For the Eager and Exhausted
A sermon brought forth from Acts 2:1-4 and Romans 8:18-27 preached on May 28, 2023
We live in a world that’s waiting to be itself again. That’s where things stand. We’re all in the middle of something. Between the now and the not yet. You’ve heard that before. Even those who don’t look at things that way are searching for more.
Last week I mentioned that we know we’re missing something we never had in the first place. Everyone knows about this itch that can’t be scratched. It’s a restless longing.
Life’s not easy but it is beautiful. Sometimes there’s so much joy we can hardly stand it, but other times we know of a hurt we can hardly endure. And it’s not because we’ve done anything spectacularly good that we know of these great joys, nor do we experience the greatest hurt because we’ve done anything wrong. We know the highest of highs and the lowest of lows because we’re alive and this is what happens. Everything happens because we live in a world that’s waiting to be itself again.
Today we celebrate the many ways that God gives us new being. Pentecost is when we the Church realize that our life, our vitality, our meaning, and purpose aren’t something that come from within us. They come from beyond us. On the morning of that first Pentecost, the disciples were held up in a tiny room. Their minds, hearts, lives were small. Their purpose was gone, shrunk down, and withered away. Frozen in fear. They thought they were alone. Left to themselves to make life work from here on out. Left to navigate what’s next on their own. They were exhausted and exhausted by the idea.
Then they heard a rumble that came from the heavens. The Holy Spirit arrived as tongues of fire and speech and as wind. Pentecost fire is not the sort that burns. It’s the sort that refines. Cleanses. Tempers. This fire is heat treatment. It helps something inflexible and rigid become pliable, shapeable, able to be remolded again, yet somehow stronger.
Then tongues of speech. Not the strange jibber-jabber heard in Holiness churches but a new language that’s given to us so that we may understand one another and be understood by one another. We read the story in Genesis of the Tower of Babel where God confuses the languages of the people so they can no longer understand one another. But with the Holy Spirit we have the ability to understand one another again. We borrow language that isn’t ours and with it we speak and are understood; we listen, and we understand. That’s a tremendous gift: to be understood. It’s a gift of the Holy Spirit who speaks into us and between us and works out what’s divided among us and broken between us.
On that first Pentecost the Holy Spirit shoves the disciples out of their complacency and their confined ways of thinking and into a world and among a people who need to hear about Jesus.
In the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost, the disciples had been cooped up. They met for worship, they had all their committee meetings, they gathered around their tables to discuss their models and strategies, they made their budget, they cooked meals for one another, but still they stayed cooped up—frozen inside their own church building—too scared to take the Good News outside their walls. Then the Holy Spirit arrives and turns their fear into power, their confusion into clarity, and their silence into communication.
That first Pentecost Day, the disciples were stirred awake and coaxed out of their paralysis and into life. They were given new words that broke their silence and unloosed their fear. That’s what the Holy Spirit can do: take what’s dead and stuck within us and about us and stir it to life. The Holy Spirit gives us what we need to embody Christ so that in our speech and in our very selves we proclaim the Gospel with a newfound eagerness, with ready and willing courage and steadfastness.
We live in a world that’s waiting to be itself again, and this is how God will accomplish His new creation. Not through us but with us. The world is not what it’s supposed to be, but it’s also not the way it’s always going to be. The Holy Spirit sustains and upholds for the eager and takes up for the exhausted.
God is in the middle of the groaning world. He’s at work birthing a new creation out of the old one—out of the one we know. We are a part of the old thing giving way to the new thing. The Holy Spirit animates what was once still and stuck in place. She reinvigorates those of us who have for far too long lived in despair. The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to the eager and exhausted.
At Pentecost we celebrate that with the Holy Spirit the animating presence of life—stirring us to action, encouraging us, and urging us on—that nothing, absolutely nothing is beyond redemption. Our suffering is real and should not be ignored or minimized or spoken over, but it’s also a part of the bigger story of our lives and where the God of new life is leading us.
The Holy Spirit met the disciples in their restless longing; and she meets us in ours. Pentecost is for the eager and the exhausted. The gift of the Holy Spirit is life for both.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.