Acts 2:1-15, 22-24, 32-33, 36-41
This description of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie. It is mysterious. It is surreal. It borders on the bizarre.
First, there is the noisy wind from heaven that blows only through the house where the disciples are gathered. No wind outside, just inside. Then there is a fire that descends and splits into many little fires, coming to rest on each disciples head with no hair being burnt. And the little fires are in the shape of tongues. Then everyone starts talking at once, but in a different language.
There was a Steven Spielberg type of character who lived back in the 16th century named Lorenzo D’Medici. They called him “Lorenzo the Magnificent” because he really knew how to create a pageant and public spectacle at religious festival times. All the people in the city of Florence, where he lived, would become involved in the celebration.
On one occasion, D’Medici decided to stage the pageant of Pentecost in one of the city’s great churches. He liked realism in his drama, so he arranged for a system of wires and pulleys to make it look like the fire was swooshing down from above. And he used real fire.
On the Day of Pentecost, as the great pageant unfolded, the fire came flitting down right on cue. But some of it brushed against some flimsy stage hangings, igniting them. The church burned to the ground.
Sometimes it’s best to just leave the miraculous to God.
The real Pentecost, the unusual, almost weird occurrence, when the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples, giving birth to the church, is evidently an unreproducible event. But shouldn’t it be so with God’s amazing acts?
Even though the spectacle makes us scratch our heads, we can’t let the bizarre side of it cloud our vision from what God was doing. There was something even more amazing than the wind, fire, and different languages going on there. All those elements were just the means God used—but they were not the end God was trying to achieve.
William Sloan Coffin, the one time minister at the Riverside Presbyterian Church in New York City, once said, “As is often the case in the Bible, it is the invisible event that counts most.” If we look beyond the out-of-the-ordinary way in which the Holy Spirit was given by God, I think we see that “invisible event”: a group of people become the church—the new community of God—the new Chosen People. What we see is a number of disheveled disciples becoming the Spirit empowered church of Jesus Christ.
Think of what kind of people were gathered in that house on Pentecost. Those whom Jesus had chosen were everyday people—hard working laborers and professional people. They, at the time of Pentecost, 40 days after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, were a lost bunch, without vision, without courage, feeling powerless. Even some of the 12 disciples were abandoning the cause and going back to fishing, including Peter, James and John.
Ted Engstrom started his bestselling book, The Pursuit of Excellence, with the following story:
There was a native American who found an eagle’s egg. He put it into the nest of a prairie chicken. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
All his life, the changeling eagle, thinking he was a prairie chicken, did what the prairie chickens did. He scratched in the dirt for seeds and insects to eat. He clucked and cackled as best he could. He would fly in a brief thrashing of wings and flurry of feathers, no more than a few feet off the ground. After all, that’s how prairie chickens were supposed to fly.
In time, the changeling eagle grew up. One day, he saw a magnificent bird far above him in the cloudless sky. Hanging with graceful majesty on the powerful wind currents, it soared with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
“What a beautiful bird!” said the changeling eagle to his fellow chickens. “What is it?”
“That’s an eagle, the chief of birds,” one of the prairie chickens clucked. “But don’t give it a second thought. You could never be like him.”
So the changeling eagle never did give it another thought. It went on thinking and living as if it was a prairie chicken.
The coming of the Holy Spirit was like seeing the eagle in the sky for those disciples. But, unlike Engstrom’s story, instead of taking the advice of the other prairie chickens, the disciples became inspired. They inhaled the breath of God. They became invigorated. They found a new strength in their wings to fly the coup and see what the sky was like with the power of the wind to lift them.
God had inflamed them with a passion to be something they had no idea they could become—to become what they were meant to become all along—transformed from timidity to boldness.
The Holy Spirit came upon Christ’s followers and, in effect, told them, “You aren’t just a bunch of prairie chickens. You are eagles, and you were meant to fly to great heights for God. Recognize who you are! Recognize what you have now been empowered by the Holy Spirit to become and to do! Spread those mighty wings and fly!”
They were an ordinary group of people, whose lives had been touched by Jesus Christ, but, before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, had somehow lost any idea or vision of what they were supposed to do beyond their time with Jesus. They were not in touch with their gifts, nor did they recognize how they were endowed by God with eagle-like qualities. All they needed was the second touch—the second empowering—by the Holy Spirit, and the world has never been the same since.
This is what we celebrate at Pentecost—the time when God’s Spirit empowered the church to do great things. But, we don’t worship the past. We, as the church today, don’t look back and think, “Wow, that was cool for them, and we celebrate that once a year on Pentecost Sunday, and leave the sanctuary after worship, ho hum.” Instead, we look for the ways that God’s Spirit continues to come to us in order to empower us as individual Christians and together as the church.
There is the story about the man who always seemed to bring home a stringer load of fish. It was uncanny, and people wondered how he could be so successful. A stranger asked to go with him in order to check out the fisherman’s reputation.
They started early and boated across the lake to a secluded area. The stranger noticed that the fisherman didn’t have a fishing pole. Just a rusty old tackle box. They got to the man’s fishing spot. The fisherman opened the box and pulled out a small stick of dynamite, lit it, and tossed it into the water. There was thumping explosion underwater, and the stunned fish rose to the surface. The fisherman began dipping his net into the water and pulling the fish into the boat.
At that point the stranger reached back and revealed from his back pocket the credentials of a game warden. Calmly, the fisherman opened the tackle box again, got out another small stick of dynamite, lit the fuse and handed it to the game warden. As the fuse burned down, he said to the game warden, “Well, are you going to fish or are you just going to sit there?”
I think the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, and at several points in the life of the church, has handed the church a lit stick of empowerment. It’s ready to go off and we are being asked if we are ready to get to work and take advantage of that dynamite potency we’ve been handed and the effective capabilities that are now in our grasp.
One woman wrote, “I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble…For the world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the combination of tiny pushes of each worker.” You know who wrote that? Helen Keller, and I think she of all people would know what she was talking about.
Let us be empowered by the Holy Spirit. Let us be heroes of the faith, and let us be the ones who add the tiny pushes that combine for heroic spiritual change in our community. But most of all, let us, like eagles, soar to the heights of where we were meant to be, rather than be content in a Spirit-less prairie chicken existence.
No comments:
Post a Comment