A Sermon for Sunday, July 5, 2022. Pentecost Sunday. Acts 2:1-17
Every year on Pentecost Sunday, I can’t help but think of the 2005 film Elizabethtown starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. The story centers on Bloom’s character, Drew Baylor, who goes to Elizabethtown, Kentucky to retrieve the ashes of his father who died suddenly while visiting family. During the memorial service, held in a hotel ballroom, Drew’s cousin Jesse and Jesse’s rock band perform a cover of the classic rock song Free Bird. As the song reaches its guitar riffing climax, a stagehand begins to release an enormous white paper bird hanging above the stage.
Unbeknownst to everyone, the bird has become overheated due to a spotlight, so when the winged creation takes flight across the room, the top of the wings and the tail are engulfed in flames. The crowd of people immediately go from rocking out to fleeing in a panic as the flaming bird soars across their heads, activating ceiling sprinklers. With people rushing out of the room, the band keeps jammin’ while one character, Drew’s sister Heather—who has been quite anxious about their mom’s well-being and long-standing grudges—serenely stands, hands held up, soaking in the water falling upon her. The scene is epic, chaotic and sacred, much like the arrival of the Holy Spirit at the ancient Jewish pilgrimage festival in Acts 2:1-17.
Pentecost (from the Greek word for “fiftieth) is the fiftieth and last day of the Easter season. Next week is Trinity Sunday, and then nearly six months of “Ordinary Time” begins. The Christian Year is divided almost in half: about six months of holy seasons (Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Eastertide), and about six months of Ordinary Time. A biblical commentary on the text observes:
“Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, or a pair of lungs breathing in and out, the church alternates between these two movements each year: high holidays and everyday life, the joys of celebration and the grunt work of growth.
Pentecost is the Christian reinterpretation of the ancient Jewish pilgrimage festival, the Festival of Weeks, or Shavuot celebrated 50 days after Passover. For the ancient Israelites, this festival was an explicitly diverse, inclusive harvest celebration and over time, it also came to mark the reception of the Torah at Mount Sinai. For Christians, Pentecost celebrates the reception of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church.”
In faith communities around the globe, Christians are celebrating a birthday—the continuing of the Spirit-driven Jesus movement post-Resurrection and the holy-inspired beginning of the universal church.
Birthdays—as one enters the teenage, and then the adult years—become less and less about the gifts received and more and more about taking stock in the life you’ve led; recalling fond memories that shaped your identity and wondering what the future might hold. On Wednesday, June 1, I spent time with my family at the beach to celebrate the birth of my oldest child. While this new 14-year-old relished her gifts, cake and a special dinner, I was acutely aware of how much she enjoyed reminiscing with her mom and I about being a toddler on previous beach trips.
However you might gather at table for a feast today, I encourage you to also reflect on your faith journey and how much impact you’ve had on the community, nation and world in your lifetime and as Emory Presbyterian members of the body of Christ. And I invite you to remember how you’ve always persevered through humongous difficulties, personally and as a church family—including a more than 2-year-old pandemic, to keep on living, and loving and dreaming… and visioning …and building God’s kindom in the here and now.
Through Pentecost, we hold firm again to the concept that the Spirit bonds us together in Christ and that without that body, the church, relationships individuals are unable to effectively grow in faith and show God’s love to others. Without one another- especially those who’ve been discouraged, disillusioned, or excluded by the church—there can be no body. A retired Presbyterian seminary professor notes:[1]
“The story of Pentecost is not meant to be a benchmark of what the church should look like on any given Sunday. Rather, it seeks to communicate how important the church is and how inseparable it is from Christ. … Every year, on the Day of Pentecost, we are reminded of who we are as a church, what we proclaim, and the source of that proclamation. It is a message to the church from the church, passed down through millennia to each generation…
The book of Acts testifies to the filling of the Holy Spirit as an ongoing gift, not just a onetime event, and the church is constantly changing, according to the Spirit’s leading. … Pentecost challenges churches to live into the promise that Christ is present and alive in the midst of change…
From the very beginning, Christ calls individuals into community as the church. Pentecost allows us to speak boldly to the church as we are and about the church Christ would have us be. The many dimensions of the church’s identity—global, local, and personal—are interrelated and essential. None can exist apart from Christ or from the others.
The plain truth is that we need each other:
those gathered here at this minute
those that were unable to attend today
those in the neighborhood and the city
those whom we haven’t met yet
those looking for a sacred and affirming space
those yearning to use their gifts for service
those eagerly awaiting to hear, in their own unique language and ways,
about God’s deeds of power, and
those of other backgrounds and cultures and communities
who yearn for the vision of God’s kindom to become a reality.
Pentecost repeatedly affirms that the Spirit is steadily pushing and empowering the church to be open to something new on the horizons of ministry that will allow for growth, discovery, transformation, and progress.
Pentecost loudly declares that the Spirit is unpredictable and will light the seat of our pants with a divine spark when one least expects all for the purpose of answering God’s calling to serve where God needs us most.
Pentecost assures us that we’ll receive visions and dreams that will allow God’s people to flourish by blazing a trail forward through the mess and the muck.
What will your visions and dreams be?
Will they further the expression of Christ’s grace, freely given to all?
Will they push us out of our comfort zones and the comfortability of these four walls to go beyond with the good news of redemption and love?
The Rev. Matthew Myer Boulton reminds us that when we celebrate the church and the year ahead, we’re celebrating something more than what is tactile. He writes:[2]
The church is not a building, nor is it a particular membership or group of people. Rather, at its heart, the church is a mission, God’s mission, the adventurous challenge of understanding and connecting with neighbors near and far. To listen and learn and speak each other’s languages. To celebrate and serve with the Spirit’s winds in our sails. In an age of polarizing fear and division (over gun violence, abortion, politics, and so much more), the church’s mission — the essence of Pentecost — has never been more pressing.
The church is God’s mission for the body of Christ—our adventure to take every day. And along the path of that exciting, joyful, painful, and mysterious sojourn, we are led by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: an entity that is constantly breathing, expanding, twisting, turning, transfiguring and re-imagining the numerous and boldly creative and bold ways we can together be lights of love and hope.
Will we let go of whatever prevents us from embracing God’s visions and dreams for God’s mission, trusting in the wildness and whimsy of the Spirit to set our hearts on fire and lead us where God would have us go? Will we pause long enough to recognize that we’re all one in Christ—
despite our various languages and backgrounds—and bask in the merciful deeds of God’s power which showers us.
As you continue to ponder these questions and how the Spirit is moving, keep in your heart the following poem by the brilliant late poet, Mary Oliver, who penned this about the character of the Spirit:
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers, ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is—
so it enters us—
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.
And all God’s dreamers and visionaries said… Amen.
[1] Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 3: Pentecost and Season after Pentecost 1 Presbyterian Publishing Corporation.
[2] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/6/3/beginning-again-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-pentecost
georgia preach 
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