“Pentecost as Missional Renaissance”

The Reverend Tom Steffen
23 May 2010

Readings: John 14:8-17

Acts 2:1-21

I suspect you have heard the phrase “broken English?” It may be that moving to the US for our British friends felt like moving to a country whose official language is “broken English.” I recently read a story about Jesse Caldwell, a North Carolina judge, who tells of a Vietnamese woman who was waiting her turn to be examined in a crowded hospital emergency room. She gradually became aware of a broken and frustrating exchange taking place a few seats down. A nurse was trying to ask a new patient for some details on her illness. The patient spoke Spanish. The nurse did not.

The Vietnamese woman listened for a minute then realized that while she didn’t speak Spanish she did understand the broken-English bits and phrases the Spanish-speaking woman offered as answers. Because of her own experience of learning to communicate, the Vietnamese woman could hear the heart and gist of what this other woman was trying to say. So she offered to “translate” the broken English of the Spanish-speaker into something the nurse could understand. And it worked. Believe it or not, she was so successful at bridging the brokenness of their languages that eventually the Vietnamese woman was hired by the hospital as a kind of generic translator.

Now, on any other Sunday, this would sound like a modern day version of the Good Samaritan story, you know the one that Jesus told about when a religious and social “alien” ends up doing the work of the orthodox and well-established guy on the way to church. But on Pentecost Sunday, we hear it as something new and dramatic, strange and yet familiar. Pentecost is wind and fire and glory that translate into passionate propulsion for true missional renaissance. And Pentecost is our “mother tongue.”

It was true for the earliest followers of the Christ. It was true for John Wesley and the early Methodists that swept through 18^th century England. And it was true for our charter members who were propelled to bring the good news of Christ to the Crossroads of Bellevue. It is true for us today. The first disciples were instructed to go back to Jerusalem and wait until the Spirit would lead them. Their spirituality – like ours – was to be rooted in the ordinary and rather mundane. And in time, they were told to look “down and around,” not up and out, in order to discover the light and the languages and the reason they need to walk and listen and talk while on the earth. Why? Because light and languages and listening skills will not be found in the heavens above, but rather in the life circumstances of ordinary people.

This is the warning of nearly every episode of the life of Jesus: it is possible to miss God, to misunderstand God’s purposes, unless we are willing to see God in a lowly stable or in the crowded streets or on the borders, on the margins, or at the Crossroads, and God only knows what other unlikely places. One of the characters in the play Inherit the Wind, put it this way: “He got lost, he simply got lost. He was looking for God too high up and too far away.”

Oh, it is a strong temptation, this temptation to look up for the Christ to descend back to lead a big Gospel sing and call for a carry-in. But we must resist this temptation. And we can.

The earliest disciples found the strength to resist it. Once they were gathered and told to wait, but then they were scattered. At first they felt left behind, but in time they felt they had been set loose to take the message of Jesus throughout Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and beyond to the complicated and diverse crossroads of cultures and languages and religions and races. It started with a local event, witnessed by a handful of people, but it turned into an international movement, a movement that blurred the categories race, religion and language. The wind and fire and glory of God call them to reveal good news that transcends our neat and ordered categories, transcends even our brokenness.

Leonard Sweet, a United Methodist pastor, author and former seminary president:
“The Holy Spirit speaks through broken people to a broken world, using language every broken heart can hear and understand. Because we know what it is like to be broken by despair, we can speak of the healing hope of Christ’s forgiveness. Because we know what it is like to be broken by doubt, we can speak of the healing faith in Christ’s promises. Because we know what it is like to be broken by illness, we can speak of the healing wholeness of Christ’s resurrection. Because we know what it is like to break down doing church — program church, purpose-driven church, seeker-sensitive church, organic church, missional church, NCD church, simple church, we can stop doing church and start doing Pentecost.” Doing Pentecost?

So, so what? So, today we celebrate a new sound, a sound like the rush of wind. The sound was, in fact, the awakening of a renaissance of purpose and direction. And the sound became languages that were spoken by various peoples. And yet, once the Spirit scatters us to do its bidding in the world, once we have entered into the Crossroads to engage in the work of interrupting “broken English,” well, we rediscover that our first language, our “mother tongue,” isn’t English or French or Spanish or German after all. Our first language is the strange sound of the wind; it is the language of Pentecost. Our mother tongue is the almost palpable silence of wind and fire and glory hidden in the least likely place and people, wherever and whenever the Christ speaks.

And it is written, “I will pour out my Spirit on all people, on all people my Spirit shall rest. Your daughters will prophesy, your sons will speak with boldness,…old men will dream, women visions…children will witness signs above and signs on the earth. And whoever calls upon the Lord, God will save.” Thanks be to God.

I am grateful to Reva Allington, friend and member of St. Peter’s, who edits my sermons.