Wind
Acts 2:1-21
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The Coming of the Holy Spirit
2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
Peter Addresses the Crowd
14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
17 ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women, n those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 19 And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 20 The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. 21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’
Everybody loves a happy ending. There’s an old theatrical device that’s been around since the amphitheaters of ancient Greece to make sure this happens when things get a little tricky. You see, Greek and Roman drama could get complicated, so complicated that it wasn’t always clear how the story would resolve. For instance, the play Medea is about a foreign princess who falls in love with and marries the great hero, Jason; forsaking her home, her title, everything for this man. Well it doesn’t take long before Jason loses interest and finds himself a new wife. As the saying goes, hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned. So Medea proceeds to murder her husband’s new wife, along with her own children. But just as Jason is set to return and punish Medea for her crime, a chariot is sent from the heavens by none other than the sun god, Apollo, to whisk her away from Corinth to the safety of Athens. The term for this, deus ex machina, translates “god from the machine,” and describes the physical stage device- a kind of crane- that was used to lower divine deliverance to the stage in order to rescue the story from an unsolvable problem and bring it all to neat, if not always happy, ending.
There was a headline this week about a public official who was quoted as saying that if climate change were a real problem, then God would handle it. That would be nice. It would be nice if God would emerge from the sky to fix the world in that way. Given the confluence of an ever-expanding human population and its use of hydrocarbon combustion to fuel economic development, we have what appears to be an unsolvable problem on our hands when it comes to our warming planet. If only God would come down and fix it for us. I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it works, but it would be nice. Then we wouldn’t have to do anything. We wouldn’t have to change our minds, or our habits, or consider the impact we have on the world around us.
When Jesus was taken into the clouds, the people who followed him, the ones who had seen and trusted in what he said and did, had to be wondering if that was it. Easter was great. Everybody was happy to see that Jesus wasn’t dead. They got to hang out with him some more after being sure they’d never see him again. But then he was gone and they were left with a cryptic assignment about being his witnesses and no clue as to how to go about doing that. He also said something about receiving power from the Holy Spirit. Only there was no online tracking back in those days when you were expecting a delivery, and anyway how exactly does one track the arrival of the Holy Spirit?
The answer is, you don’t. You wait. You pray. You pay attention. But for days nothing happened. I wonder if they ever thought they’d missed it. It happened to Thomas. They were all gathered in that room after Jesus died. Maybe Thomas got restless. Maybe he needed some fresh air. But for whatever reason, he stepped out. And while he was gone the risen Lord showed up.
I remember being part of a retreat once where the focus was on Jesus’ story of the great banquet. He talks about a big shot throwing a big party, but how when he sends out the invitations all his friends make these lame excuses for why they can’t make it. So the guest list gets expanded and all sorts of people you wouldn’t think to invite get invited.
Anyway, at this retreat we were talking about the reasons given by the people who turn down the invitation when the person next to me said, “I feel like my invitation got lost in the mail.” It’s that feeling of being in a room, or a church, or anywhere really and wondering if you really belong there, wondering what everybody else seems to understand that you’ve somehow missed. Sure, Jesus said they would receive the Holy Spirit, but what if it came and went and they somehow missed it?
When it comes to the Holy Spirit it can be hard to know what to expect. The friends of Jesus in that room certainly didn’t. For all they knew that first Day of Pentecost was going to be like the other nine days before it where nothing happened. And then, whoosh.
Suddenly from heaven comes the sound of a mighty wind. Maybe it’s the deus ex machina, maybe it’s that Holy Spirit of God finally come down to fix all the things that Jesus didn’t seem to fix. I mean what he said was great. And for the people he fed and healed, I’m sure it made all the difference to them. But in those ten days between Jesus’ leaving and the sound of this mighty wind, his friends had to have noticed that while Jesus resurrection made them feel like nothing would ever be the same, not much had changed. The Romans were still in charge. The religious class still called the shots. The temple was still standing. There we still lepers and blind beggars in the streets. There were still people afflicted by their demons. Maybe now God would come down from the sky and rescue them from this messy broken world.
The wind should have been their first clue that this was no deus ex machina. The wind should have been their first clue that what they would be receiving was far more likely to disrupt their lives than sooth them, more likely to create problems than solve them. I don’t know about you but there is something about the wind that blows here in New Mexico that sets me a little on edge. I get agitated and a little unsettled by it. On a really windy day you have to be careful on the road because a good gust of wind can really push your car.
Maybe that’s why we’re more than a little ambivalent when it comes to Pentecost. It isn’t just that we don’t know what to do with charismatic expressions of Christianity: hands in the air, speaking in tongues and that sort of thing. It’s that even though we’re not sure what to make of the tongues of fire and all the rest we know that this is a story about how when the Holy Spirit comes, it is sure to disrupt our staid upper room gatherings and blow us out into the streets to say something about this Jesus we claim to follow.
When it comes to the trinity, we like to pray to God the Father and we love Jesus the Son, but we’re not so sure about the Holy Spirit. We’re not so sure about this unrelenting wind that promises to upend our carefully laid plans with a plan of its own; one that promises to drive us out of these little rooms defined by our comfort, our preferences, our felt needs and into a world defined by God’s priorities toward justice, freedom and peace.
And yet there’s no escaping the wind. You can fight against it, or you can let it move you where it will.
But there is little chance that it will let any of us stay where we are. There is little chance that the Holy Spirit will let us stay as we are, safe and comfortable. If the wind of Pentecost teaches us anything, it’s that if we intend to be church, if we intend to represent and embody Jesus Christ and his teaching, there is no happy ending- at least not in the conventional sense.
One of my favorite movies is the 1988 Italian film Cinema Paradiso. It’s the story of a filmmaker who fell in love with movies as a little boy, befriending his hometown projectionist in the process. Toward the end of the film the boy has grown into a young man and he goes to visit his old friend, by now long-retired from the projection booth. “Life,” the old man tells his young friend, “is not like the movies. Life is much harder.”
Marie and I finally watched the conclusion to the popular British TV show Downton Abbey this past week. The show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, shared a story as they were airing the final episodes about a fan who had approached him hoping that Lady Edith would find some happiness. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
Only it doesn’t seem to be God’s priority. Or maybe, our individual happiness and security, our safety and comfort are not God’s immediate priority while there is still injustice in the world, while there are still people hungering for good news, people hungry and held captive by fear and the forces of poverty, blindness and heartache who long to know something more.
God doesn’t comes down from the machine to rescue us in the way of the deus ex machina, to soothe and solve the seemingly unsolvable problems of our world. And fail that, to carry us a way in some rapture to escape it all. No, God’s Spirit comes down to light us up and send us out. God’s Spirit comes down and further complicates our lives by giving us a mission to speak in another’s language, to share the power and the promise of resurrection with those who have been left for dead, to upend the power of greed and self-interest in a revolution love that seeks the good of all and not just some.
It isn’t like the movies. It’s much harder than that. And if it were up to us alone we would be lost. If it were up to us alone, we would certainly be better off secured safely away in our own little rooms. But it isn’t up to us.
The one who comes down, the one who blows the doors off the room and lights us up, the one who disrupts our carefully laid plans is the same one who gives us a word to say, and a vision of God’s kingdom as it comes, and a mission to make it so.