Pentecost May 27, 2012
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Acts 2:14-21I had one of those rare Sunday mornings a few years ago, when I was on vacation but still here in town. So I decided to indulge my curiosity as to what exactly goes on in our city's mega-church which many of us lovingly refer to as "Six Flags over Jesus." A friend went with me who had no experience around Pentecostal churches and I warned her that it would not be much like the very reserved university Presbyterian Church of her childhood but she wanted to go see it too.
14But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 17'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 19And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 20The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. 21Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'
After nearly an hour of hypnotically repetitious choruses that repeated the same three or four words over and over in a manner that seemed to me to be as tedious as trying to empty the Pacific Ocean with a tea spoon, things got kicked up a notch when a very large woman in a loud print dress began to run up and down the isles dancing and then another woman rose and began speaking in tongues. My friend had never seen either one of these things and was visibly frightened and so I whispered a reassurance that a man would very shortly stand up and give an interpretation of the incomprehensible utterances of the woman speaking in tongues and that, more than likely, he will tell us how angry that God is about women not being obedient to their husbands.
As luck would have it, I called it accurately just seconds before it happened. In churches where women are deeply repressed, they are not allowed to serve on the board, to preach, to teach or have any sort of religious expression, Pentecostal spiritual expressions provide a loop hole in the gender bias. Women can interrupt a male led service to dance and speak to their hearts content but in one of the rare Biblical references to the practice of speaking in tongues, Paul insists that there be an interpretation.
In my handful of experiences in such meetings, which does not rise to the point of being a scientific poll, the interpretations have inevitably been a Divine demand that women stop trying to act like they were equals to their husbands. So you get a little liberation immediately balanced with another spiritual punch in the face. Of course, I can't prove it, but it pleases me to think that the woman who stood up and so ecstatically spoke in tongues, upon hearing the interpretation of what she said as being another misogynistic message from God, is saying to herself, "That's not what I said at all you Jackass,"..... but, of course, I have no way of knowing but then you have no way of proving me wrong, so it is at least a draw.
I am certain that my account of my experience would sound like an insulting caricature in the ears of anyone who has felt a genuine spiritual presence in such meetings. It is not my goal to be insulting but rather to put our scripture reading from the second chapter of Acts into a bit of perspective.
You were not there the morning I witnessed this Pentecostal gathering so it would be hard for you to say with certainty that I am exaggerating my account. But as is clear from the third person narrative Luke records in the early chapters of Acts, he wasn't there for the events he is writing about either.
Luke writes his account of the birth of the church, placing it in the midst of the Jewish festival of Pentecost, a spring harvest festival at which it was expected that men, in particular would celebrate with over indulgence in new wine.... And so, it was not idle speculation when the people in the Jerusalem streets below the gathering in the upper room guessed that the disciples were drunk. And, in fact, Peter's only defense against that allegation was that it was only 9 a.m. and they had hardly had time to get drunk yet.
Still, Luke is taking considerable liberty with the facts in order to construct a theological story of the birth of the church. In every other Biblical account of speaking in tongues, the speech is entirely unintelligible. They call the language of angels and the phenomenon is recorded not only in Pentecost Christian settings but in emotionally charged religious services of several world religions and, interestingly enough, if you pay close attention during the comedy performances of Kat Williams, he will occasionally dance across the stage while briefly speaking in tongues. I'm sure most people in the TV audience miss it but those of Pentecostal background immediately catch the inside joke.
But Luke says that the disciples were not speaking in some angelic incomprehensible language but that they were suddenly speaking all of the languages known to the nations of the world. Luke describes the birth of the church as being a dramatic restoration of all people being able to understand one another.
If you remember the Genesis narrative about the tower of Babel when God destroyed the tower and scattered the people, confusing their language so that they could no longer understand one another....
Luke sees the birth of the church as being the healing; the restoration of the unity that Genesis says existed in the very beginning of human history.
In the first pages of the Bible, we read the accounts of sin, of separation from God and from one another. There is the fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden story, the murder of Abel by his brother Cain and Cain's subsequent banishment. There is the flood and the Tower of Babel....each accounting for estrangement and distance between us and God and between the various tribes of people in the world.
Luke wants to believe that the story of Jesus and the beginning of the church was the other bookend to that story of human history. That now our warfare with God and our divisions between different people can be over and we can all be reunited with one another and with God.
Of course, it didn't happen that way. Even Luke's account goes on to chronicle the divisions between Jewish and Gentile Christians and one way of telling the history of Christianity is by looking at the conflicts and divisions that have left us in thousands of competing and critical pieces.
The writing of the creeds themselves were a way of drawing lines to say, "if you are a Christian you have to believe this and if anyone dares to worship or believe differently then we will have no more to do with you." The church has unwittingly supported racial divisions, even supporting slavery. It has kept women in subservient roles far longer in human history than has been seen in more secular societies. The church has defended child labor, fought against labor unions and recently spent millions upon millions of dollars to deny equal rights to same sex couples.
That is not in any way to deny the wonderful things done in the name of faith by churches throughout the generations but for me, the balance between the good and the bad kept tipping through my 30 years of parish ministry towards an irreconcilable darkness until I left parish life entirely in 2007. My then teen-aged daughter asked me at the dinner table a few months later, "Do you think you will ever go back to church again?"
In that moment, I could not imagine it, though I did try. I visited liberal churches where I was bored out of my mind. I visited traditional churches where both my intellect and my values were insulted. I remember very clearly getting dressed in suit and tie to attend a Christmas Eve service and ended up just lying on my bed weeping because I couldn't think of any place where I could stand to go.
When a handful of us decided that since we could not find a place to go, that we would try to start a church we could actually support, it was done with a lot of decidedly personal motivation. We wanted what we could not find elsewhere and even though we have always committed ourselves to being in service to the poor, we must admit that the first itch we wanted to scratch was our own. We wanted a church where we could go, where we could bring both our intellect and our questions, our faith and our doubts. We wanted to be a part of a community that didn't discriminate against anyone for their sexual orientation, gender, race, or what they believed or didn't believe.
The birth of this church has always been an intention to do what Luke thought the first church would do, to end the division, to quiet the Babel sounds of segregation and discrimination. No more fear of hell. No more judgment. No more blood sacrifice, no neurotic guilt about our bodies or our humanity.
No more forcing ourselves to act like we believe what is clearly irrational.
And from this tiny upper room, our voices are heard in China, in Russia, in Iran and Indonesia, in Canada and Brazil. I think we even have some listeners in Texas and Alabama. And so we have begun to dare to wonder if we have started a church for ourselves where we can organize some service to the homeless poor around us, or are we now part of a movement that is inviting the church alumni association to dare to believe again, to believe that the divisions can be healed, the prejudice and racism can end, the craziness that has been our past experience of church can be over.
We dare now to speak of an emerging church, a church that will rise from the dust and ashes of a dysfunctional, judgmental, superstitious and divided graveyard of denominations. Let love be our only creed. Let radical compassion be our spiritual practice. It is true that a smile means the same thing in every language and it may be that everything past that is really just commentary anyway.
