Probably more than any other group in our denomination’s history, that task force represented the same diversity of viewpoints as those we see at Pentecost. All the categories were there: liberal and conservative; evangelical and social gospel; gay and straight;, urban and rural; for and against; you name the category, they had one. It was a group that was practically guaranteed NOT to come to consensus.

But an amazing thing happened: they did.
By the power of the Holy Spirit, they did.
They came to new understandings of one another.
They were surprised by their discoveries:
The others – those people with whom they disagreed –were Christians!
Those other people acted like disciples:
They read the Bible! They prayed!
They cared deeply about the church!

The task force members decided to listen to one another, seeking to understand one another, rather than shout or vote each other down. What that task force eventually concluded is less important today than what happened among the people in that group.

It was the kind of Pentecost event we’ve been thinking about this morning.

Like those gathered on the day of Pentecost, they said, we NEED each other!
The task force discovered that we need all kinds of people, with all kinds of viewpoints. For the church’s mission and ministry to sound in the band The task force said that we need both cymbals, the right one and the left! They said, in effect, that one cymbal waving in the air and one voice yelling “CRASH” won’t do it.

We need them both, even if one of them is cracked.
We need both, even when we are clashing.
It takes two cymbals to sound in the marching band.

We need each other.
We need to stay together,
to sound together,
to work and play together,
and listen together for the voice of the Spirit
speaking to us in the rush of the wind.

Today as we celebrate the accomplishments of our graduates, and as we symbolically send them out into the world, we want to send them enfolded in our love, carrying our deepest hopes and dreams. Of course, we hope for their happiness and their success, for them to find joy in their continued studies and satisfaction in their work.

We pray that they will find one other special person to love as a partner for life. And we pray that the Holy Spirit, this Spirit of Pentecost, goes with them. We pray that the activity of the Spirit in their lives will demonstrate to the world that we are all in this together, arm in arm, working together for God’s realm on this earth. In spite of our disagreements, we are knit together by the Spirit.

We pray that as we watch these beloved people begin a new phase of their lives, they will hear our voices - shouting together, sometimes clashing, but mostly cheering each other on. We pray that they will find their own part on God’s big team, their own voice to speak God’s justice, and that they will know that we are behind them, with them, surrounding them, still together, still loving God and neighbor, still saying,

"We got Spirit, yes we do! We got Spirit, how 'bout you?!"

Amen.