Sermon – May 23, 2010: Not on My Own Authority
Sermon for Sunday, May 23, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Not on My Own Authority
Acts of the Apostles 2: 1-21; Romans 8: 14-17; John 14: 8-17
When I get to the local cell phone store the woman is already serving a customer, an
older guy with gray hair and glasses. She’s explaining something to him–it seems like he is
trying to set up a new account or a new phone or something. She sets him at a table and
tells him to enter some numbers and excuses herself to come wait on me.
She is on the computer asking me questions and things, and we both overhear the
old guy in the rear of the room sounding baffled. She looks over. “What’s the matter?” she
asks, and the guy sheepishly–because he seems like a nice man and he knows it’s my
turn–admits that he can’t do this programming thing. So she calls out to him, to coach him,
and asks, “What’s your PIN?” The man looks up and says “Nineteen fifty-six.”
“Nineteen fifty-six?!” I think to myself. This old guy’s a year younger than I am. I
look at him more carefully, trying to notice how young he really looks, how relatively unlined
his face is, and another customer comes in. This is a man about our age, I’ll say now. His
hair’s thin on top but still dark, his face is deeply lined, he’s wearing glasses. She tells him
she’ll be with him soon, and she and I get through most of our business, but I still have a
few questions but think, “Hey, I sort of interrupted that other guy when I got here, and I can
wait a few minutes while she takes care of this man”–because he says it’s a billing question
and I reason that it can’t take forever. And it doesn’t take forever, but yet another man
comes in in the meantime. He’s young-looking, trim and wiry, and wears his hair just a little
long, but it’s all gray. He’s no kid either, and I don’t get a chance to see what’s going on with
him because it’s my turn again, and he is still there when I leave.
I’ve noticed something by now. The place doesn’t have any customers who aren’t
middle-aged, at least not most of the time. The generation for whom cell phones and all that
stuff is second-nature doesn’t do business like this, they go on line–probably from their
phone–and make decisions and purchases and get the information they need. That works
for them. They speak a language of symbols and abbreviations and numbers which
doesn’t make sense to me, or to the guy born in 1956, and all the gray-haired guys who are
taking advantage of this new technology still go to a physical place and speak with a human
being face-to-face. That’s how communication happens for us. The nice lady at the cell
phone store speaks our language.
The miracle in the Pentecost story is about people from all over the world
discovering that the good news of Jesus Christ is in their language. It gets communicated to
them, it reaches them, the message makes it across that barrier of strangeness and being
foreign and they’re given the opportunity to believe.
I don’t come from a tradition of charismatic gifts like “speaking in tongues” so I may
have this wrong, but if I do, I think most people have it wrong. The people who call
themselves “Pentecostals” because they speak ecstatically in a moment of spiritual
enthusiasm seem focused on the speaking. The phenomenon of tongue-trilling and
vocalizing unintelligible torrents of sound is an authentic sign of spiritual transport, known in
Islam and other traditions as well as in Christianity, and maybe that’s what it sounded like in
the room with those disciples at the first Pentecost.
That, however, is not the miracle. The miracle of the first Pentecost is not for the
disciples and it’s not to the disciples. It’s given to the passersby who encounter the event,
and it is for them. Each of them hears, in his own language, the good news of what God has
accomplished. That’s the point of Pentecost. Pentecost is about the revelation of God in
Jesus Christ bursting the bonds of particular time, place, culture and custom and finding its
way, by God’s supernatural intervention, to a wide world of those among whom the
disciples have gathered. It’s not really about the speaking so much as it is about the
hearing. It is the hearing which God achieves, by a miracle.
We know that the sudden speaking of the disciples wasn’t a matter of this one
speaking that person’s language and the next one over speaking this person’s language,
matching speakers inside to hearers outside one-to-one. Then the miracle would be one of
focus, of each stranger’s ability to distinguish the words he understood from all the ones he
couldn’t understand. There are others present who hear what’s going on as ravings, as
babblings, as senseless excitement. Those are the people whom Peter addresses
afterward, the people who can only think that the men making that uproar are drunk.
Some of that crowd will be converted secondhand by the miracle combined with
Peter’s preaching. Those aren’t the same people, however, who immediately get the
message of salvation, and who are so astonished at hearing the good news of Jesus Christ
come to them the way it does that they ask, “How is it that each of us hears in his own
language?” How indeed? It is the power of God to overcome obstacles and defy
reasonable expectations which connects those individual souls from all over the world with
the salvation accomplished for them by God.
We don’t need to read this story and get distracted by thinking about speaking in
tongues. We need to read this story and see that what God does is take advantage of
disciples gathering together, and people with an interest in God–because all these
outsiders are interested enough in God to have made long pilgrimages to Jerusalem for a
festival–in order to bless the people who are looking for God. The disciples are even
made to look foolish–people think they have been drinking and it’s midmorning–but that
doesn’t matter. Foolish-looking disciples, disciples who aren’t making much sense in human
terms, disciples who don’t know what they’re doing–God can still use them to bless people
outside the building who want to be blessed by God.
Does that make it more clear that there’s a miracle at work? When we think of it in
terms of God doing the world some good through followers of Jesus Christ getting
together, forming a congregation to mark a holy day, does Pentecost become more
astonishing? When we gather we know it does us good. It’s good to worship God and
keep our perspective by recognizing that we aren’t the greatest power there is, and keep
up our hope because we remember that God loves us. It’s good for us to encourage one
another by showing up, and showing that it’s important to attend to God–to reinforce the
damped-down flame of faith which has sent some soul to worship, who draws strength from
the faithfulness of others at worship. That does us good.
There may even be some mystical sense in which outsiders, passersby, people at
a distance are encouraged by believers getting together to believe together. A bigger
miracle comes at Pentecost, and that is that God outgrows the old holy day and God
outgrows the old holy people and God finds a way to reach people where they need to
be reached. Believers show up and God does the rest, and to some of you that may not
sound very responsible but it gives me hope. God is responsible, after all. That’s one of
the things which we believers who show up believe.
The reading from John’s gospel is about Jesus promising the Holy Spirit to the
disciples, and that involves miracles again. Jesus’ followers will perform miracles, those
who pray in the name of Jesus will get astonishing results, and again it is a matter of
miracles, of exceptions God makes to the way things usually go. God overrides the
common pattern of creation for God’s purposes, and the part the disciples seem to have in
that is merely to be receptive to God’s spirit. In other words, the disciples in John’s gospel,
just like the disciples in the book of Acts, become the occasion for God to do something
God wants which is something the disciples couldn’t do at all on their own.
God’s spirit is at work in the world. Even Jesus, in John’s gospel, is careful to
distinguish his own efforts, his own initiative, from what God is doing. He’s doing what God
wants, saying what God wants said. He does not act on his own authority–as the leader
and model for disciples he makes it clear that God has a way for the world to be, and it is
the part of those who take Christ’s part– it is us to us disciples–to accept that God will work
through us. That doesn’t give us much control to command, but neither does it give us much
power to prevent. The gift of discipleship is humble trust, and steady effort, and the payoff
for God is sometimes–in God’s time–for miracles to occur, which witness to who God is
and what God has done. Even what Jesus says in John’s gospel, which sounds like a
guarantee that we’ll get all we want through prayer, primarily is aimed at how our surprising
and surpassing works, and our faith in prayer, testify to the goodness and greatness of
God.
We would like to control the spirit, and the popularity of Pentecostalism for some
people must have to do with the joy of being able to elicit evidence of a divine world. The
true message of Pentecost, however, is that God’s spirit goes where it will, to achieve what
God intends, and that God can use even our weakness and confusion to put the spirit to
work, provided that we continue to meet together in response to our faith in God.
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