A sermon preached at Niles Discovery Church, Fremont, California,
on Pentecost Sunday, May 19, 2024, by the Rev. Jeffrey Spencer.
Scripture: Acts 2:1-21 and Romans 12:1-16
Copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey S. Spencer
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” Paul tells the church in Rome. During this worship series, we’ve reflected on ways the resurrection is about more than the promise of eternal life. The resurrection is also about this life, here and now. The resurrection is about our individual lives and our collective life.
I started this series by quoting the reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber: “The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small.”[1]
During this series we’ve looked at how God reaches into the graves we dig for ourselves by bringing us freedom, release, home, healing, liberation, and calm. Each of these is a type of transformation: moving from imprisoned to freed; moving from exiled to released; moving from lost to found; moving from broken to healed; moving from enslaved to liberated; moving from anxious to calmed.
One of the things I’ve long loved about Mister Rogers is his consistent message of “I like you just the way you are.” It is a welcoming and affirming message, one that’s needed by 3- and 4-year-olds, and by 60-somethings alike. It is a message I hear God saying to me and to you and to us as easily and believably as I hear Mister Rogers saying it to his preschooler audience members. The thing is, God doesn’t stop there. God keeps speaking: “I love you just the way you are. In fact, I love you so much I want to help you transform into an even more wonderful you.”
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
The Pentecost story – the story we reflected on at the beginning of worship today – is a story of transformation. In a poem she wrote recently, Maren Tirabassi asked herself, “How is Acts 2 like a high school language class?”[2]
It starts with really awkward folks,
eleven legacy disciples
the new guy Matthias
who won a place on the starting lineup
with a roll of dice …
Jesus’ Mom and three brothers,
Mary M., Salome, Joanna, Susanna,
who risked going to a tomb,
and met an angel posting
a change of address notice,
also about a hundred other folks –
just humming along
in a little prayer meeting
happy with their personal knowledge
of Easter and death being over,
but suddenly sopranos,
shift into the key of Cappadocia,
and baritones bellow a story-line
in a Cretan dialect
the minotaur wouldn’t recognize,
and there they are – not in the classroom
but out in the road
like midnight wanderers
after last call
but at nine in the morning,
with a belly-full of Rosetta stone,
telling everyone about the wonder
that was Jesus
because they are bursting
with the wonder
that is the Holy Spirit.
Maren points out that God’s transformative power won’t be limited to the classroom. There are Jews in Jerusalem from all over the Mediterranean world, gathered there for the Festival of Weeks, for Shavuot, celebrated 50 days after Passover. (Pentecost = 50 days). For the ancient Israelites, this festival was an explicitly inclusive harvest celebration, and, over time, it also came to mark the reception of the Torah at Mount Sinai. And thousands of those gathered in the city to celebrate, the Book of Acts claims, were transformed as well.
The disciples may have been in Jerusalem for Shavuot. They were hanging out together because Jesus had promised the arrival of the Holy Spirit not long after his departure. “And sure enough, on the festival day itself, the Holy Spirit arrives. The scene is spectacular and chaotic: a violent, rushing sound like wind, and then “divided tongues, as of fire” – not a fire that destroys, but rather a fire like the one Moses encountered at the burning bush, which was ‘blazing, yet it was not consumed.’”[3]
The chaotic spectacle spilled out into the street and the crowd questioned what was going on. Peter explained what God was up to in the lives of these followers of Jesus. He said that a prophecy of Joel was being fulfilled. “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.”
It’s through the power of the Holy Spirit that the people from the far-flung reaches of Mediterranean world heard the testimony of the disciples in their own native languages. Not the language of commerce, Koine Greek. Not the language of the Roman elites. Not even Hebrew, the language of Judaism. They heard their native languages coming from this hodgepodge group of Galileans.
I read a wonderful reflection by Cole Arthur Riley on the Pentecost story this week and here’s some of the best of it. “It began with a strong wind. Then something like tongues of fire began to divide and rest on each person gathered. I can’t tell you if they were afraid, if their eyes widened and hearts raced. If they thought to hide, be it from the fire or from one another. But I can tell you that in mystery and all at once, people in the room began to utter tongues unknown to them. And the utterance that went out to the multitude, people from every nation, as the sacred sound drew them toward one another. They heard themselves in the sound – not the language of their oppressors or people who believed themselves to be closer to the divine than others. They each heard their own language and understood. What words were spoken remain as mysterious as the tongues that bore them. But together, even in the presence of doubt, people from all nations remembered their ancestors. Those who had an imagination for a miracle such as this. The image of God, a sacred multitude, gathered in the midst of a cosmic power shift.…
“Could it be that Pentecost is paradise remembered on earth? What does it mean that in the story we are not told precisely what they communicated about the miracle or the divine? We know only that it was understood — that no tribe or tongue was excluded nor made a singular spectacle, but that a collective was born.”[4]
The thing I find most striking about Riley’s reflection is that the transformation experienced in Jerusalem that day is specifically not a transformation of assimilation. No one was asked to give up themselves or their identity to experience the resurrection power of God. They were invited into a more wonderful themselves. That’s the transformative power of resurrection.
In the midst of my reflection on transformation, a joke from my childhood came to mind. Imagine me as a fourth grader telling this joke – it’s that level of humor. There once was a man who had a hand that was quite shriveled up. I don’t know why his hand became more and more gnarled and less and less useful. I only know that it happened. First, he had trouble holding a pen. Then he couldn’t button a button with it. Eventually it became so useless he only used his left hand to do things. As things got worse, he kept praying more and more fervently: “God, please make my hand like my other hand.” And then, one day, a miracle – and his left hand became just like his right hand.
When I was a kid, I thought the joke was funny because God did what the man had prayed for, and that he probably should have been a bit more specific with God. Now, I find it funny that I thought it was funny back then. Now, I think of the joke and I realize that the God I know now would never act that way. Yes, God wants to transform us. But the transformation God wants is always a transformation of growth, particularly a growth in our ability to love.
Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans ends with what can be read as a long “to do” list:
- Let love be genuine;
- hate what is evil,
- hold fast to what is good;
- love one another with mutual affection;
- outdo one another in showing honor.
- Do not lag in zeal,
- be ardent in spirit,
- serve the Lord.
- Rejoice in hope,
- be patient in suffering,
- persevere in prayer.
- Contribute to the needs of the saints;
- extend hospitality to strangers.
- Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
- Rejoice with those who rejoice,
- weep with those who weep.
- Live in harmony with one another;
- do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly;
- do not claim to be wiser than you are.
It can be read as a holy “to do” list. I don’t choose to read it that way. I choose to read it as a transformational greatest hits list. Do you want to know how God wants to transform you? It’s going to be that makes the stuff on this list easier and easier, even to the point of becoming reflexive.
Frederick Buechner once said, “Resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing.” The resurrection of Jesus can help us unlock our resurrection stories, the stories of God transforming us into ever better versions of ourselves – individually and collectively. And we can unlock those stories because the worst thing is never the last thing. Thanks be to God.
[1] From a meme quoting Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix, (New York: Jericho Books, 2013).
[2] Maren Tirabassi, “How is Acts 2 like a high school languge class?” Gifts in Open Hands, https://giftsinopenhands.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/how-is-acts-2-like-a-high-school-language-class/ (posted and accessed 13 May 2024).
[3] “What Does This Mean?” Salt Project, https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/5/15/salts-lectionary-commentary-on-pentecost (posted 13 May 2024; accessed 16 May 2024).
[4] Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies (New York: Convergent Books, 2024), 264-265.