Sermon

It is common to speak of Pentecost as the birthday of the church. I want to add to that the image of marriage. As most of you are aware, marriages do not just happen with the signing of a contract. We announce the date in church and either banns are read or there is a notice of marriage posted at the local registry office.  This lifts up the importance of the couple's commitment to each other, but even the formal ceremony does not make a marriage.

A marriage without knowing a person is based on pure chance. It may work, but the percentages of its success are greatly lessened. Co-habiting without a public declaration and ceremony may work as well, but it tends to have a temporary feel about it. 

It is as if somehow the couple are not sure enough to publicly declare to the world that they are committed to working out the delicate and difficult dimensions of a true relationship. The public ceremony invites a larger community to not only celebrate the couple's declaration of commitment to each other but also to support them in fulfilling that commitment.

A marriage is developed as we live out that commitment to each other, discovering our differences, our commonality, and developing that third something that did not exist until we came together. There are moments of joy, friction, boredom, and fun as a couple begins to utilise every experience as an opportunity to deepen their relationship.

Those same sorts of dynamics are present in a healthy church community. Like in a marriage, members of a church discover that they carry into the community a lot of knowledge of values, relationships, roles, and responsibilities. Some of these are positive , but some bring tension.

Those same tensions often occur in a church among members and between members and their ministers. Each acts on ways and customs that they believe to be true, and they cannot understand any reason for changing. It is only as they learn to value the presence of diverse opinions that they will begin to build a truly healthy church.

With that image in mind, let us turn to Pentecost. As I mentioned, Pentecost has often been referred to as the birthday of the church. In the passage that Margaret just read, the book of Acts records that the disciples and followers of Jesus were gathered together in Jerusalem following the events of the cross. Most likely they were a motley, disorganized, frightened group of people. Their hopes had been raised so high by this man Jesus, then dashed to pieces by his execution as a criminal on the cross. 

Then some among them spoke of having experienced Jesus alive again. But even if that were so, he was not among them now to give them direction. The world outside seemed cold, inhospitable, and unresponsive. If people would not listen to Jesus and in fact had rejected both him and his message, what hope was there for this small, frightened group of people to have any effect on the world?

Aware of their many weaknesses, confused as to their role in the world, and disorientated as to the direction they should move, they gathered for the feast of Pentecost. 

Pentecost was the Greek name for the second of the three great religious feasts of the Jewish year. It was originally an agricultural festival celebrating the completion of the harvest -- something like our Harvest Festival. But as Israel became more urbanised, it became a time for celebrating the renewal of the covenant or agreement between God and God's people.

It was a time for the people of God to recognize that God's original covenant was with all of creation. That in the beginning God breathed the breath of life into Adam -- the closest equivalent we have for that word in English is humanity. God formed humanity out of earth and then breathed the breath of life into this inert body. By sharing God's breath with humanity, God formed a special relationship with them and made them partners in the fulfillment of God's purpose in creation.

In the course of time, people were continually seduced by the powers about them into distorting God's original intention of their role in creation. Therefore, in a series of calls and covenants, God formed a special people amidst all the peoples of the earth to be a sign for the rest of the world. 

Each year this people of God gathered at the feast of Pentecost, both to give thanks to God for God's bountiful blessings and to reflect upon and rededicate themselves to their part in this covenant between God and humanity. It became a time of renewal, of new beginnings in their attempt to be a sign to the world.

Then, after years of the Jewish people celebrating this Pentecost festival, a motley group of frightened Jews who had followed Jesus sought to rededicate themselves as part of the people of God. They wanted to make a new beginning as followers of "the way" in which Jesus had instructed them. Like their Jewish ancestors before them, they wanted to reflect upon their covenant with God and to seek new direction for their life together.

Once again, as it had happened at creation, God breathed God's breath upon these people who had the form of a community and the form took on life as a community of faith. Like any totally new experience, they could only describe it by looking at old experiences. It was like the breath of God breathing life into Adam. It was like the violent wind and fire of the experience of Moses on Mount Sinai when God formed the people of Israel out of the escaped slaves of Egypt. 

It was unexplainable, and it was unearned. It was a gracious gift of God that enabled them to do far more than they believed possible. They measured themselves against the world and felt powerless. Yet they trusted in God and received the power to become part of God's people.

They became a sign of a new humanity that placed the enhancement of the lives of people above the preservation of structures. They were able to speak a new language that reached across the barriers that the world had erected of language, custom, race, class, national origin, and ideology. They were, if just for a moment, able to reverse the experience of the tower of Babel and catch a vision of the direction toward which the world must go. 

Just as the first life created by the breath of God was made in the image of God, so they were also made to reflect God in creation. It was this new life, again as the result of the breath of God, which empowered them to be a mirror image of God's purpose for the world. It was the birthday of the church, as a people who, by the gift of the Spirit of God, were enabled to be a sign to the world that the barriers dividing them could be transcended.

Like those first followers of Jesus, the church today celebrates Pentecost with a mixture of hope and uncertainty. We are all aware of our weaknesses when compared to the power that many other institutions in this world can wield. We too often find ourselves subject to their power rather than transcending it. 

We tremble when the voice of economics cautions us against performing a ministry that it considers unfeasible. We conform all too easily when the voice of differences suggest that certain people should go to one church while others would be more comfortable in another church.

How should Christians respond? We come to celebrate, as did those first Christians, well aware that we do not know the actual dimensions of our role and the direction that we are to go. Yet, we come in faith that God does have a role for us and a direction for us to move. 

We celebrate the birthday of the church as a beginning of our lives together and as a time for renewing our commitment as individuals and a community to being a part of the people of God as we are given to understand it. 

We rededicate ourselves to try to listen to the word of God, to try to hear how God is trying to express himself in our lives, and to try to discover whatever gift of language God seeks to give us that will enable us to speak across a barrier that divides this world.

Good marriages take lots of hard work, lots of forgiveness, and lots of thanksgiving for the gifts we have been given. It is the same with the church. Amen.