Originally preached May 19, 2002

Pentecost Sunday

Text: Acts 2:1-12 and 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

 It starts out like any other Sunday morning worship service. The congregation – about 120 people in number – devotes itself to prayer. There is a period for teaching about Jesus and His way, and for telling stories about His resurrection.

It is the day of Pentecost – sort of the Jewish Thanksgiving holiday. The first bundles of wheat from the new harvest are being brought in, and will be offered as a sacrifice of gratitude in the Temple. While our Thanksgiving holiday is always on the third Thursday of November, their Thanksgiving was set for fifty days after the Passover

So it is Thanksgiving Day as the disciples gather to worship in the upper room in Jerusalem.

And something very unusual happens.

The still air of the early morning suddenly begins to move. An unusual soft and gentle breeze wafts throughout the room. Then a powerful gust kicks up. Bulletins fly into the air. Candles are snuffed out. Hairpieces blow off.

I like to imagine that Peter tells one of the ushers to close all the windows because a storm is whipping up outside. And one by one, the windows are shut.

But the wind doesn’t stop. The storm is not outside the room, but inside the room! And now what was once a gentle breeze, followed by a few strong gusts, becomes what the people later describe as the “rush of a mighty wind filling the whole house.”

And then another odd thing happens. Flames – with the appearance of tongues of fire – appear in the room and seem to hover over the heads of each one present. Is it St. Elmo’s fire? Or something else far more mysterious and spiritually significant?

You be the judge. All I know is that, after the wind starts blowing, and after the flames start appearing, the people – every last one of them – men, women and children alike – start speaking. And when they speak, it is not in their native Jewish tongue, but in foreign languages they’ve never learned. It must have sounded like a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly without any interpreters present. Can you imagine the sound?

By now, people outside on the streets of Jerusalem are aware that something really weird is going on inside that house. Many are visitors from other countries who have come to Jerusalem for the holidays. And as they gather outside the house where this wind is roaring, where these flames are appearing, and where these Jesus-followers are speaking in other tongues, the crowd is amazed!

They hear these Jesus-followers telling about the wonders of God in their own native languages!

And that very day, about three thousand people come to the Lord!

We like to say that Pentecost is the birthday of the Christian Church. And that it is! But we may well miss the full meaning of Pentecost if we simply reduce it to a holiday celebrating a long-ago event. No, Pentecost is the beginning of an enterprise that continues to this day. It is the moment we got our marching orders. Pentecost is the time it was confirmed that we have a job to do! And Pentecost is the day God gave us the power – a power far beyond any human power – to do that job!

And here’s the job: “Go into all the world…and preach!

We modern Christians sometimes miss that most central meaning of Pentecost – that each one of is called to go and preach.  And yet the last words of Jesus to the disciples before His ascension were to wait until they’ve received the power of the Holy Spirit, and then go and be His witnesses in all the world. And years later, when St. Paul was explaining to the Corinthians what this all meant, he reminded them that the Holy Spirit’s job is to help us communicate that Jesus is Lord.

That’s the number one job of every Christian man, woman and child – to go and preach Christ!

Trouble is, that job scares many of us to death!

When I was a teenager, I was pretty active in my local church, and on more than one occasion, adults in the congregation suggested that I ought to become a preacher. That thought frightened the heck out of me! They must be crazy, I thought! And now you know…they were crazy!

Seriously, I remember that way back, when the Spirit first started putting it into my heart that I had a calling to preach, I would rather have done anything in the world EXCEPT preach! How would I know what to say? How would I overcome this terminal case of stage fright I have? Let me be a missionary, let me be a religion professor, let me be the pope…but not a preacher!

And I guess many Christians feel the same reluctance to go and preach. And that’s understandable. Some of us are introverts and the idea of preaching just runs counter to our personality. Others of us are intimidated by our lack of theological knowledge. And most of us, I dare say, carry with us some sense that other people really don’t want us to push our religion on them. You know, the two things you never talk about at a social event are politics and…what?…religion.

Not only that, but I suspect many of us recoil from the idea of preaching the Gospel because there’s so much of it on television these days, and to be frank with you, some of it is downright embarrassing. Do you find it so? I mean, do you really have to put ten pounds of makeup on your face, and wear a big blue wig, and dress up in cowboy clothes, and learn to cry at the drop of a hat, and be able to say Jesus using at least three syllables? If that’s preaching, many of us might feel we want no part of it. I like to call that Estee Lauder preaching in honor of the makeup.

But that’s not the only kind of embarrassing preaching out there. There’s the Steven King style of preaching in which people try to lead others to heaven by scaring the ever living hell out of them.  And then there’s that As Seen On TV Infomercial type of preaching that is about nothing other than helping people separate themselves from their money. And, of course, there’s the Enron/Arthur Andersontype of preaching where the value of the Gospel is grossly overstated, and people are promised that following Christ will solve all their problems, answer every question, and bring them incredible financial prosperity. By this standard, Jesus himself could not have been numbered among the faithful since his faith constantly got him into trouble, and raised lots of unanswerable questions, and made him poor as a church mouse.

Yes, there are a lot of influences that make us feel like the last thing in the world we want to do is preach.

And yet, all around us are people who need the power of Christ in their lives – that neighbor who’s facing a serious illness without any spiritual resources, that grandchild who’s wandering into dangerous living without any consciousness of God, that friend who’s going through a divorce all alone. And what about those living in the Middle East who live in constant struggle and cannot find their way to peace? Or the young widowed mother who has three children to raise and no means of financial support? And what about the kids who make up the 1,200 reported cases of child abuse every year in our judicial district? And what about those who abuse them, or for that matter, perpetrate other terrible crimes on society? What about the person who is seeking God, but doesn’t know where or how to look? All around us there are people who need loving, sensitive and faithful people like you who are capable of communicating the Gospel with grace, and power and clarity.

So how can we learn to become such preachers?

First of all, I think we would all do well to heed the wonderful words of St. Francis who once said, “Preach the Gospel all the time; if necessary, use words!”

Probably the most powerful preaching you can ever do is when you visibly communicate Christ with your life. I still vividly remember the night my father died, and Sandy and a couple of our neighbors came to where I was working to break the news to me. I was stunned when Sandy spoke the words. And there was nothing else to be said right then. We drove home in silence, but as we rode, Sandy gently held me and let me cry and lovingly caressed my head. When we arrived back at the apartment, my seminary colleague George who was driving, got out of his side of the car and powerfully wrapped his arms around me, and the most amazing thing – I felt his tears on my cheek. I don’t recall a word that was spoken, but the Gospel was truly preached. Sandy and George communicated Christ to me.

Don’t you find it true? When people through their living convey to you redemptive love, and mercy, and hope, and justice, they bring Christ into your life. And healing and wholeness finally become possible. Pentecost is the promise that, when you live this way, the power of the Holy Spirit takes hold of those you’re caring for. Perhaps it is the very beginning of their journey to the Lord, or maybe a boost along the way. You and I may never know! But the promise of Pentecost is that the power of the Holy Spirit is at work whenever we preach through our actions.

“Preach the Gospel all the time; if necessary use words!”

But sometimes words are necessary. And you and I need to learn how to use our words wisely.

The passage from Acts tells us that what made all that talking in the upper room so powerful for the people in the crowd outside were two things. And these two things are the very foundation for effectively communicating Christ to others.

Listen to the very words of those people in the crowd: “How is it that we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues?”

Acts tells us these Jesus-followers spoke in the language of the people they were communicating with. And that’s lesson one in learning to verbally communicate Christ. You have to learn to speak the language of the people you’re speaking to.

In the movie Cider House Rules, there’s a powerful scene in which a group of black migrant workers encounter a list of rules they must follow when they stay in the Cider House of this apple farm. One of the rules is that they can’t sit up on the roof of this small house. And yet, it is a hot and sultry day, and the only hope of catching a cooling breeze would be to get up on the roof. That’s when one of the black workers speaks a provocative truth. “The people who made those rules don’t live here. They don’t breathe this air. They don’t spend their time here.”

One of the great problems of preaching is that it is so often done by people who don’t live here, who don’t breathe this air, who don’t spend their time here.

I was once asked to perform a funeral for a teenage boy who drowned. It was really my first experience with a family that had lost a child. I stood near the parents during the calling hours as family and friends came to pay their respects. And what I witnessed was so incredibly sad. Person after person came up to those parents, and tried to bring them comfort by assuring them that their son was in heaven, that this death was the will of God, even that God must have needed the boy more than they did. People, with all good intentions, were trying to preach the Gospel, I suppose, but it really was just adding more pain to the loss of these dear parents. You see, people were speaking in the language of those who’d never experienced what those parents were going through. And their inability to speak the deep, painful language of loss – the language of those who know what it’s like to lose a child – made their preaching hollow and ineffective.

You have to learn to speak the language of the people you’re ministering to. If you want to preach Christ to the poor, you have to learn speak the language of the poor. If you want to preach Christ to a doubter, you have to learn the language of doubt. If you want to preach Christ to Israelis and Palestinians, you have to learn to speak the language of each. And the only way you can learn the language is by coming close enough to understand the experience of how life is for those you’re bringing Christ to.

Preaching Christ begins with stepping into the world of the other, and becoming so much a part of it that you actually learn to speak the language!  That’s step one in preaching Christ.

Step two is learning what to say. And according to Acts, what the Jesus-followers did was to declare the wonders of God!

That’s what the crowd tells us on Pentecost morning! “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!

If you were to go this week and preach Christ, how would you know what to tell others? Well, it’s easy. Tell them how wonderful God is!

Tell people about God’s mercy, which of all God’s attributes is the highest. “His mercy is over all His works,” the Bible says. Tell people that God loves them and values them, and is on their side, and that even if we give up on God, God NEVER gives up on us! Tell people that God is a God-with-us kind of God who involves Himself in human situations and gives people strength and guidance to face the most serious challenges of life. Tell people that God is a forgiving God who took care of their sins on the Cross, and is really good at helping us put the past behind us and start over again. Tell people about the wonderful things God has done for you, and others you know.

You see, the heart of preaching Christ is conveying the beauty and wonderful-ness of God in the simple language of the people you’re preaching to.

And the promise is this: when you go out and declare the wonders of God in the language of the people you’re concerned about, the Holy Spirit comes. And miracles happen!

So today, on Pentecost Sunday 2002, will you join me in taking up the calling of every Christian?

All around us are people who need you – and me – to go…and preach! May the Holy Spirit empower you as you go!