A Sermon from First Church, Scarborough…
A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, May 27, 2007. The principal reading was Acts 2:1-13.
“Utterly amazed, they asked: ‘Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language?’”(Acts 2:7-8)
“The Gift of Understanding”
This morning, we will reflect upon the life of the early Christian community once the Spirit had come at Pentecost. We are also prompted to realize and to affirm the ever-coming and ever-present Spirit in the lives of contemporary believers and in the activities of the Church today.
Jesus always provided for his Disciples. Today’s feast of Pentecost affirms and celebrates the gift he bestowed so that his followers would never be apart from him or incapable of fulfilling his mandate. Today we celebrate in word and song, in act and in thought, Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit was quite palpable in the lives of the early believers – wind, fire and speaking in tongues. Some persons suggest that today there is little comparable evidence of the Spirit’s activity. Few of us, declare the critics, can communicate in more than one or two languages. Fewer still speak in tongues. Nevertheless, the text declares that the Spirit lives and moves among us.
The late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner suggested that we stop looking for the Spirit only under religious labels and in religious places: “If we look out for that inner freedom in which a person, regardless of herself, remains faithful to the dictates of her conscience; if someone succeeds, without knowing how, in really breaking out of the prison of her egoism; if someone with mute resignation allows death to take her and at the same time entrusts herself to an ultimate mystery in which she believes as unity, meaning, and love…when these things happen…the Holy Spirit is at work!” (The Great Church Year, Crossroads, 1994).
Before Pentecost, the Disciples had been riddled with doubt, confusion, misunderstanding, disappointment and fear. After the Spirit’s coming, freed of their inhibitions, they were brave in the face of opposition, bold in defending their faith, courageous when persecuted and undaunted by suffering. They were free to approach God as much loved children, and to welcome all other peoples as much loved sisters and brothers.
There is still more to Pentecost. The reality is, that which the Spirit brought, the gift of understanding. It was possible not only to be entranced, engaged, and even overcome by this powerful, spiritual event, but it was also possible for the particular to become the universal. It was the gift of Pentecost that these persons should really understand one another.
The text reads: “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” (2:11)
At Pentecost, the separation and confusion of peoples were overcome, for a time, by the power to understand, to hear in one’s own language, one’s own accent, the wonderful and mighty works of God. The gift of understanding did not diminish the richness and the diversity of that great crowd. The people did not cease being Parthian, or Mede, or Elamite. They were not reduced to some vague, faceless generality without a past or a place or an origin. They did not become less than they were, they become more than they had been, for they became as one with all of those who heard and understood that God was alive and active in this world and eager that they, all of them, should participate in God’s purposes. It is the reality of the particular that makes the universal so powerful and so appealing.
The universal is the good news of Jesus Christ that all of us are privileged to hear, and the unity of what we hear overcomes but does not diminish the diversity of who we are. Within the modern Church, we need to think about this truth and think long and hard.
We are Christians and followers of the Christ. We are members of a wide, wide fellowship that exceeds our capacity to define or control. Since the 16th century we, left-wing Protestants, have often boasted of what we are not and to whom we do not belong. A religion of protest is not necessarily a religion of witness. It has a definitive, negative potential. If we cut ourselves off from anything and anyone beyond our immediate circle, we become tempted to make our circle – “our story, our practices” -- the objects of our worship and our adoration. It is a dangerous, divisive, heretical, and even sinful elevation of the particular over the universal, and it is a denial of the explicit will of God that we should all be one. Much remains to be done.
Pentecost reminds us that the gift of understanding, that gift that transcends human logic and diversity, is the gift of the Spirit of unity: union with God and union with our sisters and brothers, with whom we share a telling and a hearing of the mighty works of God.
Such a spirit gave birth to the Church, and nurtured it in good and in bad times, and sustains it still. Such a spirit is our only true hope, and such a spirit is what we seek to express to family, friend, neighbor and stranger alike.
We celebrate today that gift to the early believers and now among us. We pray that what transformed them may still transform us, and with us the world for God in Christ.
Pentecost reminds us of the Spirit in our lives and calls us to forget those inhibitions which separate us from one another and keep us from God. Freed, we have the capacity in the Spirit to bring understanding and to forge a new unity among the diverse peoples of this world. But understanding and unity will not take place on a global scale until practical efforts are made on a local, congregational and personal level.
To personalize the reality of Pentecost today, we might try to speak the same language as an estranged relative or friend or neighbor or to renew a relationship which has been long neglected. Such efforts require boldness, sensitivity and courage, but these are the very gifts in which we are reconfirmed today. I really believe that. So should you. Know that the Spirit is with you. You may now squirm in your pew, but be ready: the Spirit is here.
When the Doukhobors (a small Christian group who came to Canada and Mexico from Russia in the early 20th century) pray, they face each other. They look at one and another. They believe the Spirit of God dwells in each one of us, and it is to that presence of the Spirit that they pray. If only we like them could truly see God’s Spirit embodied in each other, teaching and empowering us to do those acts of love that Jesus commanded; we could do so much more. If only, what a powerful reality it would be.
