“It’s a Conspiracy!”
Acts 2:1-21
St. Paul United Methodist Church
Rev. John Fleming
I heard
just this week that the word conspire literally means to breathe together. The origin of the word is taken from the
Latin word comspirare
which means to be in harmony or to breathe.
So try doing this. Take a deep
breath. Good, not let it out again. There!
Now do you know what you have just done?
You have just launched a conspiracy!
Did
you think that a conspiracy would be different from that? If you have ever been a part of a conspiracy,
on either side of it, then you know that it feels a little different from
that. I happened to be the pastor for a
school principal in a small town when two school board members launched a
conspiracy. They decided that they
didn’t like her leadership and so they breathed together, formulated a plan,
and brought it to the school board meeting.
The problem with it, besides it hurting someone who loved kids, was that
what they did was against the law. Two
school board members talking outside a meeting about how to get rid of someone
is a no no. It became a lawsuit that had to happen.
Conspire. Now listen to that word again and you will
hear the presence of another word inside of it.
Let me say again so that you will not miss it. Con-spire. Spire. Now you can hear the word spirit in that,
can’t you? So, to conspire
means to be filled with the same spirit, to be empowered by the same wind. We are thinking about the day of Pentecost
this morning, the day when the disciples were gathered in Jerusalem. Jesus had told them to stay in that city,
together, and wait. They really didn’t
know what they were waiting for. But on
the day of Pentecost, when the wind blew through the room and when the tongues
of fire rested on them, they found out what they had been waiting for. Ever since then, we believe, God’s spirit
swoops in. It happens
other places, of course, but we especially feel it when we gather to
worship. Something knits us
together. This something is not just the
songs that we sing, the prayers that we pray, the sermon that we preach, and
the breaths that we take. There is
something else there, too. This special something can happen when two people gather to worship
or to study. Matthew’s eighteenth
chapter has instructions on what to do when there is trouble in the
church. There Jesus says, ‘When two or
three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” That’s a scripture that we use when
the attendance is low. We should quit
doing that. When we do that, we take
what Jesus said out of context. But the
message is there that the Spirit of God is there whether there are two gathered
or two thousand.
This
Spirit, this Holy Spirit, as someone has said, can confront us. It can scare us. It can confuse us. It can clarify things for us. But it usually does not browbeat us. We are always free to choose whether or not
we will respond to it. I guess that we
could ignore it, or we could let it change our lives. If you will go back to the cross, you will
remember that Jesus was there, and willingly gave up his spirit. John’s gospel gives us these words, “It is
finished. And he bowed his head and gave
up his spirit.”
Do
you remember when you were a kid, playing outside on a cold day. I can’t recall the first time that I
happened, but I remember how neat it was to breathe out and see my wind, my
breath, hovering in the air for a minute or two, in a cloud of white. Then it disappeared.
When
Jesus breathed his last, we believe, his breath hovered around for several
days. It did because it was so full of
passion and so full of life and so full of redemption. It gathered up strength and power and
volume. It started spinning and moving
around. Jesus must have known that it
would happen that way, because he told his followers to stick together, to stay
in the city, and to wait. And on the Day
of Pentecost, that same breath blew through the house and changed their lives
and our lives forever.
Luke
is not sure how to describe what happened on that day. He is the only one who really tries and so we
will have to listen to his telling of the details. I imagine that the wind blew the shutters
open. The doors that had been locked,
most likely blew open. Luke tells us
that there came a sound from heaven, “...like the rush of a mighty wind, and it
filled the house where they were sitting...”
Luke tells us that, “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them,
and a tongue rested on each of them.”
When you use the words like and as, now that means that you’re not sure
about it. It means that you are trying
your best to describe something that is indescribable. What happened inside that room, quickly
spilled outside, to the streets of
That
is the kind of thing that Paul is trying to get across in our first lesson for
this morning, from his first letter to the Church at Corinth. “To some is given wisdom, to some is given
knowledge, to some faith, to some the gift of healing, to others the working of
miracles, to others prophesy, the discernment of spirits, speaking in tongues
and interpreting those tongues.” Paul is
clear that these gifts are given by the Spirit and are for the common good.
I
think that you’d have to say that those outside on the street didn’t understand
what had happened. Some were genuinely
interested in what had happened. You can
hear that in their question: “What does this mean?” Others were more interested in explaining it
away. You can hear that, too, in the
words that they say. They sneered when
they said, “They are filled with new wine.”
The power that the church claims is God’s gift,
the world tries to explain away as inebriation.
Oh,
it was a powerful day. God did a great
thing that day, by giving His spirit. It
was exciting
and exhilarating. It gave birth to the
church, it changed the world. My
questions for you this morning are these: Do we still believe in a God who acts
like that? Do we still believe in a God
who blows through closed doors? Do we
still believe in a God who can transform us and thrill us? Or do we believe in a different God now? Do we believe in a God near retirement who
only works a couple of days a week and on those days hears prayer
requests? Do we believe in a God who
just lets the world spin around with no involvement in it? Let me ask you this: “When was the last time, if ever, that you
felt the church so joyous, so out of control, that someone, who didn’t know
you, might think that you were drunk?”
The
Holy Spirit, quite honestly, is hard to explain. I wonder how I could explain the Spirit to
Annie Grace, my four year old. God the
Father, sure, that’s not too difficult to explain. God is the one who created the heavens and
the earth. And God as Son, well, that’s
not too hard, either. Jesus is God made
flesh, who came to be with us to let us know how much God loves us. But the third person of the Trinity, God the
Spirit, well now that’s harder to explain.
Jesus himself had trouble describing the spirit. To the leader of the Pharisees, Nicodemus, he
said, “The Spirit blows where it chooses.
You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or
where it goes. So it is with those who
are born of the Spirit.”
What
I think is that it is easier to experience the Spirit than to explain it. And as far as I have found out, there is
nothing that you can do to make it happen, except to pray for it. The prayer is simple. It is this one, “Come Holy Spirit.” You should pray that prayer every chance that
you get. But you had better be careful
doing that. One of my seminary
professors, Dr.
Annie
Dillard, writing in her book Teaching A Stone To
Talk says this: “The churches are
children playing on the floor with chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of
So
if you don’t want to change anything about your life, then for heaven’s sake,
don’t pray for the Spirit. If you don’t
want our church to change and to be powerful and passionate, then don’t pray
for that. But, on the
other hand, if you are the kind of person who likes to stand out on the front
porch or in the carport when a storm is blowing through. If you are the kind of person who likes to
see the trees bend a bit, then you are a good candidate for the Holy Spirit
prayer, “Come Holy Spirit.”
Before
we go home this morning, I want to say something else to you. It is one thing to pray for God’s Spirit,
it’s quite another to recognize it when it blows through. For you see, the Spirit doesn’t always blow
like the wind on the Day of Pentecost.
And the Spirit doesn’t always feel like a tongue of fire resting on your
shoulder. Sometimes, I might even
venture to say, most of the time, the Spirit is much quieter than that. So how is the Spirit
made known to us these days?
Barbara
Brown Taylor, a great preacher, suggests that one of the ways that the Spirit
makes itself known to us is in a new beginning, a fresh start. So maybe you have been in a bad mood for, oh,
say, a year or so. Those around you are
tired of it. If you are honest with
yourself, you are tired of it. But you
just can’t seem to feel better for some reason.
Then it happens. It’s not a
rushing wind or a flame of fire. Maybe
it’s a song of a bird in the middle of the night. You take a deep breath for the first time in
a long time. Your mouth opens, your
chest expands, and you get a second wind.
You are not really sure what to call it, this new feeling, so why don’t
you call it the presence of the Holy Spirit?
Barbara
Brown Taylor also suggests that the Holy Spirit makes itself known in relationships
that are put back together. There has
been strife for some reason for some time.
There is a reason for it. It may have been something you did or
something that was done to you and you just can’t get past it. You want to make things right and so you pick
up the phone and set it down again and again.
But finally you say “Now.” And
you say the words and the reunion begins.
You didn’t do this on your own.
You couldn’t have done this on your own.
Call it what you will, but could it be the Holy Spirit. Forgiveness is too hard to do on your own.
Or
maybe it happens this way. There you are
minding your own business, when someone crosses your mind. You haven’t seen this person in a while, and
getting in touch with them might be difficult.
Or it could be it is someone that you see often, I don’t know. But for some reason they cross your
mind. Now what are you going to do with
that? There was a great woman in the
Harmony Grove Church who once told me that when someone crosses your mind, there
is a reason for it. She told me that
when it happens, I should do something about it. She said, “Often that something is to simply
pray.”
The
Spirit’s presence also happens in this pulpit.
I’ve got words that I have worked hard to write. The sermon is there in front of me when there
is a gentle nudging in my heart to say something that I hadn’t planned on
saying, going another way that I hadn’t planned on traveling. And you can call it whatever you want to call
it, but I think that it’s God’s Spirit.
We
may not always understand it. We may
miss it. I just hope that we will pray
for God’s Spirit to change our hearts, shake our worlds, but most of all to
show up in our lives. Let us pray.
(Special thanks to the
writings of Barbara Brown Taylor for the idea for this sermon and for several
parts of it, including some of her words).