May 11, 2008
Festival of Pentecost
Pastor Harry Mueller


Grace and peace be to you, this Pentecost Sunday. If we would have gone down the street a few blocks on Summit Avenue to the Mt Zion Temple last Friday or Saturday, when they were at worship, and asked the congregation or the rabbi what Pentecost is, we might have heard that it is a annual festival day for the Jewish community when they celebrate the gift of the torah given to Moses on Mt Sinai. It is an ancient festival. It might be one that Jesus celebrated each year with his family. It comes, in the Jewish year, fifty days after Passover. Thus the name “pente” for fifty. Now Luke tells us story at the beginning of his second volume, in Acts 2, about people gathering fifty days after the Passover . This was the one after the time, we’ve recently retold the story, of Jesus being captured, tried, crucified, and rising again. People from all over, Luke tells us, were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost. This is always, by the way, one of the most difficult Sundays to be a lector because of the hard to pronounce names of places people had come from. Luke tells us that this old festival was transformed, for us Christians, to mark the coming of God’s Spirit to people of all kinds.

Luke uses a lot of different kinds of imagery to tell us the story. Wind was always a Hebrew idea for Spirit. Wind, breath, Spirit, they were the same word. Luke talked about fire. Fire is and was an idea for power and energy. Language, words, the ability to communicate in different tongues, this is an idea that says it is for all people. It is for people from many nations, like those gathered at Jerusalem. Then in Luke’s story, Peter preaches a sermon to interpret or explain, what this was all about. Peter says this was the point of the ancient prophets. This is not new. This is the point people like Joel and Jeremiah and others were trying to make. The Spirit will come so that young and old, men and women, people of all kinds, like we have here too, will see visions and dream dreams. The reign of God will be among us. You can name the different kinds. Young, old, men, women, gay, straight, rich or poor, able bodied, handicapped, educated or not. This was the old Pentecost, transformed. Now the presence of God was coming to dwell in us. Like Jeremiah had said, “I will write it in your hearts” Or Joel said, “you will dream dreams and see visions.”

There are so many ways to talk about Pentecost. Many times, over the years, I remember having a children’s sermon with a birthday cake and burning candles. Many scholars have said this was the birthday of the church. We’ve sung, Happy Birthday, to ourselves. Another way, and I love the idea, of our Sunday School superintendents, is to fly kites. Here the wind pushes those kites up into the sky and the Spirit in the wind helps them dance in the sky. This is closely related to what Peter was preaching about in the story. The Spirit helps us rise and dance as we reflect God’s will. I think another way to talk about Pentecost is the power or energy related to this day. Energy that is in our heart and flows from us to reflect what Jesus was about. Pentecost is an unleashing of the energy and power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus had taught, that the best kind of use of this energy is when you give it away in the form of a servant. This energy is a work from the bottom up. Percolating up in the works of people like you and me from our hearts, lives, and actions.

Now I could go into lots of stories and guess that someplace today a sermon, or two, will be preached that will say what the spirit does is set people free to raise their hands during the singing of a hymn. Or they might feel free to clap their hands during a song. They may speak in some strange sounds. The freedom to do this will identify people as Pentecostals. Imagine, God’s frozen, chosen clapping or raising their hands. That’s all well and good, but I think it goes much deeper than that.

As I look around, I see the energy of God unleashed, when it calls and gathers, (as the catechism said) people of great diversity together for worship and community. Much like what I see here at St Paul Reformation. We have a kind of diversity and community here that is different than a lot of places. We celebrate the community, as they did in Jerusalem, when people of all kinds gathered on that Pentecost-transformed day.

When I look around I hear voices of people doing God’s work in a hurting world. In the middle of the week I shot off an e-mail to John Nunes, the president of Lutheran World Relief, who brought the LRW message here two weeks ago. I asked, in the wake of such devastating news from Myanmar and the additional sadness that relief workers and aid isn’t getting in via the U.N, is there any good news from LWR? I got an e-mail back yesterday, addressed to pastors all over, saying some of the smaller agencies are having a little bit better luck. They are working hard to change the reception by the junta. They will keep us informed. This is the energy and Spirit of Pentecost at work percolating up in the world doing the kind of works we know Jesus cared about. I saw the Spirit of Pentecost at work here last week when Bishop Babba, from Nigeria, preached and I had heard that a week earlier, he and Nunes had the opportunity to talk and maybe there might be a way through LWR and the money they will help direct to find a way to Nigeria to help fight malaria and AIDS. This is the Spirit of Pentecost at work.

Today with this story of voices from all over the world coming together it is a great joy to welcome you, Pieter Oberholzer, from South Africa. I’ve heard about the work you do and it is a joy to welcome you. I know you have many stories to tell us about the work you do and I’m looking forward to hearing some of them. Let me mention one of my own. When I visited your country in 1984, I was even in your beautiful area of Cape Town. In those days, under the awful system of apartheid, people all talked about the change coming, but all I heard was that it would come after a terrible blood bath. I left South Africa with the idea of a coming blood bath firmly fixed in my thoughts. But ten years later change came and there was no blood bath and I thought to myself, ever since, here is the Spirit of Pentecost at work. The change may not be coming as fast as we’d like but no doubt, the Spirit is at work. It is percolating up through work like yours and people are finding community and welcome and being sustained.

Lastly, when the Spirit isn’t working change in society it is also working in our lives in other ways. I asked Marie Johnson here if I could share what’s been going on with her. Marie has been ill this winter with pneumonia and it has been frightening and brings anxiety. Both Pastor Anita and I started doing a similar thing in our visits with her, unbeknownst to each other. We started encouraging Marie to take in a deep breath and say, “spirit come into me, calm me” This is the Spirit of Pentecost at work also. It calms our anxieties.

So here we are on Pentecost-transformed. We remember Peter preaching that this is what it has always been about. The Spirit, the wind, the energy from the bottom of society upwards, of inclusion of all peoples, the compassion, the change, the relief work, the calming of our anxieties.

Come into us Spirit of God on this Pentecost transformed. Amen.