The Inclusive Spirit

The Inclusive Spirit
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b;
Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17, 25-27

I go through this routine every year as I prepare worship for Pentecost: Do I have all the place names read as part of the Acts lesson? They are a mouthful. Not every mouth can spit them out in an orderly sensible way. It’s like reading all the names in the “begats” from Numbers, Matthew or Luke. May be I should just edit the text to say, “And how is it that, each of us, in our own native language, hear them speaking about God's deeds of power?” That would just delete all the names.

Another choice that presents itself is to replace the unfamiliar ancient names with contemporary ones, so that the passage might read something like this: “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?  Portugese, Mexicans, Ethiopians, and residents of Montenegro, Japan and China, Poland and Australia, Patagonia and Pakistan, Egypt and Libya, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Gentiles and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power.” Modern day place names don’t trip off the tongue any easier than ancient ones.

So what is with all those names, regardless of whether they are ancient or modern? It’s Luke’s attempt to demonstrate that the Holy Spirit of God, as well as the Gospel which the Spirit unleashes and empowers, is universal, is for everyone, is for enemies as well as friends, is for foreigners as well as homebodies, is for people not yet met as well as bosom buddies. There is no one who cannot access the Spirit or be accessed by the Spirit. The Spirit is God’s witness that God desires to be in contact with everyone. Not some, not just the deserving, not just the beautiful, not just the poor or the rich, not just the politically savvy, not just the religious elite, not just the smaller sizes to whom  Abercrombie and Fitch prefers to sell. Everyone. All.

And that means that there are a lot of things that are different among all those diverse people. And the Spirit doesn’t play games with those things. The Spirit enables a variety of gifts which are necessary for the useful and efficient spread of the Gospel through human agency. But those gifts are spread evenly across all the lines of division that human beings would lay down: language, race, gender, nationality, education, economic status, political persuasion, physical capability.

The Spirit breaks down the divisions that we build to include and exclude, to separate and conquer, to esteem and to belittle, to shame and to promote. The Spirit unites and celebrates what we have in common: one body, one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

The gift of the Spirit to the church in particular and the world in general is all part of God’s grand design. Remember the words of the psalmist, in No. 24: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it. That’s the same message as the psalmist gave in No. 104, from which our reading today came. God’s creative work extends from heaven to earth. The psalmist has a long list of things that God has created: clouds, winds, fire, water, cattle, plants, people, wine, oil, bread, trees, birds, goats, moon, sun, darkness, light, lions. O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

God has designed everything in wisdom. In Hebrew, wisdom is more than knowledge. It includes technical aptitude and construction skill. God is the divine engineer as well as the architect. Creating out of nothing is an art. God dreams, God imagines, God envisions, God thinks, and God tinkers. That is Spirit-work. That is God inviting our participation in the ongoing work of creating order out of chaos, life out death, joy out of mourning, wholeness out of pieces, love out of indifference.

We see that in the image of the Leviathan. The ancient world thought of Leviathan as a great chaos monster, a terrifying image, a piece of early science fiction if you will: Godzilla, Jurassic Park, and Jaws all rolled into one. Yet the psalmist sees that with God the Leviathan is as harmless as a bath toy, a simple rubber duck floating in bath bubbles.

God doesn’t just design in wisdom. God also nourishes everything that God creates. God doesn’t abandon creation. Even in the midst of the rubble of a collapsed building in Bangladesh, or tornado broken homes in Texas, car bombings in Damascus, fighting in South Sudan, rambunctious rocketry in North Korea, or global warmed rising sea water in the Maldives. God nourishes the world – all the world – with the presence of the Spirit. God gives his creatures exactly what they need for life.

The Spirit is a spirit of generosity. The tongues of flame that descended were not sparingly given. They touched everyone. The Spirit is not to be hoarded any more than anything else in all of creation. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives that is that we are torn apart.” Brueggemann says that what tears us apart is the conflict between scarcity and abundance. We are torn between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief that the things of life are limited. As a result we become greedy, mean, unneighborly.

The gift of the Spirit at Pentecost was – and is – God’s affirmation that there is more than enough of the truly important things to go around. They cover the world. They are for everyone. The cup of life overflows; surely God’s goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives. We shall dwell in the house of the Lord as long as we have breath, and beyond.

All this, God freely offers us. The Spirit overflows. Brueggemann says that there is something like a table prayer in the midst of these verses. God is thanked for giving “food in due season” and filling all of his creatures “with good things.” The psalmist describes God as the great respirator, breathing life into the world. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.

The first Christians discovered all this abundance in the midst of the Pentecost experience. The Holy Spirit rushed like a wind into the gathering of the apostles. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Pentecost is about the generosity of God. The message of the Gospel is for all people, is available in all languages that were then known. And Christians continue to bring the gospel into the languages of the world, one dialect at a time. No wonder the crowd was amazed and perplexed and astonished. Here was something so important, so special, so particular, that it couldn’t be bottled up in one language, one society, one nation, one synagogue.

The breath of God fills everyone with good things and creates something new, unimaginable. The church was blessed to be multi-cultural, multilingual, multi-generational, international, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

From the outside Pentecost looks like a mess. But from the inside, it is pure genius, designed by God, nourished by God, freely offered by God, and so fully abundant that it swept through Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, to Rome, Europe, Asia and beyond. It is still sweeping today as, against all human odds, the Spirit grows the faith in ever expanding numbers in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, and in places where to believe anything other than another faith is a cause for death. The flames of Pentecost have been fanned across the world and across the centuries. They are here, even in our midst, even in our time, even in our lives. The Spirit of God is inclusive, abundant, effervescent. The Spirit of God is life itself.

Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Praise the Lord!


Sources:
Walter Brueggemann, “The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity.” Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999.
Homiletics, May-June 2013.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.