Pentecost in the Christian calendar is often understood as the birthday of the Church. It is that, of course, but it is more than that—at least more than the marking of an institution's founding. It is an occasion to recall and reflect about the fulfillment of a promise Jesus made to his followers: that the Spirit of the living God would come within and among them. Pentecost, the third of the Church's major festivals, celebrates the same reality that Christmas and Easter celebrate: life has meaning because it is rooted in a reality whose nature is unconditional love.
The Christian Church did not begin when some men and woman came together and said, "Let's become an organization, with rules and procedures, with programs, budgets, and buildings." According to the Book of Acts, the Christian Church began when something like a wind swept over people who had been with Jesus, so that they began talking about what God had done through Jesus and what God was continuing to do through them. The first thing the Church did was talk about God—not in a way that inspired fear and guilt, but in a way that led to hope and inner peace, in a way that led to repentance. Ah, that word again. Repentance means to change one's mind, to change one's priorities, to live in a new direction. It's a good word that has got a bad reputation.
The Greek word for spirit, as you know, is the word also for wind or breath: pneuma. Think of a pneumatic drill, which is a tool powered by compressed air. Spirit equals wind or breath. When the wind blew through the place where the followers of Jesus were gathered, they understood it as the spirit or breath of God filling them and surrounding them. In the Book of Acts what happened at Pentecost happened repeatedly afterwards. Luke says that on several occasions people "received the Holy Spirit" or that "the Holy Spirit fell on" people. According to the Book of Acts, it is the Holy Spirit that constitutes the Church and gives it what it needs to do its work.
If we believe that, and I hope we do, we can say that what makes a church vital is not so much its liturgy no matter how exalted it may be, not so much its music no matter how excellent it may be, not so much its preaching no matter how engaging it may be, not its buildings no matter how imposing they may be. What makes a church authentic, according to the Book of Acts, is the presence of God's living Spirit in and among its people.
What are the manifestations of that? What does a church look like when it is energized by the Holy Spirit, or by the Spirit of the living God, as we sang earlier in our service? The Apostle Paul gives us some help in one of his letters when he says that the products of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That's quite a list. It could be the basis of a sermon series, or a theme for a month of Bible study if people would do Bible study in our busy world.
I would add to Paul's list, as an heir of the Protestant Reformation, openness to change. The truth we are privileged to know and share doesn't change: a loving God sustains and energizes anyone open to the reality of God's presence. God's presence is trustworthy in life and in death. Our message doesn't change, but the world to which we tell it changes all the time. What worked for the church ten years ago, or ten weeks ago, may not work today or tomorrow. The spirit of the living God blows in and around us and asks us to be open to change.
What about you? What about me? Has the reality of God's love brought about any change in our thinking, in our approach to life? (That word repentance again) Has the Spirit made a difference in and among us?
This past Thursday there was an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times. It was written by a medical doctor in Boston who had just visited an eighty-eight year old woman who moved into a nursing home a month ago. She was used to an active, independent life, but she had begun to have problems with balance, falling twice in one week. She checked out some facilities where she would be safe and moved into the one she liked best. The problem was she had to settle for a small hospital-like room with a stranger for a roommate. She had to conform to an institution's schedule in order to gain a measure of physical safety.
Two sentences in the article grabbed my attention. "The number one problem I see is that people believe what we have in old age is as good as we can expect. As a result, families don't press nursing homes with hard questions like 'How do you plan to change in the next year?'" That's a question we should address to most organizations, especially to churches. "How do you plan to change in the next year?" Maybe we've come to accept that who and what we have been as church in the past is as good as we can expect. I don't want to settle for that.
Last Sunday I walked our young people down the aisle to point out the doors from the street into our sanctuary. They are a welcome change from the solid wooden doors most churches have—solid doors that hardly convey a message of hospitality. The church I served for twenty-seven years in Ewing, New Jersey, had solid wooden doors, painted bright red. In a sermon I preached there I mentioned my hope that some day we would have more welcoming doors, doors with lots of glass in them so that people could see into the church and church people could see out into the community.
A couple of years before the advent of life-sustaining pharmaceutical cocktails, one of our members who had had a long struggle with AIDS told me that if there were any memorial funds after his death, he wanted them to go for new church doors with lots of glass in them. When Steve died, there were such funds, and his partner John added to them. The doors were dedicated on a bright September Sunday morning in the nineteen-nineties.
The journey leading up to the new doors was an interesting one. When the Hyacinth Foundation asked the congregation to host Sunday evening dinners for AIDS patients and their partners or family members, there was little resistance. When an usher fainted at a July wedding so that you could hear his head hitting the base of the lectern, there was little resistance to air-conditioning the church. When the nominating committee presented the names of openly gay or lesbian people to serve as elders or deacons, no problem. A contemporary version of the Lord's Prayer? No big deal.
But doing away with the red doors at the entrance to the church? People wept. A church historian, Ewing's version of Vera Roberts, discovered that the doors had been red for only about thirty years, but they were the only doors most members had ever known. After months of discussion, the session of fifteen members voted by secret ballot to approve the new wood-and-glass doors with only a couple of negative votes. No one left the church or withheld contributions. But it was a lesson to many of us about how unpredictable people, including church people, can be when it comes to change.
At Pentecost the Spirit of the living God swept over people who found meaning in Jesus of Nazareth, and it has been sweeping over the same kind of people ever since. It has deepened people's experience of God's unconditional love. It has inspired people to talk about their faith journeys, and it has opened people's eyes to see needs to be met and injustices to be corrected. It has changed the direction of people's lives and reordered their priorities. Self-absorption and sharp-tongued criticism have been replaced with love for others as well as for self and an awareness of careful listening as a part of respectful communication.
The presence of the Holy Spirit in a church is a gift from God. It cannot be commanded, only invited. To invite the Holy Spirit, to pray for its power in a church, is to admit our need of it, our imperfect humanity. It is to be open to new ways of sharing our good news and new ways of reaching out to the world around us.
When we pray, "Come, Holy Spirit," we are playing with fire, fire that burns away whatever keeps us from life in all its fullness, fire that warms our hearts and energizes us for the great adventure life can be when we entrust ourselves and those we love to God. In life and in death we belong to God, and nothing in life or in death can separate us from God's affirming, inclusive, unconditional love.