St. George's Episcopal Church Roseburg, Oregon A Pentecost Sermon With Baptism, 15 May 2005 Go To St. George's Home Page

Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:35b, 104:24-34, 35b
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
John 20:19-23, 37-39
The Collect of the Day
From the Revised Common Lectionary as Adapted for Use by the Episcopal Church
and Authorized by the 74^th General Convention of the ECUSA

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, 'Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.'" Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (John 20:19-23, 37-39)

Unparalyzing the Church
The Rev. Dr. Bill Stroop, Rector

     Pentecost. The end of the fifty days of Easter, and the day many people consider the birthday of this thing we call "church." It is glorious, the last resplendent day in the liturgical calendar before the beginning of the "long green season" that will carry us to next Advent.

     It is a day of strange imagery. We hear the sound of wind in today's reading from Acts to describe the physical presence of the Holy Spirit; "And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting." And from the Gospel: "[Jesus] breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit."

     Another prominent theme of the day is fire. It is a special fire, a holy fire, a fire that appeared to the disciples and lighted upon each one of them. We commemorate that by the use of incense and by wearing fiery colors: reds, oranges, and yellows.

     And then there is this business of the power of the Holy Spirit to give the disciples the ability to speak in languages other than their own. We commemorate the power of the Word of God to spread quickly like wild fire to all nations of the earth by reading some of our lessons in Spanish, Danish, Croatian, French, and Italian.

     All of the imagery associated with Pentecost speaks to the extraordinary thing that happened after Jesus' ascension. Despite persecution and isolation, small groups of Christians devoted to their vision and understanding of Jesus as Messiah and Risen Lord and Savior, grew into larger and larger groups, such that within twelve generations, they had become the sanctioned religion of the Roman Empire.

     And as these early churches looked back on their own histories, they were awestruck by the power present to them through their faith, the grace of God, the memory of Jesus, and the presence of the Holy Spirit.

     And they struggled to find literary ways of expressing their wonderment at the power of God to transform an entire Empire. It's no wonder that we are left with images of tongues of fire resting on the disciples heads. To the early church the feast of Pentecost came to represent when light, power, and joy came to the church. The 19^th century English artist, revivalist, and author Samuel Chadwick wrote of Pentecost that it was a time when the church "experienced illumination of mind, assurance of heart, intensity of love, fullness of power, exuberance of joy. No one needed to ask if they had received the Holy Ghost. Fire is self-evident. So is power!"[1]

     In the 2004, Big Fish, Tim Burton, the director of Edward Scissorhands and Batman weaves a story about Edward Bloom who is dying of cancer, and his son Will who tries to understand who his father really is. Will hasn't spoken to his father for years because he believes him to be a liar that never really cared for his family. We learn that Edward was always a teller of tall-tales about his oversized life as a young man. We learn that Edward was gripped by wanderlust that led him on an unlikely journey from a small-town in Alabama, around the world, and back again. Will heard so many stories about his father's life he was not sure where the truth laid.

     In the film, the son Will recreates his father's elusive life from the few facts he knows. And we begin to learn about Edward ourselves. We see him as a bouncing baby on the day he was born, his involvement in Vietnam, and his job as a traveling salesman and bank robber. We seem him romantically fill an entire street and courtyard with potted jonquils in order to capture the eye of the love of his life. His mythic exploits dart from the delightful to the bizarre as his life unfolds in unbelievable tales involving giants, blizzards, and a witch. One of my favorites was how Edward rescued a pair of conjoined-twin lounge singers in Southeast Asia, and brought them to the United States. We also learn that Edward once caught the biggest fish ever using the only kind of lure one can use to catch a fish that special. One has to use something that represented great love, and we watch as Edward used his own wedding band to lure this giant fish. Through all of these tales, the son begins to understand his father's great feats and his great failings.

     In the end, we are never sure how much of these tales is myth and how much truth, and it doesn't really matter for Will or for us. Because what matters is that through the stories Will comes to appreciate a very important truth. It does not matter if the tales about his father's life are 100% true, 50% true, or complete fabrication. What matters is the profound effect his father's zest for life, the relationships he built, and his accomplishments had on everyone.

     Will's understanding of his father was made so much clearer when he understood that Edward's life could not be distilled into a few lines of an obituary or adequately chronicled by faded newspaper clippings and cracked photographs. His father's life was far more than that. It was mystical, fantastic, charming, and most importantly, it was transforming.

     And so it was for the early church. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was one of those events that identifies who and what we are as Christian people perhaps more by the myth than by the reality. It is something that has the power to transform and change with the gentleness of a light breeze, or with the speed of a tornado. Following Jesus' ascension, something gave the disciples courage to step forward as witnesses, and sufficient wisdom to be heard and understood. It was the "something" that led them to baptize people in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit as a way of demonstrating both the desire of the individual to transform their own lives, and the desire of the community of believers to support them in their new Christian vocation. As the 19^th Century Baptist Preacher A.J. Gordon, put it "Before Pentecost, the disciples found it hard to do the easy things; after Pentecost they found it easy to do the hard things."

     It is so highly appropriate that on this Pentecost Sunday, we will baptize two young adults into the Christian faith and mark them as Christ's own forever.

     Baptism symbolizes a kind of death and a rebirth. We die to our old ways of doing things, and we take on the mantle of Christ promising to proclaim the Good News of Christ by word and example; to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor; to strive for justice and peace; and to respect the dignity of every human being. We use ordinary things like water to symbolically cleanse the body and soul, indicating our desire to radically transform our lives and to live into these promises. We use oil blessed by our Bishop to make the sign of the cross on their foreheads – sealing them as Christ's own, and uniting them to all others living and dead who have joined with Christ in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

     Through our actions at Baptism, we begin the process of creating the mythic for the newly Baptized. As _____ and _____ exercise their Christian vocation in community with other Christians, they will hear fanciful stories from the Bible and other sources, and they will begin to build an understanding of Christ and the Kingdom of God that will be uniquely theirs. And that mythic story – larger and more meaningful than the reality itself – will nourish them and guide them, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

     Joe Klein tells the story of a young man and woman standing on the front porch after their first date. The young man asks the woman, "Can I kiss you?"

     The woman smiles quietly, but says nothing.

     The boy then tries again, this time saying, "I mean, may I kiss you?" But again the woman says nothing.

     Out of exasperation the boy cries out, "Have you gone deaf!?" To which the woman questions in response, "Are you paralyzed?"[2]

     The Pentecost story is a story of the church becoming unparalyzed, of becoming empowered to carry out its purpose. And today we continue that purpose as we baptize _____ and _____ in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.