Casting Lots, Making Decisions

"Drunk On The Spirit"

Acts 2:1-21
May 31, 2009

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And
suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled
the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among
them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And
at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them
speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not
all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our
own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia,
Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts
of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes,
Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds
of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this
mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of
Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say.
Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o”clock in the morning.
No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God
declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters
shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream
dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my
Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs
on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to
darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious
day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Whenever I preach on Pentecost Sunday, I find myself at a loss for words, and, that, my
friends, is not a good thing when the whole point of this event is words, and how they
sort of spew forth out of the mouths of those earliest followers of Christ. My work is all
about words, about crafting, about speaking them, about using them to knit people in
closer to the God of which the Scriptures tell. To find myself so often speechless on
Pentecost, after almost twelve years in ministry…well, it’s a bit humbling, to be honest. I
think part of the reason is because this powerfully dramatic scene is so distant from the
reality of the church today—we rarely have these kinds of divine intercessions, these
moments of the Spirit unwrapping its power inside of us, and bursting forth, almost like
we were on fire ourselves. It’s on odd moment, and its been called the birth of the
church, this moment when the Spirit erupts amongst them. And yet, there has been
nothing like it since, not really. Sure, there’s been the Pentecostal movement that
began in the late 19th century, and has been wildly successful in many ways, and yet, it
remains a minority movement in the church, even as it has grown numerically. Even
the Pentecostals have become institutionalized, with their denominations like the
Assemblies of God, and their own colleges and seminaries—like all movements within
the church, they either die out, or they become fossilized within organizations and
structures. Nothing with that kind of spiritual power can be sustained for too long
because we humans were simply not built to live on overdrive.

And yet, there have always been times when the church tried to re-capture moments
like we have before us in this Scripture—we keep trying to go back and relive this
moment. Even the Pentecostals try to go back to those heady first days of its own
movement, as sometimes seen in some new phenomenon like the “Toronto blessing”
which was a charismatic movement that seemed to have begun in the mid-1990’s and
peaked in the late 90’s. It was named the Toronto blessing because it began in a
Pentecostal church in Toronto, Canada, and it was characterized by people exploding
into a kind of holy laughter throughout the worship services. Imagine bursting out into
laugher during my sermon—something that usually doesn’t happen around here,
right? Or simply having laughter roll throughout this congregation for hours, or
throughout a congregation of thousands? If you want to see this phenomenon in
action, you can go on the church blog, where I’ve posted a web link and a video
showcasing those experiencing the Blessing. There has been a lot of criticism by some
Christians about this movement, especially those conservatives that tend to be critical
of Pentecostals in general, but I’m not here to criticize anybody, but to simply point out
how we Christians have always been trying to get back to the moment of Pentecost, to
this moment when the Spirit was so obvious, so powerful, so tangible. In some ways,
Pentecostalism itself is a sign of deep longing for that experience of the Spirit that we
see right here in Acts 2, and though it has never been my way of being in relationship
with God, I can appreciate it as a fellow traveler on the journey of faith.

But I also have to say that my favorite part of this passage is the stuff about being
drunk. The Spirit sweeps into that early Christian community, and they begin jabbering,
speaking, squawking in new languages, languages that are not their own, but are
familiar to some in that international crowd that was milling about in Jerusalem. I love
the fact that the onlookers declare that the seeming nonsense coming out of these
folks must be because their drunk, drunk on the cheap stuff, the new wine, the Mad
Dog 20/20, the Riunite on Ice stuff! And I love the fact that poor Peter has to clean up
this misunderstanding by saying: ”Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is
only nine o”clock in the morning.” As if people only drank after 5 PM! And if it had
been 8 PM when the Spirit had sweep into their presence, what would have poor Peter
said then? There is a bit of comedy here, even in the midst of this serious plea Peter is
about to give to those who are wondering what is going on with these odd folks and
their even odder languages. I suspect that that when he gives this explanation about
not being drunk that there is a bit of tittering going on in the crowd, a few knowing
glances, and some raised eyebrows. But Peter forges on, and begins to tell the crowd
that what has happened is something foretold of old, in which God promises to pour
forth God’s own essence, God’s own Spirit, into the world, and to pour that Spirit into
the most unlikely of people. The lowest on the totem of power, the daughters, the old
men, the slaves, the Gentiles, all of them will now have a piece of this Spirit, whose
presence marks the beginning of the end, the beginning of a new beginning for all of
humanity.

And yet, two thousand years later, the end has not come, and certainly the new
beginning is still, well, still in the midst of beginning, actually. Certainly we who have
called upon the name of the Lord have been saved, have been delivered, but there
has been no smoky mist, no fire, no blood, except the blood we so often spilled in our
wars with each other. Certainly Peter and the early church expected a quicker ending,
something they would see in their lifetime, and every generation has believed that they
were the last generation, it seems, at least in the church that has been the case.
Maybe that is why we so often crave this kind of experience, this kind of ecstatic
Pentecost experience, so that we can hurry up and usher in the end? Some in every
generation keep trying to convince God to end the story, to get Jesus to come back as
soon as possible, and if we have another Pentecost, another in breaking of the Spirit,
something like the Toronto Blessings, we can get God to hurry up and end the show.
Those involved in the Toronto Blessings argue that their phenomenon is a sign that the
world is indeed on its last legs, and the Jesus will be coming very soon. And, of course,
it was their forbearers the Pentecostals before them and the Millerites in the middle of
the 19th century, and every hundred years or so, we get a new something or other that
supposed to be a sign that the end is indeed nigh.

I have no doubt that there will always be a strain in our faith that will yearn for the end
of all things, and there has even been a minor strain the Christian tradition of those
who have yearned for the destruction with some kind of sick glee, as if it didn’t break
Jesus’ heart into a million pieces to speak of such horrors that would accompany his
return, as if he was looking forward to burning up the earth. But there has always been
the other, more prevalent strain in the church that took no pleasure in the destruction
of the world, and that argued that we as people of faith must make the world better if, if
we want to see the kingdom of God come in our lifetime. I mean, we haven’t been just
given God’s own Spirit, that Spirit within us, so that we can just wait it out until Jesus
shows up again—I mean, if this Spirit within us, God’s own presence in us, is simply a
nanny until mama shows up…well, what a waste of the spirit within us, don’t you think?
There is a reason why Jesus leaves us a piece of himself in each of those earliest
disciples, and the reason seems to be the same one that drove and spurred Jesus on:
to tell the Good News that God is love, that all are now welcomed, and we, we must join
the Master in the work of healing and hope for the very world that he died for.

Which brings me to the most important point of this sermon, at least in my reading of
this text on this particular Pentecost Sunday: if we are a people who contain God within
us, a people who host the Divine within us, this Spirit given to us by Christ, well, then we
might have to do a bit of listening to see what God wants us to do in particular in
response to this One who is within us. And that’s hard part, isn’t it? I mentioned that
last week, of course, that humility is so important when we begin talking about God and
God’s will for us, and especially for others. The moment of Pentecost recorded here
doesn’t really give us a lot of guidance, but I think there is a clue here, something to
unpack here. I want to look back at how the gift of the Spirit was given, was
manifested. Of all the things that God could have done to signal the beginning of the
age of the Spirit, what God chooses is this powerful burst of different languages, a
million different tongues, spewing forth what sounded like gibberish, except to those
who knew the language being spoken.

I wonder if that is metaphor about how the Spirit works in us, and how really difficult it is
to express what God says to each of us individually. Anybody who does translation
work, or who knows a second or third language, knows how difficult it is translate
something from one language to another…something always gets lost in the
translation, some nuance that a native speaker would easily understand, but someone
who is simply not immersed in the language would never quite get.   It’s the same
problem we have in translating the Bible—but it’s an even worse problem in that case
because we are separated by thousands of years from the original writers, and from
the culture in which it was written. And yet, it’s really clear that God is speaking to us,
each of us, individually, in a particular language, in a particular way that none of is ever
going to quite understand, at least not completely.   I mean, if Susan shares her
experience of God, and what she thinks God is saying to her, and how she is
responding to that to voice within, that Spirit within her…well, I can certainly be happy
for her, and affirm her, and support her, but the voice, the call from God she is
experiencing, it is hers alone, in a language that only her heart, and her heart in
particular can ever really understand. God uses the particular language that each of
our hearts and minds can understand, and the language that God speaks to you in
may be very different than the one God speaks to me in. I can maybe trace out what
God might be saying to you, but the nuances, the added meanings, the little jokes, well,
that that is something only you and God will ever fully understand—something will get
lost in the translation, I suspect, when you try to explain it to me, and vice versa.

I would just say this: we would do much credit to the witness of the church if we would
allow each other to speak the truths that God has given to us in particular, without
trying to always filter them through our language, the language God uses to speak to
us individually. Just because you speak a different language, a different language of
the Spirit, of the heart, than I do, doesn’t mean that God isn’t speaking to the both of
us. I’ve grown tired of Christians telling other Christians that their truths about God can’
t be true, because those particular truths aren’t ones that have been spoken, given to
them—as if my truth had to be your truth. My way of understanding the Gospel, the
good news of God’s love manifested in Jesus of Nazareth, well, it may be different from
yours, but that difference doesn’t mean that both understandings aren’t true, even
when they sometimes seem to contradict each other. Sometimes God can only reach
us through a particular language, a particular language of the heart, and just because
it’s not your language doesn’t mean that it’s not a divine language, a language bursting
forth from the spirit of Pentecost.

When Pentecostalism spread like wildfire in the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century, there were a couple of different locations where people began to
speak in tongues, in a language no one could understand, unlike those we heard in
Pentecost. Well, some in those early Pentecostal communities believed that God was
giving them the ability to speak in Chinese, so that they could carry the Gospel
message to the people of China. So some of them literally picked up and moved to
China, to a land where they had never been, to a culture that was not their own, and
started trying to convert the Chinese masses. Well, they quickly found out that God
had not given them the ability to speak Chinese, and they found themselves in a
strange land, penniless, and homesick. It took months and months to locate these poor
souls scattered throughout China, and it took a bit of money to get them back home
safe and sound. I wonder if these folks had just stopped—stopped for just a second—
and just considered that God wasn’t speaking in any other kind of language than the
one that they themselves needed to hear. There is certainly room for the telling of the
Good News of the Gospel, for evangelism, through both words and our lives, but I think
that probably the most effective way we can reach out to others with respect is to
consider that the Spirit of Pentecost might be speaking to them and through them, in a
language of the heart that is theirs alone, and they might also have a word from God to
us. Who knows—the language they speak, the story they tell, though it is their own, it
also may have something new to say to us as well. Amen.