Pentecost Sunday May 31, 2009 "Peace Pentecost" Reverend Michael D. Powell John 7:37-39, Acts 2:1-4

Please, I urge you; never take what we are experiencing this morning for granted. You and I are part of a living, breathing, laughing, weeping, working, praying, serving and growing spiritual body. It is healthy, and it is sacred. You are the very Body of Christ, the church doing what it was created to do, bringing people together in the Spirit of Christ. We are celebrating a miracle of spiritual community, and the world needs more miracles like the one we’re a part of this morning. It’s the Holy Spirit that binds us together and makes us one.

Everywhere we look today we see red, symbolizing that on Pentecost the Holy Spirit came in "tongues of fire." But we also read that the Spirit came in a mighty wind, and Jesus himself describes the Spirit as "a River of Living Water" flowing out from the heart of believers. At his baptism the Spirit descended on Jesus in the form of a dove. So, which is it? All of the above - and more. Obviously, the Holy Spirit is a major league shape shifter! The Holy Spirit is laying claim on your life as well, but God only knows and only time will tell what form the Spirit will take for you!

Originally, Pentecost was an ancient Jewish festival, celebrated fifty days after the beginning of the harvest. That was the reason all those diverse folks gathered in the first place, but in the Book of Acts we read how it became the birthday of the Christian church, marking the gift of the Holy Spirit that just happened to come fifty days after Easter. The first Christian Pentecost is described in chaotic, unruly terms that make it sound like some kind of happy hour celebrated by a bunch of devotees babbling incoherently while intoxicated on red wine. But both scripture and tradition tell us that it was, in fact, a miracle of communication in which every word was perfectly understood by the power of the Holy Spirit. If that’s the case, bring it on!

What the world needs today is a modern day Peace Pentecost - a miracle of communication and spiritual unity. If our world family is going to survive, we need to underscore the fact that God's love for the world is universal, and that Christ is neither nationalistic nor ethnic, but global and cosmic. Our world has outgrown the walls, the divisions, the barriers, hatreds and prejudices that we’ve used for too long to keep ourselves separate from one another.

Every Sunday school kid knows the story of the Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11, the people say, "Come, let us build ourselves a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves." Archeologists have even identified those kinds of towers in Babylonia. They're called Ziggurats. They were designed as stairways to heaven crowned with a temple called "Heaven's Gate." They were the world's first skyscrapers, and people thought that if they got high enough they’d reach God, but it didn’t work. It didn’t bring them any closer to God because, as any fool knows, God is not “up there.” What they were doing was worshipping a god of their own making. Sound familiar? Do you think we’ll ever learn? The story goes on to tell how the Tower of Babel was stricken down, the peoples divided and their languages confused. Did it really happen? Well, something happened, whether this is a literal account or a metaphor I’ll let you decide, but we’re sure as hell divided. I personally don’t think God did it. I think we did it to ourselves, and we’re doing it still.

Biblical scholars have long pointed out that the miracle of Pentecost is a New Testament reversal of the ancient Hebrew story of the Tower of Babel. At Babel the people were divided into separate nations and their tongues confused so that they could no longer understand one another. At Pentecost people from many nations come together, each speaking in their own language, and everyone understands everyone else.

If Pentecost is to have any meaning for us today, it’s got to hold out hope for once again bridging the differences between nations, cultures and faiths, for uniting our separate and individual spirits into one single Spirit, the common language of spiritual and physical survival. In a word, the Peace Pentecost I’m praying for, the Peace Pentecost I believe we’re seeking to embody and incarnate this morning is a miracle of communication and spiritual unity.

We live in a world that’s paradoxically both united and divided. In his book, Jihad Verses McWorld, Benjamin Barber describes Iranian zealots with "one ear tuned to the mullahs urging holy war and the other cocked to Rupert Murdoch's Star television beaming in Dynasty and the Simpsons from hovering satellites." He tells of: "Serbian assassins wearing Adidas sneakers and listening to Madonna on Walkman headphones . . . [and] Chinese entrepreneurs in Beijing pursuing Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. [Barber, p. 5] Barber believes our world is caught up in what he describes as a split between Babel and Disneyland, and neither of them offers much hope for ultimate peace.

Turn on your television or computer and you’ll see images of Babel beamed via satellite - nations, cultures and religions using the most sophisticated and modern technology they can get their hands on, drenched in a bloody war of division fueled by a profound distrust of anything modern. Barber contrasts that with the Disneyland perspective summed up in the endlessly proclaimed song loop, "It's a small world after all." Whereas the Babel perspective focuses on tribal divisions, he asserts that the Disney perspective "mesmerizes people with fast music, fast computers, and fast food - MTV, Macintosh, and McDonalds - pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park, one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, and commerce." [p. 4]

We live in an age of miraculous technological communication, but it has only served to underscore our divisions. What the world needs now is a modern-day Peace Pentecost, a miracle of communication and spiritual unity. And that’s why we’re here this morning. We have gathered to celebrate Pentecost, to thank God for and to help incarnate this living Body of Christ, which offers us the opportunity to participate in a miracle - a new revelation of the Holy Spirit that will draw us together in peace. Please join with me in the Peace Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Thanks be to God, and may Christ be your shalom. Amen.