“A Divine Disturbance”

Acts 2:1-21

According to Webster’s Dictionary the verb “to disturb” means, “to destroy the tranquility of; to unsettle mentally.” I guess that it’s fair to say that on that first Pentecost Sunday the tranquility of Jerusalem was, if not destroyed, then pretty much turned upside-down and inside-out. The minds of a lot of folks were unsettled that day: tongues of fire, a rushing wind, folks speaking and hearing in a multiplicity of languages.

Thus the Church of Jesus Christ was born. One Hundred and Twenty followers of Jesus were empowered in ways never before dreamed. Peter’s sermon was so powerful that 3,000 people became believers in just one day. Jesus had promised the gift of the Holy Spirit, and boy did he keep it.

And he is still keeping it. All around the world, especially in the southern hemisphere, the church is growing by leaps and bounds. Men, women, and children from every nation are being made disciples and being baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christ’s witnesses have gone out far beyond Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. The Gospel is being proclaimed in Africa, Asia, and South America. The church in China, despite decades of persecution that forced it underground, is alive, well, and growing. The Holy Spirit has transcended all barriers of race, language, geography, government interference, and even persecution.

And yet in North America and Europe the church is more and more fading into irrelevancy. There are sparks of revival and rays of hope breaking through to be sure, but by and large the church, at least as an institution, is fading away. In many places it has almost been reduced to the dry bones described in Ezekiel 37. The Holy Spirit hasn’t stopped moving within, among, and beyond us. The power of the Gospel is no less potent than in the past. So what gives?

Years ago I heard the following comment: “Whenever the Holy Spirit is mentioned more than three times in an hour Presbyterians start getting real nervous.” People, especially those in the so-called religious establishment, are funny that way. On the first Pentecost Sunday some of those types accused the Spirit-empowered followers of Jesus to be drunk, or as the NRSV so politely says, “… filled with new wine.”

The Holy Spirit disturbs the status quo, upsets the cultural applecart, and threatens those in charge – especially those who live by that ecclesiastical mantra, “We’ve never done it that way before.” Or who view changes in the church as a threat, as in: “They’re taking our church away.”

Two things we need to remember. One: Every one of our traditions – every one of our sacred cows – was at some point one of those things that had never been done that way before. Those of us who prefer organ music for our worship services need to be reminded that at one time there were many in the church who resisted having them installed. They saw them as instruments of the Devil. Guess God fooled them, didn’t he?

Two: This is not our church. It isn’t yours. It isn’t mine. It belongs to Christ. He’s the Head of the Church. He’s in charge. He ultimately decides what is and isn’t appropriate. It is his Spirit that sometimes impels us to change and sometimes calls for us to stand fast. We must be ever attentive to the Spirit, never forgetting that, “T’ain’t every spirit the Holy Spirit.” Everything, new and old, must be tested, and if it is of God, then adopted, and if not, thrown out.

The wind of the Spirit is blowing through our church and our culture right now. Change is not so much being demanded of us as it is bypassing those of us who resist it. This change isn’t just about styles of worship, forms of music, or the arrangement of church furniture. It’s about way more than drums, organs, praise teams, choirs, preachers in robes, and preachers doing the casual Friday thing on Sunday morning.

It’s about a generation that wants to follow Jesus, not be part of an institution. It’s about a generation that wants to be set free to seek and follow the Spirit, not be smothered by committee structures and paralyzed by parliamentary procedure. It’s about a generation that is hungry for permission to do ministry and the tools with which to do it, not be given some ecclesiastical blueprint that must be followed to the letter.

They’re going to follow Jesus. They’re going to attend to the Spirit. They’re going to do ministry: with or without the institutional church’s permission. They don’t give a rat’s hiney about what’s Reformed or what’s Arminian, what’s Presbyterian or what’s Methodist. They don’t care what color the carpet is or whether or not there is even a carpet.

And I’ll be honest; the thought of ministering to and with them scares the bejeezus out of me. I feel more and more like a dinosaur these days. I like traditional worship. A praise team here and a few drums there are fine and dandy, but I’m more comfortable with the tried and true historical liturgies of the church. I may fuss and fume about The Book of Order, sometimes chafe under the requirement to do things decently and in order, and pooh-pooh the work of presbyteries and synods, but deep down inside I am comforted by all those things. In my mind they keep things from flying out of control.

There, that’s the rub: control. Whether I like it or not change happens. I can ignore it. I can try to delay or impede it. I can let it pass me by. But it happens. It is God who said, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” It was Jesus who talked about the need for new wineskins.

And as for the Holy Spirit, any thoughts of controlling him are most definitely an illusion. Jesus made that very clear in the third chapter of John’s Gospel: “The wind [the Spirit] blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” Trying to control the Spirit is pretty much like trying to catch the wind. Can’t be done.

So what’s an old dinosaur like me supposed to do? Retire to the sidelines? Throw everything I am and everything I know out the window? Ask y’all to call some hotshot young associate pastor who can do all that new stuff while I minister to the rest of us? Well, I’m still too young to retire and don’t feel ready to do so anyway. It would be a slap in God’s face to say that all my training and experience are now worthless. The church can’t afford an associate pastor, and even if it could, seminaries are still training them pretty much the same way they trained me, so you’d just end up with a younger version of what you already have.

All this reminds me of the Bellamy Brothers’ song about the old hippie, “He’s just tryin’ real hard to adjust.” Aren’t we all? But adjusting is exactly what we need to be doing: adjusting our attitudes, adjusting our expectations, adjusting our view of the world. There’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There’s no need to dump everything we’re doing and start over from scratch. That would be lousy stewardship.

So what? How do we minister to and with this new generation of Christians? How do we witness to and evangelize this new generation of unbelievers and skeptics? First of all, we don’t dismiss them. They are saying things we need to hear. Secondly, we take them as they come, and that usually means adjusting ourselves to them and not vice-versa. Thirdly, we don’t stop everything we’re doing – we don’t stop being who we are; we seek the Spirit’s guidance about what new things we need to add to our ecclesiastical repertoire. It’s more about adding to than it is about subtracting from. Fourthly, we never ever think in terms of “losing our church.” It’s not ours to lose or even give away. It’s Christ’s. We prayerfully discern what adjustments our Lord wants us to make in order to re-create his church in his image.

Will it be easy? No. Will it always go smoothly? No. Will there be some trial and error? Yes, usually more errors than trials. Will the new generation have to make adjustments of its own some day? Oh yes! Nothing remains static, especially when the Holy Spirit is involved. We’ll change, and someday so will they.

Maybe the best way to celebrate Pentecost is to remember that the first Pentecost really was a divine disturbance. Tranquility was destroyed. The minds of many people were unsettled. The religious movers and shakers had their applecart upset that day.

The Spirit still moves, upsetting our applecarts, destroying our tranquility, and unsettling our minds. The thoughts of such do not bring us comfort. And they shouldn’t. They should challenge and excite us. They should move us to continually discern what new thing God might be doing, to be careful that we don’t put new wine in old wineskins, and to take seriously the power of the Holy Spirit, even when talking about it makes some of us nervous. Amen.