“Living on Borrowed Power”

Acts 2:1-21

June 4, 2006

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

Today is Pentecost Sunday. It is the Sunday that the Christian church has set aside for nearly two thousand years to celebrate the beginning and the birthday of the church. What we celebrate, in particular, is the promised giving of the Holy Spirit. This Spirit helped the church to get up on her legs. Like all birthdays, we celebrate this day in different ways, doing different things.

Most of you know that before coming to be the pastor of St. Paul, I served as one of the associate pastors downtown at First United Methodist Church. The senior pastor was your former pastor, Reverend Jeanie Burton. Jeanie had her own unique way of celebrating the church’s birthday. I worked side by side with her for four years. I remember three of the birthday celebrations.

The first one involved hundreds of balloons, and a few helium tanks. Jeanie had the bright idea that after the late worship service, the whole church (or at least everyone who was there that day) would go out the front doors of the church, be given a red balloon, and at the right moment, the balloon go. The red balloons would soar toward the heavens, and symbolize, I guess, the Holy Spirit. Getting ready for the moment of letting the balloons go was a logistical nightmare! Something Associate Pastors are often in charge of! There is a line in every Associate Pastor’s job description that reads, “And other duties as assigned by the Senior Pastor.”

We could not get a team of people to gather on Saturday some time and fill the balloons with helium. The helium would not last that long. So on Sunday morning, between worship services, a crew of us gathered in the church’s youth lounge. Luckily there was a low ceiling in that room! With an assembly line going, we filled the red balloons with helium, tied a note to the bottom of it, which I think read, “Receive the Spirit,” and placed a red ribbon where the balloon was tied. We bunched the balloons in groups of twenty or so, so that the ushers could distribute them following the worship service. By the way, it takes a whole lot longer than you think to blow up five hundred or so balloons! When the worship service was over, following Jeanie’s cue, we all let the balloons go. Looking back at it now, I’d have to say that it was a remarkable sight seeing all those balloons reach toward the heavens.

The next year, Jeanie had the bright idea of looping tie-died cloth streamers from the

church’s one hundred year old chandelier to the balcony rails surrounding the sanctuary. Jeanie had read about doing such a thing in a book. The orange and yellow and red streamers, twisted and turned, were supposed to look like flames of fire. Again it was a logistical nightmare! The streamers had to be of varying lengths because of where they would be tied to the balcony railing.

On the Friday before the day of Pentecost, we lowered the church’s chandelier (I was glad that the church had just installed an electric device that did the raising and the lowering of the chandelier. Before then, when light bulbs needed changing, someone with great strength, had to lower and raise it by hand!) We tied the streamers to the railing and then tied them to the center part of the chandelier. With all of them in place, we hit the “up” button. The chandelier slowly and surely made its way back up to the ceiling with the streamers in tow.

I will have to admit that it was an impressive sight that Pentecost Sunday morning. I positioned myself in that very formal sanctuary, with very formal worshipers, and watched as their eyes gazed toward the ceiling.

So one year it was the wind. The second year it was the flames. The third year it was a simple birthday cake. Five hundred or so pieces cut. If I remember right, the cake was a white cake, with a picture of the church on it. I think the church’s moto: “Where Everyone Is Afire in Ministry” was somewhere on the cake.

The church usually celebrates the birth of the church on Pentecost. Pentecost is a Jewish festival that falls fifty days after the Passover, which is essentially fifty days after Easter. The Jewish festival celebrates God’s giving the Ten Commandments to the people of Israel through Moses, at Mount Sinai. So the festival celebrated the giving of the law, a revelation of God through the commandments. That is the background for the church’s birthday celebration.

Now you may or may not know this; there are two accounts of the giving of the Spirit. Both are told by gospel writers. One is told by Luke in his second volume, a book that we have come to call The Acts of the Apostles. The other account is told in John’s story of Jesus.

By far, Luke’s version is the one that we know the best. It is a large and loud celebration of the birth of the church. Luke’s account takes place in Jerusalem. There were one hundred and twenty people in the house and thousands of people in the city streets for the festival. The followers of Jesus had gathered to wait and to pray when suddenly it happened. Luke tries his best to describe something that defies description. From heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind. It filled that house. What was heard was then seen. Luke says that there were tongues as of fire that appeared and landed on all of them. Luke writes, “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” The mood of the room and the climate of the city was one of awe and amazement. I do not want you to miss the descriptive words Luke uses. These are some of them. Amazed. Astonished. Bewildered. Amazed again. Perplexed. People were talking and though they were from just about everywhere, they understood each other’s languages.

I like the question that some were asking, “What does this mean?” Rumors were flying, of course, all around the city as to what it did mean. Some said that it was the wine talking. Some were disgusted, I guess. Someone remembered that these followers followed Jesus whose birth was somewhat of a rumor and a scandal.

It was the Galilean fisherman, Simon Peter, who had been so afraid for so long, who spoke to the rumors. He said that it wasn’t the wine; no one was drunk. And thus began his first of many sermons. He quoted the prophet Joel, who said that these things, one day, would happen. At the end of the sermon three thousand people joined the church! Wow! I would have loved to have been a part of that day. I get excited when a couple of people join the church on any given Sunday. That’s Luke’s version of the Day of Pentecost.

John’s version is different. You might say that John’s was not the day of Pentecost but a moment of Pentecost. His is a quiet celebration. The moment was not shared with a festival. There weren’t one hundred and twenty followers huddled in a house. There probably were ten people, ten disciples, who were crouching in fear. One of their number had betrayed Jesus. Another, Thomas, wasn’t there that day. The disciples were wondering what would become of them, what their fate might be. They are intimated. They are frightened. They had locked the door. Though the door did not open, suddenly Jesus was with them. He said to them, “Peace be with you.” They don’t flinch. The disciples are not sure who is standing in front of them. Jesus shows them his hands where there were marks of nails. He showed them his side where he had been speared. Then they recognize him and said, “It is the Lord.” Jesus again speaks a word of peace to them. He blessed them with these words, “As the Father sent me, now I send you. What I have done in my life is now up to you to continue.”

And then a strange thing happens, maybe not as strange as the wind and the flames, but still it is strange. Jesus breathes on them. In John’s story, there is not a big and violent wind, but a divine breath and a divine word: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” That is all that there is. That is the extent of it.

In that house in Jerusalem Jesus took a bunch of disciples and they became the church. They worshiped God, they wrote scripture, they prayed and they tried their best to do God’s will. They became the church, going out and helping people who sometimes weren’t all that grateful. They hurt when other people hurt. They emptied their pockets for other peoples’ children. They built houses when their own houses were falling apart. They painted houses when the paint was peeling from their houses. They mowed yards and raked leaves when their own yards needed the same thing.

Who are these people? These are the ones on whom God has breathed. These are the people who have received the Holy Spirit. Whether it happened mightily like it did on the day of Pentecost or quietly like it did in the second story room when Jesus suddenly appeared, it did happen. And it will happen to us. How will this Spirit come to you? My guess is that it will be more like it was in John’s story of Jesus quietly and without of wind and flames.

Maybe it will happen like it did for a middle aged woman named Dottie. Dr. Bill Bouknight, the Senior Pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Memphis tells her story. He says that he met Dottie while he was visiting Asbury Theological Seminary as a guest preacher. After the worship service, Bill went to the library. Dottie approached him and asked if she could share her story. Of course Bill said that she could.

She explained that her parents were not active in church. She described her father as an inactive Catholic. He would take her to their neighborhood church every time the doors were opened. The church just happened to be a United Methodist Church. Dottie’s father would drop her off and pick her up after the worship service. The pastor of that church took an interest in Dottie and soon she was a part of his family, eating Sunday lunch at the parsonage many times.

Dottie loved the church and when she was twelve, she made the decision our confirmands are making today. When she was eighteen she married a kind man and soon they had three children. As the years passed, Dottie went through the motions of going to church but without any real joy in it. One day she visited her mother and picked up a book written by Winston Churchill, entitled Inside the Cup. The book tells the story of a priest who had everything but a personal experience of the Holy Spirit. Dottie read the book and others and was convicted. She wanted a personal experience with God.

One night she lay on her bedroom floor and begged God’s Spirit to fill her up. And the Holy Spirit came, but not as an overwhelming emotional experience. Instead she felt a deep, peaceful, energizing presence. It was similar to the experience John Wesley described as a heart warming one.

In the days that followed, Dottie used her gifts to glorify God. She went to college and then to seminary. When Bill Bouknight met Dottie, she was in charge of the prayer ministries for the seminary community. It all happened because of God’s Spirit.

It is dangerous, it is risky, I guess to invite the Holy Spirit into these lives of our’s and into this church of our’s. It’s risky because we can never tell where God will lead us. What does all of this mean, the folks in Jerusalem asked? It means that the work of Jesus doesn’t die on the cross. It means that it is up to us to be his hands and feet. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to Fred Craddock for the idea of sharing both the loud story of Pentecost in the book of Acts and the quieter one in the gospel of John. The idea is his; I borrowed it. Thanks also to Bill Bouknight for sharing the story about Dottie).