The Day of Pentecost John B. Valentine
Acts 2:1-12 May 31, 2020

"THE PURPOSE OF PENTECOST"

Let’s be clear here ... folks. It’s Pentecost 2020. It’s the birthday of the Church. (The nineteen-hundred-and-ninetieth birthday of the church to be exact!)

Today was supposed to be a day of celebration.

It was supposed to be a day to celebrate how we can and are being ‘church together’ even though we are apart.

It was supposed to be a day for us marvel at how some of the new ways we’ve discovered to be church for one another in the past ten weeks parallel how the early Christians discovered THEY could be church for one another almost two millennia ago.

It was supposed to be a day for us to have some fun!

Heck ... I even had most of my sermon worked out by the middle of the week ... which isn’t something that happens very often!

But then the news of the week got in the way.

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You see ... you ... you folks who constitute Holy Shepherd Lutheran Church ... YOU have called me to be one of your pastors.

Nearly seventeen years ago now ... you invited me to stand up in front of you at an installation service ... and your charged me ... you commissioned me ... to preach the Gospel in your midst.

To preach the Gospel.

But for me to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to you today ...

I’m going to have to set aside this pile of paper ...

And attend to the pile of paper that is the newspaper.

I’m going to have to set aside this uber-cute and slightly irreverent Pentecost sermon I’d prepared about how you and I are like all the different dogs at the local dog park ....

And speak to you honestly and forthrightly about what happened in Minneapolis earlier this week.

For what has gone down in Minneapolis, Minnesota ... and by extension over the whole of our nation over the course of the past five six days ... DEMANDS we pay attention!

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Now ... in case you’ve been actively avoiding the news in recent days ...

And I do know that some of you HAVE been actively avoiding the news in recent days because you’re sick-and-tired of the nonstop squawking about the Coronavirus ....

Let me recap just briefly.

The facts in the case would appear to be thus:

On the evening of Memorial Day Monday ... six days ago now ... a forty-six-year-old man by the name of George Floyd was confronted by police in southeast Minneapolis ... in conjunction with a report that he had attempted to purchase food at a neighborhood deli using a counterfeit $20 bill.

The team of four officers:

• Ordered Floyd to exit his vehicle ... which he did ...
• Lie down on the ground ... which he did ... and ...
• Submit to handcuffing ... which he did.

Although the details of Floyd’s arrest remain uncertain ... that photograph and video of what happened next is so garish as to defy explanation ...

That picture of the arresting officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck ... and bearing his full body weight down upon him ....

• Pressing down upon him while George Floyd begs for mercy ...
• Pressing down upon him while George Floyd complains he can’t breathe ...
• Pressing down upon him while George Floyd is suffocating ...
• Pressing down upon him while the Breath of Life is literally squeezed from his body.

If you haven’t yet watched that video ...

There’s part of me that wants to say “Don’t” ... because it is horrific and haunting and heinous to its core ...

Then again ....

There’s part of me that wants to say “You must” watch that video ...

• Because it bears witness ... frame after agonizing frame ... to the lived experience of a substantive number of the citizens of this nation which we call ours ...

• Because it bears witness to the fact that there isn't "liberty and justice" for any of us until there is liberty and justice for ALL of us.

• Because it bears witness to the centuries-old lament of those who’ve said they can’t go jogging ... or bird-watching ... or ask for help following a car crash ... or simply relax in the place they call home ... simply because they are black.

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Now I’m not here to beatify George Floyd ... for I didn’t have the privilege of knowing George Floyd ... and anything I might say about him or his character at this point would simply be passing along rumors.

Neither am I here to demonize the law enforcement community ... for I have had the privilege of knowing many law enforcement personnel over the years and I know that ... although each of them ... like me ... is an imperfect individual ... they have poured their life’s energy into ensuring public safety.

Neither am I going to justify the inappropriateness of some people’s reactions to the news of this past week ... even though Martin Luther King Jr. Once rightly pointed out that “In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?”

But you called me to preach ... and “preaching” has to do with speaking divine truth ... God’s truth ... into this world in which we live ...

“Preaching” has to do with ‘afflicting the comfortable’ and ‘comforting the afflicted’ ...

“Preaching” has to do with speaking God’s truth to our lives.

So what I want to do ... for just a couple of minutes is to hold a couple of stories in tension with one another and see what they reveal.

• The first story being that of the murder of George Floyd this past Monday evening ...

• And the second being the story of the Day of Pentecost that we’re supposed to be celebrating here today ...

For ... ironically ... tragically ... the points of connection between those two stories DEMAND our full attention.

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First off ... pay attention to the fact that BOTH of those stories have to do with the WHAT of Pentecost ... for both of them are really stories focused on the Breath of Life.

The first of them is literally about the Breath of Life being pressed out of the body of a man by a uniformed officer of the law ...

The second of them is literally about God breathing the Breath of Life ... that weird “rush of a violent wind” ... into the body that we know as the Body of Christ.

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it ... but the idea of “the Breath of Life” is a BIG deal in the Bible:

At the beginning of Creation ... as poet James Weldon Johnson so poetically paraphrased it ... God Almighty ...

“Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in is his own image;
Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.”

And the climactic scene of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel involves God looking out over that Valley of Dry Bones ... and asking if those bones can live ... and breathing into them anew the Breath of Life.

And at the culmination of his crucifixion ... Matthew, Mark and Luke all report that Jesus “breathed his last” ...

And when John talks about the coming of the Holy Spirit ... he very specifically talks about Jesus breathing life into his disciples.

Point being ... the Breath of Life ... and breathing the breath of life ... is at the very heart of who God is ... and anything ... and anyone ... that steals the breath of life from another ... is at cross-purposes with the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

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The second point of connection that we best not miss between the news of the day and the good news of the day has to do with HOW Pentecost is such a big deal to the people of God.

You see ... Pentecost ... the coming of the Spirit ... was all about making the grace of God accessible to people of every tribe and culture and race and ethnicity and whatever.

The way Luke tells the story ...

When the Spirit rushes in on that Day of Pentecost ... everyone is blown away because these backwater hicks from Galilee are somehow able to communicate the love of God to people from every corner of the world ...

“Parthians, Medes, Elamites” ... Europeans, Asians, Africans ...

EVERYONE gets to hear the story in the native language of each.

Point being ... the Spirit’s coming means that there’s a spirit of inclusivity and welcome in this Kingdom of God thing that transcends EVERY barrier of language and culture and the like.

You see ... in the Kingdom of God:

• It’s not “Everybody who talks like us” ... it’s just “EVERYBODY”.
• It’s not “Everybody who dresses like us” ... it’s just “EVERYBODY”.
• It’s not “Everybody who cooks like us or dances like us or sings like us or shares our particular cultural mores or whatever” ... it’s just “EVERYBODY”.

Point being ... every time our thoughts and/or words and/or deeds EXCLUDE someone else ...

And every time we withhold or conditionalize our acceptance of another ... or put up barriers to their full participation in this society in which we live ...

We’re really just confessing how far OUR hearts are from the Spirit and the Kingdom of God.

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And finally ... it strikes me that there’s this connection between the WHY of the news in the world this week and the WHY of the Good News of today.

You see ... there are three great festivals of the church year ... Christmas ... Easter ... and Pentecost ...

And the theme which holds those three great celebrations together is the extent to which they each reveal the lengths to which God will go to actualize the Kingdom of God.

• At Christmas ... we celebrate how FAR God will go to make the Kingdom happen ...
• At Easter ... we celebrate how LOW God will go to make the Kingdom happen ...
• And at Pentecost ... we celebrate how WIDE God will go to make the Kingdom happen ...

In other words ... the whole of the scope of the salvation story as recorded in Holy Scripture is about inclusion.

For .... at the end of the age ...

When ... as Georg Friedrich Handel once noted ...“the Kingdom of this world becomes the Kingdom of our God” ...

There WILL BE people of every race and language ... or every tribe and nation ... celebrating the goodness of God.

Folks ... I guess the point is this:

We like to say that our society is founded on a “Judeo-Christian ethic ...

We take pride in the fact that our nation’s history has been intertwined with Christianity ...

We even voice hopes that someday the voice of the faithful might play a more prominent place in our community ...

But Pentecost declares ... in no uncertain terms ... that if inclusivity isn’t one of our core values ... if the radical acceptance of all people isn’t part of our agenda ...

Then the Spirit’s whose arrival we celebrate today ... has got a lot of work to do ... ON US!