What A Rush
Acts 2:1-21

June 4, 2006


What a day this has been, what a rush: speaking in tongues of different languages, the marvelous language of music, welcoming friends into our company, hearing this strange story that sets us apart as the Christian Church. A whole wing of Christianity interprets its way of living around the event of this particular day. Christmas and Easter have their place, but Pentecost is every Sunday.

And it will be Pentecost every Sunday from today until December 2, almost half the year. Therefore, thank God, we are back to normal. Living in a state of Pentecost may appear at first intimidating with all those tongues and ecstatic visions floating around, shouting and yelling, quaking and shaking. But that’s all right, living pentecostally is the Church’s normal and ordinary way.

They were all together in one place, which sounds ordinary enough. The apostles were together because of their insecurity, especially since after the Ascension they were flying solo without Jesus. We aren’t told what they were doing in the middle of that big festival. They should have been partying, but it appears that this bunch of apostles was hunkered down again behind closed doors. No way to celebrate a festival.

Then what a rush! It wasn’t exactly the wind, it was a sound like the wind. Somehow this sound like a rush of a violent wind filled the room where they were sitting, and even people out on the street could hear this unnerving sound from within the house. Unusual, to say the least, but who says anything reported in the Bible would not be unusual? The Spirit pushed them outside into that madding crowd, and they began to do remarkable things they had never been able to do before. When some people saw this happening, they assumed it was only because they were drunk. It is hard to change yourself; it is harder still to have people recognize that you have really changed.

Wind, breath, Spirit is all the same word in the original. At first, they are undistinguished as mere movements of air, but soon you know that there is a something really different about one or the other. Yet some people don’t seem to be able to distinguish the difference, so they label people empowered by the Spirit as drunks. And there are different kinds of spirit - team spirit, school spirit, esprit de corps, the spirit of a mob, a malevolent spirit that foments destructiveness rather than creativeness. What characterizes the Holy Spirit is just what the people out in the street heard - each disciple was speaking in a language so that someone else could hear about the Gospel. The disciple was not puffed up by his own eloquence - he barely understood what he was saying. What mattered is that someone else heard, someone else lived, someone else was redeemed. It becomes normal for you to give yourself first to another person who is hurting.

What becomes normal is the way you look at and see through the world, a vision not of how things have to be, but a vision of what people can become. Every week when you come here, it becomes normal to expect that something electric, something positively divine will happen. When the Spirit is not present, you don’t see or hear anything remarkable. An objective observer seldom sees, hears, senses anything tangible and so assumes nothing really is going on. Those who have ears let them hear.

What really becomes normal is that something will happen here, an event will take place. The normality of Pentecost is not a humdrum routine of predictability, but the startling intrusion of some person, some idea, some relationship previously unheard of and never before experienced.

Now we are quiet Spirit people, let’s admit it. You are probably not going to shout, but will speak to one another in simple understandable language. You won’t be rolling on the floor. But it will become normal for you to hear some thought that will disrupt the way you have looked at certain issues and people. It will become normal for you to feel hope in the midst of your despair and discouragement. It will become normal for you to encounter another person whose soul is sick and offer her love; you may finally understand another so that finally you can love one another; someone may come up to you and say a word that unties a burden attached to your soul. That is an event, something new has happened.

Those onlookers in Jerusalem did not expect and were not looking for something new to happen. The apostles were simply doing something old and used up: being drunk. The Spirit moves us to expect there will be today a new creation again. People who expect to see something new usually do see a new world, a new love, a new possibility. They’ve got the Spirit. That’s normal during Pentecost.

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