Thunderstruck
Acts 2:1-21

May 27, 2007


I have never been in any church that has not eventually come to an exasperated throwing up of hands at some meeting, declaring gloomily that “we do not communicate well in this church.” Notices of meetings and decisions are written in the bulletin and newsletter, announced from the pulpit, telephoned and emailed, and personally relayed to individuals, but we do not communicate well at all. Of course you don’t, this would not be a church if it did not communicate poorly. No church can completely communicate everything it needs to communicate all the time. It is days like today, Pentecost, when for a little while, everything was said and everything was heard.

The problem with communication in a church is that here we are expected to say everything and to be able to hear everything. Everything means more than a bunch of facts, telephone numbers, meeting times or budget figures; everything is not just our intellectual needs, but our emotional and spiritual requirements as well, and nobody else does all of that all of the time, and then only in part.

Just try to read the Bible, for since the tape-recorder was not on and we cannot decipher for certain with what tone of voice something was said, Christians sometimes have widely and wildly different perceptions of what was meant in Holy Scripture. The tone of voice makes a difference.

This story perhaps should not be told in church, except that it indeed happened in church at a high holy service. The social worker in our area who helped foster families with Vietnamese refugee children, Lucy Nguyen, told us about the proud moment when her brother was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. The service was conducted by the bishop, a Frenchman who had been in Vietnam for over 25 years, very fluent in Vietnamese which as some of you know is a tonal language. That is, there is an almost musical quality to the way in which a word is pronounced, so that the same written word can mean rather drastically different things depending upon the tone used. The people in that church loved and were very proud of that bishop, by the way, one of the last vestiges of French Indo-China.

The big day came for the ordination service and everybody was there. At the culmination of the service, Lucy’s brother was prostrated on the floor in front of the bishop who delivered an impassioned exhortation to the young about-to-be-priest and servant of God. The bishop finally and dramatically said, “Go!” - as in “Go out to serve the world in the name of Christ.” Only, in his excitement he pronounced the word Go with the wrong tone. What was heard, Lucy could barely repeat this to us, was “Go, find yourself a prostitute!” Her brother had a great deal of difficulty picking himself up off the floor, so much was he and the rest of the congregation laughing.

Nevertheless, they were communicating, communicating a long list of things and ideas and emotions. Why would I still know about this one word in the wrong tone of voice that was uttered probably 40 years ago in a distant country? What was communicated was not anger or disappointment, but love and pride in who these people were, and that such a man had wanted to become like them. The fact that he said “Go” to the incorrect place was a human reminder that he was still different and yet one with them. I don’t know at all for sure, but I can imagine that Lucy’s brother has been going around ever since telling people, “Well, the bishop told me to go!”

And lots of people thought the good church folk were drunk. I have been to more than a few worship services where the Pentecostal spirit flowed and it wasn’t even Pentecost. Yes, one could say that they were acting like they were intoxicated with some substance, but as with the multitude watching all of this from a distance in Jerusalem or in one of these churches, they were not correct in their assessment, nor were any of these objective observers thunderstruck.

It doesn’t matter which major world religion you examine, all arrive at the conclusion that there are only so many words you can say, in whatever tone, and words can often be used to say too much or too little or too deceptive. Many of us are not able to speak that well or that precisely, so it’s fortunate that God is bigger than any word. What every religion and faith hopes to be a graceful recipient of is the presence of God. If I feel God present with me now, there is no better or higher feeling, and that presence will change me and make sure I live in a particular way.

In Biblical times, there was the common conception that if you came face to face with God, you would die. Those captured by Pentecost knew that the presence of God made them alive like no other time. For an all too brief a moment, there is no time, only God. Have you ever seen someone slain in the Spirit? Lying exhausted on the church floor, perhaps even unconscious for a while; they are not slain but resurrected from the dead. We dismiss this as emotionalism out of control, yet the Pentecostals whether speaking in tongues, slain in the spirit, holy rolling, quaking or shaking, have what we always want too. We all yearn for the intimate presence of God that is unspeakably fine.

There’s usually a problem with being intimate, however. Intimate tends to mean me, and me means my own private faith, and my own private faith leads strongly away from being responsible for other people and compassionate to their suffering. Being intimate with God might also mean that I don’t need the church. After all, the church is a bunch of troublesome people who’d rather argue than pray, rather jockey and tussle for power and control than heal one another.

Yet, did you ever see someone go into a Pentecostal state of rapture by him/herself, alone? I know there are people who receive visions of divine revelation, some poets and artists who are authentically inspired by the Spirit, but even in the most rapturous of Pentecostal churches, no one speaks in tongues to an empty sanctuary, no one is slain in the Spirit without a brother or sister right there to help her get up, no one shouts without others willing to shout out with you, saying Amen is not a solitary activity. The Holy Spirit is felt the strongest when it invades a group of the saints and unsaints.

I believe a number of us have experienced the presence of the Spirit more than a few times: in the melodic power of a hymn, in the silent drawing together of minds and hearts during a prayer, in the flash of insight and understanding beyond words, in the marvelous cooperation of a work project or preparing a dinner, in the strange and wonderful fellowship of eating a dinner, in the uncanny shift of mood and empathy in a difficult discussion resulting in an unexpected and joyful consensus. There are not very many shouts in the way the Spirit moves us, but Amen keeps repeating inside our heads and hearts.

Sometimes it is precisely during these twinklings of an eye when the narrator of Acts writes that the people, upon hearing the apostles speak to each in their own native tongue of God’s mighty deeds, were thunderstruck. We may not think our bewilderment amounts to being thunderstruck, but keep in mind that the only people who are thunderstruck or bewildered or amazed or excited are those people who have committed their spirit into the holy fray. You can never be an objective observer of the Spirit at work and know what is really going on. There is no choice when it comes to being in the presence of God: you are a participating, subjective, biased, person grasped by a God who expects you to get on with doing holy things. It makes you want to shout!

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan