Troubled Spirit

WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
May 31st 2009
Pentecost Sunday
Rev. Mark R. Bradshaw-Miller
“Troubled Spirit”
Acts 2:1-11

At the very heart of Pentecost is the notion that God intends for the Church of Jesus Christ is called to be inclusive. Gathered in worship that day were folks for many different nationalities who spoke many different languages. The good news, on that day was heard in the mother tongue of each person gathered. There is no national language in the household of God. Today when we hear this we take it for granted, at least in theory. But in practice the history of the church has struggled with the realities of Pentecost.
What happens on this day is not the end of the story or the struggle, it is only the beginning. From the moment the Spirit of God shows up, trouble is brewing. The response to the “good news” on this day is that the people must have been drinking early and often. As the story of Acts develops, the response to the “good news” is to imprison and kill the messengers. In fact, the rest of the story is the chronicling of the struggle between those who have been in charge and these new people who are sharing the “good news.” It is a struggle between; clinging to the status quo, and a willingness to be open to the troubling Spirit of God.
The celebration of Pentecost is not a day for the traditionalists. For those who follow ritual law or who are well schooled in the established order, this is not a day of good news. The noise of so many different languages sounded like a rowdy bar. So the traditionalist responds by excluding the customs and practices of these new and different folks. It is not that tradition is wrong, in fact, the work of the “good news” is always tied to the tradition of God’s liberating action. But those who did not welcome these outsiders for who they were, the faith community who rejected the loud disruptive folks are part of a tradition which is now dead.
What I mean is that when the institutional faith community was confronted with the reality of really including outsiders, they decided the Spirit could not have meant for this to happen. The resistance from the insiders focused on ritual purity, worship style and types of food eaten at the church dinners. I am not making this up, consider the council of Jerusalem. Paul, Peter and the council join together to figure out what to about the new people that God had brought into their midst. It was not that the established leaders did not want to welcome the new folks, they just demanded that they act, and eat, and become like themselves. From Paul’s perspective, this denied the reality of Pentecost. At the end of the council the final decision was that the new people would have to have their own community to do things their way and the long term folks would have their own community to keep traditions pure. It was the first major rejection of the Spirit, but it would not be the last. The followers who rejected these outsiders cease to exist after a few years. It leads me to conclude that Spirit of God may be rejected, but the results are not promising.
While the arguments which brought about the council of Jerusalem are ancient history, the struggle is not. While we are no longer a faith community which excludes people based on race, we are not the fully inclusive church envisioned at Pentecost. I say this because given the ways of the Spirit, we never arrive. Instead, we simply try and keep up with the new ways the Sprit is at work. Or we end up clinging to the newest form of tradition because we like the certainty and security it provides at least in the short run.
But, I do know this: the Spirit is at work right here, right now. Let me tell you how I know. Those of us gathered right here are a group of folks the world says do not belong together. In a world where there are churches for white folks and churches for black folks, churches for rich and churches for poor, churches for educated and churches for uneducated, and churches for democrats and churches for republicans, we are a church where folks for all walks of life gather to worship and serve together and that tells me the Spirit is up to something. Do not get me wrong, we still struggle with the same thing our brothers and sisters at Pentecost, who first came in contact with the Spirit. We struggle to overcome our comfort with status quo and our ability to interpret the work of the Spirit. But in our journey to be faithful we have an important witness. We are here brought together by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the good news that God welcomes all people, including us! Everything else is just details – our committee work, our mission work, our worship must flow from this good news story.
The book of Acts could really be called the Gospel of the Holy Spirit. But when the Spirit is at work proclaiming the “good news,” the response is less than positive. The reaction against the good news comes from the surrounding culture as well as the established faith community. Rejection from all sides makes the work of evangelism seem less than exciting. So how this is all supposed to be good news? It is good news because the troubling Spirit marks an end to certainty around our established way of doing things, and replaces it with a certainty based in God alone.
The bottom line is that the church of God is called to be an inclusive, affirming and welcoming place for all people. Our bottom line is not custom or tradition or personal preference or institutional security. The bottom line is the powerful capacity of the one God; the Creator of all, the giver of life even to the dead, who brings a newness that meant, and means, jubilee for all people. Sometimes it helps to make it plain so let me do that. What this day of Pentecost means is that the good news is trouble for those of us comfortable with status quo in the institution or too comfortable with our culture. But this troubling spirit also has the power to set us free even from our own captivity to these things. So on this day, let us trust, deeply trust that we too can be set free and trust that the good news is really good. Amen? Amen!