Ezekiel 37: 1-14 & Acts 2: 1-21
Roger C. Lynn
May 20, 2018
Pentecost
If Ralph Nader were to focus his consumer advocacy attention on the Holy Spirit, he might very well be tempted to re-use one of his old book titles – “Unsafe At Any Speed.” When we look at how scripture describes the activity of the Spirit in our world and in our lives it quickly becomes clear that getting involved with God’s Holy Spirit is a dangerous business. When the Spirit shows up things start happening, things that are neither predictable nor controllable. Dead, dry bones start rattling and coming back to life. A nice, safe, quiet gathering to celebrate an old, established religious festival is suddenly transformed by wind and fire and foreign languages into a noisy tent revival where old barriers are knocked down and diversity is embraced. Being touched by the Spirit can definitely be unsettling. Old, comfortable patterns are disturbed. Safe, carefully defined boundaries are erased. The illusion of control is shattered. The Spirit’s activity can be disturbing – but it is never boring.
Take, for example, Ezekiel’s vision – the valley of dry bones. The Hebrew people were living in exile, cut off from their homes, their land and most everything else that was familiar. Their hope had long since died and they were feeling very much like the dry bones in Ezekiel’s valley. In the vision, God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” to which Ezekiel responds, “You know.” But the unspoken truth seems blatantly apparent. “There is no way these bones can live. They are dead. They are dry. They aren’t even connected to each other. It is hopeless.” That is, of course, before God’s Spirit blows into town. When that happens, the impossible becomes possible. Dead, dry bones rattle. The disconnected become reconnected. The lifeless are filled with new life. Desolation is transformed into new vitality. The message is abundantly clear – nothing is beyond God’s ability to accomplish! But what is accomplished is not what is expected. It is not what is comfortable. It is not even what we would necessarily choose, if we were doing the choosing. This radical, over-the-top, unexpected new life which God’s Spirit ushers in is not what we are used to – and we often try to stay away from things we aren’t used to.
Or take, as yet another example, the experience which Luke describes in the second chapter of the book of Acts – the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. It had been an unsettling couple of months for Jesus’ disciples. Following Jesus had never been what could be described as comfortable or easy. He seemed to always be doing something or saying something which challenged the ways they had come to view the world. But the last few months had been even more chaotic than usual. His arrest and conviction and execution had been shattering. Not only did it pull the rug out from under their growing confidence that they had, indeed, found the messiah, but none of them had survived the experience with their integrity and self-respect intact. They had all betrayed and denied and deserted Jesus at the first sign of trouble. And the roller coaster ride did not end there. Jesus didn’t stay dead. No one could quite say how it happened. Indeed, there were differences of opinion about how to even describe the experience. But they all agreed that the resurrected presence of Jesus, whom they now understood to be God’s Messiah, God’s Christ, was alive in their midst. Their shattered world was restored. Their grief was transformed into joy. Their despair changed to hope. And then they settled back into a new sort of comfort zone. Their numbers were small. They were confident in what they believed to be true. It was as if they had become a nice, safe family for each other. That all changed on the day of Pentecost with the unsettling activity of God’s Spirit. It’s hard for life to stay “normal” when wind and fire and the sound of foreign languages suddenly show up unannounced and unexpected. Their “nice, safe family” grew quickly and exponentially, and included all sorts of strange people who spoke different languages and came from different cultures and had different ways of doing things. And almost overnight it became a lot more difficult to stay quietly below the radar of the powers-that-be. This new community of faith was coming to the attention of people who felt threatened by its presence. The Spirit had really shaken things up this time!
And so, all these years later, we gather once again to celebrate the unsettling presence of God’s Spirit in the midst of us. We remind ourselves that “throwing caution to the wind” can sometimes be good for us, even when it makes us uncomfortable. We seek to remember (and maybe begin to believe) that even the dead, dry bones of our lives and our world can be restored to new life through the power of God’s Ruach Spirit blowing in us – the bones of separation which leave us feeling cut off from our brothers and sisters in this community and around the planet, the bones of smug superiority which leave us convinced that our tolerance for diversity makes us better than those who disagree with us, the bones of geo-political power which leave us as participants in bombed out devastation and wide-spread suffering and unrest around the world. We strive to be open to the wind and the fire of God’s Holy Breath which breaks down barriers, shatters false divisions and moves us past our sense of “us and them” into a new awareness that there is only “us” – an “us” which stretches across lines of color, race, ethnicity, cultural practices, sexual orientation, gender, age, political views, language, economic status, educational achievement, and any other line we might care to invent. We ask God to help us step beyond our discomfort and our fear, so that the wind of God’s Spirit might continue to fill our sails and move us beyond whatever horizons we can currently see. On this Pentecost we acknowledge that allowing God’s Spirit to blow in our lives is never safe, but it is always an adventure.
Come, Holy Spirit, come! Blow in our lives and help us to throw our caution to your wind. Unsettle us and lead us to new life! Amen.
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