Sermons

Where the Spirit Leads Us

Last weekend I was in New York City celebrating my engagement with my fiance, Jamal, and my brother, sister-in-law and niece, who live in Chelsea. I was reminded what an incredible metropolitan center the city is. I saw so many different kinds of people: Hasidic Jews, Wall Street WASPS, 20-somethings going to the club, and tourists from basically everywhere around the world.

At one point Jamal and I piled into a tight elevator, displaced to the back by a group of middle aged women, East Asian tourists with large bags speaking a language I didn’t recognize. And I was thinking, how are we going to awkwardly navigate out of the corner of this elevator? Our stop is coming up next! But as the elevator slowed, I heard Jamal say, “sumimasen,” which means “excuse me” in Japanese.

Instantly the air in that crowded elevator changed. The women cooed at Jamal, but also peppered him with questions about how he knew Japanese. He smiled sheepishly as we navigated off the elevator, thanking them as well in their own language. I beamed, like “THAT’S MY FIANCE!”  because as we all know, I have no chill.

But I could tell that it was a gift for those women to hear words of their own tongue so far from home. I wonder if they’ll also tell this story when they return home, if it colored their experience of Americans, who are often depicted as only caring about our own country. For me it was a glimpse of the story we hear today in Acts, of how much can change when the languages and cultures that separate us are transcended, of how quickly our common humanity can unite us.

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Today in the church year we celebrate Pentecost, remembering the sending of the Holy Spirit to be with the Apostles, and that her presence continues down throughout the ages, to us. Pentecost marks the culmination of our Easter celebrations. And, much like how the events of Holy Week and Easter take place during the Jewish celebration of Passover, Pentecost takes place during the Jewish celebration of Shavuot, which is 50 days after Passover. That’s where we get the name, “pente” for 50. That’s why the reading says “When the day of Pentecost had come.” And also, “Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem.” The apostles gathered for the Jewish festival of Pentecost from all over the known world.

In the Jewish tradition, Shavuot celebrates receiving the Torah, the guiding principles for faithful people. So it makes sense that this is the day that God sends the Holy Spirit to be the guide for this new community of Jesus-followers. And here’s who the scripture says was in the house that day, because it can be hard to follow all these proper names. Parthians, Medes, and Eliamites, are from what is now Iran, a country with whom we remain in a bitter and senseless war. Mesopotamians are mostly from what is now Iraq, Judea, which is now Southern Israel and Palestine, not far from the Gaza strip, an area in desperate humanitarian crisis. Cappadocians, Pontus, Phryigia and Pamphylia are from what is now Turkey. Egypt, Crete, Rome, and the Arabian Peninsula, we all know from modern maps.

My point is that this is a hugely diverse group of people. And yet the gift of the Holy Spirit made them all able to hear in their own language. The beauty of Pentecost is not that the Holy Spirit changed everyone in the room to only speaking one language: Hebrew, or Greek, Latin, Aramaic. The beauty is that the Holy Spirit descended on each person so that all were able to hear the word being proclaimed in their own language. It is really a blueprint of the church, which allows for Christian worship to be practiced in any and every language, a distinction between us and our Abrahamic siblings. Our diversity is not eliminated but rather elevated because God can speak to each of us in the language of our hearts.

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There is much to be said about the day of Pentecost but what about the gift of the Holy Spirit? She is the most elusive of the Trinity, but also the one who leads and guides the church. Each week we ask the Holy Spirit to bless the bread and wine and turn them into the body and blood of Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit whom we ask to bless the water of baptism, as she blessed all of creation when she hovered over the waters in Genesis 1. And when the priest or bishop puts chrism oil on the head of a newly baptized person, she says that the person is “sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” At every ordination and consecration, we invoke the Holy Spirit to make a candidate into a priest, deacon, or bishop.

Still, I think we can be hesitant to attribute actions in our own lives to the Holy Spirit. And I think that is a bit of healthy humility. Too often the divine is used as an excuse for human actions, especially deplorable ones. But that doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit isn’t at work in our lives. It just isn’t always clear at the time, but becomes clearer in retrospect.

Each of us probably has a story of a time when we just felt the spontaneous need to call a friend only to find out that our friend desperately needed to talk to someone at that moment, or we doubled back after leaving home to grab something we missed, and discovered that the stove was still on. When you reflect on your life thus far, can you think of a time when you knew the Holy Spirit was at work in your life?

I don’t think I realized in 2019 that the Holy Spirit sent me to the Online News Association conference in New Orleans. But if I hadn’t been there, just quick flight from my home state of Oklahoma, I never would have made it to my mother’s bedside before she lost consciousness just a few hours after I arrived, and died the next morning.

I’ve heard it said that the work of the church is just trying to follow what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world. May we run fast enough to catch up. Amen.