Helper

Helper

Acts 2:1-6

June 9, 2019 (Pentecost) • Mount Pleasant UMC

We spend a lot of time waiting. In an average lifetime, you will spend six months waiting in line, and twenty-seven days waiting on transportation (busses, taxis, airplanes). Researchers say we spend seven years of our lives waiting to fall asleep, and twenty-six years actually sleeping. We spend 2 weeks of our lives waiting at red lights and 38 hours every year waiting in traffic, though the researchers did not factor in Terre Haute trains. We wait at doctor’s offices, we wait for our meal to be delivered to our table, we wait for the coffee to brew and we wait for the water in the shower to warm up. Of course, we’re not really good at waiting, and we don’t like it much, so now we have apps on our phones that allow us to order our food so it’s ready when we arrive at the restaurant, map apps to tell us when there is a crash or construction so we can re-route our trip, and when we do get caught at a light, we’ve got our phones to entertain us so that it doesn’t feel like waiting. (By the way, we pick up our phones every six and a half minutes—150 times a day.) We’re impatient. We rely on next-day delivery, or we order items online and then drive to the store to pick up what someone else picked out for us. We’re not good at waiting. I walked into a restaurant for lunch this week and after about three minutes of no one paying any attention to me, I walked out. I complain about the people who cut me off in traffic because they are in a hurry and then I turn around and do the same thing to someone else. We don’t like to wait, so we hurry, but when we do that, we miss things. I think of that when I read today’s text, which talks about waiting, and I wonder what these disciples would have missed had they refused to wait on Pentecost.

This morning, we’re continuing our journey through the stories and themes from this year’s VBS—which not only stands for “Vacation Bible School” but also for “Very Best Summer.” The theme this year is “Power Up,” and we’ve been looking at ways we can “raise our game” in our walk with God. Through the story of Abram, we remembered that God wants us to know him, and through the story of Josiah, we learned that we can know God through his word. Last Sunday, we focused on how the world is broken so God sent Jesus to save us and repair the world. Salvation is not just about us, about “me and Jesus.” Those who are God’s people are called to live in a certain way, to do what we can to repair the broken world, to change the world as we know it. And if that seems like a huge task, it’s because it is! We need help if we’re going to be able to accomplish that task.

It’s hard to imagine what those few followers of Jesus were thinking and feeling in those days after his resurrection. Certainly there was joy: Jesus spent forty days with them, teaching them more about God’s kingdom (lessons which, apparently, no one wrote down!), and then one final time, when they are eating together (proof again that meals are very important to the Christian faith), he told them to wait in Jerusalem. Then Jesus told them God the Father was going to send them a gift, and this gift is somehow tied to what we talked about last week: that Jesus came to bring a baptism in the Holy Spirit (1:5). Can you imagine how confused they may have been at that point? They had heard Jesus describe the Spirit is described as an Advocate and a Helper, or as a counselor (in some translations). But now Jesus tells them that the Spirit would also be the source of their power for what is coming next (1:8). And just when hope settles in, Jesus disappears; we’re told he is “taken up” and he does not appear to them any more. That’s what we call the “Ascension,” and after that the disciples become determined. They do what Jesus said to do. After years of seeming to miss Jesus’ message, they get it this time and they go back to Jerusalem and they wait. They replace Judas with Matthias, a follower who had been with them from the beginning (1:21-26), and then they wait some more. For ten days they wait, unsure what was coming (or when it was coming) but sure they would know it when they saw it or felt it or experienced it. For ten days, they hung out together and then the day of Pentecost arrived. And that day turned their world upside down.

Pentecost has a longer history than we usually think of. Originally, Pentecost was an agricultural festival. It was when the first of the wheat harvest came in, and that first sheaf of wheat would be presented to God as an offering of gratitude as well as a prayer for safety and prosperity while the rest of the crop was brought in (Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One, pg. 21). The word itself means “fifty” because Pentecost happened fifty days after Passover. It was one of the three great festivals for the Hebrew people. Passover celebrated their freedom from slavery, Pentecost fifty days later celebrated God’s provision in the harvest, and Tabernacles in the fall focused on their reconciliation with God and their mission to the world. By the first century, especially for those in Jerusalem who didn’t practice farming, Pentecost had become a time to renew their covenant with God. They remembered the fifty days between crossing the Reed Sea and the arrival at Mount Sinai, and Sinai is where their ancestors, under Moses’ leadership, made a covenant with God. Pentecost became the time when they renewed that covenant, much like we use our covenant prayer at the beginning of the year to do the same thing. So for many Jews in the first century, Pentecost was all about remembering the law God had given through Moses and renewing their promise to live it out (cf. Wright 21; Longenecker, “The Acts of the Apostles,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 269).

The problem historically is that Israel had failed time and time again to live that law out. Over and over again they went chasing after other gods, other priorities. In many ways, the story of the Old Testament is of covenants made, covenants broken, covenants remade, covenants broken again and so on. In their own strength, they could not live out what God required. No one could, and they were not meant to. And I believe that’s why God chose this day to send his gift, because the gift is the power of the Holy Spirit living inside each believer, enabling them to live the way Jesus called them to and to do what Jesus asked them (and asks us) to do. What was law-driven and law-centered has now become Christ-centered and Spirit-driven (Longenecker 269).

We see that in the three symbols of the day, so I want to spend a little time with each one of those this morning. The three primary ways God shows up in that gathering of disciples is through wind, fire and speech, and each one of those will help us with our bottom line this morning: God sent his spirit to help you (and me). So, first, the wind. Luke (the author of Acts) says the disciples were “all together in one place” (2:1). We don’t know where that place was, though traditionally it has been suggested that they were back in the same room where they celebrated the last supper with Jesus. We know it must have been near the Temple, because after the Spirit arrives they spill out of the place in which they are gathered and encounter the crowd from all across the world that has gathered for Pentecost. But more on that in a moment. So they are all together, and Luke says the first thing they notice is this: “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind” (2:2).

“Wind” has been a symbol or reminder of God’s Spirit literally since the beginning of time. The Old Testament is written mostly in Hebrew, and in that language, the word ruach means both “wind” and “spirit” and when you read in Genesis (1:2) that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters of the world, the word is ruach. Spirit. Wind. Breath. The New Testament is written in Greek, and the word pneuma is the same: it can mean “spirit” or “wind” or “breath.” The wind of God’s Spirit blows all through the Bible, and in this moment, it’s the first sign that something is happening. The wind blows, and it’s a violent wind, a loud noise, perhaps like how we can “hear” a storm coming before it actually hits. The folks who have been through the tornadoes that have plagued the middle of the country recently know what this is like. The wind warns that things are coming loose, breaking open. The wind that brought about creation is bringing new life once again (cf. Willimon, Interpretation: Acts, pg. 30). The “sound of the wind” tells them something new is happening, a change is coming, the promise is arriving (cf. Longenecker 270).

The second thing the disciples encounter is fire. Luke tells it this way: “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them” (2:3). This is another symbol of God’s presence that goes back a long time. These disciples, steeped in their Scriptures, would remember how God spoke to Moses through a bush that was on fire but did not burn up. They would remember how God’s presence was seen in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night when the Hebrews were escaping from slavery. They knew that God’s presence on Mount Sinai had been seen as a consuming fire and smoke on the mountain. More recently, in Matthew and Luke, John the Baptizer had said Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Well, here’s the fire. Fire, of course, has a purifying quality; one way to sterilize something is to run it through fire. It also has a shaping ability; a strong substance like metal can be shaped into almost anything if you put it in the fire. Fire can destroy, fire can cleanse, fire can light the way. This is an image that’s not easy to pin down, but we could say God is coming to the people here in a lot of different and powerful ways.

The fire comes, then it divides and rests above each individual person. The Spirit of God comes to the community and also to each individual person. Something new is happening. Biblical faith is faith that is connected to a community; I know you hear that a lot from me, but it’s true. It’s also true that faith must also become personal. In other words, simply being a member of a church or a part of a small group doesn’t mean you are a believer. The “flame” has to rest on you personally, individually, as well (cf. Longenecker 270). We are part of the whole but we also need to connect with God in a personal way as well. That is part of this first Christian Pentecost as well. Wind. Fire.

Then there is the third sign: speech. This is a part of the story that sticks out because something way out of the ordinary happens. Luke describes it this way: “All of them…began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them” (2:4). When we read this, a lot of folks jump to what Paul describes later in the New Testament as the gift of tongues, but that is not what is going on here in Acts 2. The gift of speaking in tongues, what Paul describes as a gift of the Holy Spirit, is when someone is given the ability to speak in an unknown language, sometimes referred to as a prayer language. Very often, it’s a private, personal gift and Paul is clear that it if it is exercised in a public setting, like a worship gathering, there must be someone who can interpret (cf. 1 Corinthians 14:26-27). What happens here in Acts 2 is different, because what is said is understood, just not by everyone. Here, the disciples are given the ability to speak in known languages without learning them. They had no need for the Rosetta Stone app; the Spirit gave them the ability to speak in the native languages of the people around them, people from other nations who were in Jerusalem for Pentecost. There were people there who understood each one, but not all understood everyone. And there’s a reason the Spirit gave them this ability; it wasn’t for their own person edification. It was so that they could preach, so they could share the good news with the people who had come to Jerusalem from far off. So the point of the gift was preaching the good news. It was helping other people hear about Jesus (cf. Longenecker 271).

In fact, all three symbols point toward that purpose. One author describes it this way: “Everything is by wind and fire, loud talk, buzzing confusion, and public debate. The Spirit is the power which enables the church to ‘go public’ with its good news, to attract a crowd and…to have something worth saying…Pentecost is a phenomenon of mainly evangelistic significance” (Willimon 33). The Spirit comes to help the disciples and the other early followers of Jesus do what they are called to do. Wind, a reminder of the creating presence of God. Fire, to purify and empower them. Speech, giving them something important and significant to say and the ability to say it. And the Spirit still comes to us today to be our helper. Jesus promised that it would be so and Pentecost proved it. Just as he came on that first Christian Pentecost to empower the disciples, so he still comes. The bottom line for this week is this: God sent his Spirit to help you and me and all of us. And, even more to the point: the Spirit was sent to help us spread the good news.

So how does he help us? That’s a good question! First of all, the Spirit helps us live the life Jesus has called us to live. He does that when we become believers, but even before we come to know Jesus, he’s active in our lives. We Methodists call that “prevenient grace,” “the grace that goes before.” Simply put, it means that even before we’re aware of it, God is working in our lives in ways that keep us from going so far away that we can’t come back to him. He’s working in our lives from before we are born, surrounding us with grace and mercy every moment of our lives. I picture the Spirit’s work a little bit like this: one of the things our kids do in making that transition toward “growing up” is learning to ride a bike without training wheels. I remember helping my kids learn to balance, to not focus on the pedals as much as watching where they were going, helping them make it all work together. And then there is that moment when they take off down the driveway or the sidewalk, and you run along beside. You want to be there but you don’t want to get in the way. That’s an imperfect analogy of how I picture the work of the Holy Spirit. He’s there beside us, watching, helping, ready to steady us when we need it and ready to pick us up when we fall. Sometimes kids fall off the bike, and sometimes we fall in life. Sometimes it’s an accident, but sometimes we intentionally do what we know is wrong. And in all of those times, the Spirit is there, running alongside us, ready to help when we mess up. And on days when we do well, when we’re intentionally trying to follow Jesus, he is there giving us the strength to do what we need to do. There have been a lot of times in my life when I needed that strength, but one of the moments that stands out is the day I got a call from Marv. Marv had been one of the first people I had met when I arrived at that church, and he had shown himself to be a faithful, quiet servant. Whenever something needed to be done, Marv was there. Then came the day we learned Marv was battling kidney disease. Among other things, he needed to go on dialysis, so he did. And Marv battled the disease for many months, but then the word came down from the doctors that dialysis wasn’t really going to do much more good. He could keep doing it, but he wasn’t going to beat the disease. Marv called me, telling me he was going to stop dialysis. He knew that was a certain death sentence, and like so many other times, I had no words, but the Spirit gave me some. And the Spirit gave us all strength to walk with Marv through the next few days and into eternity. The Spirit helps us live the life; he helps us on good days and on difficult ones.

The Spirit also enables us to preserve the faith. One of the things Jesus said the Holy Spirit would do is remind us of all he said and all he taught (cf. John 14:26). Through the centuries, the Holy Spirit has enabled the church to pass the faith down from one generation to the next. There are times in history where the faith had been seriously twisted or corrupted; some even say that in our culture we may be in such a time again today. There will always be people who take the faith and try to use it to their advantage, but the Holy Spirit will always preserve a remnant. He will call people like Martin Luther and John Wesley and Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa, people who bring the church back to its foundations, to the essentials. Luther called the church back to the Scriptures and to the truth that salvation comes through faith in Jesus alone. Wesley sought to renew the church in England from a dead ritual to a living faith, one filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit. King reminded the church that racism is a sin, that the Bible says there is no Jew or Gentile, male or female, but that all are one in Christ (cf. Galatians 3:28). And Mother Teresa reminded us of God’s care for the poor and the outcast, of God’s love for the marginal. In all of these people and countless others, the Spirit was working to preserve the truth because he is called the “Spirit of Truth” (cf. John 14:17; 16:13). Who is he using in that same way today?

And the Spirit enables us to share that truth with others; as I mentioned, evangelism or sharing the faith is the main thrust of what happens at Pentecost. I remember being taught in InterVarsity that the faith is always only one generation from dying out. That’s true; if the faith is not handed down, there will not be a church for the next generation. If ever there was a time when we needed to rely on the power of the Spirit to reach people, it’s now. In his book Canoeing the Mountains, Dr. Tod Bolsinger tells the story of Lewis & Clark. They were commissioned to explore the western part of what is now the United States, and Lewis and Clark and everyone else in the known world was convinced they could canoe all the way to the Pacific Ocean. They knew without any doubt that there was a water route to the Pacific, and then they encountered the Rocky Mountains, and they found no way to take their canoes down the other side. Lewis and Clark had to re-think their whole strategy for reaching the west, and Dr. Bolsinger’s contention is that today’s church is at a similar point. What worked in the past doesn’t work anymore. We need what he calls “adaptive leadership” to be able to reach the next generation, and that adaptive leadership is going to come through a new work of the Holy Spirit. Dr. Bolsinger, by the way, will be here in October to talk about that, and I encourage you to plan to be a part of that day-long workshop. (Yes, that was a shameless plug.) But the point is this: what got us here will not get us there. The routes to the future all look different, and unless we open ourselves to and rely on the power of the Holy Spirit, we will fail to reach the next generation with the good news of Jesus Christ.

Undergirding that, and undergirding the original Christian Pentecost, is one other piece, something that we often overlook when we read this story. The context of Pentecost is prayer. The arrival of the Holy Spirit was God’s response to the disciples’ time of intensive and focused prayer. Luke makes that clear, back in chapter 1. What did they do during these ten days before Pentecost? Luke says, “They all joined together constantly in prayer” (1:14). Then, "When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place” (2:1), continuing to do what they had been doing. We cannot disconnect the arrival of the Spirit with the disciples being in prayer. It is as we connect with God in prayer that the Spirit sends the help we need. If we’re disconnected, we cannot receive the gift God wants to give: his Holy Spirit.

That’s why, as I shared a couple of weeks ago, I and others believe Mount Pleasant is being called to a deeper culture of prayer. It’s why we’ve begun offering times of prayer in the Upper Room (the former choir room) before every service. You’re invited to take part in that, to join our prayer team and ask God for great things here in this place. It’s why we’ve been working on a variety of prayer guides, to help us enter into this strange mystery we call prayer. You should know by now that I don’t see prayer as a magic act by which we convince God to do this or that. The disciples in that Upper Room were not trying to convince God to send the Spirit; God already wanted to send them his Spirit. The prayer was and is meant to prepare them and us to receive what God wants to send. Prayer is more about shaping us than it is about twisting God’s arm. It’s about preparing us as vessels to receive what God wants to send.

I’ve shared before that I have a collection of communion chalices from around the world. They’re all made out of different materials and by different methods, from crystal to wood, from silver to pottery. The ones I have that are made out of pottery remind me the most of Pentecost. At one point, this chalice was a lump of clay—wet, a little slimy, and unformed. It wasn’t useful for much until it was picked up by the hands of an artist, who spun it, shaped it, who saw in his or her mind’s eye what it could become long before the shaping began. The artist worked, and cut away what wasn’t necessary, and worked some more until it was in the desired shape. But even then, it’s not done yet, because to keep it in this shape, fire is required. The clay is submitted to some intense heat, where it becomes a beautiful vessel, suitable for use. I think of that when I think of the work of the Holy Spirit and Pentecost. These disciples in the room are unformed lumps of clay. Jesus had begun some work on them, and he had gotten them to the place where they were useful—but not until the fire of the Holy Spirit came to finalize the work. The analogy isn’t perfect, of course, but on the other side of Pentecost, baptized by the fire of the Holy Spirit these men and women turned the world upside down.

And it all began in prayer. The great author E. M. Bounds once said, “Little prayer, little power; much prayer, much power.” Our Bishop, Julius Trimble, added to that statement: “No prayer, no power.” I think that’s a good addition that Bounds would have approved of, because it’s all true. If we’re going to experience the help and the power of God’s Holy Spirit, we have to begin in prayer. Little prayer, little power. No prayer, no power. Much prayer, much power. Which will it be for you? Which will it be for us as a church?

So, this morning, we’re going to end with a different time of prayer. On this Pentecost Sunday, I want us to follow the example of the disciples in that “all together” one place. I’m going to allow some time for quiet, for prayer, for listening for God to speak to us. More than that, I want us to allow some time to ask God to send his Holy Spirit among us, that the wind and the fire and the voice might be felt, seen and heard in and through us. Let’s pray that God would send his Spirit among us and among all the churches in our community in such a way that Vigo County knows the Spirit is among us. So there will be longer times of silence, and I challenge you during that time to simply pray, “Come, Holy Spirit.” Then let’s watch the ways in which God will send his Spirit to help us all. Let’s pray.