May 31, 2020
Pentecost Sunday
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
Acts 2:1-21
Ever Opened and Made New
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
Pray with me: Breathe on me, Breath of God! Fill me with life anew. That I may love as Thou hast loved, and do as Thou wouldst do. Amen.
The disciples were sequestered in their upper room. They were closed up, holed up, shut up, locked up, sealed up. Perhaps they were feeling a little broken up, or fed up. Or maybe even a little pent up.
For ten days they’d been waiting. Waiting in Jerusalem, just as Jesus had instructed them. And then on that tenth day, there they were, all rounded up in that room. And in came the Holy Spirit.
How did it get in? How did that Spirit get in through their bolted up and triple barricaded upper room? They were in their safe house! They were sheltered in place! How did that Holy Spirit manage to enter in?
It came as a sound, like the rush of a violent wind. The howling and the roar filled the entire place where they were hiding. And then came the fire. A holy fire. Individual flames, like little tongues. The flames were everywhere. They rested on top of each and every one of the disciples.
And then that great rush of wind filled them up, filled them up and overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God! Those little tongues of holy fire seemed to loosen up their tongues. They began to speak, each one of them, in a foreign tongue. They spoke Egyptian and Phrygian! Suddenly these men of Galilee were uttering in Arabic and Greek and Cappadocian!
That Holy Spirit had broken into their closed-up existence. It had filled them up with its holy power, and now, it pushed them out. Like little fledgling birds in a nest, it pushed them out like a mother bird. Out into the streets of Jerusalem they poured. The power of the Spirit could not be contained by the confines of that tiny upper room. It had burst open their locked door, and out they went! Out into Jerusalem, out into the world.
What exactly had happened to those disciples? It was the same thing that had happened to Jesus 50 days earlier! The authorities had closed him up, too. They wound up his dead body in its grave clothes and put him up in that tomb. Then they rolled up a great, big stone in front of the tomb’s mouth. They thought him properly shut up inside the dark and damp hole, locked up forever.
But they weren’t counting on the Holy Spirit of God! For God will not tolerate closed up things! God opens up! God breaks open the fetters of the slaves. God opens the waters of the Red Sea. God opens up the rock in the desert so that water may pour forth. God declares, “Ephphatha! Be opened!” And the deaf can hear.
This is what the Holy Spirit of the Living God does! It opens up what is closed. It fills up that which is empty. It builds up the broken down and torn apart. The Spirit bears up the weak and forgotten. It draws up the lost and despised.
This Holy Spirit that enlivened the disciples now lives and breathes among us. That same Spirit bubbled up in the waters of our baptism! On that momentous day, each of us was baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And then we were prayed over. Hands were laid on us. The sign of the cross was made upon our brow. And the congregation prayed for the Holy Spirit to sustain us through all our days:
• the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
• the Spirit of counsel and might,
• the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord,
• the Spirit of joy in the Lord’s presence.
The Holy Spirit fills us up here and now. It now pushes us into the world. Now it endows us speak a word of commonality and understanding to a diverse and multi-racial world.
Parthians and Medes. Phrygian and Pamphylian. White skinned and dark skinned. In this last week, we’ve been all too aware of racial divides. A quick succession of hostile events on African American citizens has erupted.
• Two weeks ago, a video surfaced of the shooting death of a young African American man in Georgia, Amaud Arbery. While out on a run in February, Arbery was pursued and shot dead by two white men. Authorities had had possession of this video for months, but no arrests had been made until the video surfaced and went viral on media.
• Then just this past week, Minneapolis citizen George Floyd was detained by police, forced to the ground and handcuffed. He then died after his throat was obstructed for a prolonged period of time by the knee of one of the officers. Before dying, Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe.”
Since then, our nation has erupted in hostilities and flames from pent up frustration and rage. These enduring suspicions and hostilities between the races persist from generation to generation. Since the days of slavery and down to our own times, the long-established responses of fear and hatred continue.
It’s into this division, this hostility, that the Holy Spirit calls and sends us as agents of peace and concord. We cannot stay safely barricaded in our upper room. The Holy Spirit pushes us out, into Jerusalem, into the world.
The Spirit fills and empowers us to bring healing to the nations. Out of the Babel of our racial discord, we are called to channel the peace that passes all understanding. We pray for peace; we become the peace.
We pray for peace, but more, we call for justice. On Pentecost, Peter said, “This is that which the prophet Joel spoke, “I will pour out my Spirit, and your sons and your daughters shall prophecy.”
The Holy Spirit fills us now with prophetic utterances for the world. The prophets of old rallied for justice. They knew that there can be no genuine peace without justice. Peace flows out of justice.
My fellow Spirit-endowed Christians, when we encounter injustice, the Holy Spirit will fill us and use us. We can speak and prophecy until justice flows down like mighty waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Christian author Henri Nouwen writes about the “great liberation of Pentecost.” Left to ourselves, we are powerless. But through the Holy Spirit, what was impossible is realized. He writes:
“The Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised to his followers, is the great gift of God. Without the Spirit of Jesus we can do nothing, but in and through his Spirit we can live free, joyful, and courageous lives. We cannot pray, but the Spirit of Christ can pray in us. We cannot create peace and joy, but the Spirit of Christ can fill us with a peace and joy that is not of this world. We cannot break through the many barriers that divide races, sexes, and nations, but the Spirit of Christ unites all people in the all-embracing love of God.”
In this Holy Spirit, may we live and move and have our being. Breathe on me, breath of God! Fill me with life anew! That I may love as Thou hast loved, and do as Thou wouldst do!
