Acts 2.1-21 — Andy James

Unscattered and Unscrambled

May 15, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21
preached on Pentecost, May 15, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

One of my less-well-known and newer hobbies is crossword puzzles. Many nights, as I lay on the couch catching up on the latest episodes of my favorite TV shows or watching a soccer match, I pull up a crossword puzzle on my iPad and do my best to complete the grid based on the pithy clues. At this point, a couple years into this new hobby, I’ve gotten reasonably proficient at the New York Times’ Monday and Tuesday puzzles. I struggle a bit but usually try and occasionally finish a Wednesday puzzle, but I gave up even trying Thursday through Sunday when I could only fill in one or two blanks on a good day! I suspect I’ll never be a really amazing crossword puzzle solver, but I find it strangely relaxing and a great brain exercise to spend some time unscrambling the letters and words that make up our language in this way.

On this Pentecost Sunday, as we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit in power upon the disciples in Jerusalem fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, we get two visions of scrambled and unscrambled words that speak to a whole different kind of approach to language and words in our world. First we hear from Genesis about how everything got scrambled in the first place, of the strange city and tower that were under construction on a plain in the land of Shinar, where desire for human achievement clashed with the depth and breadth of divine sovereignty. On this plain, the people realized that they could build “a tower with its top in the heavens,” a monument to what they could pull off as human beings and a link connecting them to one another that would survive any attempt to scatter and separate them.

With each new level of bricks added, God became more concerned. Their intentions at the beginning were small, limited to one tower in one town on one obscure plain, but God felt that they would have little difficulty taking up an even greater creative project because it was so easy to communicate with each other. “Look… this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” So God decided to confuse their language and scatter them away from this great city. Unable to communicate effectively with one another, they were forced to abandon the tower that they had set out to build. They called the place Babel, recognizing the “babble” of languages that had come as God had scrambled their language and scattered them across the face of the earth.

The scattering and scrambling begun at Babel persisted for generations. The story of God’s people throughout the ages was built upon the confusion first created at Babel. Not only were God’s people spread all around the world with different languages from this initial time of scattering and scrambling, the people of Israel had been further dispersed by the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to Assyria, sending them all around the Mediterranean region and giving them many different local languages even as they shared a common religious tradition.

So on that first Pentecost morning, after the disciples had gathered “together in one place,” the Holy Spirit came upon them in “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” as “divided tongues, as of fire… rested on each of them.” In this moment, they began “to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” Now this was perfect timing—not only was this fifty days after Jesus had risen from the dead, but there was a festival going on in Jerusalem fifty days after Passover, bringing some of those scattered, faithful Jews from all around the world to join in the celebration and pilgrimage. On that first Pentecost, though, these faithful Jews suddenly heard not Hebrew or Greek but their own native languages, spoken not by linguists or educated translators but by a bunch of country bumpkins from Galilee, the backwater of the backwaters of the empire.

Even before they started to make sense of any of the words, the message to these scattered and scrambled people of God was clear: God was ready to unscramble everything that had been scrambled so many generations before at Babel. Slowly but surely, as faithful Jews from all around the world heard the proclamation of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection in their own language and as Peter reminded them of the words of the prophet Joel that claimed that something new would be coming in the last days, the deeper message became clear to everyone: God was up to something new, and everyone was invited to join in. In Jesus, God unscrambled everything that had been scrambled before and brought together everyone that had been so scattered for so long.

Now things still seem scattered and scrambled a lot of the time. The various different versions of English that we hear in our daily lives, marked with the inflections of our homelands and first languages, are only the beginning! Even when we can understand each other’s words in shared language, there are so many other things that so easily scatter and scramble us. We struggle to recognize the differences of life and station that separate us simply because we have been born in different times and places. We intentionally and unintentionally affirm the privileges that come with our power and position along the way, dividing God’s people based on these very human things. We separate ourselves from those who appear to be different from us by the color of their skin, their ethnic or national origin, their understanding of gender and sexuality, or any number of countless other factors. And we scatter and scramble God’s intentions for our life together as those who lead us pursue policies and strategies that drive us apart from one another and even deny the image of God in some members of our human family.

But by the power of the Holy Spirit seen in such glory on Pentecost, God unscatters and unscrambles us along the way to show us that all things can and will be made new by the power of God in Jesus Christ. God works in ways beyond our comprehension to unite us across our differences and transform our lives so that we recognize the many things we share in our humanity. God shows us that the greatest service we can offer to God and humanity comes as we reach out to those in greatest need, speaking up for those who are victims of systems of greed and privilege, insisting that division on these very human grounds is unacceptable at every turn, and linking our future to the lives of those who have been scattered and scrambled by the difficulty and challenge of this world. And God comes to us in Jesus Christ to bridge the gaps that we create with one another and with God when we go astray from what God intends.

The gift of the Holy Spirit shows us that we can participate in God’s work of transformation in this world, that we are not left alone to face the challenges that confront us along the way, that we can only be divided from one another by the many assumptions of our world or the boundaries of this age. Just as the Holy Spirit breathed on the disciples on the first day of Pentecost, so the Spirit still blows in our midst. The Spirit opens us to new ways of living with one another that recognize the value in each and every human being and enable us to speak up amid the systems and structures of our world that try to deny this value over and over again. The Spirit helps us to recognize our complicity in the pain and struggle of the poor and suffering of our world so that we might live in ways that show hope and dismantle the systems and structures that get in the way of justice and peace. And the Spirit empowers us to be a part of God’s new creation taking hold in our world, sharing good news in our words and even more in our deeds so that the wonder of new life might take hold ever more deeply around us.

So as we celebrate this Pentecost day, may the Holy Spirit unscramble and unscatter us anew, guiding us beyond our assumptions to listen and act for the good of the whole creation as we walk together into the new life that emerges in the new things that God is doing in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Be Careful What You Pray For

June 8, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 2:1-21
preached on Pentecost, June 8, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As I mentioned last Sunday, I spent three days last month with about 500 Lutherans from all across downstate New York, serving as the parliamentarian for their Synod Assembly. The theme for the three-day gathering was “Come Holy Spirit,” which seemed quite appropriate at so many levels. It was only a week before Pentecost, after all, and some of the business was also the sort of thing when you might want the Holy Spirit to be present. At the assembly, they were continuing to live into their Strategic Plan that was adopted last year, and this year they were electing a bishop for a six-year term.

In many ways, the Spirit cooperated perfectly, as the basic business of ministry and operations went off without a hitch, and the strategic plan presentation was great, but when it got to the election of a bishop, the Holy Spirit’s work started to get a little weird. Thankfully they had invested in an electronic voting system to make votes go more quickly, but the first ballot had to be done on paper, and the counters reported that there were 425 ballots cast—when the report from registration showed only 420 voting members! In the end, after an evening of rethinking voting processes and recounting registration sheets, the repeat of the ballot the next morning went off without a hitch, but it was very clear that their prayers of “Come Holy Spirit” were being answered in ways that they didn’t quite expect, and they learned one of the most important lessons about the Holy Spirit: be careful what you pray for!

The first Pentecost as told in our reading this morning from Acts had its own surprising and unexpected turns, too. The disciples had been spending time together in Jerusalem after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, waiting and watching for whatever would come next, praying for the Holy Spirit to come as Jesus had promised them. However, I doubt that they expected the Spirit to show up quite like it did, with a rush of wind blowing through the room, divided tongues of fire settling on each of them, and the strange gift of speaking and being understood in the languages of the world coming up the disciples just in time to speak to faithful Jews from around the world who had gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival now known as Shavuot.

Once again, the Spirit had shown up, and things got weird. Everyone in the city was astonished, for they could tell that the people who were speaking in these languages were ordinary folks from Galilee—a region that everyone considered to be the backwater of the backwaters of the Roman empire. But it wasn’t just that—the message was strange and surprising too, describing the good news of God’s deeds of power and mercy in this man named Jesus.

Everyone was trying to figure out what was going on. Some were genuinely curious, others a touch perplexed, and still others completely dismissive, fully convinced that the only thing special going on here was an abundant serving of wine with breakfast! But the Spirit had shown up in ways beyond their expectations, offering an amazing and surprising appearance of power on that first day of Pentecost and inspiring the first disciples to expand their community as they welcomed the first group of newcomers to join their circle after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. But the Spirit’s surprising power made it clear that they had to be careful what they prayed for.

The Holy Spirit whose coming we celebrate today is a strange and unexpected presence in our lives and our world, and as these stories show, we too have to be careful what we pray for when we pray “Come Holy Spirit.” This Spirit comes in unexpected times and places, challenging our assumptions about what God is up to in our world, insisting that we think again about the plans we have laid out for ourselves, demanding that we open our hearts to something other than the status quo or the easiest and most comfortable and familiar option. This Spirit comes and challenges our assumptions, popping into our lives with surprising displays of power and presence that often raise as many questions as answers, suggesting that we might need to look for God at work in new and different ways, and defeating all our attempts at controlling its power in our world. And this Spirit comes with a presence that sometimes looks nothing less than weird, upsetting our our attempts at good process, surprising us with unexpected outcomes, and guiding us into a new and different way. Yet through it all, the Holy Spirit is among us, coming into our lives in amazing and wonderful ways to show us the presence of God each and every day.

My friends, there are two places where I think we need to be on the lookout for this strange and amazing Spirit in the coming days, especially praying “Come Holy Spirit” in our lives and our world. First, I hope that you will join me in praying for the Spirit’s presence at our Presbyterian General Assembly that begins next Saturday in Detroit. There, about 700 ruling and teaching elders from across the country will gather to discern the call of the Holy Spirit in the life of our national church. I’ll be going myself in my role as Stated Clerk of the Presbytery of New York City, though I’m there to support and advise our four commissioners and won’t be able to speak or vote. This 221st gathering of our national church will be working to discern the Spirit’s call among us on issues ranging from procedural changes in our Book of Order to divestment from companies that profit from the use of fossil fuels or non-peaceful pursuits in Israeli-occupied territories to same-gender marriage in our church and everything in between.

While I suspect a lot of the voting commissioners will go to Detroit with ideas and thoughts about the issues before the assembly, our common understanding as Presbyterians is that they gather with that prayer of “Come Holy Spirit,” not representing the view of the people in the pews or the pulpits but coming together by the power of the Spirit for this one week to discern God’s call to the church in these days. While this simple prayer of “Come Holy Spirit” may not embody our clear expectations and wishes for particular outcomes in these deliberations, I believe that this simple prayer is the best thing we can offer this important gathering as we trust that God’s presence will inspire these faithful women and men as they find and seek the will of God together, even if it makes us wish we had been more careful about what we prayed for!

The second place where today we will pray “Come Holy Spirit” is a little closer to home. Today as we welcome our confirmation class into membership of this congregation and two of them receive the sacrament of baptism, this my prayer for each of them, that the Holy Spirit might be present with Nicholas, Avayana, Chris, and Christine as they continue to grow in their faith in this place and beyond. Again, we don’t know exactly what that prayer will bring them, but we offer it anyway, trusting that the gift of the Holy Spirit—even if it ends up being a bit weird!—will be enough to sustain them as they walk the road ahead and join us in the journey of following Jesus each and every day.

So while we may wish that we had been more careful about what we prayed for when we pray “Come Holy Spirit,” may we always trust that the Spirit will come and surprise us and astonish us and challenge us whether we want it or not, inspiring us to pray with all the more confidence and hope, “Come Holy Spirit,” so that we all might be filled with the power and wonder of this amazing gift on this day of Pentecost and every day of this journey of faith together. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Scrambled

May 19, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21 for Pentecost
preached on May 19, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It was quite an accomplishment, really—all the people of the world coming together, working to show off their best architectural and engineering skills, coordinating their labors in new ways to build a great city centered around a single monument, to “make a name for” themselves. As the bricks were made out of mud, as the stones were laid upon stones, the accomplishment became clear—humans could do anything they wanted to do if they put their minds to it. Divine limits meant nothing. The result was stunning—a great city, with a tower reaching high into the sky, showing off the greatest possibilities of human coordination and consultation, making it clear that humans could do anything and God didn’t have to get involved.

But then a slightly jealous God took a closer look at what was going on. The people shared common roots and a common language, and there were few limits on their communication and relationships. God saw this city under construction, the great tower as a monument to human possibility and ingenuity, and most of all their pride at what they had accomplished. God was not happy:

This is only the beginning of what they will do;
nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

So God took action to preserve God’s role in the order of things. God scrambled their words and confused their language, forcing them to scatter from the city and abandon their great work of human ingenuity and creativity. So the people called the place Babel, a nonsense word signifying confusion and misunderstanding even to this day, for in this place everything that they understood about themselves and one another was scrambled once and for all.

In a world where our human accomplishment goes far beyond the wonder of Babel, where communication even across language barriers is nearly immediate, where we build towers reaching 1776 feet into the sky, where human pride for the world we have created for ourselves reaches far beyond the bounds of a small city in Mesopotamia, the scrambled world of Babel seems deeply distant from our experience. But when we look a little more closely, we know that the scrambledness of Babel is still very much with us. Even though we may be able to talk with those who use a different language, the cultural differences among different peoples still make it difficult to really understand one another. Even though we may be able to build skyscrapers that tower over this vertical city of ours, we can’t manage to relate to one another without resorting to violence and animosity. Even though we may be more mobile than ever before, more communicative than ever before, more a global village than we ever could have imagined, we don’t always recognize the byproducts of our accomplishment in the climate change and overpopulation that ultimately threaten our very existence as the human race.

Now I don’t imagine God looking down at us in quite the same way as we hear in this story of Babel. The sort of direct divine interaction described in this reading from Genesis just hasn’t been sustained over the course of the Bible, let alone in the days since. But I do suspect that there is nonetheless some divine disappointment with the way we have managed to unscramble ourselves since the days of Babel and yet scramble things up all the more.

Amidst all our best attempts to unscramble things for ourselves, the ultimate unscrambling of Babel came by the power of the Holy Spirit on a strange morning in Jerusalem fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus. That first Pentecost day, as the disciples of Jesus gathered to pray, a strange rushing wind blew over them, and divided tongues rested on them, then they began to speak in other languages—just in time to talk about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus with Jews from all around the world who had gathered in Jerusalem for a festival. It was a strange sight—uneducated country folk from Galilee speaking the languages of the nations of the world, sharing a strange story about a teacher who had been condemned for blasphemy, insisting that God was doing amazing new things to unscramble the mess that humanity had made of the world.

Some people seriously wondered what it was all about, but others just assumed that the disciples were drunk. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, though! Peter, for one, insisted that this strange event was God’s unscrambling finally at work, that God was pouring out the Spirit upon all flesh, to bring prophesies, visions, and dreams into the light, to draw attention to God’s presence and work, and to bring people back together in understanding and hope. In a moment when the disciples still didn’t quite understand life without Jesus, when things felt very much scrambled and the future still uncertain, God stepped in to unscramble it all in ways beyond their wildest dreams.

The gift of Pentecost today is that we too can experience God’s gift of understanding that unscrambles our world and our lives. While the languages that have historically divided us can be bridged both through technology and understanding; while the cultural differences that make it difficult to live and work with people who come from different backgrounds can be overcome through careful listening, respectful action, and openness to new ways of thinking and being; while even our great insistence upon the depth and breadth of our human accomplishment can be tempered by new recognition of our limitations and the need to care for the full breadth of creation; we ultimately need the Holy Spirit to step in and act if we are truly to be unscrambled. We need God’s transformative Spirit in our midst to show us how to live together in peace and harmony. We need God’s powerful Spirit to overcome our insistence on our own well-being at the expense of others. And we need God’s renewing Spirit to help us through all the moments of transition that come as we are unscrambled into the new creation that God intends for us.

So on this Pentecost Sunday, as we wait and watch and pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon us, as we look for signs of maybe a little less power but no less spirit as on that first Pentecost, as we look for renewal and rebirth in our lives and in our church, may we see the scrambled mess of our lives and our world more clearly, may we set aside all that keeps us from God’s presence and all that encourages us to think that we are responsible for the gifts surrounding us, and may the Holy Spirit step into our midst to unscramble us anew, now and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.