Sermon for Pentecost 2019

Preached at Canadochly and Grace on June 9, 2019
Preaching text: Acts 2

“Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak...”

What a powerful moment that must have been. The Spirit came down upon an unsuspecting world and it caught it completely flat footed. Even the disciples, who had been instructed by Jesus to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit, did not know what that would look like until it happened. It caught them just as much by surprise as it did the Jews who had come to Jerusalem for the festival. No one, not even the believers, saw this coming.

Our God is a god of surprises.

I’ve preached on that so many times I’ve lost count, particularly at my first congregation in WV. Our God is a god of surprises. He likes to do the unexpected. Jesus himself is perhaps the greatest example of this. People expected a king like David, a warrior, a man of strength and power. They got a carpenter, a rabbi humble of birth and attitude, who rather than storm the castle and defeat the enemies of God’s people, submitted himself to death and then rose again to bring sin and death, the greatest enemies of humanity, to heel.

As strange as it may sound, we should come to expect the unexpected from our God.

Why am I reminiscing on these truths? Because I find myself envious of the people of Jerusalem on that first Pentecost. Maybe that’s because I’m tired. Synod Assembly takes it out of all of us who attend. “Making the sausage,” to use the old idiom, is hard work and doing the business of the Church institutionally is wearying. I hunger to witness God working in powerful and dramatic ways, not in the drudgery of Robert’s Rules, voting, resolutions, bylaws, and so forth. I want God to shake things up. I am impatient for the kingdom of God made manifest in the world. I eagerly wish to see a world where all are valued, all are precious, all know how they are loved. I want the things I preach about to come to pass in powerful ways. Let this world be remade and God’s kingdom reign.

But, our God is a god of surprises. And just as Pentecost came unexpectedly upon the world, perhaps too God is at work in ways right now in ways that I do not expect. In ways I do not see. In things that astound and astonish all of us, perhaps by being so ordinary and everyday we don’t even notice them.

I had a conversation at Assembly with the folks from Reconciling Works. That’s the ELCA group that’s promoting greater inclusion of LGBT folk in our congregations and communities. I make no secret that I am an ally of their cause and purpose, but as the conversation progressed, I came to tell the story of my internship congregations. In 1998, two years before me, they had a gay intern and felt terribly betrayed by this intern because of who he was. In 2001, the year after I was there, they were to be assigned another LGBT intern and I got to witness the hatred and fear of the congregation of “those people” first hand. It was ugly. It was not Christian. Suffice to say, that intern never showed up.

Two years ago, however, those same two congregations who were so vehement in their disdain and hatred of the sexual other declared themselves openly as “Reconciling in Christ” congregations. That is to say they are open and eager to welcome anyone regardless of their sexual persuasion or identity. What a difference those 16 years made. God was at work in quiet, subtle, and unexpected ways.

At another point during Assembly, I got ambushed by a fellow pastor. She looked at me with wild excited eyes when she realized who I was. “You’re the one at Grace and Canadochly. I need to talk to you.” Suffice to say, I was a little nervous about this. What had I done?

I had lunch with her at Assembly yesterday. She outlined her plan, a new ministry project that she’s looking for congregations to participate in. A project both Grace and Canadochly would be perfect for. I became excited. Something we can perhaps offer to the wider church, something that might invigorate some things here. Provide us options. A new way to look at ministry. While I can’t say everything about the plan here, it is something we need and can use. Again, God at work in a way I wasn’t expecting. I certainly didn’t expect anything like that to happen.

Last evening, I came back directly from Assembly to Canadochly. We were hosting the second meeting of what has come to be known as TAGS, the Analog Gaming Society, a new club that my friends and I are putting together to promote gaming. This is a group eager to help create community and fellowship between people around games. It’s not explicitly a church group (nor would it be), but as we concluded our meeting several of those who attended came up to me to share some of their personal faith journeys. People I’d known for a while in a very different context than this were talking about faith. What moved them to do that but the Holy Spirit? Relationships are forming. Fellowship was coming to be. God was being surprising yet again.

We say, somewhat flippantly, that God works in mysterious ways and that’s true. Sometimes, so mysteriously that we often fail to see it. But sometimes in the least likely places, God reveals himself. Hey, look here. Look at what’s happening here. Pentecost didn’t end on that day so long ago. The Spirit is still moving, perhaps not quite so dramatically, but still moving. Still changing lives. Still making a difference. Still changing the world. Still bringing the kingdom. It’s in your life and mine. All around us all the time, if only we have eyes to see the fire and ears to hear the mighty wind. It’s still there and the world is becoming new because of it. Amen.