Come, Holy Spirit, Come Pentecost Sunday 2007
Sermon for Pentecost Sunday: May 27, 2007
Scripture: Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21
I love Pentecost Sunday. There are so many things I’d like to share with you about this special day in our Judeo-Christian past. I’m going to begin by telling you a couple of stories. Although these stories correspond to our two scripture lessons, much of the detail and style I have taken from Mark Nepo’s book called TheExquisite Risk.[1]
This first story begins a long, long time ago, in the land of Uruk, which is somewhere in present day Iran. In our Hebrew Bible this land is referred to as a city in Sumeria and later called Babylon. In this city there was a tribe of the early human family that devoted themselves to the building of a single tower, a tower taller than any structure ever built. This tribe wanted to create a visible landmark so that anyone losing their way might look for this tower and it would guide them back to their home.
The building of this tower took much longer than anyone imagined. By the time that the third generation was working on the tower, it was so tall that it took a worker almost a year to carry the next brick to the top. The first generation of this tribe was completely devoted to this project; however by the third generation, there was much less interest. We know how that is, how many of our grandchildren are less interested in the projects and places we hold dear. For these grandchildren the work on the tower felt like a chore, like having to build someone else’s dream. One day, so some story tellers say, a worker carrying the next brick fell and the tribe mourned the loss of the brick more than the worker. The tribe became less and less compassionate and more and more greedy as they hurried on to finish the tower, caring more about the tower than the workers. So God confused their tongues. This human family was no longer able to communicate to one another and they were dispersed across the earth, with their many different languages. The Tower, which was never completed, was called the Tower of Babel, a play on the Hebrew word balel, which means confusion or mixing. The city Babylon was named from this tower. Even today, about fifty miles from Baghdad in the Tigris-Euphrates valley one can still see the ruins of the city of Babylon.
So if we wish to think about the lesson from this story, it seems to say that whenever we value the material over the person, we lose the ability to understand each other. Also if we spend our time building a dream that we do not believe in, we lose our joy and become enslaved to the task.
My second story takes place generations later and will soon be quite familiar to many of you. There came to earth, born of a human mother, a spirit, mysterious and powerful, yet very gentle and unconditionally loving. His ways were threatening to the Empire of the time and he was killed; however he had touched many lives very deeply and meaningfully in his short time on earth. His closest followers were heartbroken by their master’s death. At first they wandered among themselves, confused and grieving. Then this man, called Jesus, appeared to them again. What this appearance did to Peter and the others was impossible to explain. It’s one of the things that has always made me believe in the Resurrection: first the disciples were cowering in locked rooms and then they were boldly going about sharing the news of Jesus with others, even at a great risk to their lives.
Not long after, Peter found himself before a crowd of Jews assembled from all over the world at Pentecost. (Pentecost is described in Leviticus as the Feast of Weeks, occurring seven weeks and one day after the Passover. The date was associated with the arrival of the Israelites at Mt Sinai at the time of Exodus, when God gave Moses the Covenant). So around Peter were all of these faithful Jews from many lands. They spoke many different languages, and there were no translators. But Peter was so devoted to telling about the profound experiences that had happened to him from this Jesus, he spoke directly and humbly from his heart. The amazing thing was that everyone there could understand him in their own language. As Mark Nepo says, “The moment we speak from the truth of compassion, we speak the same language always waiting underneath our differences.” This is because we are speaking from the divine center of things, from our own understanding of God, from our authentic selves. This is the miracle and the possibility of Oneness.
So everyday we carry both the possibilities of compassionate oneness and the possibility of separation due to our greed and ego. As Nepo says, “when I am drawn to speak or listen with compassion, holding what is living above all that the living make, things become one. Suddenly I belong again to the one tribe that holds each other at days end…So when we find ourselves speaking a language no one seems to understand or more important, when we can’t seem to understand or feel anyone else, we need to ask, “What brick am I carrying, and has it become too important?” If we are able to put that obstacle down, we can then listen and open our hearts to the human family.
Now I want to share with you a third story about the World Trade Center and the modern day Tower of Babel—the Twin Towers. Under the leadership of Guy Tozzoli, the NY Port Authority wished to build the tallest building ever, an eighth wonder of the world. When the architect Yamasaki proposed a ninety story structure, Tozzoli and his team insisted on 110 stories, even though safety was in question. There were other things, motivated by greed that happened while constructing the Twin Towers; for example, to insure the most space for rent per floor, the stairwells, which usually drape the perimeters of each floor, were stacked at the core of the building, and were walled with sheetrock instead of brick—which when attacked on 9/11 burst into flame, trapping many people as the buildings collapsed. In an article in the NY Times magazine section in September of 2002, the head engineer admitted his great remorse that mistakes had been made that may have cost thousands of lives. [2] None of this takes away the responsibility of the terrorists for doing this horrible thing; however, as Nepo says, “this story reveals the greed and ego that made the Twin Towers ripe for disaster: the economic greed that prized rental space over safety, the relentless greed for greatness that insisted that these buildings be taller than any other,” and so forth.
In our Acts Scripture, before Peter addresses the diverse crowd, we are told that “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” (2:2-4a). Some of you may remember that the Greek and Hebrew words for breath, wind and Spirit are the same: pneuma in Greek and ruah in Hebrew. If we listen for the Holy Spirit, we too can speak so that others may hear. One of the important things for us to listen for is understanding and the recognition of when we are valuing the brick over the person and when the dream we are building is not our own—when the life we are living is to please someone else, not our selves. As a church family, I pray that we will help each other to build our individual dreams as well as the dream that God has for our church. Pentecost is seen as the birthday of the church, the Holy Spirit blew into the hearts of those present that day, introducing a new way of living among all different kinds of people in different places, with different cultures, backgrounds, languages and experiences, different races, and different sexual orientations. Filled with the Holy Spirit, we can create the Beloved Community.
Let us pray: Blessed God, help us to listen to you and accept your guidance for our church, a church built on love, peace, justice for all, remembering that we have been commissioned to bring the Good News of Jesus to all nations, remembering that you are with us always even unto the end of the age. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] From the chapter called “The Loss of One Brick”, pp 154 to 159.
[2] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, “The Height of Ambition”.
Scripture: Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21
I love Pentecost Sunday. There are so many things I’d like to share with you about this special day in our Judeo-Christian past. I’m going to begin by telling you a couple of stories. Although these stories correspond to our two scripture lessons, much of the detail and style I have taken from Mark Nepo’s book called TheExquisite Risk.[1]
This first story begins a long, long time ago, in the land of Uruk, which is somewhere in present day Iran. In our Hebrew Bible this land is referred to as a city in Sumeria and later called Babylon. In this city there was a tribe of the early human family that devoted themselves to the building of a single tower, a tower taller than any structure ever built. This tribe wanted to create a visible landmark so that anyone losing their way might look for this tower and it would guide them back to their home.
The building of this tower took much longer than anyone imagined. By the time that the third generation was working on the tower, it was so tall that it took a worker almost a year to carry the next brick to the top. The first generation of this tribe was completely devoted to this project; however by the third generation, there was much less interest. We know how that is, how many of our grandchildren are less interested in the projects and places we hold dear. For these grandchildren the work on the tower felt like a chore, like having to build someone else’s dream. One day, so some story tellers say, a worker carrying the next brick fell and the tribe mourned the loss of the brick more than the worker. The tribe became less and less compassionate and more and more greedy as they hurried on to finish the tower, caring more about the tower than the workers. So God confused their tongues. This human family was no longer able to communicate to one another and they were dispersed across the earth, with their many different languages. The Tower, which was never completed, was called the Tower of Babel, a play on the Hebrew word balel, which means confusion or mixing. The city Babylon was named from this tower. Even today, about fifty miles from Baghdad in the Tigris-Euphrates valley one can still see the ruins of the city of Babylon.
So if we wish to think about the lesson from this story, it seems to say that whenever we value the material over the person, we lose the ability to understand each other. Also if we spend our time building a dream that we do not believe in, we lose our joy and become enslaved to the task.
My second story takes place generations later and will soon be quite familiar to many of you. There came to earth, born of a human mother, a spirit, mysterious and powerful, yet very gentle and unconditionally loving. His ways were threatening to the Empire of the time and he was killed; however he had touched many lives very deeply and meaningfully in his short time on earth. His closest followers were heartbroken by their master’s death. At first they wandered among themselves, confused and grieving. Then this man, called Jesus, appeared to them again. What this appearance did to Peter and the others was impossible to explain. It’s one of the things that has always made me believe in the Resurrection: first the disciples were cowering in locked rooms and then they were boldly going about sharing the news of Jesus with others, even at a great risk to their lives.
Not long after, Peter found himself before a crowd of Jews assembled from all over the world at Pentecost. (Pentecost is described in Leviticus as the Feast of Weeks, occurring seven weeks and one day after the Passover. The date was associated with the arrival of the Israelites at Mt Sinai at the time of Exodus, when God gave Moses the Covenant). So around Peter were all of these faithful Jews from many lands. They spoke many different languages, and there were no translators. But Peter was so devoted to telling about the profound experiences that had happened to him from this Jesus, he spoke directly and humbly from his heart. The amazing thing was that everyone there could understand him in their own language. As Mark Nepo says, “The moment we speak from the truth of compassion, we speak the same language always waiting underneath our differences.” This is because we are speaking from the divine center of things, from our own understanding of God, from our authentic selves. This is the miracle and the possibility of Oneness.
So everyday we carry both the possibilities of compassionate oneness and the possibility of separation due to our greed and ego. As Nepo says, “when I am drawn to speak or listen with compassion, holding what is living above all that the living make, things become one. Suddenly I belong again to the one tribe that holds each other at days end…So when we find ourselves speaking a language no one seems to understand or more important, when we can’t seem to understand or feel anyone else, we need to ask, “What brick am I carrying, and has it become too important?” If we are able to put that obstacle down, we can then listen and open our hearts to the human family.
Now I want to share with you a third story about the World Trade Center and the modern day Tower of Babel—the Twin Towers. Under the leadership of Guy Tozzoli, the NY Port Authority wished to build the tallest building ever, an eighth wonder of the world. When the architect Yamasaki proposed a ninety story structure, Tozzoli and his team insisted on 110 stories, even though safety was in question. There were other things, motivated by greed that happened while constructing the Twin Towers; for example, to insure the most space for rent per floor, the stairwells, which usually drape the perimeters of each floor, were stacked at the core of the building, and were walled with sheetrock instead of brick—which when attacked on 9/11 burst into flame, trapping many people as the buildings collapsed. In an article in the NY Times magazine section in September of 2002, the head engineer admitted his great remorse that mistakes had been made that may have cost thousands of lives. [2] None of this takes away the responsibility of the terrorists for doing this horrible thing; however, as Nepo says, “this story reveals the greed and ego that made the Twin Towers ripe for disaster: the economic greed that prized rental space over safety, the relentless greed for greatness that insisted that these buildings be taller than any other,” and so forth.
In our Acts Scripture, before Peter addresses the diverse crowd, we are told that “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” (2:2-4a). Some of you may remember that the Greek and Hebrew words for breath, wind and Spirit are the same: pneuma in Greek and ruah in Hebrew. If we listen for the Holy Spirit, we too can speak so that others may hear. One of the important things for us to listen for is understanding and the recognition of when we are valuing the brick over the person and when the dream we are building is not our own—when the life we are living is to please someone else, not our selves. As a church family, I pray that we will help each other to build our individual dreams as well as the dream that God has for our church. Pentecost is seen as the birthday of the church, the Holy Spirit blew into the hearts of those present that day, introducing a new way of living among all different kinds of people in different places, with different cultures, backgrounds, languages and experiences, different races, and different sexual orientations. Filled with the Holy Spirit, we can create the Beloved Community.
Let us pray: Blessed God, help us to listen to you and accept your guidance for our church, a church built on love, peace, justice for all, remembering that we have been commissioned to bring the Good News of Jesus to all nations, remembering that you are with us always even unto the end of the age. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] From the chapter called “The Loss of One Brick”, pp 154 to 159.
[2] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, “The Height of Ambition”.
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