With our routines and world upended by the Shelter in Place Order that affects all of California, we are looking for ways to stay connected during a mandate to physically stay apart from one another. This is a continuation of our time together, even though we’re in different spaces.
Opening Hymn • Holy Spirit, Truth Divine • Page 241, Chalice Hymnal
Opening Prayer
Lay Leader: Rene Horton
Perplexing, Pentecostal God,
you infuse us with your Spirit,
urging us to vision and dream.
May the gift of your presence
find voice in our lives,
that our babbling may be transformed into discernment
and the flickering of many tongues
light an unquenchable fire of compassion and justice. Amen.
Tithes and Offerings
Checks can be mailed to:
Grace Community Church
C/O Rene Horton
P.O. Box 368
Auberry, CA 93602
Today is also the date of the Strengthen the Church offering in the United Church of Christ. If you would like to give to Strengthen the Church, please note it on the memo line of your check, or give here.
Holy Scripture • Acts 2:1-21 • 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 • John 20:19-23
Lay Leader: Rene Horton
Children’s Time
Church at Prayer and The Lord’s Prayer
A Blessing for Pentecost Day” © Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.
All are invited to email me prayer requests for next week’s prayer, or to get in touch any time during the week. We are in the midst of an unprecidented global event, and I am available as a compassionate ear if you find you need to talk through what’s going on.
Hymn • Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness • Page 249, Chalice Hymnal
The Message
Sermon Transcript
This morning, if you came to worship for a sermon that would comfort you, or let you feel at ease, I am giving fair warning. Today is not that Sunday. Today is not the day where you will sit back, settled in your righteousness feeling at peace with the world as it is. I may get a few upset emails about that, and that’s okay. I will be happy to be in discussion with anyone who takes issue with today’s discomfort.
This is Pentecost. In Jewish tradition, it is the celebration of having been given the law at Sinai, it is to commemorate the covenantal relationship between God and God’s people. In our Christian tradition, we often call it the “birthday of the church,” and the festivities are lighthearted. In the church I come from, Pentecost Sunday has always been synonymous in my mind with birthday cake for the Sunday school classes and red, yellow, and orange gladiolus creating a dazzling flame at the altar. Wear Red on Pentecost is so often said that it has gotten mixed up in my mind with the quote from the movie “Mean Girls,” where instead of “On Wednesdays We Wear Pink” the line becomes “On Pentecost we wear read.”
And yet, like we’ve discovered this year with so many other texts we know well and holidays we can usually celebrate on autopilot, to hear and read and study the texts for this Pentecost in the year 2020, we are taken to a deeper understanding. Today, when the so called “culture wars” are at an all time high, and when racism and anguish, and systemic evil are clashing against human suffering, we cannot simply eat a slice of “Happy Birthday, Church!” cake and comment on how great we all look in our red attire.
The text from Acts comes at us swinging from the beginning, from the first line We, a scattered, dispersed people, read the words “They were all together in one place.” Our hearts break a little. I think of the welcoming smiles, the welcoming, casual atmosphere in the pews before service starts, and the way we all greet one another. I think of Barb coming up to me with a quick little note before we start the service about some piece of church or conference business—I am positive that if we were in person today she would be relaying particulars of yesterday’s Zoom Annual Meeting for the Northern California Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. And I think of Mary Lou making me feel at ease with her warm and welcoming smile. I envision our kids, all antsy and ready to get back to the Sunday School room where they can get to the wiggly work of experiencing the Gospel through crayon, chalk, and play. I think of how exciting it is when I see that Mary Jo will be sharing a special song with us during worship. I yearn for sitting around the table with everyone during our time of fellowship, swapping stories and laughing heartily. I could name all the interactions I am missing with every one of you, and the inside-out nature of our celebration of Pentecost this year brings me to tears.
In the story of this first Christian iteration of Pentecost, jewish peoples from across the map have assembled. In it, the root “Pente” tells us that there is five of something, in this case it is the celebration of the fiftieth day after the sabbath on which Passover began, and this places it fifty days after the season of Easter begins. Our celebration of Easter this year felt stunted in some ways in that we could not come together and proclaim our alleluias, and at the same time it was enriched with a deeper grasp of what the disciples felt, why they reacted the way they did, what it meant to be hidden away in isolation because a threat to their lives loomed outside the doors of their private upper rooms. We have felt their grief and loss because we have collectively shared in complex emotions this season. And as we approached this morning, the morning the disciples were among thousands of other Jewish people from numerous lands, as we heard Rene list for us in today’s reading, we approach it at more than a six-foot-distance. We are still under our cover and in our hiding spaces. However, as we read further, we can tell from the full story that Church, with a capital C, was never meant to be the building. It has always been about the people. We are th opened up version of the nursery rhyme “this is the Church and this is the steeple. We are the “See all the People” part, but without the walls or the door.
All the better for the movement of the Spirit. While the Jewish festival is one of the law, the Christian celebration is one of chaos, of movement, of bewilderment. If I can get way with a pun, just one today, that Sunday a few thousand years ago, it was a day of Law and Disorder.
Pentecost is the day the Holy Spirit bridges the gap between God and people. With Jesus ascended, the disciples were wondering “what now,” even though Jesus had given them ample, ample lead up and warning that it would be the Spirit that would come to them. But without precedent, what does that even mean? And here, with those thousands of years of contemplating it, writing about it, reading what has been written about it, and rewriting it, the Holy Spirit is still wild. It is unwieldy. It does unpredictable things like showing up as tongues of fire and causing men to speak in languages they had never taken a Rosetta Stone lesson. It makes the disciples look…drunk. That huge gathering of the devout Jews from across the globe didn’t know what to make of this.
Isn’t it funny that our first instinct when we don’t know how something works or experience it firsthand for ourselves is to discredit it? I’ll come back to this, so remember this tidbit.
Peter, however, gives a speech. He tells the crowd, “No! It’s 9 AM, of course we’re not drunk!” Instead, he relates what is happening, this baffling, flaming chaos of foreign words and violent wind to scripture. To Prophesy. Joel had told us that the spirit would be poured out on each one of us, breaking gender and age barriers, crossing economic and class lines, and saving all who call on the name of the Lord. Being the devout pilgrims who had traveled far to attend this feast, the familiarity with and importance of the fulfilment of this prophecy was not lost on them. The Holy Spirit was not just there to visit, or to be mischievous. The Holy Spirit showed up and gave them marching orders. They had been endowed with gifts of the spirit. They were called to something new. Something radical. Something…uncomfortable.
The Holy Spirit stirs in and around each of us. At times we can feel the presence of the Spirit in peaceful places, yes. But the stirring, the push, the inward burning to “do” and to “go” is not comfy. The Spirit does not whip around us in order to push us toward our old, same ways. The Holy Spirit shows up ready to ignite us. Ready to give us new was of thinking, of communicating, and of reaching outside of our own cozy sphere of people who look and think like us and way out of our comfort zones. To take Church outside. The Spirit does not come with fire just for us to roast marshmallows over.
Imagery of fire and igniting are painfully appropriate on this Pentecost. As we are coming together this morning to Worship God, to glorify Jesus, and to marvel at the Holy Spirit, our country is in turmoil. This could be said of any given Sunday as acknowledge that racism and violence have deep roots in our American system, however, this week it is on full display. On Monday, two news stories leapt from the page and off of our screens—the story of the black birder Christian Cooper, who asked a white woman, Amy Cooper, to leash her dog while in a wildlife area of Central Park. Rather than leashing her dog, she called the police and falsely accused him of threatening her life, harnessing a powerful tool that has been used in this country since it’s violent inception—white women’s tears. The other story, one that has changed physical city scapes as flames engulf buildings, is of a black man, George Floyd, who was killed by an officer during his arrest. Whose neck was under the full weight of Officer Derek Chavin’s knee for a full nine minutes. Who said, “Please, I can’t breathe” and was unresponsive for three minutes while the weight of unchecked power upheld by a system that values things over human life pushed down on him. And today, as a new weeks begins, fire fills our newsfeeds. How is God Still Speaking, how is the Holy Spirit still moving this Sunday morning, what rush of violent wind, what flames of understanding are being stoked? If our answer is simply “They shouldn’t riot. It doesn’t help their cause. Can’t they do this peacefully” then we are not listening deeply enough. If our answer is “Well, I’m not racist. I don’t see color.” Than we are not honoring the spirit granting us the gift of seeing difference and honoring it. The Spirit did not come to the disciples and make it so that everyone in the room heard the same language-their language. It had them each speaking in the languages of those around them, honoring the diaspora, honoring difference. Honoring the personhood of each of those gathered there. If our response to the centuries of rape, enslavement, murder, fear, subjugation, dehumanizing, and violence manifesting in taking it out into the streets and demanding to be seen and heard—because we have all witnessed that peaceful protest has been discredited when we look at athletes taking a knee in protest of police brutality against black bodies—if our response is to discredit rather than to ask the Holy Spirit to grant us the ability to understand—then we have closed our ears to a Still Speaking God, and worse, we have closed our hearts to those Jesus has continually reminded us to love. Our neighbors. Are we those who discredit a movement because it makes us uncomfortable by saying “They are filled with new wine” or are we saying, “Nope, It is 9 in the morning and we are here to fulfil prophesy, to give voice to the voiceless, to see to it that there is equality and equity among all.”
But then we come to the same snag where we first began. All of this is happening while the spread and contagion rates of an unpredictable virus are still rising. As protestors are out demanding justice and pleading for the respect of black and brown bodies, and chanting for change, the risk of a greater spread of Covid19 is lurking in the background among the other risks, risks of peaceful protests turning violent, dissenters running protestors over with their vehicles, rubber bullets, tear gas, arrest. How, do we hear what the spirit is telling us, and how do we act on it when we have so many good reasons to remain safe and at home?
Our reading from first Corinthians speaks of spiritual gifts, qualities that the Holy Spirit has activated in each and every one of us. We each have a role to play. While we cannot all stand in the streets and demand that our white-skewed system see the humanity and value in life of each member of our society, we all are still given everything we need by God to do some part in creating a just world for all. What are your gifts? How can you use them, even from home?
What are the ways we can each work to realize the prophesy by Joel of hearing equally the prophetic cries of those who our world tries to drown out? When, in our John passage Jesus says “Peace Be With You,” it is a sending. It is an active peace. How can peace be with us if we are not doing what it takes to make it so. This Pentecost, how are we receiving the Holy Spirit? What is gnawing at our insides, setting us aflame? How are we learning from our discomfort and using it to spread the Good News of a God who has created us—all of us—in God’s own image? May we be stirred by the rush of a violent wind, burning with compassion and action, and discern how our gifts can co-create with God a world that is safe and equitable for all. Amen.
Note: I am compiling a list of anti-racist books, articles, podcasts, etc. It can be accessed here. If you have a resource I have not listed, please send it my way so we can all learn, grown, and work together to end systemic racism in America.
Closing Hymn • Be Thou My Vision • Page 595, Chalice Hymnal
Powerful, needed, and right on! Amen and Amen!!!!!