May 27: The Gift of the Spirit, The Gift of You
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Matthew Johnson, preaching
Acts 2:5-21
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
In our lesson from Acts today, people from all over the world were gathered in Jerusalem for the celebration of first fruits and the Torah. They were all going about their business, having a great time on the holiday weekend, when they suddenly, they couldn’t believe their ears. All around them were bunch of people from out in the sticks who were speaking their languages. They were not of the same cloth as these world travelers. These were Galileans. The shadow people. The working poor from a as rural a place as there was in Judea. They had enough trouble with their native tongue.
So the things they were saying … and the way they were saying them … was so impossible and implausible that these pious, religious people dismiss them as babbling drunkards. The only way to explain this, they said, was that these people had each consumed a box of wine before lunch. That is the only way this was possible.
Little did they know that something dramatic had happened earlier that morning. A gift arrived … packaged in a wind that sounded like a storming sea, tied in a bow made from tongues of fire. It was a gift that, by Old Testament accounts, was given only to great prophets and those who had achieved wisdom beyond the understanding of commoners. It was never something that had been given to Galileans. But on Pentecost, that gift is placed upon a few fishermen and some other guys who couldn’t cut it at their old jobs. It was the gift Jesus had promised his followers so they might carry out his commandment to be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth. At first, nobody noticed this, though. These religious elite insisted that these followers of Jesus were drunk on cheap booze.
It is easy to make assumptions about the faith of others. It is easy to miss the point in an attempt to maintain stereotypes, dogmas and fundamentals. Too much religion can do that to the best of us.
On a hot day like this, about seven years ago, a band I formed at my first church out near Rockford was playing at a teen center in Waukesha, Wisconsin. We were second on the bill after a band from Harvard … a rock group cut from similar cloth as us. On the back of the bill were two local screamo-bands … heavy, hardcore and really, really loud. Jet-engine loud … heart-restarting loud.
And, as we loading-in our gear, we noticed the crowd that had gathered looked like they identified more with “them” … the loud bands … than us. We paraded through a gauntlet of black fabric draped over tattooed arms and necks. Cigarette smoke hung low over all our heads in the humid night air.
Heavily colored hair often hid the rows of holes in their faces, plugged with bits of silver and steel. This was not the kind of crowd that enjoyed our music, an assumption that became a reality when only a handful of them came inside to listen to our set.
After the set, we repeated the same process of running the goth gauntlet with all our gear. Near our car, there was one girl sitting on the curb. I walked by her a couple of times … doing my best to be friendly but stay focused on the task at hand, I nodded and smiled. She took a short drag off her cigarette and flipped the ashes on the ground with a quick stroke of her darkly decorated fingertips. Her name was Gwendolyn. She was a pretty typical 17-year-old in my estimation. Awkward, heavier than her friends; quiet, yet-capable of speaking like a sailor.
As I carried out the last armful of stuff, she had her head hung a bit, allowing her hair to obscure her eyes. “You really believe that stuff?” a voice said from beneath her veiled exterior. “I know about you,” she said, “I know what you’re about. So tell me, do you really believe all that stuff?” I thought that she may have been drinking.
Apparently, she had taken the time to check out the bands on the bill before the show, and had discovered that we were a group of Christians. Now, we had never marketed ourselves that way … the Christian label was something others put on us … so she evidently heard something in the music that led her to this conclusion.
“Believe what?” I said as I closed the tailgate, making sure she was talking about what I assumed she was talking about.
“All that God and love stuff,” she replied, pulling her head up to draw one last time from her cigarette.
I smiled and said, “Well, secretly, it is all just an elaborate hoax so we can play in front of huge crowds like we did tonight.”
Gwendolyn let out a small laugh through her nose. “I used to be into all that stuff. Then my friends stopped handing around me. They told me I was no good. They told me that I failed Jesus too many times.”
Her words stopped me in my tracks. When I walked through that gauntlet of teen angst the first time, I didn’t really see any of them as individuals. I looked at them en-mass. I only saw their difference … their challenges to my understanding of culture. I saw them as philosophy, as legal code, as a generation. But after I heard Gwendolyn speak, that all changed. I saw the pain dancing like fire on her head.
Instead of looking at who she was, I listened to what she was saying. Instead of judging her for the way she looked, I remembered that she had a heart. I remembered that she had a Divine Parent who loved her. I remembered she had a brother in Christ who walked with her, and I remembered that the Spirit sat there on that curb with her. She had been given those gifts. And she, too, was a gift.
“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, says God … and your children shall prophesy, and your young shall see visions, and your old shall dream dreams. In those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall all prophesy.”
On the Christian calendar, Pentecost is the last of three high-feast days that we celebrate in the faith; it is of equal worth to both Christmas and Easter. All three have amazing and awesome things occur … angels, earthquakes and tongues of fire … and all three occur when big groups are gathered … but Pentecost is generally forgotten. It is shadowed by the other two. It is unfortunate, but I think I understand why.
We like Christmas because God gifts us with the real presence of the Son. The gift of Christmas is something we receive that reunites us with God … so the void can be filled … so a bridge can be made between the holy and us. We are given the gift of God with us. And we like Easter because we are promised to receive the gift of eternal life by and in Jesus Christ. We are give the gift of God for us.
But at Pentecost, we become the gift. The gift of the Holy Spirit isn’t given so I can sit firm in my faith and know that God loves me. It isn’t given so I can have assurance that Jesus is mine. It isn’t so I can have “blue sky, apple pie and the by-and-by.” It isn’t so we can pass judgement on those who don’t live up to our standards. Pentecost is the gift of God in and upon us. It is love unleashed in our life. It is love set free in our everything.
“My friends who claim to be Christians don’t love very well,” Gwendolyn told me. “In fact, I don’t believe they love me anymore at all.”
“Religious people can really miss the point sometimes, can’t they? I wish I could give you a way to resolve everything with your friends,” I said. “Sounds to me like they really don’t get Christianity. I can say with certainty, though, that God gets you. I’d go so far to say that God has gotten you. Maybe you can be the one who shows them how to love like Jesus does.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” she scowled.
“Tell the truth and love in the ways they couldn’t or wouldn’t. Love always trumps religion. And I see it in you,” I told her. “I see the love of God in you right now. Don’t give up on it. Someone will hear it.”
“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, says God … and your children shall prophesy, and your young shall see visions, and your old shall dream dreams. In those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall all prophesy.”
The same can be said for all of us … we have all been given the gift of becoming the gift. The gift of the Holy Spirit comes with the obligation to unwrap it and share it … unwrap it and let it move you out into the street and share how God — in your life and tradition — has made grace and love real. The gift of the Spirit asks you to engage the people of the world in relationship without worrying how you may be perceived. The gift of the Spirit moves us beyond the practice of religion into a life lived in difference.
You may not believe you have a gift to offer, but by the grace of God, you do … the Spirit is taking root in your life, just as Joel said it would, and Peter repeated, and Gwendolyn so simply pointed out to me. This gift is given without discrimination to everyone. It is given to you in the fullness of your race and ethnicity. It is given to you in the beauty of your gender identity and sexual orientation. It is given to you regardless of what stage in life you are … regardless of what you have experienced. It is a gift of God that identifies you as a child of God made in the image of God. You are the gift.
Friends, where will this Spirit lead you today? Will it lead you to speak words and live deeds of love to the homeless on your street? Will it lead you to join a grass-roots movement for community change? Will it draw you into deeper discipleship within this community? Will it simply give you the strength to commit yourself more fully to God going forward?
Wherever you go, and whatever you do, may the Spirit of God convict you to love and live in truth in such a way that people ask if you are drunk. You’d be in good company.
Tags: Matthew
