Pentecost Sunday
May 24, 2015
Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:24-35; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
Messy. I am slowly
coming to grips with the fact that a house with two little kids is going to be messy. Oh sure, things get picked up, the house gets
cleaned, but how long until the toys are all over the floor again? 2.2 seconds.
Maybe less. A house with kids is
messy. And what comes next? A house with teenagers may be clean, but more
often than not, the teenager’s room is messy.
How many people here like messes?
Who would rather be neat and organized?
And yet how many of our houses actually reflect our desire for tidiness
and cleanliness? Messes seem to be a fact of life, although hopefully not a
permanent state of being.
A
mess seems to be the state of things on the first Pentecost Day. The disciples were all together in one place,
in a house. And suddenly this sound of a
howling wind fills the house, so it gets really loud. And each of them are filled with the Holy
Spirit and they begin to speak in other languages all at the same time! The word that comes to mind to
describe this mess of noise is cacophony,
a harsh, meaningless mixture of sounds.
It’s bad enough when everyone talks at the same time in the same language! Then, maybe you might be able to understand
the person talking closest to you. But
twelve people speaking twelve different languages all talking at the same
time? It sounds like a recipe for an
auditory disaster. In fact, the noise
was so harsh and so messy that a crowd gathered outside the house. The crowd was surprised and bewildered and
amazed, and really, didn’t know what to make of this noisy mess. Some people searched for meaning in it;
others thought it was meaningless, and the only possible explanation could be
that the disciples were drunk.
Those who searched for meaning in it had the right
response, because this cacophony wasn’t
meaningless. This was a mess with a
purpose. Jerusalem, in those days, was
what we would call today a global community, with people from all over the
world living there, and what’s interesting is that each one of them could pick
out their native tongue from among all the languages being spoken in the mess. They each heard the Gospel in their own
language! When you live in another
country you don’t often hear your native language. It becomes a big deal when you do hear it and
you pay more attention than you might otherwise. These people, who rarely heard their mother
tongue in public places, heard the disciples proclaiming the great things that
God has done, each in their own language.
In the middle of that mess of noise, the Gospel was shared.
This might be like a hearing aid, which is designed to
make speech more intelligible and to minimize background noise. Only in this case, it would be a hearing aid
to help you hear your own language, and tune out the other noises. Sometimes that’s what we have to do in a
mess, figure out what the most important thing is, and focus on that
first. Then, from there, we can figure
out how to deal with the rest of the mess.
Sometimes we find ourselves in messes of our own creation. It may be as simple as how messy the kitchen
looks when you’ve brought all the groceries in or the mess of clothes as you
work on laundry. It may be the mess that
results from being creative, like cooking and baking and painting and
gardening. Other times, though, we find
ourselves in messes not of our own choosing or our own creating. We find ourselves in the mess of a disease
and doctors and hospital mazes. Or we
inherit a mess and have to clean it up before we can do anything with anything. Or out of love for someone, we take on their
mess as our own, because they need help finding their way out of their
mess. What’s interesting about this
cacophonic mess of Pentecost is that it is a mess God created. While Jesus promises the coming of the Holy
Spirit in the Gospel passage we read, he never said just how the Spirit was
going to show up. It could have been
quietly and discreetly or with a loud trumpet and procession, something nice
and neat and orderly. But no, the Holy
Spirit shows up and creates a mess. In
creating the Church, because Pentecost is known as the Church’s birthday, the
Holy Spirit makes a huge, confusing, disconcerting mess! Sometimes we create the mess, sometimes God
creates the mess, and sometimes the mess is a result of sin in the world and
things not working how they should. The
good news is that, just like at Pentecost, God can work through the mess. And that’s a good thing. Sharing the good news in the middle of that
mess is how God often works. He doesn’t
wait until everything’s nice and neat and orderly. You’d never get anything done then! It’s like a couple who wants to wait to have
children until they have the right house, the right jobs, the right financial
situation… those things are all good, but there never is going to be the right
time. In the process of getting your
ducks in a row, you’re always going to keep finding more ducks out of place,
making a mess out of your row.
The
good news is that God creates order from
messes. He’s done this ever since
the beginning, when the earth was a “formless void,” and God brought form and
shape and order to the chaos.[1] Today, Pentecost Sunday, is known as the
birthday of the Church because the good news of Jesus Christ was spread to
people from other places. In that loud,
harsh, seemingly meaningless cacophony of everyone talking at the same time in
different languages, the church was born.
God created the church out of that ragtag group of Jesus’ followers,
through the messy chaos of the Holy Spirit coming on Pentecost. You’d think God might have come up with a
cleaner solution, but he didn’t. He didn’t
just work through the mess; he created the mess to make something beautiful
come out of it.
We
heard about God creating in our psalm this morning, too, which proclaims God’s
wisdom and provision to his creation. It
talks about how all of God’s creatures look to him to give them their food in
due season. It’s all organized, on a
schedule, with seasons that cycle one after the other. You know, God actually likes routine. We tend to look for God in the extraordinary,
in the special events, at the times of greatest joy or greatest sorrow, but
God’s there in the everyday, too. The
everyday, boring, routine, mundane parts of life are also where we can find
God. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that
the prayer that I read on Mother’s Day about the wide spectrum of motherhood
was written by a woman named Amy Young.
Amy Young keeps a blog called “The Messy Middle.” She describes it as the place “where the
pains, joys, boredoms, frustrations, interests, relationships, and God reside.
It’s not as easy or clean or simple or safe as life on the perimeter, but
there’s no place I’d rather be.”[2] And she says, “The messy middle exists
everywhere! The Messy Middle is not so much about a location, as an attitude.
Am I going to take a risk, live life, and when I fail, fail towards God? Do I
see God not only in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary too?” It’s usually the things that are different,
that aren’t routine, that catch our attention, but the ordinary, routine stuff
is important, too. It’s why sports
coaches have the players do drills, to make sure they know the basic, usual,
predictable moves on the field. You have
to make sure you get those down and can do them well. The ordinary is important, too.
One of the most ordinary parts of life is water. And yet water
can be used to clean up all kinds of messes. We wash just about everything in water to get
rid of the mess and make it clean. Clothes,
dishes, even ourselves become clean
in something as common as water. We use
water to restore order and get rid of the mess.
In the Church, we do this through baptism. God washes away the mess of our sin through
the waters of baptism. It’s another way
of creating order from a mess. It’s the
gift of new birth, bringing forth something new from something old. In the Great Thanksgiving for the Easter
Season in the Book of Worship we declare that “Once we were no people, but now
we are God’s people, declaring his wonderful deeds in Christ, who called us out
of darkness and into his marvelous light.”[3]
Life
is messy, and I’m sure each of you have your own messes that you’re dealing
with, whether it was one of your own choosing or your own creating, or
not. Life is messy, including church
life, but God knows how to work through it, how to send the Holy Spirit in, and
create something beautiful from the mess.
He may make things messier first, like he did with that mess of a noise
at Pentecost. But God is a God who
brings order to chaos, who calms the seas, who drives out demons, who doesn’t
care if the toys aren’t all picked up, and doesn’t care if we have our ducks in
a row first before we come to him or not.
Look at that very first miracle Jesus did at the wedding in Cana.[4] His mom tells him the wine has run out and he
says, “it’s not my problem; my time has not yet come.” His mom tells the servants, “do whatever he
tells you,” and all of a sudden, it somehow became Jesus’ time as he then gives
the servants instructions. Don’t let the
mess in your life be meaningless. It may
be harsh, it may be senseless, it may hurt your ears and your other senses, but
don’t let it be meaningless. Give it to
God, let him work through it, and it’ll become like broken glass that reflects
more light than a solid pane of glass.
And then trust Jesus, when he says how beautiful you have become,
because of your mess.
No comments:
Post a Comment