This sermon was preached for online worship for St. Andrew's and St. Michael's for Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2020. The texts for this sermon are: Acts 2:1-21, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 20:19-23, and Psalm 104:25-35, 37.
Before I start my sermon, I want to acknowledge that we recorded our Prayers of the People on Tuesday afternoon. So, so much has happened in our nation since then that needs our prayer, our lament, our action. So on behalf of St. Andrew’s and St. Michael’s parish communities, let us pray.
God of boundless love, today we remember before you the Black community across this nation in their grief and anguish, especially the families and friends of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. On this day of Pentecost, send your Spirit on our broken and hurting nation, especially all those feel overwhelmed by fear, anger, and despair.
God of compassion, you have called us to be a society of liberty, justice, and love for every living being. Teach us how to confess the evil that has torn the fabric of our communities for so many generations. Embolden us to dig out the roots of racism, violence, and prejudice wherever they have taken hold – in our public servants, our churches, our schools, our homes. Heal its deep wounds, Lord, and hasten the coming of peace and freedom for every one of your children.
Lord in your mercy.
Hear our prayer.
And now, may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.
Our stories from Acts and the Gospel of John feel pretty far removed from life as we know it under quarantine today. A group of adults from different households clustered into an ventilated room. Thousands gathered for a festival from all different regions. Jesus even breathes on people.
But the story of Pentecost IS a story that’s happening today, happening right now. We need to be careful not to miss it.
On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit bestowed new, unprecedented powers of connection on the disciples. This gift, violent and fiery, broke through all that divided the people gathered. Each person was able to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, right where they were, right as they were, in their own native language. Today, we heard that story in the beautiful diversity of our own parishes, in eight different languages. On top of that, the story reached us across space and time to right where you are, right as you are because the church has stepped up to learning the new languages of the digital landscape. This is the Holy Spirit’s doing, her sacred work.
Usually, I experience the Holy Spirit best when I am in the midst of others, worshipping and singing together. I feel her most in that wonder-filled moment when our heartbeats and breaths all align. So on this day of celebration of the Holy Spirit, I feel the Spirit’s absence first, before I can recognize her action in the world today. Yet she is here, she is moving, doing the new work of connection that is particular to who we are as church right now. If we discount how our souls have been moved and animated these past few months as not “real” church, if we look only for the connections we are used to, we may miss our own Pentecost moment of here and now.
The thing is Pentecost moments of Holy Spirit connection are not necessarily filled with joy, peace, and wonder. The Holy Spirit breaks into our lives with moments of grief, anger, conviction. She comes as Jesus’ gentle, loving breath, yes, and she comes as a violent wind, a holy flame.
Last Sunday, the New York Times dedicated its front page to a long list of names, 1,000 of them, representing just 1% of the nearly 100,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19. Scattered among the names were short biographical remembrances, sentence fragments really, that summed up the person who was lost.
Fred Walter Gray, 75, who liked his bacon and hash browns crispy. Christine McLaurin, 86, who was never at a loss for words. Israel Sauz, 22, a new father. Perry Bulchater, 64, quiet hero.
With each tiny detail, the Holy Spirit transformed the daunting, impassive statistic 100,000 into bright sparks of memory and life. Intimacy. Realness. Humanity where there was none before.
How little the Holy Spirit needs to connect us to another person’s humanity, even across the differences of language, race, and everything else that distances us. In fact, this holy transformation depends on difference – on focusing our hearts on the beautiful particularities of the person before us. The grandmother who sang a special song to her grandchildren on the first day of school. The inveterate harmonica player.
Opening our hearts to the Holy Spirit means that we refuse to skim over a life as just another casualty of a disease or just another victim of racial injustice. Instead, we say: Ahmaud Arbery, 26, he had an easy smile and infectious laugh. We say: George Floyd, 46, high school football star and gentle giant. By choosing to reach toward the unique beauty of each person, we glimpse human beings as they were to the people who loved them, as they are to God. We allow ourselves to be moved by their particular stories into the hard, holy work that’s required of us here and now.
Our work as church is to recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit and move right along with her, even if that means entering new unknowns, speaking strange languages, and sacrificing the comfort of the lives we’re accustomed to for the well-being of people we’ll never met.
As we look to regathering as a community in these complicated days, our challenge is to follow the Spirit toward what will bring us deep, real and unexpected connection. Perhaps that means staying online longer than we anticipated because we can be less guarded, more intimate here than what we can safely be in person. Maybe it means that our parishes expand to include folks who weren’t able to physically come to worship before. Perhaps the partnership between St. Michael’s and St. Andrew’s will continue to flourish in surprising ways. I can’t know for sure. But I can trust that with the power of the Spirit, new creative possibilities will open to us.
Amen.
Before I start my sermon, I want to acknowledge that we recorded our Prayers of the People on Tuesday afternoon. So, so much has happened in our nation since then that needs our prayer, our lament, our action. So on behalf of St. Andrew’s and St. Michael’s parish communities, let us pray.
God of boundless love, today we remember before you the Black community across this nation in their grief and anguish, especially the families and friends of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. On this day of Pentecost, send your Spirit on our broken and hurting nation, especially all those feel overwhelmed by fear, anger, and despair.
God of compassion, you have called us to be a society of liberty, justice, and love for every living being. Teach us how to confess the evil that has torn the fabric of our communities for so many generations. Embolden us to dig out the roots of racism, violence, and prejudice wherever they have taken hold – in our public servants, our churches, our schools, our homes. Heal its deep wounds, Lord, and hasten the coming of peace and freedom for every one of your children.
Lord in your mercy.
Hear our prayer.
And now, may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.
Our stories from Acts and the Gospel of John feel pretty far removed from life as we know it under quarantine today. A group of adults from different households clustered into an ventilated room. Thousands gathered for a festival from all different regions. Jesus even breathes on people.
But the story of Pentecost IS a story that’s happening today, happening right now. We need to be careful not to miss it.
On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit bestowed new, unprecedented powers of connection on the disciples. This gift, violent and fiery, broke through all that divided the people gathered. Each person was able to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, right where they were, right as they were, in their own native language. Today, we heard that story in the beautiful diversity of our own parishes, in eight different languages. On top of that, the story reached us across space and time to right where you are, right as you are because the church has stepped up to learning the new languages of the digital landscape. This is the Holy Spirit’s doing, her sacred work.
Usually, I experience the Holy Spirit best when I am in the midst of others, worshipping and singing together. I feel her most in that wonder-filled moment when our heartbeats and breaths all align. So on this day of celebration of the Holy Spirit, I feel the Spirit’s absence first, before I can recognize her action in the world today. Yet she is here, she is moving, doing the new work of connection that is particular to who we are as church right now. If we discount how our souls have been moved and animated these past few months as not “real” church, if we look only for the connections we are used to, we may miss our own Pentecost moment of here and now.
The thing is Pentecost moments of Holy Spirit connection are not necessarily filled with joy, peace, and wonder. The Holy Spirit breaks into our lives with moments of grief, anger, conviction. She comes as Jesus’ gentle, loving breath, yes, and she comes as a violent wind, a holy flame.
Last Sunday, the New York Times dedicated its front page to a long list of names, 1,000 of them, representing just 1% of the nearly 100,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19. Scattered among the names were short biographical remembrances, sentence fragments really, that summed up the person who was lost.
Fred Walter Gray, 75, who liked his bacon and hash browns crispy. Christine McLaurin, 86, who was never at a loss for words. Israel Sauz, 22, a new father. Perry Bulchater, 64, quiet hero.
With each tiny detail, the Holy Spirit transformed the daunting, impassive statistic 100,000 into bright sparks of memory and life. Intimacy. Realness. Humanity where there was none before.
How little the Holy Spirit needs to connect us to another person’s humanity, even across the differences of language, race, and everything else that distances us. In fact, this holy transformation depends on difference – on focusing our hearts on the beautiful particularities of the person before us. The grandmother who sang a special song to her grandchildren on the first day of school. The inveterate harmonica player.
Opening our hearts to the Holy Spirit means that we refuse to skim over a life as just another casualty of a disease or just another victim of racial injustice. Instead, we say: Ahmaud Arbery, 26, he had an easy smile and infectious laugh. We say: George Floyd, 46, high school football star and gentle giant. By choosing to reach toward the unique beauty of each person, we glimpse human beings as they were to the people who loved them, as they are to God. We allow ourselves to be moved by their particular stories into the hard, holy work that’s required of us here and now.
Our work as church is to recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit and move right along with her, even if that means entering new unknowns, speaking strange languages, and sacrificing the comfort of the lives we’re accustomed to for the well-being of people we’ll never met.
As we look to regathering as a community in these complicated days, our challenge is to follow the Spirit toward what will bring us deep, real and unexpected connection. Perhaps that means staying online longer than we anticipated because we can be less guarded, more intimate here than what we can safely be in person. Maybe it means that our parishes expand to include folks who weren’t able to physically come to worship before. Perhaps the partnership between St. Michael’s and St. Andrew’s will continue to flourish in surprising ways. I can’t know for sure. But I can trust that with the power of the Spirit, new creative possibilities will open to us.
Amen.
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