Fasten Your Seatbelts

Written by Ed Kauffman

Fasten Your Seatbelts

June 12, 2011 Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21; Numbers 11:24-30

Ed Kauffman

We have just sung a prayer, “Come, Holy Spirit, come.”  Are we expecting something to happen?  Annie Dillard, writer and mystic, once said,

"On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. "

— Annie Dillard

One of the hazards of needing to write a sermon title for the bulletin before you complete your research is that sometimes your memory fails you.  I remembered the quote as being about having seat belts, when it was really about crash helmets, but the idea is the same.

We rather blithely speak and sing about the Holy Spirit, inviting the Spirit’s presence among us, but do we really think about what that might mean?  When Jesus promised the Spirit to his disciples, he talked about waiting until they received power from on high.  And when Luke records the events of that first Pentecost in Acts 2, he speaks of “the sound like the rush of a violent wind.”  I don’t know how many of you have heard a tornado approaching, but I have an believe me it is a frightening sound – as though you were sitting on the tracks with a train headed for you.

Wind and fire, both symbols and manifestations of the Spirit present on that occasion are also symbols of power.  We have seen the power of both wind and fire in recent events.  And that’s how the Spirit is represented.  Is it any wonder Dillard suggests that if we truly believed that the Spirit would come among us, we should don our crash helmets?

The other tendency we have is to believe that we know how the Spirit will act.  Over the years I have had people tell me that I shouldn’t use notes to preach, I should just let the Spirit give me the words.  Whenever I hear someone say that, or similar ideas, I am reminded of the preacher who kept being told that and so decided one week to not prepare, but simply wait for the Spirit to speak.  He waited.  Friday came and he still didn’t hear anything, then Saturday came and went.  Finally, as he walked to the pulpit, the Spirit spoke to him and said, “You’re not prepared are you?”

Throughout Scripture we are given example after example of times when people thought they had God’s spirit all figured out. And then the Spirit did something totally new.  We see it already in the story we read from Numbers.  The Israelites were out in the desert, complaining as usual and Moses was getting fed up, both with the people and with God.  All the weight of leadership rested on Moses’ shoulders and he was feeling the weight.  And so God told Moses to choose 70 elders of the people to come outside the camp and meet with God, and it says, “the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested on them, they prophesied.” (Num. 11:25)  So they thought they had it all figured out.

But, lo and behold, two men who were still back at the camp also received the spirit and began prophesying.  Well, someone wasn’t following the rules.  These men weren’t properly sanctioned.  They didn’t follow the proper procedures and polity.  Someone should stop them!  And so someone ran to tell Moses.  But thankfully Moses, either because he understood God better, or perhaps just because he was so tired, recognized that God’s spirit doesn’t always work the way we expect.  In fact, Moses declares, “Would that all God’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”

And that’s exactly what happened at Pentecost.  With one mighty swoop, the Spirit fell on all the believers. Twice in Luke’s account he mentions “all of them.”  They were “all together in one place” in verse 1, and “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit” in verse 4.  Not only that, but it started ripple effect, as Jews from all over the known world began to hear the message of Jesus Christ.

And the Spirit continued to surprise the believers.  Suddenly Gentiles were receiving the Spirit, despite Peter’s protests.  And the church grew and spread, and was forced to change as the Spirit of God led them to new truths, just as Jesus had promised.

We believe the Spirit is still active in the church and in the world.  Throughout the history of the church we can find evidences of the Spirit at work.  Just when the church may think it has everything figured out, the Spirit tends to come along and ignite something new.  Jesus told Nicodemus that the Spirit blows where it wills, and certainly the evidence of that is all around.

The Anabaptists of the 16th century believed they were living in a new age of the Spirit, and talked about the Spirit more than any other of the reform movements, sometimes even being accused of rejecting the Bible in favor of direct inspiration.  And while there may have been a few for whom that was true, most of the Anabaptist writers saw the Spirit not as replacing Scripture, but as God’s Spirit in the church leading them to the truth of the Scripture.  Whereas most of the church of that day seemed to think that it was only certain people who had the Spirit and could interpret Scripture, the Anabaptists, rereading the account of Pentecost, said that everyone had received the Spirit, and the Spirit was still active.

We believe the Spirit of God is still active, and that all believers are given the Spirit. Article 3 of Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective begins, “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the eternal Spirit of God, who dwelled in Jesus Christ, who empowers the church, who is the source of our life in Christ, and who is poured out on those who believe as the guarantee of our redemption and of the redemption of creation..” 

And we believe the Spirit is still guiding us into all truth.  Over and over again we think we have God all figured out, and we have our theology and practices set down on paper.  But God’s Spirit isn’t done with us yet.  God’s Spirit is still “blowing where it will.”  I’ve seen it in my lifetime, and you have certainly in yours as well.  When I was a youth, we couldn’t even sing “Lord of the Dance”!   For many years in the Mennonite Church we somehow thought that God’s Spirit maybe wasn’t given to women quite as much as to men, and so there were certain things women shouldn’t do in the church.  But the evidence of God’s Spirit active among women began to show the church that we were wrong.

As a Conference Minister we often joked that, alongside the Bible and the Confession of Faith, the Polity book our practical guide.  It set out policies and procedures for identifying and credentialing pastors and other leaders in the church.  We had it figured out.  But then a strange thing began to happen.

I remember one of the last interviews for credentialing that I was involved in as a Conference Minister.  It was a young man who was involved with a ministry to street people in Minneapolis, primarily ex-offenders who were living on the street, often with addiction issues as well.  He served as a chaplain and pastor in this ministry, which was multi-denominational, but wanted him to be credentialed.  And he was clear in his convictions that if he were to be credentialed, he wanted to be a Mennonite.  But he wasn’t a member of a Mennonite Church, although he often attended one.  He had no formal Mennonite training, and not even a Mennonite name!  He didn’t fit any of the categories, and the process was definitely not in order.

Yet the committee agreed to meet with him for an interview, and here he was sharing his story of faith, affirming our Mennonite beliefs as his own, and opening himself up to our counsel and affirmation.  As one member of the committee said as we deliberated, “It would be a shame not to credential him.”  Eventually the Polity book will need to be rewritten to recognize the ways the Spirit is moving in the church.

If we truly believe that God’s Spirit is still active in the church and in the world, then we will need to be ready to change as the Spirit guides us into the truth.  Like Paul, we affirm that we only see things darkly at this point, that we will never know the truth in its fullness.  But we believe the Spirit continues to guide us.  In some ways that’s a scary thought.  It would be so much easier if we could just say, “OK, the Spirit’s done.  We now know everything and how it should be.”

But God is still at work among us.  God is still active in the world.  And if we believe what we say and sing, then perhaps Annie Dillard is right.  Buckle up!  Put on your crash helmets! Perhaps we can’t even imagine what God has in store for us in the future.  The words of the Prophet Joel are just as relevant today as they were in his day, and when Peter quotes them at Pentecost.

The Lord said to his people, "It shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. Then everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved."  Joel 2:28-32a NRSV

Hang on, it could be quite a ride!