Pentecost May 15, 2005

Acts 2: 1-21

Call and Response

Elizabeth Macaulay

Edwina Gately is a Christian poet and writer and a woman who has learned much about oppression. She has been involved for years in a ministry for prostituted women.

In her ministry, she is often stricken with a heart near broken by the Christian church. She sees the immense resource the life-giving gospel and the community of faith could be for the women with whom she works. All too often, she sees the church step away from sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with those who need to hear it most - you and me and people who live by supporting themselves in the most heartbreaking of ways and all who are hungry to know the touch of grace.

Gately makes the claim that people of faith seem to worry and quibble more about how the good news of Jesus Christ is told rather than the fact that the good news of Jesus Christ is shared with all and any. Working as she does with women who have been oppressed by so many, women who feel less than welcome by the established church, Gately tells a powerful story.

There once were a people given a sublime gift. They were given the gift of truth and love and the expectation of promise that gave the truth and love energy and sizzle. The people were stunned by the enormity of the gift, and they celebrated for a good long while the wonder of such a treasure. They grounded their whole way of living upon the shine of that gift, and HAD to share the good news of that gift with anyone who passed by. It was too good to keep to themselves.

And creation danced with the joy of a people who lived knowing that the good news of love and joy had to be shared.

Gathering places for telling the story were set up. It didn't matter where. Wherever there were people, the story was shared and celebrated.

But after a time, the people began to know the presence of worry. They had been given this great gift and they knew the truth and shine of having that truth and they came to worry about sharing it quite so freely and creatively with those who would listen. After all, they were the keepers of the truth. What would happen if they told the story and the next storyteller didn't tell it correctly or in the same exact way they had heard it?

So they called a meeting - communities LOVE to do that - and after much discussion and a lot of energy expended arguing their points, the community decided that they should really begin to be proactive in order to protect their treasure.

So they began to think about ways to guard the truth. It had been given to them, after all, and they didn't want it sullied by other people's interpretations or incorrect methods of sharing.

So they walled the truth and the joy and the expectation and power of promise up. They began to believe that the gift was best contained in a suitably imposing sort of edifice to be celebrated once a week and they became uneasy when people not like themselves stopped by to hear the story. They had become so familiar with the story that they forgot what it felt like the first time they heard it. They forgot how important it was that someone had seen fit to share it with them in a language they could understand. So if people didn't understand the story as they told it, they blamed the people - those dunderheads! - instead of their own growing unwillingness to tell the good news well and powerfully no matter how much creativity it took.

And the joy of the people? The hope and excitement and sense of power of the people? That joy became something to fight about and worry over. They began to be dedicated not so much to celebrating the gift. Instead, they were earnestly sure that their job was to manage it with the correct administrative practices.

People eager to share the gift continued to come to the special building where the story of the gift was told in the proper ways. But less and less people came over the years. And the less people who came, the more the people who guarded the gift were sure that they had to guard it more carefully and vigilantly. The right words had to be said when talking about the gift and the right music had to be used when singing about the gift.

And so it went until for many, the intricacies of proper management of the gift became more compelling than the shine and power of the sharing of the good news that began the movement so long ago.

Pentecost is a reminder, my friends.

It is a reminder that into the places of fear and walling away bursts the dance and sear of Holy Spirit firepower and that in-bursting changes EVERYTHING.

We become, through the gift of the Holy Spirit a people emboldened and charged with loving and living and sharing the good news of the vision of Jesus.

Not just on Sundays. Not just using the magic words or the approved music and not just those of us ordained and not just those of us who are perfect - are there any of those here? Good!

What the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost did was invite us to fill the places of fear in our life - the places where we feel inadequate and not enough and for sure so wretched that we don't want anyone to know the REAL person behind our persona. What Pentecost means is that those places of ache and not-enough are filled with the power of the holy. And is precisely in those places where our most powerful work can be done.

The places of our wounding can so often become the places of our greatest power.

Those disciples? They were huddling in a room so afraid and so unsure about what God wanted them to do next.

And so it is. We are engaged in so many effective and life changing ministries through this church but we too are sometimes afraid and unsure about what God is calling us to do next. And like those disciples long ago, our fear has the power to immobilize us.

But oh, into the midst of that fear swooped the dance of the spirit and the assurance that life is more than fear and that ANYTHING is possible as long as we are telling the story of God's mighty works.

So how will we tell that story, my family in Christ?

How will we work with the people joining our church today and with those who will visit next week and how will we tell the story to our neighborhood and to our world that

We worship a God who calls to us each to live joy and love and the power of grace

And we serve a God who insists that there is enough for all and that no one should be without the

Shelter of community

And we follow a teacher who reached into the places of pain and want and reaches toward us yet

With such longing.

Such longing for us to live the power and promise and dance of the Spirit in our midst.

Will we open an after school program? Will we begin a second worship service? Will we intentionally learn how it is we are called to reach out in this time and place? Will we endure the discomfort of peeling back our walls and sharing the good news?

Oh, we have such good news to share.

May we be people of the Spirit.

Amen

Amen