Our Sons and Our Daughters

Picture taken by a church member at the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota.
 We used this as our Prayer of Confession in worship.

June 8, 2014 - Day of Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

¹When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes ¹¹Cretans and Arabs — in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹²All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

¹³But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

¹⁴But 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. ¹⁵Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶No, 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, 
        

in 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.’”

Sermon: “Our Sons and Our Daughters”

I wish I had been there, on that first Pentecost day, the birthday of the church.  How incredible it must have been!  That Spirit swooping in like the sound of a hurricane, with flaming tongues hovering over each person’s head. 

I mean can you even imagine?  We get startled when someone drops a hymnal!  We’re talking flammable heads, y’all!  It doesn’t get less decent and orderly than that.  I imagine that if that sort of thing happened here, we’d all be taking turns dunking our heads in the baptismal font before anyone got hurt or our church set fire.  We’d have the fire and rescue squad here immediately.

Pentecost is a strange story.  But when I read this familiar text yet again, I noticed something exceptionally strange about it, something I’d not seen before.  It talks about this diverse gathering of Jews from many cultural backgrounds being bewildered and astonished.  This isn’t new: of course they were.  But was it by those gail-force winds?  Nope.  Surely it was the Pentecostal pyrotechnics that shocked them?  Nope, not even that. 

It would seem that none of this really phased them.  So what was this source of bewilderment?  A sound.  Not a heavenly sound, but a very, very human sound.  The sound of the voice next to them, and the voice next to them, and the voice next to them.  Everyone spoke in other languages, and heard in their own, about God’s deeds of power.  Everyone understood everyone else.  That was the power of the Pentecost story.

It never really was about the rushing wind.  It never really was about those flaming tongues.  It was – and is – about the sound of people really hearing one another, across all sorts of cultural barriers.

It’s easy to overcomplicate the Pentecost story into a magic show of sorts by God to show the might of the Holy Spirit.  We do this when we think the Holy Spirit will come blazing a burning trail in our hearts showing us the one exact way to go in our lives.  We do this when we speak of Her (the word for Spirit in both the Old and New Testaments is feminine, so I use that today) as a possession who comes to live inside us when God decides we’re worthy or deserving.  We do this when we wait and wait and wait for God to give us direction while the Holy Spirit waits and waits and waits for us to just step out in faith.

The Holy Spirit doesn’t need the bells and whistles, the fiery show and furling winds.  She just needs a voice.  That’s the power of Pentecost: your voice, my voice, our collective voice as a church, the voices of those who go silenced, the voices of those who speak a different language than us, they all matter. 

Because that is how the Spirit first spoke that Pentecost Day…through ordinary human voices.  Which is, of course, why that voice of God was so easy to mock or ignore.  Several said those speaking were just drunk (on a different kind of spirit, you might say).  This shows something powerful about the vulnerability of God.  God wants to speak through us – and so God is willing to risk being ignored or silenced in order to do so.

And so we should never take the voice of another lightly: it might just be the voice of the Spirit.  As Peter promised, through Joel, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old mean shall dream dreams, even upon those in captivity – male and female – I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.”

But what happens if no one listens to those Spirit-filled sons and daughters, young and old men, captive men and women?  What happens if we dismiss their voices as drunk, or irrelevant to our lives, or lesser than our own?  Where does the prophecy go?

Unfortunately, we know the answer to that question.  We in the church have often been about the work of hearing people, but we have also silenced others.  This day, when we receive the Presbyterian Women Birthday Offering for Native American women who have been victims of sexual abuse, we confess, I confess, that our history is complicated.  We have brought the good news of Jesus to Native Americans, and we have brought the bad news of cultural superiority.  We have brought education, and we have brought exploitation. 

It would be nice to just let history be history, and keep our faith in a safe space beyond complicated human relationships.  Except that we all know history isn’t just history – it impacts our realities today, and faith that is divorced from complicated human relationships isn’t really faith.  And, of course, there is that pesky Spirit.  She spoke through the voices of complicated humans – and the power of Her message was in people finally, finally understanding each other.

And so we have to acknowledge our history, while proclaiming with the voices God has given us that we are building a new reality for our sons and daughters: a place where young girls do not live in fear of abuse and college women do not suffer violence because they say no.  A place where young boys are raised to understand that “being a man” involves compassion as much as courage, vulnerability as much as strength. 

Let us not silence the sons and daughters of our society: they are our prophets.  They are how the Spirit chooses to speak, just as much as She speaks through each of us. 

Yes, I wish I was there that first Pentecost Day.  I can just picture a mother walking away with her little girl, and the wide-eyed daughter looking up with amazement saying those powerful Pentecostal words we want all of our children to say, “Everyone heard me!  And I heard them, too.”  We don’t need the flames.  We don’t need the wind.  We don’t even need the red outfits.  We just need to really hear one another.  That is Pentecost.  Amen.