A Church of Power and Peace
Pentecost Sunday
May 27, 2007
Rev. Samuel Schaal

Romans 8:14-17
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, 25-27

Last week we commemorated the Ascension, and left the disciples waiting in faith, praying in the temple, for the coming of power on high as Jesus promised. Today we celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit to that body of believers that makes that body the church.

The church is oddly not of much interest today in all the talk in our culture about spirituality. Too much of what passes for spirituality is the private pursuit of personal therapeutics and perhaps a quest for personal power. The latest expression of this is The Secret which was first a video, then book, then Oprah devoted two shows to it. It purports to unveil the secret of the ages which is: You attract what you think about. So God exists to satisfy personal wants. It’s not altogether bad advice (I do believe in the power of positive thinking and I do think God wants us to be whole and healthy), but it skews everything toward personal (and sometimes narcissistic) needs. Nowhere in The Secret is there the need of a community of seekers serving something greater than they are: God.

And yet the entire Biblical witness is about God forming community. God is concerned with God’s people in community: first in Israel, then a new Israel, and finally the body of Christ.

In today’s lections celebrating Pentecost, we see the culmination of God’s work in the forming of the church. This event is the crown of the Easter experience, the final of a three-part series of events: the resurrection of Jesus, the ascension of Jesus, then the formation of the church by the work of the Holy Spirit that takes the church out into the world.

I think the Holy Spirit scares us a little. When we think of the Holy Spirit we may think of the Pentecostals whose worship style is very emotional and expressive. We Congregationalists are, after all, God’s frozen chosen, so anything that smacks of emotional worship scares us. Someone recently said to me that Pentecostals worship with both arms raised in ecstasy. When Congregationalists get really excited in worship, they raise both eyebrows.

But the Holy Spirit is not about wild, ecstatic worship. The Holy Spirit is what gives the church its life. Spirit in Latin is spiritus, or breath, and we know that we need breath to live. If you have no breath, you’re dead. So is the church without the Spirit.

For me, the Holy Spirit is the most universal of the Trinitarian modes of God; that reaches out into every crack and crevice, in every low-lying spot of our lives, touching us, reminding us that there is no spot where God is not in our lives or all life. The Spirit is where we might know God in direct experience, which for me is the reason we are church—in the hope that in that human encounter we might encounter God.

Indeed as we read today in Acts, the coming of the Holy Spirit forms the church and moves that church into a universal church.

Notice that the spirit came once the people “were all together in one place.” So to be church, to be open to the power of God among us, we first have to be gathered as church. God speaks primarily to the community. There is something greater than the sum of our parts when we gather, especially when we gather for worship. This resonates particularly in our own Congregational tradition as we consider ourselves the “gathered church,” with the local church as the church complete, meaning that we are then, here in this local place, all together as church so that the Holy Spirit might move.

But notice that in Acts, this being drawn into community doesn’t squelch true individuality. It doesn’t mean that we are all alike or that we think alike. On that day in Acts, devout Jews were gathered from every nation. They had gathered for the Jewish festival of Pentecost which was 50 days after Passover and celebrated the giving of the law by Moses and the renewal of the covenant. So the devout had gathered, all in one place, and this is where the Holy Spirit enters.

But in this diverse group of the devout, each speaking in the various native languages, they suddenly realize they can understand each other – each speaking in one’s own dialect but hearing each other. This is to say that in the church we don’t have to change who we are. We don’t lose our accents (which pleases me greatly). Further, the language of the spirit is communicated within the dialects of particular human groups. God works in and through real people.

Christian community is not a cult where we leave our real selves and become an automaton, like perhaps the “Stepford Wives” of Jesus Christ (to mix metaphors). Christian community is not a place where we wear masks to look good, losing our real selves. In community, we find our true individual selves.

But the individuality of believers is not the foundation of this kind of power. This kind of power is sourced in God. It is a living power that animates all we do and gives us a new and living perspective. It is a living power that opens us to the Living Word.

Look what happens in Acts after the Spirit hits and they can really understand each other. Peter stands up and preaches a sermon. He takes his text from the Scripture, from Joel (2:28-32). That’s a text about how Israel will be restored. The crowds no doubt expected a sermon about Israel; they were after all Jews gathered from all the nations. Peter takes the text and in the larger sermon that proceeds from where our reading today stopped, proclaims that the text prophesies the coming of Christ and then Peter proceeds into the core teachings – the kerygma – of the Christian faith that Jesus died, rose, ascended to God and will come again. Peter, now working under the Holy Spirit, now opened to the living word of God, finds new meaning in the old Scripture.

Today when understood under the aegis of the Holy Spirit, the words of the Bible also give us the Living Word for today. Again, remember that about 150 years ago, most Christians believed the Bible supported slavery because of Paul’s clear—or so it seemed—mandate for slaves to obey their masters. And yet today no reasonable Christian would assert that the Bible supports human slavery. This is one of the best examples of how we can misread the Scriptures when we are not open to the Living Word therein, but read only the surface meaning that tends to be interpreted by the current culture. But that the Bible opens up new meaning to us shouldn’t surprise us – Jesus tells us this will happen in the gospel text. There Jesus promises the Advocate, or the Holy Spirit, who will “teach you everything”—even the truth that they were not ready to hear. Even the truth that we today are being prepared to hear.

And in the gospel text, Jesus grounds the community in his peace. “I do not give to you as the world gives,” he says, another indication that the peace he is speaking of, the power of the Holy Spirit, is not rooted in human concepts of those things, but rooted in the divine.

So the model of church given in the lessons this morning is a church of Power and Peace: Energized by the power of the Holy Spirit and grounded in the Peace of Christ.

And yet I wonder how often we in the modern church realize that we mediate this power. I think that most churches try to diminish their power, or are not aware of their power, perhaps because they don’t act as if there is a Living God. But the more we open ourselves to God’s presence, the more we actually ask God what to do, the more we seek not our power, but God’s power, to do what needs to be done by us, the more will God unfold in our midst.

We can’t always predict how this will happen; in fact, we rarely can. The early church after the Ascension waited in faith, then the spirit came to them, and it was then they knew what to do and the epic of Acts unfolds in the adventures of the early church.

Paul in the Romans lesson this morning gives us a good indication of the kind of people God wants us to be: “We are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” We have the power of God in our midst—what we do with it is up to us.

* * * * *

Writer Annie Dillard tells the story (in An American Childhood) of a science experiment in elementary school. In a mason jar the teacher had placed the cocoon of a polyphemus moth. A polyphemus moth is a huge moth that will emerge out of the cocoon with enormous and beautiful wings.

In the classroom experiment, the moth in the jar crawled its way out of its cocoon and the children watched transfixed as the moth emerged wet, climbed upon a twig in the jar, and began to shake its clump of wings, spreading the new wings so that blood would fill their veins and the birth fluids on the frail wings would harden to make them tough. But the jar was too small for the tremendous wings of this particular variety of moth. The children watched as the moth tried in vain to spread its wings, but the wings could not fill to their capacity. So they hardened while they were still crumpled. A smaller moth, Dillard says, would have had enough room to properly spread the wings, but not this large moth. The jar was too small and she watched in horror as the teacher bounced the moth from the jar, letting it crawl down the driveway, with only a clump where its wings should have been. It was crawling, Dillard noted, to its certain death since it had been deprived of its natural defense, its beautiful wings.

Sometimes the church takes the enormous power and beauty of God, given through the Holy Spirit – sometimes the church takes the potential of spiritual wings given by God, and puts it in a jar that’s too small. Puts it in a concept of church that’s too small. Tries to take the natural generosity, benevolence, giving-ness, liberality of a generous and loving God and squeeze the things of God down to little narrow concepts and categories that we can better understand. Sometimes the church can squeeze the spirit out of what God gives.

I am not saying we do it, though I’m sure we have. I am not saying it is a problem of our church, but I think it’s a problem of The Church. I think it’s a problem in just about any church or any human organization. I think it’s a problem whenever we try to use our power instead of giving ourselves over to the power of the Holy Spirit.

And just as in the lesson from Acts, when we try to limit the church, the community, we end up limiting the individuals in that community. For it is in God’s community where we might each find in our individual lives the work of the Holy Spirit, where we might find, in the Community of Jesus Christ, rest, respite and healing from the experiences of life that have limited the natural expansion of our wings, when we come hobbling in, perhaps not unlike that moth hobbling down the driveway. But the difference is, when we hobble in here, we are not hobbling to our certain death. We are, or we should be, hobbling toward our regeneration in the life of God, through the life of the community, grounded in the Peace of Christ, energized by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.