Russ Dean, June 3, 2001

Today is Pentecost Sunday. The day commemorates the coming of the Holy Spirit on those early believers in Jerusalem. The word itself means “fifty,” and refers simply to the day’s calendar relationship to the celebration of Easter: 50 days past Easter. Those first followers, still few and still anxious, on the heels of Jesus’ terrifying death and his mysterious resurrection, had gathered (as faithful Jews) to celebrate the Law. Yet with eyes opening to a New Law, and hearts prepared to hear its Word, their celebration itself became a new celebration: Pentecost. The promised Holy Spirit of God, foretold by the prophet Joel had come. Pentecost came as an ironic reversal of the story of Babel, which Betty read about just a few minutes ago.

The people built that tower into the heavens, striving for God, and because of their arrogance God crumbled the tower and confused their scheming by dividing their unified language into a confusion of many tongues. Pentecost comes as a reversal of this confusion. The people heard the Gospel in their own language.

Pentecost joins what was separated. Fixes what was broken. Makes whole what was fragmented. The Holy Spirit broke in to the ordinary world and the disciples shared their Easter faith in extraordinary ways.

This morning, let me ask you: What kind of “Pentecost-al” are you? For some of us this might be a frightening, unnerving, even repulsive question. “You won’t find any Pentecostals here” you might say; “we don’t do that pew-jumping, hand-waiving, and-all-the-people-said ‘Amen’” charismatic stuff at Park Road Baptist.” And as to our manner of worship, our style, our form, our emotional bearing, you would be right. But we do believe in the Spirit, don’t we? We sing about it in our hymns: “Breathe on Me Breath of God.” “There’s a Sweet, Sweet, Spirit in this Place.” “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.” Some of you might have grown-up singing “Lord, send the old-time power, the Pentecostal power...”

This sermon is really about one question. I usually do a better job of asking the questions than giving the answers, and I ask today, not rhetorically, but with sincere invitation to dialogue. Today’s text records the gift of the Holy Spirit of God to those earliest followers. It was a gift of The Sacred. Yet, for the grace of the gift 2000 years ago, we still struggle to understand: How do we Possess the Sacred?

Our favorite date has always been a night at the movie theatre. Though we have seen considerably fewer Hollywood hits in the last four years, we have been very interested in the number of box office releases which deal, specifically, with spiritual issues. Some time back we enjoyed the movie City of Angels, which stars Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage. The story is told from the perspective of one of the multitude of angels who walk among the people of Los Angeles. (The city of the Angels). Generally invisible to the human eye, these Guardian Angels are depicted not so much protecting, providing, preventing, as simply being present. I think this is a wonderfully interesting implication in itself!

Meg Ryan plays an elite Cardiac Surgeon who loses her first patient in the operating room. The surgery had been routine, everyday stuff for this modern miracle-worker. Yet, ultimately helpless to reverse his fatal arrest, and broken by her encounter with the shocked and grieving family, Dr. Maggie Rice quizzes a friend, “After all this time; all this work, I suddenly had the feeling that none of this is in my hands. And if it isn’t, what do I do with that?”

This life-saving surgeon, a skeptic, an agnostic, a non-believer had encountered in this tragedy something very much “other.” The movie offers some provoking spiritual insights, in the form of Maggie’s encounter with her angel -- who represents that dimension of this life that she was able to experience, palpably, but which was completely beyond her control.

In her wonderful book on science and religion, Barbara Brown Taylor quotes the British biochemist Arthur Peacocke: “We are that part of the cosmos consciously capable of being aware of and of responding to that immanent Presence” (The Luminous Web, p.43, emphasis added). Even many of the most avid naturalists in the scientific community are beginning to grapple more seriously with the mysterious “otherness” of this world, which seems undeniably beyond our control.

The Gospel of John says, “The wind blows where it wills, but you know neither whence it comes, nor where it goes.”

Pentecost is not the story of invisible angels who walk the city in black coats, who fall in love with humans, and who dive to earth to experience mortal love. Pentecost is the story of the very human experience of the something “out there” which occasionally, unexplainably makes its way right here. We should make it clear that Pentecost was not a new thing. God was no more present on that day than God was any day before or has been every day since. (Perhaps I should not use the phrase “out there.”) But it is clear to me that in a temporal world, for reasons we cannot understand, there are times when everything works just right. The astrologists say it’s in the Stars. The Apostle Paul says it’s in the providence of God’s timing. (The “rightness of time,” kairos in Greek.) Pentecost is an example of one of those right times when the Spirit, which seeks daily to be known and experienced, to be possessed – was, in fact, possessed. And those early believers’ ability to Possess the Sacred, changed the whole world.

Dr. Molly Marshall was one of our most influential Seminary Professors. She preached at our ordination service. I was standing beside her in that service when our pastor offered his customary benediction. It was a beautiful and familiar blessing which focuses on the work of Christ “in, with, above, below, behind, ahead of” the people. The benediction makes no mention of the action of the Spirit. Molly whispered, in her professorial tone, “He needs some pneumatology in that benediction.” (Pneuma is the Greek word for spirit or wind.) It seems to me that Molly’s comment could be applied equally to our own lives, our own work, our own worship. We need some pneumatology in our living benedictions as well.

I am troubled by our inability to deal with the Spirit of God. Our discomfort with the language of being “moved by the Spirit,” or “led by the Spirit.” The corner of the Church in which I have spent my last 15 years has focused its energy and efforts into my head and away from my heart. Into my Knowing and away from my Feeling. Into my Acting and away from my Being. What it means to be Christian is to Know. To Believe. To Think. To Profess. (All of those words are cognitive words – brain words.) We have made Christianity a thing that is almost solely to do with orthodoxy (right thinking) and little to do with orthopraxy (right acting or feeling or following or discerning).

Pentecost asks us to rethink a head-centered faith.

The word “Pentecost” and the language of “the Spirit” might make us nervous. Pentecost might trouble our still waters, might ruffle our well-groomed feathers. And maybe it should. Make no mistake about it, for Peter and those first disciples, the coming of the Spirit was a troubling, stirring, feather-ruffling experience. Thanks be to God that their heads and hearts and hands were open to Possess it when it came.

Dennis Covington is a Birmingham native, a reporter, who has had a pretty interesting life and some pretty interesting news assignments. Several years ago he covered a trial in which a Preacher from Sand Mountain, AL was on trial for attempted murder. Apparently one night, in a drunken rage, he forced his wife’s hand into a cage of Timber Rattlers. These rattlesnakes were all about faith – used regularly in worship on Sand Mountain. His wife must not have been a woman of much faith – she was bitten three times and nearly died. Covington’s recorded encounter with “Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia” is entitled “Salvation on Sand Mountain.”

For any who are just a little apprehensive of letting the Spirit “get ahold of you,” the book might be more than you want to take to bed at night. It is provocative and disturbing. In covering this story and doing its research, Covington was “caught up in the Spirit,” and on more than one occasion was, himself, led to “take up serpents.” Let me read to you Covington’s words as he recalls his first experience handling a rattlesnake in an Alabama church:

[The other handlers] knew before I did what was going to happen. They were already making room for me… I’d always been drawn to danger. Alcohol. Psychedelics. War... So I got up there... [Carl handed me] the big rattler... acrid-smelling, carnal, alive… But as low as it was, as repulsive, if I took it, I’d be possessing the sacred. Nothing was required except obedience. Nothing had to be given up except my own will… I didn’t stop to think about it. I just gave in. I stepped forward and took the snake with both hands… I turned to face the congregation and lifted the rattlesnake up toward the light… And it was exactly as the handlers had told me. I felt no fear. The snake seemed to be an extension of myself. And suddenly there seemed to be nothing in the room but me and the snake… all [were] gone, all faded to white… The air was silent and still and filled with that strong, even light. And I realized that I, too, was fading into the white. I was losing myself by degrees… The snake would be the last to go, and all I could see was the way its scales shimmered one last time in the light… I knew then why the handlers took up serpents. There is power in the act of disappearing; there is victory in the loss of self... (Salvation on Sand Mountain, p. 168-170)

From Covington’s encounter, let me offer you three suggestions for this Pentecost:

1) Pentecost is Dangerous. Like the wind, so is the Spirit of God. Where it comes from. When it comes. Where it moves. We cannot know. And like everything else in our lives, there is an element of fear in the unknown. Danger. What might the Spirit ask of you, if you really wanted to hear? To take up serpents? Even worse, To take up your cross? To deny yourself? To give all that you have to the poor? To follow Christ even into death?

2) Pentecost requires Obedience. “Nothing had to be given up except my own will.” So it is with the Spirit. The gift of the Spirit is not selective. There are no elite ranks. No chosen few as some of our Pentecostal friends would have us think. Peter said the coming of this new age would be marked by the out-pouring of God’s Spirit on all flesh. Who receives the Spirit? Whoever will. Young and old, rich and poor, slave and free, established and outcast, educated and common... the Spirit is available to whoever will. Pentecost requires only obedience.

3) Pentecost demands that we Lose Ourselves in the powerful light of the Spirit. This is what Jesus meant when he said we would “find ourselves,” only by “losing ourselves” for the sake of the Gospel. Covington’s words are strong, “There is power in the act of disappearing... victory in the loss of self.” We live in a world that calls this foolish thinking, a world that calls the loss of self just that, a loss. But most of God’s Truth is paradoxical Truth: We find in losing. We are strong in weakness. We are bold in meekness. We retaliate by repaying good for evil. We fight by turning the other cheek. We become great by serving others... The Spirit is the author of paradox. Pentecost requires the loss of Self.

Danger. Full Obedience. Loss of Self. No wonder we don’t like to talk about the Spirit. It’s so much easier just to say that we believe it, isn’t it?

Let me close with an observation. I’m not a charismatic. I’m not about to pick up a rattlesnake. Especially in here. I’m even uncomfortable with praise worship in which the air is filled with uplifted hands. But I have to ask myself, “Why?”

Psychologists tell us that we speak more with our body language than we do with our spoken language. Praise or prayer with open palms is just a posture. A language of the body. Does my discomfort with this kind of language say more about my own relationship with God than I care to admit? Do you hear what I’m asking? Is my inability to open myself before God in body language, an indication that I have closed some portion of my soul as well?

I’m not a charismatic, and I’m not ashamed that I’m not. I like our worship. Our style. Our format. But I wonder about our posture and what it says about how we Posses the Sacred.

You might want to try a little experiment sometime. The Psalmist exhorts the people to “lift holy hands in prayer,” and though this is not our style, it occurred to me that this position expresses a posture of openness. It is a physical posture of vulnerability. So I have tried to pray, sometimes, with my palms upturned in my lap. A simple gesture, but an intentional posturing of openness before God. We can’t Possess the Sacred if we are holding on to anything else.

Will Pentecost come to Park Road? Are you open to the danger? Am I ready for obedience? Are we all prepared to lose ourselves in God?

Maybe a few opened palms is what God needs for Pentecost to happen even here.

May it be so. Amen!