Sunday’s Sermon – The Spirit Moves – Pentecost- Acts 2:1-21, Numbers 11:24-30

Congratulations! Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away(i)!

These words the classic children’s book Oh the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss. The whole book brims with the excitement of possibilities – the whole world is open to the reader – anything can happen! It speaks truth about all of this, too. There will be ups and downs in life, but it reassures its listeners that they can do it. It ends like this:

You’re off to great places! Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting. So . . . get on your way(ii)!

While this book is extra popular around this time of year, it’s also perfect for this day of Pentecost, which reads as the epitome of excitement on the brink of something new. We begin this new season in the church year with the whoosh of the Holy Spirit coming over those early believers gathered in Acts, and experience a whirlwind of language and energies throughout Jerusalem. In this moment, 50 days after Easter, the church is born; the prophet Joel’s prophecies are fulfilled and God’s people are alive and moving with visions, dreams, and the spirit with which to bring them into light. Pentecost ushers in a new life for believers, the church, and the world. All of which is possible because of the presence of the Holy Spirit, which lingers like fire among them.

To be clear, this isn’t a new phenomenon. We know that the Holy Spirit has been present throughout the Biblical narrative. We read about it in the very first moments of creation, brooding over the chaos and breathing life into the world. We hear echoes of it in Numbers, as it stirs and moves the seventy elders of Israel. The Holy Spirit announced Jesus as God’s son at his baptism, and was the promised Advocate by Christ himself. When the Holy Spirit shows up, things change in drastic and dynamic, life-giving ways. The Holy Spirit is God on the move.

This summer, we will spend the next two months looking at stories of God on the move, hopefully considering what it means for us to be on the move as well. The root of all of this movement is always the Holy Spirit, alive and present in our sacred stories and in our lives today. It is something we long and hunger for, to be renewed and energized in ways that can only come from God. When we feel tired or stuck in our lives, it is the Spirit who comes with fresh breath and new life. But we aren’t always ready for a moment like the one we read about today in Acts. Jana Childers writes:

Many Christians have become accustomed to thinking of the Holy Spirit as more of a Hawaiian breeze than a Chicago gale. . . . [but] the Holy Spirit’s power is not always subtle, fragile, or polite. Even today it can be electric, atomic, and volcanic(iii).

We tend to push against the more dramatic movement from the spirit. We’d rather keep it contained and manageable, limiting God’s work to happy coincidences, warm fuzzy moments, those things that give us good chills and goosebumps. We might even let in a few instances of things taking our breath away. But when the Spirit moves in bigger ways, we get nervous, or even skeptical. Joshua heard the Israelite leaders prophesying and begged Moses to make them stop. Those observing the scattered languages at Pentecost in Jerusalem assumed that this group of believers must have been drunk, even though it was only 9 in the morning. However, that’s often how the Holy Spirit shows up, isn’t it? God’s Spirit often takes the world by surprise and in doing so accomplishes some pretty incredible things; freedom for the Israelites and freedom for the church unleashed on the world.

A few weeks ago I was at a preaching conference in San Antonio with 1,800 other pastors(iv). The lectures and sermons were held at two different venues a few blocks apart. During one break between sessions, many of us spilled out of the Methodist church into the heart of downtown, down a half flight of steps that almost immediately became the corner of an intersection. Several tourists happened to be walking on the sidewalk as I came down the steps, and I heard one exclaim to the other, “Oh my, they let the church out.” The work of the Holy Spirit is done within the church so that when we leave, the world might have an audible gasp at what God has unleashed. The Holy Spirit is on the move – our texts for today ask whether we are as well.

Pentecost might be about making space for the Spirit to move. When I was in seminary I had the opportunity to serve as an assistant for our General Assembly, that every other year meeting of our denomination where delegates conduct the official business of our church. It was the year that Bruce Reyes-Chow was elected as moderator, significant because he was at the time just under 40, the youngest ever for us Presbyterians. As the debate on the main floor got heated, one Youth Advisory Delegate came to the microphone and asked if we could have a few moments of space for prayer and reflection, perhaps to let the “Holy Spirit move” among the group as they discerned. I remember Bruce taking the suggestion to heart, and commenting how it was hard to refuse someone the time for the Holy Spirit, much less a young person given his banner as the “youngest moderator” – so he agreed and paused debate. For two minutes. You see, as Presbyterians we have to keep things decent and in order. There are rules for debate and processes to keep meetings moving forward thanks to our friend Robert(v). So, in 2008, the Presbyterian Church, USA, allotted exactly two minutes for the Holy Spirit.

Of course, the Holy Spirit worked beyond those two minutes. Even if we tried, we couldn’t contain the Spirit. Nor would we want to. Taking time, even short moments, to intentionally allow ourselves the opportunity to focus on the Spirit’s presence will help us tremendously if we want to be a part of the movement of God in our world. But, more often than not, I think we pack our lives so full of other things that we remove the majority of spaces that the Spirit might have to work. This happens when our schedules are so full that we can’t squeeze another thing in, but we do so anyway. It happens when we push off those spiritual practices in our lives – worship, Bible Study, prayer – things we know will renew and sustain us, but just don’t fit into our too busy lives. It happens when we hear and see what God is trying to do, but refuse to be a part of it. It happens, but it doesn’t have to be our ongoing reality. This summer can be an opportunity for us, as individuals and as a church, to shift our habits in ways that are life-giving, and allow the Spirit to move more freely. Our new summer schedule is evidence of that, from the literal new space in our sanctuary for children to experience God’s presence in hands-on ways to the space left in our timing for fellowship after worship together. We need space for the Spirit to move. We have to give it more than two minutes.

The Holy Spirit, the breath of God, needs space within us to move. The image of Pentecost is that of fire, dwelling on each one gathered. As anyone who has ever built a campfire knows, it is essential to lay the logs in a particular way so that your fire will not collapse on itself, but instead will grow and glow brightly. Judy Brown describes this art in her poem titled, “Fire”, writing:

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the space in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make the fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way(vi)

For God’s presence to burn brightly in each of us, we have to be good tenders of the fire that the Holy Spirit puts within us. It is then that we begin to be the lights of the world that Jesus called us to be, shining for others to see. Speaking in every language under the sun, that all may know and understand the good news of God’s love for us and the world. That, after all, is the end goal of the Holy Spirit at both in Numbers and at Pentecost; no longer is God to be contained inside some small, isolated group of select people, but instead is set free to every corner of the world. “Oh my,” those passing by might say, “God let the Spirit out.” And that Spirit is on the move. Amen.

~Rev. Elizabeth Lovell Milford

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(i) Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, (Random House, 1990).
(ii) Ibid.
(iii) Jana Childers, “Homiletical Perspective: Acts 2:1-21,” Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 3, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).
(iv) Festival of Homiletics 2017 in San Antonio, Texas.
(v) Referencing our adherence to Robert’s Rules of Order.
(vi) Judy Brown, “Fire,” in Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach, Sam M. Intrator & Megan Scribner, editors, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).