“They warn’t scairt no more”
A sermon for Pentecost Sunday
Lanny Peters, Oakhurst Baptist Church
May 30, 2004
Acts 2: 1-18
As Jesus had instructed when he left them after the ascension, the disciples waited in Jerusalem for the promise of God to be fulfilled. Despite having experienced the resurrected Christ they were still scared and hiding. While waiting, they devoted themselves to prayer. It was now 50 days since Passover and it was the Jewish custom to celebrate two things at this time, the first fruits of the harvest and the giving of the Law. Jews would gather in Jerusalem to participate in an agricultural and religious festival. On the streets were travelers from all over; many different nationalities and languages could be seen in the market places and the Temple.
The disciples were behind closed doors but the Holy Spirit found them. The Spirit came with wind and fire to signify that something was happening full of mystery and awe. Hearing all the sounds and excitement, a large crowd gathered and the people were bewildered, because each could understand what was going on.
The miracle of Pentecost was not just the wind and the fire; it was this sense of unity that God had created between people from many lands and many tongues. This was why everyone was amazed and astonished. On that day when the church was born, it was created to unite people across the many barriers that divide them. It was a sign that God speaks all our languages. At Pentecost, the Spirit speaks to everyone in his or her own tongue and, at the same time, transcends all these languages signifying that God will not be contained by any one culture.
Last Sunday, our church hosted the Decatur High School Baccalaureate Service. Instead of a traditional address, three of us shared the time. The others were Rabbi Joshua Lesser of Congregation Bet Haverim and Tayyibah Taylor, who founded and publishes a magazine for contemporary Muslim women (Azizah), and who spoke at Oakhurst on a Wednesday evening last year. I shared with the seniors how the three of us and a larger group of Muslims, Jews, and Christians became friends on an interfaith trip to Turkey two years ago. Tayyibah shared words of wisdom from her Islamic tradition and Joshua adapted a Jewish blessing for the graduates. As important as our words was the model of our friendships.
Describing this, I said, “What is much needed in our world is people who are willing to reach out across the barriers of class and ethnicity and national boundaries and our own narrow ideas about God.” Tayyibah put it this way: “Know that every human being you meet is, like you, a soul on the spiritual journey back to God. Learn to look at people as souls, not as a function of their gender, or age, or ethnicity or religious tradition or social statue, but as another human soul on this Earth Walk at the same time and space as you, returning back to God. People, no matter how different they appear are of one essence. The differences are created by God to allow us to know each other, to know ourselves and to know God.”
Peter, who in fear had abandoned Jesus after his arrest, and ran for his life, now stepped forward. Amazed and perplexed, the crowd was asking one another, “What does this mean?” Others just sneered and said, “They are filled with cheap wine.” Peter answered boldly, “Listen to what I say. Indeed these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” (Later in the day, maybe, but not at nine o’clock the morning.) “No,” Peter said, “this is a fulfillment of what was spoken through the prophet Joel, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will 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.”
What a radical thing to say! Everyone knew that only the prophets, those rare charismatics, dared spoke on behalf of God. Peter declared that a brand new day was here when young and old, women and men, even slaves, all get to be prophets. All the differences that tear our world apart are broken down at Pentecost.
This just may be the most important Sunday of the year, and the most overlooked, probably because our culture has not yet found away to commercialize it. Many people who are not all that interested in church still feel a tug and show up on Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday, but I doubt anyone woke up and said, “Hey, it’s Pentecost, I need to go back to church today.” (After the service, I was proved wrong as two people who had not been around in a while came because it was Pentecost!)
In the novel Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns, there is a scene where a character makes a case that Pentecost is as important, if not more so, than Christmas or Easter. The narrator is a boy named Will Tweedy who recalls a conversation with his grandfather. Grandpa, who runs the local general store, has created a scandal in their small southern town by marrying Miss Love, an independent lady who had moved to Cold Sassy Tree from up north. The problem is that he had only been widowed three weeks. It turned out to be a marriage of convenience and companionship, Grandpa offering to leave her his house when he died if she would cook and keep house and offer companionship.
When folks found out that they had separate bedrooms, Will observed: “It was a strange thing to me that the same people who condemned her on her wedding day for taking advantage of an old man’s loneliness would be condemning her now, just ten days later, for denying Grandpa his rights.” (p. 184)
“We held church up at the house this mornin’.”
“Sir?”
I was the preacher, Miss Love was the pi-ana player, and the both of us made up the congregation. Hit was a real nice service.” He enjoyed seeing I was confused. “Wish you’d a-been there, son. We sang us some hymns, after which I talked to the Lord a while, tellin’ Him about the week, and I then preached a sermon. Tell you the truth, I think I upset Miss Love.”
“Sir?”
“I didn’t have no words thought out, you know, so I jest commenced sayin’ things I been a-thinking on lately—bout the Virgin Birth and Resurrection and all like thet. Well, Miss Love like to had a fit. Said she warn’t raised to thin like thet. I said I warn’t neither, but thet didn’t keep me from thinkin’, and I ast her do the Methodists interrupt and argue with the preacher or do they sit and listen to what he’s got to say.”
“Gosh, Grandpa. You mean you don’t think Jesus rose from the dead?”
“I’m a-sayin’ thet did He or didn’t He ain’t important, son. What’s important is thet when the spirit of a-Jesus Christ come down on them disciples later, they quit settin’ around a-moaning and a-tremblin’, and got to work. They warn’t scairt no more, and the words they spoke had fire in’m. Compared to a miracle like that, Jesus rollin’ back a dang rock and flyin’ off to Heaven ain’t nothin’.”
“What did Miss Love say to that, Grandpa?” I was real excited.
“Nothin’. I didn’t let her interrupt me agin. I said that same miracle is still a-happenin’ right here in Cold Sassy, in July of nineteen aught-six. A crippled person or an invalid, or the meanest thief or the most despairin’ misfit, why, if’n he can ketch aholt of the spirit of Jesus Christ, he can quit bein’ scart and be like risin’ up from the dead. Once his soul gets cured, no matter what his body’s like, he can start a new life.” (Pp. 187-88)
Grandpa goes on to “preach” about the Virgin Birth and Eternal Life and answers a question from Will about prayer, all worth reading. I don’t agree with all that Grandpa says, but he comes out of that tradition that a lot of you experienced; once you’ve been shunned or kicked out of the church, at least you can start thinking for yourself!
It may not be more important then the resurrection, but it may well be as important. For when the spirit came, the disciples finally overcame their fear and begin showing everyone what the love of Christ was all about. If the disciples had not overcome their fear of death, of failure, of living fully, the church would not have been born. If they had not been open to God’s Sprit individually and collectively, Christ’s vision might not have lived on. Now they could go forth and live out the love they had experienced through the earthly and the risen Christ, embodying the ministry that Jesus had begun.
As we recently observed the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in “Brown versus the Board of Education,” there were reminders of the people who embodied God’s spirit during the civil rights struggle. Many of them were unsung heroes, like Barbara Rose Johns, a sixteen-year-old-honor student who led a strike at her all-black high school in Farmville, Virginia in 1951. “Designed for 180students, R.R. Moton High School crammed 450 children in a ramshackle building and three tar-paper shacks with leaky roofs. The school had no running water or indoor plumbing and only two bathrooms. The student strike at Moton drew the attention of the NAACP legal team, and Davis vs. County School Board of Prince Edward (Va.) became one of the four desegregation cases folded into Brown.
Barbara Rose Johns, who went on to attend Spelman College here in Atlanta, died in 1991. Asked once why she risked her life, she said, ‘We wanted so much and had so little. We had talents and abilities here that weren’t really being realized, and I thought that was a tragic shame, and that’s basically what motivated me to want to make some change take place here. There wasn’t any fear, I just decided, ‘This is your moment. Seize it.’ ” “Brown v. Board’s goals unrealized.” Atlanta Journal Constitution. Editorial, May 16,2004.
Such moments are Pentecost moments. They are not limited to the church or even those of our faith. I am thinking of Irshad Manjii, the author of “The Trouble With Islam, A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Own Faith. At great risk, she is calling Muslims to their tradition Ijitihad, or independent thinking. Even as her family in Canada is concerned about her safety and security, she says thing like this: “I refuse to join an army of robots in the name of God. Anybody’s God, including my own.
This really gets to what I consider to the trouble with Islam today….Most of us Muslims are complacent and passive in the face of the terrorists that is being committed in the name of our God. It is not enough to assume that non-Muslims know that Islam mean peace and Islam means love. The question is what are we doing to prove it? Are we looking extremist in the eye and saying, ‘I’m a Muslim and I disagree with your perspective.’” Interview in The Atlanta Journal Constitution April 14, 2004.
That is the kind of courage that we need in our time. We are so driven by fear. It is fear that guides the attempt to ban committed and loving gay couples from marriage and other rights that heterosexual couples enjoy. One of our graduating seniors, Dominick Reuter, showed courage addressing this in an editorial in his school paper: “I am straight, so a ban on gay marriage wouldn’t put a barrier between me and someone I love. But a state ban on gay marriage would destroy the rights of some of the most important people in my life, not to mention belittle their human status….This belligerence masked as piety is something I am sure Jesus would have condemned.” The Southerner, Grady High School, March 5, 2004.)
It was fear that led so many people to support our country’s misguided war in Iraq. We attacked a country that posed no real threat to our own, certainly less of a threat than Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or North Korea then or now. We ignored the United Nations, world opinion, international law, and the Geneva Conventions, and have suffered the consequences. Out of the mess we are now in, there is still hope that we can create a democracy in Iraq but we are admitting we cannot do it without the help of the United Nations and countries we belittled for not going along with our actions.
Now more than ever, we need people of faith who are motivated by God’s love and not fear. What if every mosque was a peace mosque; and every synagogue a peace synagogue; and every church a peace church? I would say that would be Pentecost for our time.
Here at Oakhurst, we want to be motivated by love and not fear. We want to open ourselves to God’s spirit in a way that outside will be asking, “What is going on in there?” And we want to be able to show them a Pentecost church, where “we reject any status in terms of church office, possessions, education, race, age, gender, sexual orientation, mental ability, physical ability, or other distinctions.” (from our church covenant.)
A Pentecost church where we “can quit bein’ scairt and be like rising up from the dead.”
That great Southern prophet, Clarence Jordan, summed it up when he said: “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full heart of his transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship; not a rolled away stone, but a carried away church.”