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This Week's Sermon ! May 27, 2012 -- Pentecost

Acts 2: 1-21
Psalm 104
Romans 8: 22-27
John 15: 26-27; 16:4b-15

Babel or Pentecost

I love er. It’s a TV show set in the emergency room of a Chicago hospital. It’s no longer airing new episodes but it is on every day in the early afternoon. Most city emergency rooms are busy places where the people who work there see more than their fair share of sickness and sorrow, violence and heartbreak and occasionally, small amounts of joy. I was watching an episode the other day when a flower delivery van sped around the corned and crashed into another vehicle and a man in a wheelchair. The driver began talking very excitedly in an unknown language and gesturing excitedly. One of the doctors figured they should check the back of the van and they found two boys in the back. Turns out the van driver was a good samaritan who ad picked up the boys off of the street because one had stopped breathing and collapsed because of an asthma attack. The boys spoke English and did not know who their rescuer even was. Since no one could figure out what he was speaking, it took quite a while to find someone who could translate!

In another episode a man comes in, high on magic mushrooms. He is given a stretcher and a chart is started. When the man on the next bed does not receive speedy enough treatment this other fellow hypnotizes him and sets and puts a cast on his broken wrist. It is at this point that the er staff find out that this funny, high, hippy type man is in fact an orthopaedic surgeon at another hospital!

This is Pentecost - the day when we remember the powerful visitation of the Holy Spirit Fran read just a few moments ago. In case you wouldn’t understand Hungarian, I out an English version in your bulletins - the Spirit can use all he help she can get.

We need to remember that the church did not invent Pentecost. The people had gathered for the Jewish festival of Pentecost - celebrated 50 days after Passover and commemorating the giving of the law to the people of Israel in the desert.

Since this event is said to have taken place on that day the church adopted the name for the Christian festival of the power of the Spirit.

Back in the early part of Genesis is a story shrouded in the mists of time. It’s reason for being there is likely to answer the kind of question a precocious kid would ask. “Mom, If all the people of the world are related, from Adam and Eve, or from Noah and his sons, how come we speak different languages? These days adults know better than to ask such questions?

But, as we know, children step in where angels fear to tread. When kids ask them we wonder why we didn’t think of that ourselves.

In case you don’t remember it - the people built a high tower, a tower so high they thought they would soon be equal with God. So God came down and mixed up their languages so that they could no longer work together and would not be able to focus their combined energy on such a grandiose project.

These kind of ancient stories seek a spiritual explanation for the things people cannot figure out themselves. Where did those towers come from and why cant we speak with the people across those mountains or on the other side of that lake?

The book of Acts tells us that Pentecost is the reversal of that - by the power of the Spirit the Gospel overcomes the barriers of language and ethnicity.

The experience of that first Pentecost after the resurrection was so hard to describe that the accounts are full of fantastic images. When I was a kid I read this story in a Children’s Bible and the writer took it literally and all the people looked like little candles.

A ragged group of believers, still reeling from Jesus’ death and still in hiding from the authorities are immediately driven into the streets to proclaim the good news of Jesus to the crowds who had come to town to celebrate Pentecost at the temple. Imagine all the people milling around and talking at once in different languages - and all of a sudden realizing they were hearing the excited disciples speaking in their own language and there were many because people came from far away for this important.

Imagine that emergency room scenario again where a patient does not speak English and the doctors try to understand what is wrong. Sometimes even English speakers need other methods of communication. I recall someone telling me of a doctor in Souris who asked patients to describe pain with hand gestures and facial contortions - apparently it was a very effective diagnostic tool.

Sometimes we rely too much on language. In the course I took at the hospital many years ago we were supposed to become comfortable visiting patients who could not talk - I’m not that good at it but there are usually several residents at the Manor who cannot speak or who take a long time to form even a few words. Sometimes we communicate with smiles and music - sometimes we walk away in frustration, but we need to know how to communicate love and caring in ways that are non verbal.

When working with children or animals who are ill we know it would be much easier if they could speak. I know when my cat is racing around the house, seemingly going nuts I wish she could speak so I would know what she wants - and so that I could tell her she cant have it!

What we need in all situations is the guidance of the Spirit, which according to this passage enables communication. Notice that the people do not learn to understand the disciples language but they hear in their own language.

We are probably more amazed when people who are very different, get along than when they don’t. We are probably more amazed by acts of caring than acts of indifference though it’s not as bad here as in a big city. (Or at least that’s what we country folks think). In one of the places I have lived previously, native people often got a bad rap. A friend of mine, a non-native was driving in winter about an hour away from home and her car slid into the ditch, just like that without warning, she was in the ditch. The first car to stop contained four burly native guys. They picked her car out of the ditch and set it back on the road. She thanked them and all of them continued on their way.

St Francis of Assisi, who lived about 900 years ago is thought to have said, “Preach always, if necessary, use words”.

We really don’t know exactly what happened on that long ago day, but we are fairly certain of the results. A group of fear-filled people were transformed into faith-filled proclaimers of the Good News.

What is our Good News and to whom are we called to proclaim it?

Amen.

1995- 2012 The Rev. Beth W. Johnston.

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