Sermon: “As the Spirit Gave Them Ability”

Text: Acts 2:1-21

Day of Pentecost (C)

May 23, 2010

Scripture introduction.  In the first chapter of Acts, just before the resurrected Jesus ascended into heaven, he promised his disciples that when the Holy Spirit came upon them they would receive power and would be his witnesses.  Our second reading this morning, from the second chapter of the book of Acts, records how this happened.  According to the Jewish religious calendar, seven weeks after the beginning of Passover, there was to be another festival—in Hebrew, Shavuot, also called the Feast of Weeks.  Because of how they counted the days between the festivals, the second feast actually began on the fiftieth day after Passover.  In Greek, the word for “fiftieth” is pentecost, and so the festival was also called the Feast of Pentecost.  According to the first chapter of Acts, the risen Jesus had remained with his disciples for about forty days after his resurrection at Passover.  Thus, the disciples would have been without the physical presence of Jesus for about ten days when the Holy Spirit came upon them on the day of Pentecost.

When the Holy Spirit did descend upon them with a sound like a mighty wind and with tongues like flame, they began to speak in other languages.  Scholars differ on just what Luke was describing in these sentences, but the weight of opinion seems to be that they were not “speaking in tongues”—a kind of ecstatic speech that is meaningless without an interpreter—but rather were given the miraculous gift of speaking in other human languages that they did not know.  Jews from all around the Mediterranean world and Asia, who faithfully had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the festival, thus heard these uneducated Galileans speaking in their own languages.  What could it mean?

Sermon.   Some of you know that Amanda and I have a new dog.  Her name is “Pearl.”  She has a pink collar with rhinestones, but don’t led the glamour mislead you—she’s very, very active.  About a week ago, just before we left for Lee’s graduation in North Carolina, I took her on a walk down Ohio Boulevard.  When we got to the long stretch of woods close to Deming Park, she saw several squirrels up ahead and ran for them, jerking the leash out of my hand.  I hurried to catch my end of the leash, and when I recovered it I realized that both Pearl and I had landed in a patch of poison ivy.  When we arrived back at the house, I wiped her down and washed my arms in cold water.  But the damage was done.  In a day or so the itchy sores began to break out on my arms.  Ever since then that song “Poison Ivy” by the Coasters has been in my head.  Some of you are old enough to know the words—about an attractive but dangerous woman:

Poison ivy, poison ivy

Late at night while you’re sleepin’ poison ivy comes

a creepin’

around.

You’re gonna need an ocean of calamine lotion

You’ll be scratchin’ like a hound

the minute you start to mess around

with poison ivy.

That song rose to the top of the charts in 1959, and it’s easy to see why—although simple, the lyrics are clever and memorable and [pause to scratch] exquisitely descriptive.

There’s something powerful about a lyric or a poem or a speech or a sermon that turns a phrase just the right way.  Whether we are reading Shakespeare or our award-winning local columnist Stephanie Salter, their words have a power to put us in a different place—emotionally and spiritually.  When we read the works of great historians, we begin to see the world through their eyes.  They help us make sense of the world we live in.  When we read a great novel and find a character in the story who has had the same feelings we have had—feelings that we were not sure anyone else has had, feelings that we ourselves might not even be able to express—it can be deeply satisfying.  The novelist helps us make sense of our inner lives, just as the historian helps us understand the world around us.  And in showing us that we have common experiences, the writer demonstrates that we are part of a community of humans and not simply individuals swimming in a sea of time.  In a sense, language and literature create community.  A story doesn’t even have to be a great work of art to bring people together.  Go to any party or dinner or family gathering, and you will hear ordinary people telling stories.  And everyone else is listening.  Stories have power.  Language has power.

Is it any wonder, then, that stories and language are central to our experience as persons of faith?  As the long story of the Bible begins, how does God create the universe?  By speaking words:  “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”  The statement in Genesis that male and female humans were created in the image of God begs the question, doesn’t it, just what it is we have in common with God.  Could it be language?  Dr. Dean Thompson, the soon-to-be retired president of Louisville Seminary, in his sermons and prayers often refers to human beings as “speech creatures,” to distinguish us from all the other life-forms that God has created.  When we speech creatures began to be too self-sufficient and to think that we could handle things just fine without God, that was when, according to the biblical story of Babel, God slowed us down by giving us all different languages.  When God singled out the family of Abraham to be the ones through which God’s divine purposes would be worked out on earth, the relationship was expressed in a covenant of words.  When God rescued the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and told them they were to be a holy people set apart, God gave them the law—in words.  When the people strayed from God’s law, God sent prophets to call them back—prophets who had no weapons or armies, nothing more than the power of their inspired words.  In the fullness of time, God chose to come to us in person—to “crawl into that cradle in Bethlehem.”[1]  And how did the gospel writer describe it?  “The Word [—the Word—] became flesh and lived among us, . . .  full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14).  During his earthly ministry Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”  (Luke 21:33)

After his crucifixion and resurrection, as Jesus departed from his disciples, he promised them that they would receive the Holy Spirit.  When the Spirit came upon them, he said, they would receive power and they would become his witnesses—in their own country and in the broader world.  Ten days later, on Pentecost, when they were gathered together in prayer in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit did come.  Luke does not say that the Spirit came with a mighty rush of wind, but that the sound of the Spirit was like a mighty wind.  Likewise, there were tongues—not of fire, but like fire—that rested on the heads of all the persons in the room.  I don’t think it was coincidental that the manifestation of the Spirit was in sound and in tongues.  These are the essential tools of language—sound and speech.  And immediately upon receiving the Spirit, the disciples of Jesus began to speak in other languages because the Spirit had given them this ability.  The Bible tells us that it was the sound of this speaking that drew a crowd of devout foreign Jews who happened to be in Jerusalem for the festival.  We can imagine a Jew from Parthia thinking, “When I’m in Jerusalem, I speak Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek because no one here understands my native tongue.  Who is that speaking Parthian?”  Those who heard the miraculous speech were amazed and asked what it meant.  The events of Pentecost signified that the power of language to divide peoples, which had been the rule since the tower of Babel, was now being used to create community and to unify.  In the words of the prophet Joel, quoted by Peter, God was about to “pour out the Spirit upon all flesh.”

Pentecost is often referred to as the “birthday of the church,” for that was the day on which the disciples of Jesus received the Holy Spirit and became witnesses to Jesus in the world.  From and after this day, they were no longer timid, leaderless, and dependent on the physical presence of Jesus among them.  Because of the power they had received through the Holy Spirit, they were now courageous, energetic, and completely convinced of Jesus’ spiritual presence with them through the Holy Spirit.  It was on this day that Peter preached his first sermon (in words!), and many faithful Jews—the Bible says three thousand persons—repented, acknowledged Jesus as Lord and Savior, were baptized and themselves received the Holy Spirit.  (Acts 2:14-41)  From this point on, the book of Acts tells how the words and power of gospel preaching changed the lives of persons throughout the ancient world.

I don’t know of any time in history when words were as plentiful as they are now.  There was a time—not so long ago—when an educated person might reasonably expect to read all of the great books of Western Civilization.  Now books and newspapers, TV and radio, Internet web pages and E-mails and text messages and tweets multiply so fast that one of the most important tasks of learning is first to screen out the junk before moving on to analyze and learn what is important.  Yet even in our own time, the words of the gospel have power to change lives for the good and to free people from slavery to ideas and circumstances that oppress them. 

As members of the church born on Pentecost, we inherit both the power and responsibility to be Jesus’ witnesses to a hurting world.  Our actions will be important.  The example we set will be important.  But let us never forget the power of our words—of gospel words—to turn the hearts of people toward the God who loves them.  In order to tell the gospel story, we must first learn the story—the words we have inherited in Scripture from the faithful of earlier generations.  We must be biblically literate, and we must teach our children to know the Bible—both the Old and New Testaments.  It may be old-fashioned to memorize verses of Scripture, but there may be no better way to plant the story deep within our hearts.  Having learned the story, we then must be interpreters of the gospel in ways that are faithful and true—and that speak to the needs of our own generations.  For example, this is a generation that continues to be influenced by the findings of science, so we must be prepared to show how the Bible makes sense to persons who think scientifically.  Finally, we must tell the story.  And we must tell it from our own point of view, showing how the gospel reflects and informs our own personal story.  We must tell it to persons who do not yet know the story—or who have not heard it recently, or who have not heard it in a way that speaks to their own needs.  Above all, our witness must be given lovingly, patiently, and without coercion, for that is how God works.

On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gave birth to the church.  As the book of Acts shows us time and again, the power of the church was in its words.  With the Spirit’s help, our words, too, can have power.  If we use the power of words effectively and with love, it will create a hunger—an itch—in our listeners that cannot be relieved with an “ocean of calamine lotion,” but only by accepting God’s love and forgiveness, by “calling on the name of the Lord and being saved.”