Sermon, May 27, 2007 -- Acts 2:1-21

“Is the Fire Out?” (Acts 2:1-21)
Rick Olson, May 27, 2007

Fire is an obvious metaphor for power, for heat, for warmth . . . its opposite water is cold, wet, clammy . . . one of the standard tricks in the bags of movie production designers are color-schemes that suggest these two extremes. In the recent Pan’s Labyrinth, its central character Ofelia’s plight goes from not-so great to even worse worse, and she increasingly retreats from her everyday world to an alternate world of fantasy . . . as her day-to-day existence becomes increasingly grim, the color-scheme of the film’s “real world” is gradually bled of color, of warmth—it becomes increasingly bluish, increasingly grey-ish as Ofelia’s straights become increasingly dire. By contrast, her fantasy world—which may or may not be real—begins by being cold and gray-blue, but by movie’s end it’s warm and inviting, all rich reds and browns and golds. Fire—and the colors that evoke it—suggest warmth and power and life.

And of course that’s why God chooses it for this little demonstration . . . God could have had them doused with water from out of the blue—excuse the bad pun—or maybe had a shrubbery fall on them from the sky, but it just wouldn’t have had the same oomph as little dancing fires, miraculous flames that crackled but didn’t burn . . . fire signals power, it signals warmth, it signals strength . . . and the flames are accompanied by “a sound like a rushing wind” that fill the whole house where they’re sitting . . . and now we have another image, another metaphor for power and might, and it’s the wind, so strong it can blow down houses, knock over barns, mow down crops . . . strong but capricious . . . who can forget the stories of winds that level whole towns, yet pick babies up and deposit them light as a feather? As John the Evangelist says, “the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” And in fact, in Greek the word for wind is pneuma, the same as for spirit, and in Hebrew it’s ruach—I love that word, ruach—which means wind and spirit and breath . . .

So the spirit-wind-fire-breath of God comes upon them there in that Pentecost house, in tongues of fire, flickering on their foreheads, and one more metaphor, one more image is at play here . . . they’re tongues of fire, and it’s in tongues that the disciples begin to speak, in tongues that they do not know . . . and everyone was amazed and flabbergasted because though the disciples are all Galilean, every one in the crowd understands what they say, every Parthian and Mede, every Elamite, Mesopotamian, Judean and Cappadocian, every mother’s son and daughter of them understands every word. Every Pontene and Asian, Phrygian, Pamphlyian, Egyptian, Libyan and Roman, every one of them gets what it is they’re saying . . . the breath of God—which burns like fire, which scorches like the hot desert wind—is also a breath of fresh air . . . no more is religion caught up in its own arcane customs, its own esoteric liturgy, its own peculiar, exclusionary ways . . . a new and white-hot wind is blowing across the middle east, and indeed the whole world. Everyone can hear in it, in their own tongues, no less, everyone can hear in their own voices, no one is excluded.

And on that day, powered by the Holy Spirit, the church set sail on its great voyage, its mission to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth in thought, word and deed . . . and it caught fire in the ancient Middle East, and expanded rapidly—using the fine Roman road system to its fullest effect—and the Romans made it the religion of the Empire, which probably saved its bacon, and for centuries, in the West, when you said philosopher you meant theologian as well, if you were one, then you were the other, and the great classical periods of the church followed, when they were the bastion of European culture, and the gale-wind of the Spirit blew the church to the four corners of the world and then . . . then it turned a corner, somehow, just in the last 60 years . . . or maybe in the last 200, since the enlightenment, I don’t know, but now Europe is a black hole of Christianity, great cathedrals empty even on high holy days, churches funded by taxes whether you attend them or not . . .

And here, across the pond, things are heading that way, they’re are in decline, attendance is on the wane, and whole denominations are fading away like the morning mist . . . a prime example is our own Presbyterian Church USA, I’m afraid, losing 40,000 members every year, cutbacks at headquarters, reductions in the mission fields, and fully 75% of individual congregations in need of renewal. And it’s like that all across the land . . . sure, there are growing denominations and congregations, but the state of Christianity in the West – that’s Europe and the United States seems to be on its last legs.

And so the question I’d like to ask here is—what happened? How did the church go from its red-hot youth, sure that it had the good news for all mankind, to the cautious, accommodated old age it now inhabits? Well, of course, whole reams of books have been written—and will be written—on the topic, and we all have our own pet theories, some say “the church is too liberal” some say it’s not liberal enough, some say we haven’t kept up with the times, others that we’ve changed too much, we’ve gotta get back to that old time religion. And though I don’t think our problems are as simple as one thing or even five things, on this nineteen-hundred and some-odd birthday of the church, where we celebrate the endowment of us all with that Holy Ghost power, maybe we should look in that direction . . .

Joan Gray, moderator of our General Assembly, thinks that one of those problems is “bank account” Christianity, where churches consider their bank-accounts first and their mission second. And a sometimes distant second, at that. And I don’t know about you, but that rings true in some of the churches I’ve known over the years—but certainly not in this one, of course . . . It’s embedded in bedrock by the kind of budgeting they do, where they look at how much money they have before they consider mission, and so the vision is curtailed from the outset, it’s circumscribed, by their budget. It’s the exact opposite of how the first generation followers of Christ operated . . .

Those first Christians, meeting in houses, sometimes in secret, often in fear, spread the Gospel throughout Palestine, throughout the so-called civilized world at a time when there was no radio, no automobile, no airplane or TV or internet. It spread so fast that there was a shortage of clergy after only a couple of hundred years, so fast that there were not enough priests and Bishops to adequately perform the sacraments . . . and all on the quick, on the cheap, often on the run . . . these first evangelists had no physical resources, no money, no expensive buildings, no—gulp!—paid staff, and yet they grew like wildfire, even in the face of persecution. They had no budget to consider, no artificial constraints on their spreading of the Gospel, but what they did have was that gale-force Spirit, given to them in tongues of flame . . . they relied on that spirit, they opened themselves up to it, they couldn’t help it, they could do nothing less . . .

Looking back on those days, they must have been raw, exhilarating, like the early days of any movement are, only magnified hundreds of times over . . . there was no filter between them and the Spirit, no church hierarchy, no rules and -didn’t have to refer it to three committees, two boards and a Bishop for the go-ahead . . . they weren’t boxed in by a budget because there was no budget, their reliance on the Spirit had to be total . . .

One more image from Joan Gray . . . she points out that an early symbol for the Church was a ship that sailed the world’s stormy seas . . . and if you look up, you can see it reflected in the architecture of this sanctuary. And it’s an apt metaphor in many ways—the sea was a common image of Chaos, danger, unpredictability. On the sea—even one as tame as the Galilee—a storm could blow up out of nowhere and swallow you up in a heartbeat, dragging you to Davy Jones’ locker, down never to be seen again . . . and the boat that is the church offers stability, it offers smooth sailing above the icy depths, safely transporting Christians to their destinations . . .

And what Joan points out is that in first-century depictions of that symbol, in coded drawings on ancient walls, it is always a sailboat, never a row boat, that is drawn . . . it’s always a boat that is wind powered, spirit powered, and who does the work in such a boat? Who powers the whole enterprise and gets you where you need to go? The wind, of course, but here’s the point – it’s never the folks riding within . . .

We are not meant to do the work ourselves, folks . . . like any ship designed to run before the wind, the church is a veritable dog when rowed by hand, wallowing and foundering and guttering . . . it is the Spirit Wind that powers and pushes and motivates the Christian ship, the Spirit Wind that moves it like a knife cutting through the sea . . .

But the great lie of the world, of Western society, is precisely this—that everything is up to us. There is no spirit, there is God, there is no help . . . we’re all alone, the boat is powered by our oars, it’s all up to our own muscles. Our mission is dependent on our own budgets, our own resources, our own strength, and brothers and sisters, too many churches dance to that tune, too many churches believe the lie. And when they do, the adversary, the world, the flesh, that old Devil, has already won.

And now, I’m going to push the sailing ship metaphor just one step further, and I have Greg Bentley to thank for this, so you can blame him if it’s a step too far, but in a sailing ship, the sailors aren’t just passengers, are they? They aren’t just rag-dolls tossed around in the hold . . . to sail a boat well you must steer her, you must position her precisely to seize the wind. You must constantly present the sails in such a way that they catch the wind most efficiently. And friends, I am happy to report that at Covenant we are doing just that. It’s what the Covenant Seekers project is all about . . . we are seeking to position our church so that the Spirit’s power acts upon it in the most efficient way. We’ve entered into a process of discernment that is nothing more—but certainly nothing less—than that: discovering how to best guide our Covenant-ship to respond to the Spirit’s power.

Is it scary? You bet . . . stepping out in faith, truly relying on the Spirit always is. The Spirit Wind truly does blow where it chooses, and we cannot know where it comes from or where it is going . . . shipping the oars and hoisting the sail, giving up our own power and relying on something else can be a pretty frightening thing. But I truly believe that it’s the only way to do business, and I’m proud of Covenant Presbyterian Church that we’re all willing to tap into that old Holy Ghost power. Amen.