May 24, 2015 Pentecost Sermons from The Church of the Covenant The Breath of Life The Reverend Amy Starr Redwine The Church of the Covenant Presbyterian Church (USA) 11205 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, Ohio 44106 CovenantWeb.org
Genesis 11:1 9 11Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the LORD said, Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another s speech. 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Acts 2:1 21 2When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. 5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs in our own languages we hear them speaking about God s deeds of power. 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does this mean? 13 But others sneered and said, They are filled with new wine. 14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 17 In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 19 And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 20 The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord s great and glorious day. 21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
The Breath of Life Genesis 11:1 9, Acts 2:1 21 Author and Scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn has made a career out of teaching people how to breathe. He calls his course Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and he describes mindfulness as actively tuning in to each moment in an effort to remain awake and aware from one moment to the next. It s a way of bringing our minds into the present moment since, as you may have noticed from time to time, our minds have this habit of wandering. Instead of noticing the feel of the sun on our faces or the scent of the newly-mown grass we fixate on that conversation we had yesterday with the person who never listens to us the way we want or we worry about tomorrow and how we will ever do what needs to be done by then. Another way Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it is that we become lost in our thoughts. So he decided to see what would happen if you took people who were chronically ill or in constant pain or under intense stress and taught them to pay attention to their breathing as a way of tuning in to the present moment. He introduces the concept by asking people to just try a little experiment: Close your eyes Sit up straight And become aware of your breathing. Don t try to control it Just let it happen and be aware of it, feeling your breath as it flows in and out. Now, he knows as well as anyone that sitting there just watching your breath is probably going to make you feel foolish or bored or both! If that s the case, the next thing he suggests is this: Take the thumb and forefinger of one hand, pinch your nose shut and keep your mouth closed. Then notice how long it takes before your breathing becomes very interesting to you indeed! 1 The point, of course, is that if we stop breathing we will die. 1 Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Bantam Dell, 2005, p. 22-23.
So noticing our breath actually becomes a way of noticing our life. Today is Pentecost. It s the day the apostles received the Holy Spirit and became the church. The word spirit in both Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Bible, actually means breath or wind. What we tend to overlook, though, is that this wind, this breath, this Holy Spirit is not just from God it is God. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, the one who came for us soon after Jesus returned to God the one who is still with us even now. And just as our breath is necessary for us to have life, so the Holy Spirit is the very thing, the very breath, that gives life to the church. Pentecost teaches us that if the church does not have the Holy Spirit, it will die. But like anything else that is with us all the time, that happens whether we notice it or not, most of the time we can t be bothered to notice the Holy Spirit any more than we bother to notice our own breathing. If you think about it, the same is also true with language. Our native tongue, the language we first heard whispered to us by our mothers and fathers eventually came from our lips as naturally (as they say) as breathing. Our ability to speak and understand what those around us are saying is rarely something we notice until we discover we can no longer summon words at will or until we are surrounded by people who do not speak our language. Certainly the people who built the tower of Babel had no idea how fortunate they were that they all spoke the same language. After all, they had never known anything different. The whole earth had one language and the same words. How convenient. How it must have simplified their communications and interactions.
And yet even though God had blessed them with this means of unity, they were afraid of being scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. So they built for themselves a city to live in and a tower that reached up to the heavens so that they could remain together, unified by their language and their customs and their God. It was comfortable. It was what they had always known. It was a people united by what they had in common. It was also a people who had forgotten to notice what and WHO gave them life. When God saw the city and the tower, God knew what had to be done. The people s worst fears needed to be realized. And so God gave them many different languages and scattered them abroad...over the face of all the earth. It was the very thing they had been afraid of in the first place and it happened because they took their unity, their one language, and they used it to serve themselves instead of God. When God created human beings and breathed the breath of life into us and gave us the gift of language, it wasn t just so we could understand each other. It was also so that we could spread the good news! Language was the way God intended God s people to tell each other about God, to share their faith stories and to hear the stories of others, to witness to God s work in the world. But if God s people just stayed in one place and kept to themselves, taking turns climbing the tower to heaven then how would the good news spread abroad upon the whole face of the earth? In order for God s people to be united, they first had to be divided, scattered, spread abroad so that the earth the whole earth could be populated with people of God who could bear witness. 2 On that first Pentecost, we have the reversal of what happened at the tower of Babel, where everyone could speak but no one could understand. With the arrival of the Holy Spirit, as the church breathed its first breath, 2 In this interpretation, I am indebted to Walter Brueggemann s analysis of the text. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. WJK Press, 1984.
what happened was that the apostles could suddenly speak other languages, This was no punishment or party trick; it enabled them to go out from their hiding place and preach the gospel. It enabled them to leave that house where they felt comfortable and tell the story of what God had done in Jesus Christ. Even more important, It meant that everyone outside could now hear the gospel in their own native language. Suddenly, the truth of the gospel sounded as familiar to them as the sound of their own breathing. It was truly a remarkable moment in the history of the church. The problem is, we tend to remember it as just that HISTORY when in fact the appearance of the Holy Spirit is no more something that happened only in the past than your breathing is something that only happened the moment you were born and never since. Most of us have become so accustomed to the presence of the Holy Spirit which is God! God with us! that we have stopped noticing it. But when we stop noticing the Holy Spirit among us, we stop noticing the life of our church. It s like forgetting the fact that we can only do the things we do each day because we take air into and out of our lungs nearly a thousand times an hour. We breathe in...we breathe out. We live. So if we stop for a moment and take time to notice the breathing of our church, which is the Holy Spirit giving us life, what might we notice? The church breathes in: in worship in prayer in Bible study in choir practice in times of fellowship in caring for one another The church breathes out: when we fill our food pantry and use that food to feed hungry people when members help build new houses through Habitat for Humanity when children and their parents spend a Friday night at the church preparing a garden
when we open our sanctuary as a place of peace and meditation for those in our community when we offer our space for the Saturday Tutoring Program, for sacred music concerts, and for weekly support group meetings like AA when strangers come into our midst and we welcome them as God s own. The church breathes in...the church breathes out... The church lives. When Jon Kabat-Zin teaches people to pay attention to their breathing it doesn t take away their pain, or their disease or their stress... but it changes their relationship to those things. It changes the way they experience and participate in their lives. When we make the effort to notice the Holy Spirit among us it s not going to take away our worries about the church: about growth about money about whether our children will have faith and our faith will have children. 3 it s not going to take away our worries about life outside the church: about the Brelo verdict and continued racial tension in our city about the dangers faced by the men and women who serve our country abroad or the challenges they face when they return home about the divide between the rich and poor about ISIS and Syria and mass graves in Malaysia about global warming. But noticing the Holy Spirit can change our relationship to those questions and worries. Noticing the Holy Spirit God with us can change the way we experience our faith and participate in the life of our church. It can literally inspire us and divide us and scatter us abroad in the best possible way giving us language and courage that we didn t have before to share the gospel with those who ve never heard it or understood it before. Many years ago, when Tom Long was the new pastor of a small church, he made an announcement to his congregation, Next Sunday morning at ten o'clock, I'm going to start a class on the basics of the Christian faith. If you are new to the faith, or if you would like a refresher course, I invite you to join me." The next week, he went to the classroom expecting to greet a throng of people, but he was immediately disappointed. The only people in the classroom waiting for him were three elementary-schoolaged girls. He tried to hide his disappointment and over the next few weeks he did the best he could to teach them about the Christian faith. 3 From a Pentecost video by David Lose and Ben Cieslik that can be found at http://www.davidlose.net/2015/05/pentecost-b-comealongside-holy-spirit/
The week before Pentecost Sunday, he said to them, "Do you girls know what Pentecost is?" They didn't. So, he said, "Well, Pentecost was when the church was seated in a circle and tongues of fire came down from heaven and landed on their heads and they spoke the gospel in all the languages of the world." Two of the little girls took that rather calmly, but one of them gasped and her eyes became as big as saucers. When she could finally speak, she said, "Reverend Long, we must have been absent that Sunday!" We go through life, thinking and learning and questioning and acting and moving, but all too often failing to notice the breath that is making all that possible. As a church we do the work worshipping learning meeting administrating serving receiving the sacraments working in the world for justice and peace witnessing to the gospel Amen. But when we do these things without noticing the presence of the Holy Spirit among us which is what makes it all possible then we miss something vital to a life of faith. When we take time in daily life to notice our breath, it changes us. When we take time in the life of the church to tune in to the breathing of the Holy Spirit among us it has the power to change us and, through us, to change the world. 11205 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, Ohio 44106 CovenantWeb.org Convinced of God's grace, the Church of the Covenant strives to be a caring and compassionate congregation, welcoming all people regardless of age, race, national origin, marital status, gender, affectional orientation, and mental or physical ability.