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“Gone With the Wind”
A sermon for Pentecost Sunday, June 12, 2011
By Rev. Diane Gallo Ryder
Scripture: Acts 2: 1—21
The year was 1969. The day was July 20th. Do you remember where you were?
I was in Adana, Turkey, having just spent my 17th birthday in that hot, dusty city on the Mediterranean – the fourth largest city in the country at that time, although it boasted only one paved road. On a cool day it was 100 degrees; on a hot day it topped out at 120 degrees. As an exchange student in the American Field Service, I lived with the family of one of the richest merchants in the city and I accompanied his 16 year old daughter Esin everywhere she went, along with her 19 year old male chaperone. Esin was in love with her chaperone – a tragedy of epic proportions – because she was promised in marriage to an older man, a holy Muslim man, as was the custom of that time and place. Esin prayed daily that the maid who washed clothes on the roof of the home, hoping to catch a breeze, would not notice the glances the two lovers exchanged because it would mean immediate dismissal for him and immediate disgrace for the family. Conditions were primitive by the New York standards to which I was accustomed. Electricity did not exist; one spigot provided the home’s only running water; and “indoor plumbing” consisted of two ceramic foot holds spaced strategically over a hole in earthen floor of the outhouse.
I tell you these details so you will understand the context in which I heard about the successful first moon landing of Apollo 11. I could not see it on television because television was unheard of; but the Turkish newspaper headline was, “Men on Moon” and underneath it were the words, “The Eagle has landed.” As an American of the space generation I was proud and thankful and totally unprepared for the reaction of even the most educated Turks around me in that remote place. With few exceptions, their reaction was, “Look what those crazy Americans want us to believe now!” In other words, the moon landing was incomprehensible to them; they had no context of modernity in which to place that phenomenon, so it remained a fairy tale. They were simply unprepared to accept this amazing good news.
The reaction of my Turkish friends on July 20, 1969, was not unlike the reaction that some people had on the day of Pentecost which we just heard about in the Book of Acts. Peter was preaching to a mixed group of “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phyrgia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs .” The Bible list is extensive, not merely as an attempt to trip up lay readers many centuries later – but to be sure we understand how amazing, how miraculous, how inclusive, how world-changing was the Wind of the Spirit which blew through that room, creating a miracle by which people who spoke different languages could actually understand one another! (And we all know how difficult it can be to understand one another, even when we speak the same language!) But, as amazing as that miracle was, some dismissed the phenomenon as an illusion proposed by hard core drunkards so misguided that they were already drunk by nine o’clock in the morning. Some in that room heard Peter preach and called it a triumph; some heard the same sermon and called it crazy. Likewise, some heard of the Eagle landing and called it a triumph; while some called it crazy.
It seems to me that this story symbolizes the different ways we, too, can choose to react to amazing good news: We can allow ourselves to be astonished, to be amazed, to recognize something new in our lives and embrace it whole-heartedly; or we can shake our heads in disbelief and tell ourselves, “This cannot be; I cannot understand this new thing, so I will return to the familiar; Iet us turn back toward the ways we have always done things.
What does it take to amaze you? Are you still capable of being astonished? Do you personally or does this church still have the capacity to be amazed? In this era of cynicism, of technological advances so rapid that we become blasé about things that were unheard of yesterday, do we even know what amazement is? The Pentecost story requires us to ponder and to answer these questions because in order to be disciples of an amazing, surprising, ever-renewing and still-speaking God, we must be capable of wonder, we must be eager to embrace miracles; we must be willing to feel the winds of the Spirit blowing new ideas, new visions, and new people into our lives and into our church. To be capable of amazement is one hallmark of a disciple. To see the fire of passion through the medium of tedious New Awakenings meetings, to feel the sweet breeze of change blowing on our skin despite our armor of tradition – these are some of the promises of Pentecost.
Pentecost is all about enthusiasm….did you know that the English word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek “en” meaning “in” and the word “theos” meaning God? Enthusiasm thus means “having God within us.” When was the last time you felt enthusiastic about anything at church? At home? Anywhere? Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.” His contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” May God grant us each and all enthusiasm!
The other side of the Pentecost story, the side that gets the most attention in the most sermons, the side that we least like to consider, is that the wind of God’s Holy Spirit is a two-edged sword. On the one hand it brings new enthusiasms; on the other hand it blows old ways away. God’s Spirit brings CHANGE, my friends, and CHANGE is challenging! Just when the disciples were getting adjusted to Jesus being gone in the flesh, just when they thought they had Jesus’ message all worked out, smooth sailing ahead, just when they had acclaimed Peter as their pre-eminent preacher, along comes the Pentecost experience which challenges them to change! No longer could the disciples claim that Jesus’ message was confined to their comfort zone, just for the Jews, just for certain races, just for one sex, just for one type of person. The Bible’s long list of people on whom God’s Spirit fell makes it clear that the Pentecost experience included people of black skin and white skin and every shade in-between. Politically, it included friends as well as enemies of the Jews. Socially, it included men AND women, young AND old men, slaves AND free, dreamers AND visionaries. Wow! God’s Spirit at Pentecost was scandalously inclusive. Old ways of multiple languages, social separation, political maneuverings, and even of religious dogma were blown away by the winds of the Holy Spirit and something new had begun. Yes, it is a fearsome thought that in order for new things to arise, old things must die; such is the way of life both biological and organizational.
Pentecost, as most of us were taught, celebrates the birthday of the church. At Pentecost the seeds of Christianity were sown; it was the beginning of the end of Jesus’ message being confined only to Judaism. Halleluiah! But now, 21 centuries later, the church as we know it has become moribund, deadening, full of boring meetings and stuffy preachers and organ music to which many young people cannot relate. Across the board, people in both pews and pulpits know that the organizational church has to change in order to take back its path and its promise as a way for people to follow Jesus without all the organizational trappings that get in the way. Today’s meditation at the top of your bulletins comes from UCC pastor Robin Meyers book whose title, Saving Jesus from the Church, says it all: “After centuries of being told that ‘Jesus saves,’ the time has come to save Jesus from the church….If the door is locked, we will break in through the windows. If anyone forbids us to approach the table, we will overturn it and serve communion on the floor…until the church itself is raised from the dead.”
What does it take to get back to the roots of Christianity? What must we be doing NOW to ensure that the organizational church, if it exists at all through the end of this century, embodies the enthusiasm of the church of the first Pentecost? This is what New Awakenings is about; this is what all Christians must be praying about and working out, if the church is to celebrate more birthdays in the future.
Jim Burklo, one of my favorite progressive Christian authors, has developed a list of ten thing in the Bible that don’t make sense to him and ten things in the Bible that DO make sense to him. (Birdlike and Barnless) They are a pretty good list of pre-and post- Pentecost beliefs, a list of the things the winds of the Spirit blew out of the way in order to make room for new things, then as now. I share them with you here and I challenge you to devise your own list of what we must keep and what we must drop in order for enthusiasm to renew our own lives and our own church on this Pentecost Sunday.
Ten Things In the Bible That DO Make Sense: God’s name is “I AM” (Exodus 3:14) The Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5: 7-21) Loyalty and friendship (Ruth 1: 16-18) Awe (Job 37: 14-24) Humility (Psalm 8: 3,4) Justice (Micah 6:8) Love God and neighbor (Mark 12: 30,31) Love your enemies (Matthew 5: 43, 44) Hope (Romans 8: 18-25) Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness (Galatians 5:22)
Ten Things In the Bible That DON’T Make Sense: God only loves Jews (Psalms 33: 10-12) Gays should be stoned to death (Leviticus 20: 13) Women are men’s property (Deuteronomy 20:14) Slavery is OK (Exodus 21: 7) The world was created literally in six days (Genesis 1:31) (Stay tuned for next week’s sermon) God literally sent a flood to destroy the world (Genesis 6:17) Non-Christians will go to hell (Hebrews 10:29) We are depraved sinners who can be saved from hell only by believing that God arranged for his son to be brutally murdered in our place (John 3:16) Women should be seen and not heard (I Corinthians 14: 34) It is best never to have sex at all (I Corinthians 7:1)
The Holy Spirit of Pentecost still sends violent winds our way today, my friends. Can we accept its amazing, new, inclusive power? Will we let it have its way with us? Can we, will we allow some old, no longer useful organizational thoughts and behaviors to be gone with the wind?
Amen.
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