Pentecost
Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Peter’s first words to the assembled crowd that morning were “These guys aren’t drunk like you think. After all, it’s just mid-morning.” The crowd had come to Jerusalem for the Jewish spring harvest festival, this list of unpronounceables who are the bane of lectors in worship every year fifty days after Easter: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs.” If they were observant enough in their faith that they made the trek, many of them probably would have been in Jerusalem just over a month before for the Passover festival. And they were confused by this what-the-Frick-Museum moment. It just made no sense. What was coming out of the disciples’ mouths was literal non-sense. The best explanation was that these guys were plastered off their keisters, spit-faced drunk.
Fifty years ago when I was in junior high, my dad ran Dale’s Shoe Repair in Sturgis, South Dakota, home of the famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. I spent many hours in that shop amid the humming sanding and polishing machines with their noisy belts, spinning sandpaper wheels, and whirring brushes. I can still hear the ka-ching of the antique cash register when you cranked the handle to open the till drawer. I loved the smells of rubbery replacement Cat’s Paw heels, of leather for new cowboy boot and wing-tip soles, and the acrid pungency of contact cement that entered your nostrils at your first inhalation when you walked through the door off Main Street. I suspect it’s that last smell that attracted Dick Brazier.
Dick would have fit in well as an extra among the psych unit patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Graying comb-over and around six-two, but because he was always a little hunched over, he never seemed as tall as he was. His googly eyes had a hard time looking in the same direction and never seemed to get past his grand hook of a nose. Coming through the shop door was for him less a matter of walking than of floating though in some kind of purple haze. Or more likely a silver haze, because Dick Brazier was our town drunk and his favorite potable was a lethal admixture of a pint of silver paint and a can of Sterno fluid. I’d never been drunk myself, but a fella could imagine it just from Dick’s noxious breath.
When the Jerusalem crowd describes the disciples as filled with new wine, they’re not thinking the boys are merely tipsy or what my alcoholic chain-smoking and foul-mouthed great uncles called being “half-snockered.” No, they thought the disciples were full-snockered, Dick-Brazier-drunk. But notice Peter’s words: “These are not drunk as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” He’s not denying they’re drunk, only that they’re not drunk according to the categories the crowd is using. They think that Peter and the others have imbibed in stiff spirits, but he wants to share with them the real Spirit from which they’ve sipped deep. He beckons them in by saying, “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say.” Come close and get a whiff of this. Luke tells us in this story in the sequel to his gospel that the crowd did just that. Like young Ken Jones smelling the paint and Sterno on the swooning Dick Brazier’s breath, the crowds breathed in what floated off Peter’s breath, the air shaped by his lungs, teeth, lips, and larynx. That is, they took in the gospel words that fell so trippingly from the apostle’s tongue. And they became just as taken by the Spirit, to the point that around three thousand were baptized.
The bible of Alcoholics Anonymous is what’s commonly called the Big Book. It’s a collection of writings about what it’s like to be an alcoholic, about the twelve steps that lead to sobriety, and what a new sober life looks like. It’s offered hope to millions since the first group of drunks clung to each other as a lifeline in the kitchen of Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City 90 years ago. The Big Book describes addiction as a “spiritual malady.” No one in AA speaks for AA. They can only speak of themselves and their own stories of finding help and hope, as I suspect a good number in this room can. I’ve heard many talk about being attached to the wrong spirits. They’d looked to fill the emptiness within with alcoholic spirits and found only their same empty selves mirrored back at them in the bottom of the glass. But by being connected to the only Spirit that could help them, that is “to God as we understood him,” they found new life.
Peter works the same territory in his preaching to the Pentecost crowds. He did what Paul would call “discerning the spirits” by making a distinction between the Spirit that is Christ Jesus, crucified, risen, and ascended, in whom there is life, and all other spirits, the spirits of this world that, since the serpent in the Garden, have contorted us in on ourselves and resulted only in death. Peter won’t let them live with any illusions. He won’t let them hang onto their understanding of what it means to be “spiritual.” He tells them their illusions had led to an overarching self-regard that allowed no response to Jesus other than the words “Crucify him!” “This Jesus you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law.” They’d imbibed in something as noxious as silver paint and Sterno, and being around even their exhalation was stupefying and dangerous to your own brain cells.
The end of the Moody Blues’ great song Nights in White Satin segues into spoken words on the track Late Lament that in 1967 was often heard floating from a vinyl disc on a cheap record player as part of a late-night imbibing/inhaling session. A deep voice speaks these words: “Breathe deep the gathering gloom / Watch lights fade from every room / Bedsitter people look back and lament / Another day's useless energy spent / Impassioned lovers wrestle as one; / Lonely man cries for love and has none; / New mother picks up and suckles her son; / Senior citizens wish they were young / Cold-hearted orb that rules the night / Removes the colours from our sight / Red is grey is yellow white / But we decide which is right / And which is an illusion.” It’s a poetic turn on the addiction to ourselves that we call sin: days of useless energy, crying for love and finding none, a world of available colors but eyes that see only grays. It’s not far removed from our days of crucifixion by calendar, suffocation by suburban ennui, and watching the fabric of society torn apart by the tribalism of the self. There has to be something more, something lasting that can be counted on when we do what recovering addicts point to as their bottoming out.
The disciples had encountered that hope in the person of Jesus, Emmanuel, God in the flesh, the one whom Jason likes to call “Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.” But they hadn’t yet fully understood the power of the gospel that Paul extols in Romans. The tongues of fire on the disciples’ heads are the equivalent of a cartoon light bulb over someone’s head to show they’ve suddenly realized something. For Peter and the others, the aha-moment was God creating faith in them. The eleven remaining disciples and their new addition Matthias “got it.” Like Saint Paul after being blinded on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from their eyes. Like a drunk in a circle of other drunks in countless dingy church basements, a different understanding was given to them. Unlike Cleopas and his pal reporting meeting the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus and having their hearts burn within them, now for the disciples and Peter, the burning was external. They’d imbibed in 200-proof capital-t Truth: the one crucified is risen, and he is the very Lord and God the crowds had come to Jerusalem to bow to in obeisance. And now Peter tells them, “You think we’re drunk? Get a whiff of this.”
It’s appropriate to think of Peter’s Pentecost sermon using the metaphor of the cloud of powerful spirits coming from Dick Brazier’s breath. The Greek word for spirit in the New Testament is pneuma. You know it from the word pneumonia, the lung infection that inhibits your breathing. If your breathing stops, your pneuma goes away, and you die. The New Testament word pneuma is the Greek rendering of the Old Testament word ruach. The book of Samuel says that King Saul’s sanity, reign, and life began to end when God’s ruach left him, when the Spirit abandoned him and went to Bethlehem to land on the shepherd boy David instead. Genesis tells us that in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, and ruach from God swept over the face of the waters. Ruach can be translated as spirit, as wind, or as breath. For my money, breath is your best bet. God’s breath, the essence of God’s very being was afoot. Like the torn temple curtain at Jesus’ last breath, the complete chaos of the formless void was rent asunder by God’s “Let there be light.” The entire cosmos was breathed upon by a gracious God who called it tov, good. And not just good, but tov me-od, way good.
At Pentecost, the disciples themselves were rent asunder. This was the axial point with a distinct before and after. Now they knew the power and primacy of the God who will allow no other comers, who insists on being your Lord, who will let nothing, even death on a cross, impede his gracious will for you, and who insist the flame being handed on. Where there is darkness, even a little flame on a disciple’s bald spot has ultimate power.
The ruach, the pneuma, the breath and Spirit of God that rent and sorted the cosmos, that led the Israelites to freedom, that held up kings and empowered armies, that protected Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that kept the Temple lamp lit in the midst of desecration, this breath that is the very being of God now floats off the lips of the guy who fifty-two nights before had denied Jesus. And his unclean lips are where it belongs.
There’s a reason for the way Martin Luther talked about the Holy Spirit in his great work Bondage of the Will. Whenever Luther mentions the Spirit there, it’s always in connection to the Word of God. It’s because where words are spoken, it requires ruach — breath. You know how to speak, don’t you? You send some air from your lungs over flaps of tissue in your throat to make sounds and vary the pitch. I want to make sure you can do it, so we’re going to do something extraordinarily gimmicky and completely counter to your lead pastor’s worship instincts and good taste. This is the moment for you to grab your kazoos. I asked Jason if there’s a hymn most Methodists know, and he told me “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” Let’s do a verse of the hymn with our kazoos.
[kazoo verse]
You just used your kazoos to put your ruach to use. You know how breath works. Now, can you create a pneumatic event where your breath becomes the Word of God? All you do is shape your lips and tongue around these words:
Jesus Christ is Lord.
For Jesus’ sake, you are forgiven.
God is for you.
Lo and behold! You didn’t need to be ordained to do it, and neither did Peter. It’s not that hard. You use words all day long. And when you put your ruach to this Word, you become one who ferries Christ from your heart into another’s ears. That’s where the name Christopher comes from. It means “Christ-bearer.”
This is what God gives the church for. As Luther asserted, the church is to be a “mouth house.” The church is where mouths do more than mundane yapping about overbooked calendars, the achievements of grandchildren, and office politics. The church is where the Holy Spirit can be counted on to be available. It’s the only reason we have preachers: to make sure the Word is present and accounted for. When you combine that with ears that hunger for the gospel and more mouths that regard it as worth handing on, then the church will get a idea of what’s going down in the ancient city of Jerusalem fifty days after the ignominy of Golgotha.
The chaos of Good Friday and the crucified body of Jesus are sorted out. It is no ill wind that is blowing, for the deathless life of the resurrected Jesus is doing exactly what the Word did at the beginning. The formless void, the chaos in you is being sorted. This process can be so slow and incremental that you hardly notice it, but little by little, Sunday after Sunday, sermon by sermon, and prayer by prayer it happens. The very breath and being of God come as some divine paramedic to lock lips with you and blow life into your lungs, to push away what stops you short, what takes your breath away: soured relationships, daunting illness, the pile of unfolded laundry getting ever more wrinkled in the dryer, aging bodies, parenting kids, parenting your parents, traffic on the Beltway, the not knowing the future for the federal agency where you work, the caustic political milieu and the standards of decency that have no bottom, the vast hopeless hole that is the aching need in the world that you can hardly open your eyes to look at. In his 1979 hit Blow Away, the ex-Beatle George Harrison sang, “Day turned black, sky ripped apart / shattered Rained for a year till it dampened my heart / Cracks and leaks, the floorboards caught rot / About to go down, I had almost forgot.” At the end of the song he says, “Wind blew in, cloud was dispersed / Rainbows appearing, the pressures were burst / Breezes a-singing, now feeling good / The moment had passed like I knew that it should’ve.” The chorus goes, “Blow away, blow away, blow away.” It sounds like the disciples before and after the tongues of fire.
If someone asks you what you think about Christianity, you can say, “It blows.” You can say the same thing about your church or the faithful work of the Mission Center. It blows. Or your pastor. Yeah, he really blows. Because every bit of it is the ruach where you’re getting a whiff of what’s at the core of the delighted glee exchanged between the Father and the Son as their Spirit descends on you.
In a few moments you’ll come to the altar where the Spirit of Jesus, the Father’s only Son, bestows on you his body and blood given and shed for. Today, deny the Moody Blues and don’t breathe deep the gloom around you, but instead take a quick second to put your nose to the bread and wine and catch a whiff of 200-proof pure grace, utter breathing space, fresh air to dispel the rot. It could make a person feel a little tipsy. Would that the world would shake its head at these proceedings and all these new members (like those joined to the church on Pentecost) and we could respond, “Annandale United Methodist Church is not drunk as you suppose for it is only around eleven in the morning.” I pray that others in your life will come close and get a whiff of what you’ve been drinking today. Amen.
And now may the peace of Peter who’s finally become a preacher, the peace that makes you giddy, may such peace keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus, your ruach, your breath, your life. Amen. Can I hear a little toot on your kazoo as an Amen?
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