Sermon Text

May 31, 2009
Pentecost Sunday

THE VIEW FROM PENTECOST
Acts 2:1-21

In the first two chapters of Luke's volume on the Acts of the Apostles, two very important events take place. Forty days after Easter, Jesus departs into the heavens, an event we call the Ascension; fifty days after Easter, the Spirit arrives from heaven, an event we call Pentecost. These are two very dramatic, mysterious events.

But we may miss an important dimension of their meaning if we ignore the whole story, and the verses that surround these events. It is ironic, to say the least, that sandwiched between these two mountaintop experiences is an event as mundane and uninspiring as a congregational meeting, called to elect someone to fulfill an unexpired term on the Session!

I guess it is characteristic of the Biblical story to contain both peaks and valleys like that, but it does seem to be a strange sequence. Dr. Tom Long of Candler Seminary puts it this way: "There this story stands, plugged in the gap between Ascension and Pentecost like a ukelele player sent onstage to entertain the audience between the New York Philharmonic and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir."

Judas has fallen away and has left a vacuum in the Twelve. They are only Eleven, an incomplete Biblical number if there ever were one. Peter stands up among the approximately 120 believers and puts the call for the meeting into theological and Biblical perspective. But no amount of high-flown preaching can make this event other than what it is – a good, old-fashioned election of a church officer, members of a gathered congregation trying as best as they know how to discern who can most faithfully lead them in Christ's way.
You know how these meetings usually go. The floor is opened for nominations and two names are presented -- Joseph Barsabbas, otherwise known as Justus, and Matthias. After prayer, the leaders cast lots, and Matthias is chosen, according to the immutable will of God! Here between the spectacular mysteries of Ascension and Pentecost is what amounts to a congregational coin toss, and Luke tells us that God is still in charge, even in so mundane and chancy an event as this!

I think Luke is revealing to us an important truth about the life of the Church here. This is the way the Church experiences the will of God! This is the way we move from Ascension to Pentecost, from vision to mission. We hold elections, baptize babies, ordain ministers, try to balance budgets, recruit volunteer workers, set up service programs, and generally feel our way through all the alternatives and ambiguities of our life together, praying and hoping and believing that we have not been left totally to our own devices, and that all this is somehow part of the will of God.

And so, the great day of Pentecost comes, and somehow, for the fledgling Christian Church, things are never the same again, even though much does remain the same. The Spirit has been given, but we still receive the professions of faith of youth and adults whom we know, like us, do not measure up to the fullness of the stature of Christ. The Spirit has been given, but we are still bold to ordain men and women to all the ministries of the Church, knowing that in many ways over the years they will experience both success and failure.

Luke, you see, looks at the Church and knows that precisely because the Spirit has been given, there is always more to the life of the Church than meets the eye. The Spirit makes the promise of life and growth in faith to a young person or to a seminarian, to a minister in the pulpit or a worshiper in the pew. The Spirit makes the promise of a community of love and caring, peace and justice, felt even today in this congregation and in many others like it. The Spirit leads us to see the life of the Church eschatologically, to see it in terms of what it shall be, in terms of our best hopes for the Church's future, and in terms of where the Church's Lord is taking us.

To put it another way, you need to look around you this morning at the people sitting in the pew next to you, and in front and behind, up in the loft behind you and perhaps even in this pulpit. You need to look at all these folks, and I wish I could hand you a mirror, because you need to look at yourself, too.

And as you look, what will you see? You just might see people who are struggling, sometimes in joy and sometimes in fear and trembling, to be the Church of Jesus Christ. If we look carefully and faithfully, we can, from time to time, see resting on those around us and even on ourselves, those tongues of Pentecostal fire.

And that opens up to us the amazing possibility that we are called, you and I, to do God's will, and to be Christ's people, empowered by the Spirit for both the mountaintops and the valleys and congregational meetings sandwiched in between, to be in and for the world God loves so much.

And may God's people say: Amen.