Ezekiel 37: 1-14 Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
Acts 2: 1-21 John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.
There is an old adage that we should be careful what we wish for. Perhaps it could also be said that we should be careful what we pray for. Like praying for patience. Or adventure. Answers to prayers can, and often do come to us in unexpected and maybe even unwelcomed ways.
So I think we would do well to think twice about praying this seemingly innocuous prayer today….Come, Holy Spirit. Because when the Holy Spirit comes, if our readings are any indicator, strange things, unexpected things, life changing things, begin to happen.
The prophet Ezekiel was led by the hand and the spirit of the Lord, we are told in the first reading, to a rather terrifying place. In this passage that has some similarities to the spirits in Dickens’ Christmas Carol, Ezekiel is shown a disturbing scene. A valley is filled with dry bones and the spirit of the Lord is questioning the prophet. Can these bones live? And then the spirit of the Lord is commanding Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, that they would hear the word of the Lord.
And in Acts, we have the story of the Holy Spirit coming into the lives of the early church. We often use the word descending upon, when we talking about the coming of the Holy Spirit, but that’s not what we have in this chapter of Acts. The Holy Spirit comes like the rush of a violent wind and fills the entire house. It fills the entire house. There was not room left for anything else. It must have been terrifying. Because remember what those apostles and followers of Jesus were doing in that room….they were re-grouping. Jesus had ascended into heaven, they’d watched him go. The only thing they knew, as we heard in John’s Gospel, was that some Advocate would come and take the place of Jesus. That seemed reasonable and comforting, I imagine. So, there they are, hiding out a bit, choosing a replacement for Judas, and praying too, maybe even praying that that Advocate Jesus had talked about would come soon.
We should be careful what we pray for.
Before they knew it they were surrounded…they were stirred up…they were overcome by the Spirit. And there was fire….fire over the heads of each of them and they were speaking in other languages. And suddenly they knew that the things that they were afraid of….chaos and negative attention and questioners and doubters….they were all coming true…because the thing they were hoping and praying for had blown into that room and occupied the entire house.
Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber notes that those gathered apostles were operating from a place of fear and isolation. They were trying, I would add, to manage the situation. They were having an election, determining that Matthais would now be the replacement disciple. And when the Holy Spirit blows in, instead of being one body…they are many.
Bolz-Weber suggests that we can see in the varied responses from that day, similarities to denominations that exist today. Those who were speaking in tongues…they were Pentecostals, of course! And those who were making a list of the nations and reveling in the multi-culturalism…they were the UCC. The ones who suggested that they were drunk were certainly the Evangelicals who mistake faith for morality. And those who in that nice, but naïve way, said “They can’t be drunk, it’s only 9 o’clock”…they were probably those logic loving Methodist. Finally, those who attempted to place an intellectual construct on the chaos, asking “what does this mean?” were, of course, the Lutherans.
What have we to learn from Ezekiel’s journey to the valley of dry bones with the spirit? And what does the story of the occupation of the Spirit say to us today? Or, to put in the language of the Lutherans “What does this mean?”
What is important to remember in Ezekiel’s vision is the identity of the dry bones. They were the people of Israel. God’s chosen. And they were living apart from God. They had not followed God’s commands, they had wandered away, and now they were like dried bones, with no flesh, no blood, no sinews or tendons…they were, seemingly without life. Can these bones live? the Lord asks. And the answer is yes, because God will cause them to live. The only hope they have is in God. They cannot hope in themselves or even in the reluctant prophet. The only hope they have is that God, in the sending of the spirit or the wind from the four corners….from all of the earth…..will restore them to life.
Because the Spirit that is sent is always a spirit that comes from and sends to the whole earth. The Spirit, contrary to what we might otherwise believe or represent, is not a Spirit sent to Europeans or Americans or even to Scandanavians. The Spirit pushes the church to move across all boundaries. We move across boundaries of age as both young and old see visions and dream dreams. We move across boundaries of gender as women are affirmed by Peter as prophets. We move across boundaries of class as uneducated, common Galileans preach to devout leaders and later to scribal authorities. The tongues of fire in this story foreshadow the pan-Mediterranean missionary reach of the gospel in Acts. The Spirit is sending us OUT to other lands and other cultures. The Spirit is igniting a church that must live into the fullness that only comes when all are truly welcome. When all are welcome regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation or political affiliation or heritage or belief system or occupation or marital status or socio-economic position.
Yet, too often, especially in North America, we are like those gathered in that room. We are afraid of diversity. We are suspicious of pluralism. We don’t want to admit that we live in a post-Christian world. But look around. We do! But if we, as the church cling to the idea of one dominant culture, we are missing the entire lesson of Pentecost. That the Spirit comes and it crashes our party. It sends us out, it does not gather us in. It puts other languages in our mouths and sets our hair on fire!
Friends, today we have heard the strongest Biblical argument for diversity and against conformity. Let us not be like the dry bones, but rather let us be filled with life…be filled with the Spirit.
Yesterday on Facebook, a woman who had grown up in this church posted on our Facebook page that her strongest memory of Pentecost took place at Luther Memorial. She wrote: “still my favorite memories of growing up at LMLC was the annual releasing of red, helium filled balloons after worship every Pentecost. Glad it’s not done any longer for environmental reasons, but there really is nothing as spectacularly descriptive of Pentecost as that to a child.”
There are other spectacularly descriptive Pentecost Spirit infused ministries happening here. We are reaching out to others in ways that we have never tried before. Sometimes it is hard. Sometimes it feels as though our hair is on fire. And there is more to do. More people who are nothing at all like us, but who God is sending us out to serve. And every time we start to ask ourselves what we want….every time we, like those first apostles gathered in that room, start to try to manage the Holy Spirit. Well, that’s when we must stop and pray. Pray that the message of God’s unconditional love and mercy for all….young and old, male and female, gay and straight, red, yellow, pink, blue, Republican and democrat, rich and poor, that that message will take wings and blow through the whole world. And that we would prophesy to all we meet, in word and action, of the mighty power of God, who is Holy Spirit…Advocate…breath….mighty wind….filling up the entire place.
Even so, come Holy Spirit, come! Amen.
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