acts 2

we couldn’t understand anybody 

we were alone in the city

this great big city by itself 

but now

with so many visitors 

from so many nations 

speaking so many languages 

we truly couldn’t understand anybody 

we were alone

when we tried to speak the local language 

nobody could understand us either

we would try to find food 

or a shelter 

and people would look at us 

like we were aliens

which I guess we were to them

but still

we kept getting lost

and were alone and hungry

and we didn’t know how to find the festival 

even with all the crowds 

or maybe because of them 

there was some commotion 

in a building 

maybe a house

off to one side

a lot of voices

many people crowded around 

we came closer

there were people speaking 

a lot of different languages 

but amazingly 

as clear as could be 

we heard a voice speaking our language 

we stood gaping

at this new word we could hear and 

understand

then

one of them stepped forward to speak 

to say they weren’t drunk at 9 a.m.

and then to quote a prophet 

and to talk about 

a Spirit being poured out on everybody

and then to talk more about someone 

named Jesus

others came through the crowd 

to help us 

one of them asked us 

not in our language 

if we needed anything 

I said 

as best as I could in their language 

we were hungry 

and somehow she understood 

and took us in

and gave us food to eat 

so we were fed twice that morning 

we knew then

that we would not be returning to 

our homeland alone

even if 

we would be traveling 

by ourselves

Sermon: The Spirit Poured Out

First Presbyterian Church

June 8, 2025, Pentecost C

Acts 2:1-21

 

The Spirit Poured Out

 

 

Here we are again, at one of those passages of scripture that we may not hear very often, but we do hear it at least once every year. It's the kind of scripture reading that we recognize almost immediately upon hearing, but that, if we're honest with ourselves, we don't really know all that well.

We know the basic beats of the story:

ü All of Jesus's followers, gathered in a room, waiting for...who knows?

ü The sound of a great wind, "divided tongues as of fire", suddenly speaking languages they'd never learned or known before;

ü The great crowd, in Jerusalem but from everywhere (a detailed list follows, representing the entire known world); that crowd hearing all the commotion and wondering what was going on up there;

ü Some terminally clever oaf in the crowd cracking wise about their being drunk;

ü Peter responding that it's only nine o'clock in the morning, and that nobody's drunk, but here's what's happening; and then quoting some spooky stuff from the prophet Joel, launching into a sermon from there (that we only get part of in today's reading).

Sometimes those familiar phrases, though, can get a little bit dull from repetition, so familiar that we don't really hear them. We might just slip into the thought, "oh, yeah, the Pentecost story" and go on autopilot, not really hearing.

For example: what does it suggest when Peter, following Joel 2:28-32 pretty directly, quotes God as saying "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh"? Does that strike up any particular image in your mind? Or has it become so familiar that it doesn't really strike up anything? 

Sometimes when I find myself in this rut I turn to the Cotton Patch Gospel, the work of biblical scholar Clarence Jordan, who not only translated much of the New Testament but created a version set in the Georgia of his day, namely the late 1950s. Jerusalem became Atlanta, the baby Jesus was born in Gainesville (Georgia, not Florida), and so forth. Being born and raised in Georgia, this naturally got my attention. Jordan's colorful and evocative language can be at times illuminating. It's not a substitute for a more straightforward translation, but it can be an interesting supplement at times.

And for this passage, Clarence Jordan offers "I will share my spirit with all mankind." OK, there's the dated language "mankind," as if women weren't included, but the main verb is "share." It's an effective enough verb, to be sure, and it's definitely accurate enough in this context, but for those who respond to imagery and vividness of language, it perhaps doesn't offer as much help. 

Another, much more recent reading of the scriptures in a different cultural context is First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament, published only four years ago. This work, produced by a council of Native religious leaders and teachers and scholars, sought to perform a task not unlike Jordan's Cotton Patch Gospel, but not exactly the same; the setting is not changed, but the names of places and persons are given in a Native idiom and the style of the account is rendered as much as possible in the style of a storyteller in the oral tradition of the many nations and tribes of North America. 

In this reading, after the "sound of a great windstorm" and "flames of fire" have come and the crowd is hearing in their many languages, Peter's reading of Joel is rendered as "'In the last days,' says Creator, 'I will rain down my Spirit upon all human beings...'."

Now there's something. 

The thing about something being poured out is that if you're not directly under whatever is being poured from, you might well miss it. Rain, on the other hand, is not so easy to escape. If you're outside when it starts to rain, you get wet. There's no sidestepping the rain or jumping out of the way of it. You get wet. 

Maybe this helps drive home the fact of the Spirit being poured out on everyone. No one is left out. Everyone gets wet. 

This doesn't go down well for a lot of people. It's been true in every age and it's most definitely true now; too much of the church wants this pouring out of the Spirit to be for just us, or maybe more specifically not them. We're the "special" ones, they insist; we're God's chosen, God's favorites. Not those people who don't look like us, who don't sound like us, who don't flatter us or cozy up to us or make us feel important. Not them. The Spirit doesn't pour down on them. That's how an awful lot of people want it to be.

But when we think of the Spirit raining down? As the old verse says, the rain falls on the just and the unjust. It doesn't miss anybody. There's no getting left out, there's no Great Replacement anything, there's no "for me but not for thee," none of that. The Spirit rains down on everyone, whether we like it or not. Everybody gets wet.

Does everybody respond to the Spirit the same way? No, they don't. Think again about the rain; your first impulse is to seek shelter, yes? Or perhaps pull out an umbrella? For some people, the Spirit is a disruption, maybe even a threat. You never know what's going to happen when the Holy Spirit gets loose. Life might get uncomfortable. We might be led places we're not comfortable going. Best get out of the rain before you get too wet. But then there are those lovely souls who, when the rain comes down, will take it all in and maybe skip about and kick around a few puddles when they form. The Spirit truly soaks them with all that it is.

This is one rainstorm from which we don't need to take shelter. The Holy Spirit, raining down on all humanity? In the dried-up wilderness that is increasingly the world in which we live, that raining down is nothing less than life itself. The church, big or small, local or global, dare not try to shelter against this rain, not if we want to live up to the label "Christian," or (even better) terms like "Christlike," or "follower of Christ." 

One more thing: the Holy Spirit didn't go away after Pentecost. It keeps raining all through the book of Acts (we've taken in a couple of such passages back in the month of May). Even more, that same Spirit is still raining down on all human beings. The Holy Spirit - third person of the Trinity, remember; in other words, God - continues to rain down upon humanity, seeking to wash us and renew us and fill us with what we need to do Christlike things in a decidedly non-Christlike world.

This is one rain from which you don't want to seek shelter or pop up an umbrella.

It's time to let it rain. 

It's time to get wet.

For the raining down of the Holy Spirit, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #289, On Pentecost They Gathered; #286, Breathe on Me, Breath of God; #285, Like the Murmur of the Dove's Song

 

 

References:

 

Clarence Jordan's Cotton Patch Gospel, the Complete Collection. Macon: Smith & Helwys Publishing, 2012.

 

First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021. 

Sermon: What Are You Looking At?

First Presbyterian Church

June 1, 2025, Ascension C

Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23;

       Luke 24:44-53

 

What Are You Looking At?

 

“What are you looking at?”

You can hear that in the voice of someone trying to keep something a secret, annoyed at being caught in the act; maybe in the voice of a stereotypical tough-guy movie or TV character (though a Robert DeNiro or Joe Pesci character might turn it around to say “you lookin’ at me?”); or a more casual, “hey, what are you looking at?” It’s a pretty flexible phrase. 

You don’t expect to hear it as angelic proclamation, though. 

But the end of the Acts account here features “two men in white robes” who suddenly appear beside the disciples (that’s a pretty characteristic way of the gospels describing angelic appearances) uttering a much more formal query: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” But really, they’re asking “What are you looking at?” Seriously, you have to wonder if one of the disciples was fighting the urge to turn on the two men in white and exclaim “are you kidding me? Did you not just see what happened here? People don’t just pick up and float off into the sky, you know…”

If one of the disciples did that (my money would have been on Thomas, with his contrarian attitude), Luke did not record it. Instead, the men in white issue a promise; the Jesus they just saw lifting up into the sky would, and will, return one day in the same fashion. Something to hold on to, I guess, in the now-inarguable absence of Jesus from his followers. 

Already Jesus had left this little band with plenty of instruction, and also a reprimand in the bargain. Luke’s account of the Ascension here at the beginning of Acts is a bit more expansive than that at the end of the gospel that bears his name, and there’s at least one really logical possible explanation for that: Luke learned more in the meantime. At the beginning of the gospel we call Luke the author admits very frankly that the gospel is not an eyewitness account. He advises his recipient, “most excellent Theophilus,” that he has set out to gather the best information he could to pass on an “orderly account” of the evens of Jesus’s life. The end of Luke’s gospel sounds frankly a lot like the end of Matthew, with an account of the Ascension thrown in. 

But by the time Luke started into the book we call Acts, he has a few things to add to the Ascension story. For one thing, we learn he was around for forty days, which the Luke account doesn’t really suggest. For another, there is more instruction included here. The disciples aren’t to rush off, but to return to Jerusalem and wait for the “promise of the Father,” wait to be “baptized with the Holy Spirit” before too many days have gone by. It turned out to be ten days until the event called Pentecost lit a fire in the disciples (almost literally) and initiated the work of the church on earth in a way that, quite frankly, none of the disciples could have anticipated.

As for the rebuke, one of the disciples (this could have been Thomas too) had to ask, as Jesus drew his remarks to a close, the most oblivious possible question in the context: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Even at the very end somebody is trying to press Jesus about when he’s going to Make Israel Great Again.

Jesus answers with one of the most ignored (and outright violated) scriptures in the whole book: “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” For all these so-called ministers or biblical authorities spitting directly in the face of Jesus trying to work out some code or clue that tells them exactly when Jesus is gonna come back: it’s written right here, in Jesus’s own words: THAT’S NOT YOUR JOB. That’s not your place.

Your job is this: 

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

 

That’s the disciples’ job; wait for the Holy Spirit and then go! Go all over the world, says Jesus. And the church, in fits and starts, sometimes ruinously and sometimes beautifully, has been doing that ever since.

But what about the Ascension itself? What’s the point of this story with Jesus lifting off like a slow-moving rocket and being taken from the disciples’ sight? One of the best explanations in scripture is actually found in this passage from the letter to the church at Ephesus. Towards the end of today’s reading we get the rundown of why Christ’s ascension matters; the same Jesus who walked the earth with his followers now is at God’s side above – “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion,” not just now but for all time, with all authority over the church, and everything else under his feet. To be short about it, we have no business – at all – giving our allegiance to any authority but Christ. None. (For all we talk about wanting to be followers of Jesus, we sure do skip over a lot that scripture instructs us to do to be about that very business. Seriously, Christ’s church isn’t nearly radical enough.)

Still, though, you have to feel for the disciples, at least for those ten days. They’ve been told to go back to Jerusalem and … wait. What do you do when you wait for the Holy Spirit to overtake you (whatever that means)? 

You have to figure there was some remembering what Jesus said and did, maybe some arguments about those things, some impatience to be sure. You have to wonder if they gathered around a table for a meal at times (they needed to eat, after all) and were reminded again, and again, and again of that last meal with Jesus, the bread and the cup; or the encounter on the Emmaus Road, or back in Jerusalem; you have to wonder if picking up that loaf and that cup could possibly have ever been the same for them, especially now, with their Teacher and Lord physically gone for good.

This meal is handed to us even today, to remember; to take to heart and to remember the words and deeds of Jesus in our very beings. With the church in every age, from Ascension to now, we take this bread and this cup and show to the world the Lord’s saving death until, like the men in white promised, he returns that very same way, to be with us and us with him for all time.

For Jesus who departed, and will return, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #260, Alleluia! Sing to Jesus!; #---, When Jesus knew his time had come; #262; Since Our Great High Priest, Christ Jesus