19 May 2013

“Red, wide, and blew”
Pentecost C
Romans 8:14-17 / Acts 2:1-21 / John 14:8-17, 25-27
19 May 2013


The day of Pentecost has come and we are all together in this place … here we are, 50 days after Easter, that first and highest festival of the Christian Church, because without resurrection we would be once, always and forever DEAD … so Easter – Resurrection for Jesus, and his promise of eternal life for us in the future, and rich, full abundant life for us now … Easter is our “big day.”
Now, here, on Pentecost, this second festival of the Christian Church, we are here, gathered together to hear about, to mark the giving (and receiving) of the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit, Jesus’ Spirit, to, upon the 12 apostles and, through them, God’s creation of the Church.
Yes – it is the second festival of the Christian Church … right after Easter, long before Christmas and Epiphany and all the others were publicly and corporately marked … Pentecost has been celebrated by Jesus-followers for 2000 years. Before that, it had been – and continues to be – a Jewish festival, the feast of Weeks, literally, a week of weeks, 50 days following Passover. Jews today call it Shavuot – the first fruits festival, the marking of the first harvest of wheat in the Holy Land after the Israelites had come there from slavery in Egypt – and Shavuot this year ran from sundown on Tuesday to sundown on Thursday.
But Lutherans … many Lutherans have been a little slow to warm up to the fire of Pentecost … getting a little oogie when someone starts to talk about the Holy Spirit, perhaps sliding down in the seats, thinking that someone’s going to come out and start speaking in tongues or something. (A well-ordered demonstration, with all the Scandinavian languages, now, is OK … but please stop there, thanks.)
Well, people of God called Nativity, I’ve never known you to get too oogie about anything, so we’re not going to curtail this Spirit-celebration today … because what this day is all about, is NOT just a one –time “Birthday of the Church” – no, it is the continual unleashing of God’s Spirit upon all the earth, all the peoples, all of God’s beloved, precious creation.
And what we learn from our three texts for today, is that that Spirit-unleashing can, will take many different forms, in and through God’s people.
But we will always be able to distinguish God’s Spirit at work through one constant mark.
Paul puts that forward in his letter to the Roman church.

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

God’s Spirit-sign is the sign of the Cross. Strength through suffering … Jesus’ suffering, and death on the Cross … his suffering brings us life. And as Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is marked with the Sign of the Cross, so too are ours to be, marked and sealed with the Cross of Christ, upon our heads and on our hearts, forever.
A true story titled “Young Men and Fire” – a book written by Norman MacLean, he who also wrote “A River Runs Through It” – that story is burned into my memory as a illustration / remembrance of what Paul is saying here in Romans.
“Young Men and Fire” is a story of some Montana smokejumpers, Forest Service firefighters who some 60+ years ago parachuted into Mann Gulch in NW Montana – the Gates of the Mountains area near Helena – to put out what they thought was a routine lightning strike fire.
However, this fire turned into a “blow up” and became, until recently, the most deadly forest fire for those fighting it, in American history.
MacLean’s story follows in painstaking detail what happened over the course of an hour and a half that hot August afternoon in 1949. After landing from the jump and securing their supplies, the smokejumpers set out to survey the fire to try and get a line around it.
But the day was no ordinary day and the fire, no ordinary fire. The air temperature was 97 degrees and the wind was so turbulent that one smokejumper got sick on the plane, didn’t jump and on landing in Missoula, quit the jumpers altogether.
MacLean relates how they never really got the fire line started, because the fire jumped from the heavily wooded ridge to the east, onto the more grassy upslope where the jumpers had landed. The foreman, Wag Dodge, advised his crew to start running uphill to escape the fire.
But there was no escaping it. The blow-up burned toward them so fast that it consumed 3,000 acres in 10 minutes’ time. Flames went into the air 10 stories high, and the temperature reached close to a thousand degrees.
Realizing he wouldn’t be able to outrun the fire, Dodge made a split second decision … he lit a small fire in the grass ahead of him and advised his crew to jump into the burned grass and cover themselves to survive.
But none did; they scoffed at him, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here” Dodge later reported hearing one of the men say as they ran past him. Two who were already well out ahead did manage to outrun the flames and make it to the other side of the ridge. But eleven of the remaining thirteen died immediately from suffocation … the fire was so intense, it consumed all the oxygen out ahead of it. Two survived the blow up but died the next day in hospital from severe burns. Wag Dodge survived unharmed, by lighting his own fire and jumping into it. He said that the blowup fire swept around and over him so fiercely he was lifted up off the ground two or three times before it passed over him and burned itself out at the top of the ridge. But he survived … he lived to tell the tale so others would hear, and learn, and live, from his experience, in future fires.
And this is what Paul is saying here. The Spirit, God’s Spirit, leads us, calls us, to serve … to serve in the Sign of the Cross … that this faith, this life, it’s not all about us but it’s all about Jesus … and so, like Jesus, we follow the call to service … serving others, most especially those who Jesus went out of his way to be with and do for … those who some (who called themselves “religious”) … these religious, they shunned, they stayed away from, they disdained them … but Jesus did not … and just as he was willing to light and lay down in his own fire … the firestorm which is stirred up wherever the Cross is present and living and active in people’s lives … so we too, are called to lay down in the fire … to be willing to risk it all, for Jesus’ sake … for it is only through that fire … it is only through the Cross … that true, real, rich, abundant life comes … for Jesus, for us, for the world.
And Paul makes this even clearer for us:

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.

When you’re adopted, adopted into a loving, caring family, especially when you’ve known other than that … and there are many ways to be adopted … through legal means, through friendship means, through marriage and in-laws … when you are adopted into a loving, caring family, and you know real love, how it should be, there is no need for fear anymore.
Paul is telling his Roman Christian brothers and sisters here, that they indeed know this spirit of adoption through their baptism into Christ … as they have become church, adopted into God’s family because of, through Jesus, they no longer shall have a spirit of slavery … the attitude of the fearful world … a spirit of scarcity … there will never be enough to go around, so I had better gather and hoard all I can for myself and look out for myself … but instead, they will have a spirit of abundance, of blessings full and rich, deep and wide … and this spirit, God’s Spirit, Jesus’ spirit, will bring, is bringing faith into their lives, so that those Romans can risk in service …. service which may bring some suffering, it’s true, but service which will end in glory … Christ’s glory, their glory with him.
In other words, Paul says, Romans, you need to be able to lay down in the fire, to be willing to give it all up, in hearing the call to follow Jesus … and thus you will be filled to abundance.
It’s not the message the world wants to hear. It’s not even the message WE want to hear, let alone speak to others.
And yet, what Paul is saying here in Romans, is the same thing Jesus’ followers were saying there, on that first Pentecost, as Acts conveys the word that those who heard them, saying, in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.
Luke – the author of Acts – is certain to say that All were amazed and perplexed and were asking one another What does this mean?
But there were others – others who put themselves outside the “all” of the gathered community through their scoffing and sneering – others who, for whatever reason, couldn’t, didn’t want to think anything of God was going on here, and so they scoffed, scoffed like those who saw Wag Dodge’s fire and refused to lay down in it, Ah, what a bunch of drunken bums. To hell with that, I’m getting out of here.
And so God leaves it to Peter … the one who denied Jesus just weeks earlier, the one who has bumbled his discipleship at every turn … Peter is the one who sets everyone straight.
Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem … he begins … and then he does a very strange thing … he takes a passage of Scripture which is all “gloom and doom” – from the prophet Joel – and, for those who are paying attention to him, turns this text on its ear.
This is the “Day of the Lord” text … a day of gloom and thick darkness … a day when the priests of the Lord are to weep between the vestibule and the altar … a day which is to drive God’s people to utter repentance for the overwhelming weight of their sins. We use this text to begin the Season of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, our rough Christian equivalent to Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, apology, repentance.
And yet, hear what Peter says here. He turns this “gloom and doom” text on its ear … he’s saying, hey, remember this word from our past … what we thought was going to be awful for us? It is here, here, right here, right now, your sons and daughters ARE prophesying, your young men ARE seeing visions, your old men ARE dreaming dreams. THIS is the time, right here, right now, God’s kingdom has broken, is breaking into this world … and God’s Spirit is here, as Jesus has promised, for US.
And that’s what Pentecost is all about. God’s Spirit … Jesus’ spirit, which he promised he would send to his followers, God’s Spirit, Jesus’ spirit, he has sent it and is still, is now sending it upon us, here today.
Through waters of Baptism … through Word of Proclamation … through Confession and Forgiveness … through the shared Meal in which Jesus shares his very self … here, we receive God’s Spirit of adoption … of freedom … of life … life which inexorably drives us out, drives us out to serve, to share, to live and to love one another as Christ has loved us.
Sometimes we will have to lie down in our own fires, that is certain. The world is no fan of the Sign of the Cross, strength through being with and for the suffering, living the life of servant-leadership and humility. Sometimes the world will be downright mean to us … sometimes, even those who we thought were with us, there for the festival, they will end up scoffing and sneering.
Pay no attention. That’s their fear talking. The spirit of slavery.
But we have received a spirit of adoption, and so we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
That Spirit, God’s Spirit, Christ’s spirit, is active and alive and moving in and among and through us … manifesting itself in as many different ways as there are of us … moving us to service in as many different ways as there are of us … sometimes, when we need to lay down in our own fire, saving us … but always, always, leading us into God’s future, God’s future where Christ already is, the Lamb who is the Shepherd, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End … always, always, for us. For you.
Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
So Happy Pentecost! Blessed Spirit-Day! Come, Spirit of the Risen Lord Jesus, move us and fill us,
Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness!

You call from tomorrow, you break ancient schemes,
From the bondage of sorrow all the captives dream dreams;
Our women see visions, our men clear their eyes.
With bold new decisions your people arise.

Spirit of Restlessness, stir us from placidness … send us out boldly, to serve the world you love, in Jesus’ name!
Amen! Come, Holy Spirit!