Sermon: “The Safest Place?”
Text: Acts 2:1-21
From the “Inspiration in the Inbox” department: Earlier this week I received an email from a church member. It was entitled “The Safest Place” and it read:
How to stay safe in the world today:
1. Avoid riding in automobiles because they are responsible for 20% of all fatal accidents.
2. Do not stay home because 17% of all accidents occur in the home.
3. Avoid walking on streets or sidewalks because 14% of all accidents occur to pedestrians.
4. Avoid traveling by air, rail, or water because 16% of all accidents involve these forms of transportation.
5. Of the remaining 33%, 32% of all deaths occur in hospitals. So above all else, avoid hospitals.
But…
You will be pleased to learn that only .001% of all deaths occur in worship services at church, and these are usually related to previous physical disorders. Therefore, logic tells us that the safest place for you to be at any given moment is at church!
Isn’t it nice that there are statistics proving that church is a safe place? After all, church should be a safe and secure place for Christian believers. I think about all the visitors who find a place in these pews Sunday after Sunday, looking for a new church home. In a very real way this place, this sanctuary, should be just that – a place of peace and comfort, acceptance and welcome. Visitors should feel safe to visit and join this church. I also think about our homeless neighbors who join us every Wednesday during the fall and winter months. In talking to them, I’ve discovered that many of them have been to this church before and recognize it the minute they step into the Fellowship Hall for dinner. One of them once told me, “I’ve been to this church before, and when I saw that we were coming back here tonight I was so excited.” I was glad to hear that. Our church should be a safe and secure place for those who have little to no safety or security.
Anne Lamott in here wonderful book Traveling Mercies tells the story of a little girl who got lost in her home town and couldn’t find her way home. Apparently a helpful police officer saw the girl, and after asking her some questions let her get into the front seat of his patrol car so he could drive her around. His hope was that she would eventually recognize a familiar landmark. After a few minutes, the little girl suddenly sat straight up in the seat and said to the officer, “There’s my church. You can let me out here.” Shouldn’t church be like that? Shouldn’t this or any church be a safe place for lost children and lost adults alike?
We Presbyterians have historically been quite good at safety and security in church. We like to do things “decently and in order”. We like non-threatening, comfortable worship services and friendly, safe people sharing the pews with us. We excel at this, and so through most of the church year, we become accustomed to safe and secure Sunday mornings at church with no surprises.
But then comes Pentecost.
It all began with the breath of God, God’s Spirit, when it roared through that place where the disciples were gathered. It shook the walls and rattled the doors. It blew over tables and chairs, and made casual observers dive for cover. Suddenly tongues of fire appeared on the head of each disciple. Quite literally, they were on fire! This sounds like something straight out of a science fiction movie, doesn’t it? Some people have called Pentecost “the divine disturbance”. I think that’s putting it lightly. A disturbance is when a gnat flits around your head while you’re trying to read. A disturbance is when a faucet drip… drip… drip… in the bathroom keeps you awake. Pentecost was not a mere disturbance. It was all-out explosion of God’s holy power. It was not decent. It was not orderly. And it was anything but safe.
That’s just how it is with God’s Holy Spirit. You see, scripture tells us that God’s Spirit hovered over the watery void, the formless nothingness, and at the moment of creation brought order out of chaos. You only have to read the first three verses of your Bible to see that. God’s Spirit is well known for turning chaos into order. But, there are plenty of other instances in the Bible and throughout history when God’s Spirit does just the opposite. God turns order into complete chaos. That’s the part of God’s presence that we decent and orderly folk don’t do so well with. We’d much rather have a God who behaves, a God who does predictable and non-threatening things, a God who simply comforts us when we are afflicted. When God suddenly turns around and afflicts us when we are comfortable, well, then we’ve got a problem.
I think for that reason God’s Holy Spirit is fairly misunderstood. We have a pretty good idea what we mean when we speak of God as Father, and an even better idea of what we mean when we speak of God as the Son, Jesus Christ, but we have little to no idea what the Holy Spirit does. Several months ago I got a good laugh out of reading an article I found on a satirical news website. The headline read, “Holy Spirit Gets Laid Off”. The article went like this: “Calling the Holy Trinity ‘overstaffed and over budget,’ God announced plans Monday to downsize the group by slowly phasing out the Holy Ghost. ‘Given the poor economic climate and the unclear nature of the Holy Ghost’s duties, I felt this was a sensible and necessary decision,’ God said. ‘The Holy Ghost will be given fewer and fewer responsibilities until His formal resignation from Trinity duty following Easter services this year. Thereafter, the Father and the Son shall be referred to as the Holy Duo.’” I laughed because I think many Christians wouldn’t mind seeing the Holy Spirit take a little break for a while, especially when that Holy Spirit is responsible for bursting through the windows and doors with a violent wind and tongues of fire.
Though we might rather God’s Spirit not do things like that to us, Pentecost is our yearly reminder that God’s Holy Spirit breaks into the comfort, the security, and the complacency of our lives and turns the whole joint upside down with chaotic power. We may find ourselves wondering how the same Holy Spirit that brought order out of chaos in the Genesis creation narrative can also bring chaos out of order in the story of Pentecost. I think the answer is pretty clear once we stop assuming that order is better for us than chaos is. The Holy Spirit seems unconcerned with either the order or the chaos as ends in themselves, as scripture describes it. What the Holy Spirit does is bring about a new creation. Sometimes, as we see in the creation narrative, that means creating new order out of old chaos. However, there are just as many instances in which God’s Holy Spirit creates a new chaos out of an old order. It’s called renewal. It’s called rebirth. It’s called new life.
It’s interesting to me that Luke, who wrote both the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, uses the word “power” here. In the gospel, he describes Jesus telling the disciples to “stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). Again in Acts, Jesus says “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8). And here, in our New Testament reading for this morning, we hear that the disciples begin speaking in different languages, proclaiming God’s deeds of power. To know what Luke means by “power” we can’t just go to a dictionary, as the definition would be too general. Too know what Luke means by using that word we have to look at the other places he uses it. As it turns out, Luke uses the word five times in the first two chapters of his gospel alone, and in each instance, power is connected with pregnancy and birth. For instance, Mary is told by the angel Gabriel, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). The power of God’s Holy Spirit is one of creation, conception, and new life. Those in scripture who have an encounter with God’s Holy Spirit can do nothing but yield to it. They are blown by God’s Holy wind wherever God wants them to be. The windblown journey is the Christian life. You don’t make demands of it. You don’t try to establish safety and security in it. You just go where it takes you.
How often do we really pray for God’s Holy Spirit to create something new in us? I think more often than not, when we pray, we ask God for things that merely help maintain our safety and our security. But Jesus called his disciples to far more than safety and security. In fact, he told them precisely that they would not be safe. They would not be secure. He sent them out into the world to turn it upside down, to welcome the last as if they were the first, to treat the smallest like they were the biggest, to join the poorest as if they were the richest. How often do we pray for God to do the same thing with us?
Christian author Shane Claiborne wrote about one of his college professors who told the class, “All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don’t tiptoe.” (The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, p. 225.)
Brother and sisters, Pentecost reminds us that the church should never just be a safe and secure place, by which we merely tiptoe through the Christian life to arrive safely at death. Pray for God to create something new with you, to use you to turn the world upside-down. Go visit the Urban Ministry Center, or the Correctional Center, or one of our area’s many hospitals, and look into the eyes of the people that Jesus called “the least of these”. Trust God’s Holy Spirit to carry you into the lives of people in need. William Sloane Coffin once said that “God is always beckoning us toward horizons we aren’t sure we want to reach!” (Credo, p. 146.) On Pentecost, that is particularly clear. God’s Pentecost wind is liable to surprise you at any moment. I can’t promise that you’ll be safe. I can’t guarantee that you’ll feel secure. But I can promise you – because God promises it to each of us – that you will feel God’s power, that you will experience new life, and that God will create something brand new through you, in you, around you. That’s what church really is.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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This sermon was written by Rev. Lee A. Koontz
