May 19, 2024
Pentecost, Year B
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Acts 2:1-21
You might not have noticed, but in that reading from Acts Peter preaches a sermon based on a reading from the prophet Joel, who wrote maybe four or five hundred years before Peter came along. So here I am, preaching on something from Acts, written a few thousand years ago, and I’ll quote Peter who reached back a few hundred years to quote Joel who himself reached back two or three hundred years to mess around with the words of two other prophets named Micah and Isaiah. And we all keep reaching back to tell a story about a God who keeps looking forward and making promises about what is yet to come.
Two observations, then. The first is that what we’re doing here is part of a long, long, long history that stretches way, way back, and that will just keep rolling right along. The second is that, well…with Paul, Peter, Joel, Isaiah, Micah…there sure are a lot of guys – you know, men - doing all the talking through that long, long, long history.
I know a woman who grew up decades and decades before our church decided, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, to ordain women. She hadn’t necessarily wanted to be a pastor herself, but she always felt uneasy as she looked around and saw men in all the positions of power: The pastor, the council chair, the whole council. Some of you might remember what it was like. Every year, on Pentecost Sunday, she would hear what we heard Peter preach from the prophet Joel today: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will our out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”
What a wonder. That’s what she always thought. What a wonder – that God will pour out the Spirit on daughters and even women who are slaves, and they will prophesy, speak God’s word, just like the men. What a wonder.
And over the years as she grew, there were all kinds of women who had dreams and visions of how women could preach, and some men heard and saw the dreams and visions too, and soon the whole church was taken hold of by dreams and visions. And this young woman, now much older, saw and heard how God’s spirit could always make something new.
It’s the eighth Sunday of Easter, Pentecost Sunday as we call it, and we hear of a God who does new things, and of the risen Jesus whose new life is a new thing, and of the Holy Spirit who stirs up even the young and slaves, even women and girls, to speak the word that God would have them speak. We hear of a God who does new things and works with us in ways we couldn’t discover for ourselves.
Let’s switch gears for a minute, for a little word about Pentecost. The word Pentecost itself just comes from the Greek word for fifty, and it refers to the fiftieth day after Easter Sunday. Seven weeks, forty-nine days plus one, when we celebrate the giving of the Holy Spirit. That’s today – it’s the fiftieth day since we celebrated Christ’s resurrection.
The disciples were gathered that day for the feast of Pentecost as well, but it wasn’t Pentecost like we know it, and it wasn’t invented on that day. They were gathered in Jerusalem for a Jewish festival called the Feast of Weeks, which had also come to be known as Pentecost. It’s a harvest festival that celebrates the first of the wheat harvest. It takes place fifty days after the Passover, which in turn celebrates how God did a new thing by setting the people of Israel free from slavery and making them a new people. So the festival of Pentecost celebrated the wheat harvest, that annual miracle of crops growing and the earth giving food once again. It also tied back to that Passover miracle of God’s people being set free from slavery, just like we still recall today how Christ was set free from the slavery of the grave. And now a band of Jesus’ followers have gathered for that feast, and God does another new thing. It doesn’t replace those other new things God did, but it’s a new new thing – the Spirit is poured out on the disciples, and Peter preaches a sermon on the prophet Joel, who talks about God pouring out the Spirit and giving dreams and visions to the young and old, to daughters and sons, to women and men enslaved, and they will speak God’s word in a fresh way for a new day.
When my friend heard about God’s Spirit being poured out on daughters and on women, it was all so new to her. But it was an old old word from an old old story that keeps on insisting that God is doing a new new thing.
Sons and daughters will speak a new word. Young and old, women and men who are slaves, will have dreams and visions, and they will speak God’s new word for a world that needs a new word.
And don’t we need something new? I will resist the urge to make a list, because each one of you could probably make your own list of what’s going on in the world, in the nation, in the church, all around, or in your own lives that no one has figured out how to fix yet. Take a quiet moment, even close your eyes, to see what’s on the list…
And now hear this again: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”
In those days that are still to come, God will give dreams and visions, even when we don’t know where to go. We won’t be left on our own. God will give dreams and visions to someone, even if some of us can only see blood and fire and smoky mist, as Peter quoted Joel in that old, old story. In those days when we still can’t see any clear way through what is breaking and dividing the world or our own lives, a promise is spoken that the Spirit of the risen Christ will give dreams and visions that show a way forward, and show us a new day where all will be made new.
Because God will never stop doing a new thing. Christ is risen, to open up all the graves. Christ is risen and the Spirit he sends will give dreams and visions when the world most needs to hear something new and learn to see clearly again.
Dreams and visions and the ones who see them and speak them are out there. It’s a promise.
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. A few years ago Jesus called two, then four, and then there were twelve, and now on that first Pentecost they are together, and there are more, and the Spirit has brought them together into a community. Even that is an old story, because Jesus was part of a Jewish community and an ancient tradition, called together by the God who breathed life into all. When the day of Pentecost came around this morning, we disciples gathered together in this place. And we’re together, so while we wait for dreams and visions or try to make sense of our own, it’s not just me, or just you. The Spirit makes a community of us, so we never need to make our way through the smoky mist alone. We don’t need to wait for the vision alone.
They gathered and they were not alone. And while they were together they started to speak all the languages of the ones around them who also just needed to hear something new; who needed dreams and visions. The real miracle is not that they suddenly spoke languages they never knew. That miracle won’t happen to us either, and unless you’re lucky enough to be born into two or three languages or more, any of us who want to learn to speak another language are just going to have to do the hard work of learning the vocabulary and all those pesky verbs.
The real miracle of Pentecost is the understanding. Parthians and Medes and Elamites and Mesopotamians, Phrygians and Pamphylians, Lutherans and Anglicans….speak and listen and understand. Maybe they don’t even always agree, but they understand. It all holds out a larger promise of what God’s spirit will do in the world: a promise that dreams and visions will be given and that Israelis and Palestinians and management and labour and liberals and conseratives and Drake and Kendrick and - you know all the ways that we need to learn to listen and understand people we just won’t hear – this promise of Pentecost is that the Spirit that is poured out on us is the Spirit who draws together those who were kept apart; this Spirit poured out on us it the Spirit who shows us how to listen to those we would not hear.
That’s the Spirit who is given today: The same Holy Spirit who opened the eyes of a young woman long ago so she could see a dream and a vision of dreams and visions given to daughters and sons. It’s the same Spirit given to us by the risen Christ, the same Spirit who speaks the way of the one who rose up out of a tomb, and walked through the smoky mist, and brought new life that we will all see.