The Unpredictable Spirit
I love order. I have shared with you before of my love of lists. I will add things to my lists, things that are easy, like starting the dishwasher, just so I can momentarily relish the satisfaction of crossing them off. I like to know what is coming and I don’t do well with much change. I love things to be in nice piles organized by how they relate to my writing or when I can get to them. And not surprisingly, I try to do this with God too. I would love to have different piles on my desk relating to what God has to say on a given topic. I would do just about anything to know where God is leading us here and a map with directions would be nice. But as much as we try this, God resists. Many people spend lifetime upon lifetime proclaiming that how God moves in the world is clear and predictable and understandable. Books and sermons and seminars are composed to share what God wants and how God wants us to be. God in this ordered, over the top, controlled and confined world sounds more like what we long to be than what we know of our God from our scriptures. The God we hear about, as startling as it may be is a bit of a loose canon. This God is not really ordered at all. This God, this God we know in Jesus Christ is predictably unpredictable. And this is clear today perhaps more than any other day in our church year. On this day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit bursts on the scene and changes everything.
It is a site so weird we can understand why some onlookers believed that they were drunk. They were gathered for a festival, most likely the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which marks the conclusion of the Counting of the Omer and celebrates the day the Torah was given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. Jesus was no longer with them so they were probably not up to much, sharing their usual stories and recounting what seemed like the greatest days of their lives. And then something totally extraordinary happened; it was like nothing they could have ever predicted. If Jesus himself had foretold it they wouldn’t have believed it. One Apostle got them all going laughing about the incident that included just a few fish and lots of people being fed. Another recounted the myriad healings and they all wondered again why Jesus did what he did. And in the middle of their laughter and tears and questions…Whoosh! Not just a gentle breeze, but a violent wind, a violent rush of wind blasted in and filled the place, filled it entirely. This wind, this Holy Spirit filled each of them up to overflowing and they began to speak in other languages.
Now by this time, the raucous that was unfolding inside the house began to draw attention. Having been to Jerusalem, there are few fences or property lines marked with bushes and barriers. The wall in my house is the wall in your house. There is no room to hide anything or to be overtaken by the Holy Spirit without your neighbor taking notice. And that’s what happened. Neighbors poured into the house. It must have been an immigrant neighborhood because they all spoke different languages. In utter confusion, the neighbors shouted, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” It’s hard to be neighbors when you don’t share a common language. They probably had a long list of questions to ask one another, things they had been meaning to ask but couldn’t. One needed to ask his neighbor about the fact that his rugs blocked her view. The other had been meaning to figure out a way to ask his neighbor to move his donkey cart to his own driveway. Another wanted to know why they let their kids hang out in the street long after dark. And now for some reason they could understand one another. By now the Apostles were used to God’s ways, God did odd things, but God always seemed to have a way of turning anything into something wonderful. God, they had learned was unpredictable and sometimes even silly. And now this moment. It was filled with possibility. Think of all that we can do if we can understand one another. Think of what is possible! They were sure it was a miracle. It was so outlandish, so glorious that it could only be from God.
But then the order-loving, sense-making, no way no how group walks in the door. We all know this group, because we have walked with them a time or two. We are the rocks and the ones who make sure that the rules are followed and the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed and things never get out of hand. The Holy Spirit blasts through and stirs things up and it is so much not what we expected that we assume it cannot be God. This group walks in and dismisses the whole party. This is nothing special, they say, they are just drunk. “They are filled with new wine.”
It could have ended right there. The Council could have been dismissed, the party over, and everyone returning home back to their old ways of living in frustration, not understanding one another, living so close but so far away. It could have ended right there. They all could have agreed that it was just an incident, something we should all forget ever happened, they could have said, “Let’s not tell anyone about this…it’s just too weird.” But that’s not what happened. It just took one person, just one audacious fearless fool to stand up for God. This may be odd and not what we expected or wanted or predicted, but this is God, this is the Holy Spirit, this moment could change us all, if we let it. Peter reminds them what was promised through the prophet, “‘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. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’”
Wind and fire. Dreams and Visions. Prophecy and darkness. These cannot be ordered, or clarified, quantified or predicted and so it is with our God. Some call Pentecost the birthday of the church, the day that the Apostles went out and began the work that Jesus called them to do. But birthdays are packaged and planned and this is not what happened. Birthday cakes have candles on top, they are little flames that don’t ignite fear in us- instead it’s just sugar sweet frosting and gifts galore. Pentecost is fiery and out of control. Jan Richardson says that “the fires of Pentecost are not the tame flames of birthday candles or a cozy winter’s hearth; the fires of Pentecost are a sign of the God who resists our every attempt to domesticate the divine and to control how the holy will work.”
On this Pentecost, we remember the day that the Holy Spirit was almost dismissed, it was almost missed and cast off as too weird, too unpredictable, too unexpected, but the gathered group was just valiant enough to follow and to believe that this moment was a gift from God, a turning point in how they wanted to be in the world. In that moment, at that party, they chose to say yes to God, to say yes to our predictably, unpredictable God and I wonder what our response might be.
We know that we cannot control our God and that means that we cannot control the way our God calls us or comes to us. We cannot control how or when or to whom the Holy Spirit will come. In our ordered, scheduled, planned, prepared lives, are we ready to say yes to holy interruptions? Are we ready to look for the Holy Spirit to blast on the scene when we are busy doing something else? Are we ready to believe that it is indeed our God when the world says that it is just too odd? Are we ready to welcome this unpredictable Spirit at church meetings, in worship, at dinner parties, at work, on walks, wherever we are? Because friends, if we say, “Here we are!” God will come. And we must be ready to welcome the odd and wonderful, the unplanned and the unlikely, we must be ready for God to show up and surprise us with things we would never imagine. And I believe we are that group. We are the community of faith that proclaims that we are here God and we want you to use us and lead us, we are ready to welcome whatever holy curiosities might show up. The next time something unpredictable and odd happens, it just might be the Holy Spirit. Amen.