The Rev. Dr. David A. Van Dyke
The House of Hope Presbyterian Church
Saint Paul, Minnesota

Pentecost Sunday
June 12, 2012                      Acts 2:1–21

Prayer: God of rushing winds and quiet stirrings, God of burning passion and a warm embrace, we give you thanks for the opportunity to gather on this Pentecost Sunday as so many did so long ago. In our coming together from many different places and backgrounds, show us how this ancient story is our story. Then send us out into the world to make your love known to all we meet.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Maybe it’s the Presbyterian in me but I sometimes wonder if Pentecost was an organized event?  Had there been a committee working months in advance to plan it?  We don’t know why all those different people from all those different places and cultures were gathered together that day, but presumably they were not sitting around waiting for something big to happen because when it did, everyone was surprised and amazed by it.

As Presbyterians, spontaneity is not our strong suit. We’re leery of it because control seems better to us.  It’s more thoughtful. Sadly, people who give in to the emotion-of-the- moment tend to make us uncomfortable. We like things more structured and organized. The name of our denomination, after all, comes not from our theology but from our system of government.  We are a branch of Christianity that places a high value on our governance structure and our systems.  We have a Book of Order and it is designed to do just that—to keep order in the church and not to let things get out of order.

But I’ll confess something to you, as long as it doesn’t leave this room, that even though we believe the Spirit works in and through our systems and structures, sometimes it’s hard for me to discern the Spirit’s moving under the weight of it all. Some things in the church can move so slowly.  We have numerous meetings and debate things to death and are sometimes guilty of over-thinking even the simplest things. It seems painful at times.

There’s a story about Charles Dickens attending a meeting of ministers one time.  He said the meeting was so dead, so dull and so boring that after a couple of hours he said to the ministers, “May I make a suggestion? Let’s move over to a table, join hands and sit in silence and see if we can commune with the living.”

As someone who has sat through my fair share of church and denominational meetings that have dragged on and on, I love this story about Pentecost—where the Spirit moves in a powerful way and no one expected it and no one could have stopped it even if they’d tried. It’s so refreshing.

And I love that it happens in a rich, culturally diverse, urban setting.  I think we need to pay attention to that detail in this story.  In fact as a city, Jerusalem was so cosmopolitan that it once prompted the Scottish minister George MacLeod, to say about it that, “When Jesus was crucified they had to write his name in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.”

And so when this thing happens, when the Spirit of God moves, it takes place where there are Parthians and Medes, Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Phrygia and Pamphylia—and some other places not recognized by spell-check.  When it happened, it took place when all those different people were gathered together in one place.

On the one hand it seems remarkable that all those different people would be assembled together in one place until you think about it for a moment, and then you begin to realize that all those people from all those different places speaking all those different languages, is exactly what takes place on any given day at any public library in this country, or hospital or public school or airport—or on just about any street corner in America, for that matter. I mean, who could have imagined even twenty five years ago that the Twin Cities, of all places, would become one of the most diverse places in the country?  Who could have envisioned the day when you’d be able to locate a Hindu temple in Maple Grove, a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Roseville, and an Islamic mosque in Fridley!

Sometimes it’s difficult to make scripture relevant today.  Sometimes it takes a great deal of imagination just to understand its ancient settings.  Given the scene at Pentecost and the incredible sense of religious diversity in our country today, however, I think this Pentecost scene is one of the easier images in all of scripture for us to grasp.

Religious pluralism in this country can be a challenging issue but it’s not a recent phenomenon.  In a biography about Jonathan Edwards that came out a few years ago, the author describes the early struggles of a young man with all the answers living as a devout Puritan in the New World and confronting a growing religious diversity.  The biographer says this,

Edward’s life presents a particularly dramatic and influential instance of a   perennial American story. Countless Americans reared in conservative religious traditions have confronted the troubling issue of how their exclusive faith should relate to a pluralistic modern American environment. That tension has been felt especially among persons in ethno-religious communities—of which English Puritans were one of the first instances—who brought with them Old World ideals concerning the one true religion.

Even today, there are vast numbers of Americans who, although committed to live   at peace with other religious groups, believe it is a matter of eternal life or death to convert members of those groups to their own faith.  Like it or not, such evangelistic religion has been and continues to be a major part of the experiences of many ordinary Americans. Indeed, the tensions between religious exclusivism and pluralism are among the leading unresolved issues shaping the twenty-first century (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, George Marsden, p.8).

Perhaps no one is more in touch with issues of religious pluralism than Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School and head of the school’s Pluralism Project that tracks this country’s growing religious diversity.  Eck, a United Methodist, cautions against tactics of religious conversion, however, and instead argues that followers of America’s traditional religions, Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism, need to open paths of understanding to different cultures and faiths because no longer are Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains living on the other side of the world, they’re living on your street.

She also argues that accepting as legitimate the beliefs of others deepens one’s own faith rather than endangering it or diminishing it, and that increasing one’s understanding doesn’t mean leaving your religion at the door or discarding it, rather it’s about affirming a commitment to live together and to respect one another.

What we now know to be true is that America’s many faiths have never been static and that they will continue to grow and change and breathe in the air of a rapidly changing world.  And furthermore, that any religion or religious expression that isn’t open to breathing in that new air and living peacefully alongside people of other faiths, is destined to wither and perish and fail.

Breathing the air of new times sounds exactly like what happened at that first Pentecost.  The coming of the Spirit is known when new speech is heard for the first time—when people begin to hear things differently than the way they’ve always heard them.  When those who had been strangers are suddenly seen and understood in a new and different light.  When understanding develops as a result of real listening.   But none of that is easy and it doesn’t happen naturally.

Among the ordination vows for all officers in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), is the promise to work for the peace, unity and purity of the Church.  We are at an interesting time in the life of our denomination.  We have recently removed discriminatory language from our constitution and made ordination possible for all those who are called to serve, including gays and lesbians.

This week a small group of us in the more progressive stream of the Church will be meeting with seven Presbyterian ministers who represent the more conservative stream of the Church and who are among the most vocal critics of the recent decision on ordination and who are now the most fearful about the Church’s future. They sent out a widely distributed letter in which they proclaimed the Presbyterian Church to be “deathly ill.”  They are threatening to leave the denomination which they acknowledge is difficult to pull off, or to at least isolate themselves from the rest of us—to retreat into subsets of the “like-minded,” to use another one of their terms.

And I really have a hard time understand where they are coming from.  I’ll be honest, I don’t understand what they think it means to be the church other than they seem to want to focus more on the church’s purity and less on its peace and unity.  I just don’t get it.  But I’m committed to being in conversations like the ones we’ll have this week because I love the church and I believe wholeheartedly that the church is better and healthier and a more accurate reflection of what God has in mind for the church, when it is made up of a broad diversity of people and when it doesn’t settle for doing the easy thing, which would be for us all to go our own way, drifting into camps of the like-minded—of keeping the Parthians with the Parthians and the Medes over there with the other Medes, and the progressive Presbyterians in their corner of the church and the conservative Presbyterians in their corner of the church.

How utterly dull and unhealthy that would be and furthermore, as I listen again to this great Pentecost story, I think that a case can be made that when people are grouped into their natural, comfortable clusters, composed of people just like themselves—communities of the like minded or of the same color or the same socioeconomic background—that when that happens, it is not where you’ll discover the Spirit doing the most exciting, creative, life-giving and nourishing work. And what a shame and what a blight on the church and on society when segregation, division and distinctions are made that result in keeping people apart instead of focusing on those things that will draw us all together.

In a wonderful essay about the church entitled The New Community, Wendell Berry writes,

The unity of the church is not to be found in structures, offices, doctrines, or programs. It is a distinctive unity rooted in new fellowship with God through Christ in the Spirit. The unity of the church is a fragmentary and provisional participation in the costly love of the triune God. Unity in the love of this God cannot possibly mean lifeless uniformity or deadening sameness. The unity of the church is a unity of love that enters into relationship with others and finds identity in relationship. The love of God, and the unity of the church which is grounded in it, is a lavish celebration of the communion of the different.

A communion of the different—I love that!  What a beautiful image and breath of fresh air. And what an altogether Pentecostal image.  It’s who and what we’re called to be as a church.  Diversity doesn’t mean that anything goes as some fear, but neither does unity mean that there is only one true expression of faith, as some claim. God’s grand creation is simply too large, too diverse and too mysterious for anyone to claim with much certainty anything that sounds exclusionary. It’s why someone once said that all good theologians know when to mumble.

God’s good creation is a communion of the different.

People of God, the Spirit who moved then still moves today, speaking a new language—a language larger and more comprehensive than our individual, regional, native and denominational dialects.  The church of Jesus Christ need not be worried about anyone else’s beliefs if we are simply intent on being faithful to our own.

Through the power of the Spirit, if we intentionally set out to live into the reality that we are a communion of the different, if we work to break down walls of segregation and separation, if we welcome all of the strangers with our gates, if we feed the poor and shelter those who need shelter—if we live the way Jesus taught us to live, the rest will take care of itself and God will see to it!

Of that I am both convinced and comforted.

Amen.