Acts 2:1-13
When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them. 4 They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.
5 There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. 7 They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? 8 How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!” 12 They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?” 13 Others jeered at them, saying, “They’re full of new wine!” (Common English Bible)
Pentecost Sunday 2017
Last
week, we spoke of the good and kind souls living thousands of miles away in
Manchester who responded with compassion, love, and openness to the terrorist
attack at the Ariana Grande concert that week. But Carrie Frank is not a good
and kind soul living thousands of miles away—she is a good and kind soul living
right here in Longview’s interstate neighbor, Rainier, and was recently the
subject of a very touching and moving profile in our local paper.
In
response to last year’s terrorist attack at the LGBTQ nightclub Pulse in
Orlando that killed nearly fifty people, Carrie decided to do more than
mourn—she decided to act, to show that people from all over cared about those
who were lost and those who remained. The owner of a pottery store and an
artist by trade, she handpainted over one hundred mugs bearing the names of the
victims, calling them “cups of love.” She was determined to send them to the
survivors and the families of the deceased. But then she hit a snag—she had no
way of knowing to whom to send the cups of love to ensure that they made it to
the correct people, families, and households. And I’ll let the writer of the
profile on her, The Daily News’s Madelyn Reese, pick it up from there:
Dejected, Frank gave up
for a time. Then just before Easter she contacted the Orlando police department
again. That’s when she got in touch with administrative assistant Dorothy
Patterson and told her about her “cups of love” project…Patterson was able to
get Frank in contact with someone who would help her—the Orlando United
Assistance Center…
Thanks to Patterson and
officials in the police department, Frank will send off the cups next week
(sic). The cups are filled with rainbow-colored jelly beans donated from the
Jelly Belly Co., and the cups will be shipped through the Kelso J.C. Penney’s
bulk shipping account.
The mugs are individually
packaged, so all the center needs to do is write the address of each family or
survivor on the box and send it off. Though the project has been delayed many
months, Frank said it was “meant to be” because the cups will arrive near the
one year anniversary of the Pulse tragedy.
“I’m actually really
happy that it happened the way it did,” Frank said. “It’s going to be more meaningful,
I think. I hope that it’s more meaningful to them now, a year later, they are
remembered.”
What
had originally hoped to be a rapid show of compassion turned into more of a
commemoration through the passage of time. Still meaningful—very meaningful, in
fact—but it is meaningful in a slightly different way than before. Which is a
good way of summing up the importance of today, Pentecost Sunday, for the
Christian church.
Pentecost
celebrates the day that the Holy Spirit came to the assembled believers in
Jerusalem, fifty days after Easter. Which begs the question—what were they all
doing in Jerusalem to begin with?
Pentecost,
like Good Friday, fell on a Jewish festival day—in this case, the Feast of
Weeks, which was a commemoration of the giving of the law to Moses at Mount
Sinai, just as the Passover (when Good Friday falls) is the commemoration of
the liberation from bondage of the Israelites under Moses.
But
that isn’t how the Feast of Weeks actually began—it evolved into a celebration
of the giving of the law. Before that, it was a harvest festival, as Bible
professor Paul Walaskay explains: “The Day of Pentecost (fifty days after
Passover) was also known as the Feast of Weeks, an agricultural festival in
which the community celebrated the gathering of the first harvest (wheat) and
offered thanks to God for nature’s bounty (Exod. 23:14-17; 34:18-24).” It is a
holiday that may not be quite as prominent on the calendar as Passover, but is
still nonetheless important, as evinced by the number of Israelites who have
gathered from all sorts of places to Jerusalem in order to celebrate this
holiday together.
So
what became a holiday commemorating a spiritual harvest—the gathering of God’s
Law upon Sinai—has its roots in also celebrating a physical harvest—the first
wheat harvest of the year.
Yet,
as the story of Carrie Frank ought to teach us—in huge, flashing neon—spiritual
harvest ought to be able to lead to physical harvest. Her good faith and her
belief in goodness led her to creating the physical gift of the cups of love—a
harvest of physical fruit, as it were, from spiritual seeds.
It
has taken her most of the past year to get these cups of love out to their
intended recipients, though, and if that seems too daunting a timetable for you
to try to reap a harvest of fruit from your spirituality, then why not try to
take on the more modest timetable of Pentecost itself?
Fifty
days after the redemption of humanity in the crucifixion and subsequent
resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit arrives to the disciples who have
assembled in Jerusalem for the festival. Fifty days from today is Monday, July
24.
What
can the Holy Spirit do through you in the next fifty days?
Because
believe me, the world needs the Spirit working through you as surely as it does
the Spirit working through any of us. We’re mourning the loss of two Good
Samaritans to the violence of white supremacy in Portland, we’re grieving the
carnage and loss of life of back-to-back terrorist attacks in England—first in
Manchester, and now yesterday deep in the heart of London—and we’re facing down
epidemics of addiction and poverty and homelessness here in Longview…what can you do in the
next fifty days to put even the smallest of dents in these soul-sized problems
before us?
For
sometimes, being able to minister, and to be a net force for good in the world,
isn’t about being the one to fix something. It’s about being the one to
minister to something, or to someone, in a way that empowers them to rise up
themselves, to find their own inner strength, instead of us waving a magic
wand.
The
cups of love are not going to bring back to life the dozens of loved ones who
went to their graves that night in Orlando nearly one year ago. But those cups
will at least offer something of value—a message of hope, of love, and of unconditional
compassion to the soul-sized gaping void that I promise you still remains in
the lives of the people who lost someone at Pulse, or at Manchester, or at London Bridge.
The
Holy Spirit coming to the disciples wasn’t meant to fix the reality that Jesus
was gone—He ascended to heaven ten days previous—but instead was meant to be something
new entirely. The Holy Spirit didn’t necessarily fill the void left behind by
Jesus. It equipped the disciples to move forward without the bodily incarnation
of Jesus right next to them.
So
how might the Holy Spirit be equipping you to plunge forward into the next
fifty days in spirit and in truth? We have lived the fifty days since the
crucifixion and resurrection—what about the next fifty? And the fifty after
that?
Before
you know it, you may well have taken some small calling and made it into
something good and something great in God's sight.
Such
are the ways of the Spirit.
Such
are the ways of a Pentecost church.
And
such are the ways of God who loves you so much that God will not leave you
alone.
After
all, Jesus has since ascended to heaven.
But
the Spirit remains.
And the Good News of Pentecost is that the Spirit always remains.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
June
4, 2017
