Finding Your Motivation
A Pentecost Sermon by the Rev. Paige Blair-Hubert
"The miracle of Pentecost wasn't that everyone was speaking different languages and no one could understand anything. The miracle of Pentecost was understanding. The miracle of Pentecost was these people, these very, very different people from all over the known world, who'd come to Jerusalem at that time, understood each other."
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[00:00:00] So as I've been preparing for this weekend, um, I've been enjoying the different ways we talk about the Holy Spirit in the church and the story, um, from my own life that keeps coming up.
It's actually relatively recent. Um, some of you may remember last October, I went on a retreat, a silent retreat, a very quiet, quiet retreat to Alaska, uh, to our family's cabin on the Kenai River. I wanted to be close to God, and I wanted to be close to the spirit of my dad, too, which is very present there.
And, uh, it was a marvelous, quiet retreat. I got to commune with all kinds of wildlife. The river was full of seals and salmon. The silvers were running. It was so fun to watch the eagles as they fished and they carried off [00:01:00] salmon to go eat them. It was just an amazing few days being present to God to just take in all this incredible beauty of creation.
And on my last day, my, my dad's, my dad sort of. Spirit animal is is the bald eagle and not just because he was a fighter pilot guy, but because because of the all the full spirit of all the eagle represents to us and And the last day I was sitting at lunch at the table and I looked out to the river and I saw Not one but two bald eagles in a tree right next to our dock Which is out of the water this time of year, but but a great place where i've been sitting all week watching and being present to all of God's creation.
And there were not just one, but two eagles there in the tree. And so I very carefully walked out to the dock. I didn't want to scare them away. I just wanted to see them one more time before [00:02:00] I went home. And I got to the dock and the base of the tree, and I must have stood there for half an hour looking at these majestic creatures.
So noble. Um, so beautiful and then all of a sudden there was this really strange sound. It was, it was a distant cacophony. It was really puzzling and I had no idea what in the world it was and the eagles couldn't figure it out either. They had this like puzzled look on their face. They looked at each other.
They looked off into the distance. They looked at each other. What in the world was that? And it got louder and louder as this crazy sound was coming closer and closer. And then finally, when it was just a roaring sound, it was hundreds of white snow geese flying over[00:03:00]
The Holy Spirit, the Celts will tell you, is a wild goose. We often yearn for the Holy Spirit. We often need the Holy Spirit that's the peaceful, comforting dove. But that is not the Holy Spirit we got in this morning's reading from Acts, is it? We got the wild, unpredictable, raucous, cacophonous wild goose in the form of the Spirit that we heard this morning.
We heard that the spirit came upon them with the rush of a violent wind. Not a gentle breeze. A violent wind. And the flames of fire on them. And then they started doing things they never could have imagined before. Like, speaking different languages. I love that they make the distinction in this passage.
These folks were Galileans and even the Judeans were puzzled that they could understand them. [00:04:00] Galileans did have an accent, folks, and it wasn't always comprehensible to everybody else. But they could understand. Now, sometimes we in the church have practiced Pentecost, um, in a way that I think kind of misses the point of this story, and I've participated in this.
I'm going to own that to you right now. We used to print out copies of this passage in every language we thought we had in the room. German, Spanish, French, Tagalog, Russian, you name it. We, we had that passage available and we would read it all at the same time in all these different languages and it was cacophonous and you couldn't understand a darn thing.
That's not the point of this passage though, is it? The miracle of Pentecost wasn't that everyone was speaking different languages and no one could understand anything. The miracle of Pentecost was understanding. [00:05:00] The miracle of Pentecost was these people, these very, very different people from all over the known world, who'd come to Jerusalem at that time, understood each other.
The miracle of Pentecost is understanding across differences. I don't know about you friends, but almost 2,000 years later I could use a bit of that miracle, right? How often do we struggle to understand one another, whether it's in our families, in our workplaces, in our society as a whole? Sometimes it feels like we're talking past each other or experiencing a completely different reality.
I could use a little bit of this Pentecost miracle in my world. How about you? Yeah. Indeed, the miracle of Pentecost is a miracle of understanding. Now Pentecost itself is, is a [00:06:00] very fun, fun holiday, holy day, and we didn't invent it by the way. Some of us Christians might not realize that Pentecost is a Jewish celebration.
It takes place 50 days after Passover, and it's a celebration of the giving of the Torah, which the Jewish people understood to be their way of being close to God, their way of knowing God, their way of being God's people. And that is why Jerusalem was full of Jews from all over the known world. You may remember when Rabbi Shulman was with us, he pointed out that Jews are not an ethnic group.
There are Jews from every ethnic group. And this passage really witnesses to that diversity. And they're there to celebrate the giving of the law, the giving of the Torah to Moses. This is from Mount Sinai and celebrate how God is one with them and known to them [00:07:00] in the practicing of Torah. And then the Holy Spirit shows up and says, I have a way of you knowing God.
Here we go. Hold on. It's going to be a wild ride. And now we have a way of knowing God. through God's spirit. The passages we hear this, this morning are, are marvelous. And I encourage you also to read the passage, um, from Romans, the alternative passage that we did not hear in this service, um, in which Paul, um, is, has, there's a bit of tension.
He talks about creation, all creation growing, groaning for the redemption promised in Christ and us groaning as well. There's a lot of groaning in this passage. And then he says, but we wait patiently for what we hope for. And I don't know about you parents, have you ever heard any patient [00:08:00] groaning? Right?
No such thing as patient groaning. But there's that tension, right? There's that already but not yet present in this passage. And there's the comfort of knowing that the Holy Spirit is there in the midst of that complexity. Giving us what we need. Including The ability to pray when we don't know how to pray.
When we can't even find words. The Holy Spirit giving us what we need. With sighs too deep for words. So we have the Holy Spirit, like the rush of a violent wind, and we have the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who gives us what we need and helps us pray when we can't even find the words to pray. And then we have this gorgeous psalm, which it is such a privilege to chant this psalm or read this psalm or pray this psalm when we can actually say, yonder is the great and wide sea, [00:09:00] right there, out that window, out that door, with all its wonder.
And we've seen those little purple sail guys, the vallela valella coming through. The creature's small and great, right? We've been a front row at some of the mysteries that that ocean offers us just in the last few weeks. Or how about, speaking of the wonders of creation, how so many humans got to see the Aurora Borealis recently.
Yeah, except for my stepmom in Alaska. She said, you know, we get to see them often. This time it was for everybody else. They had clouds. But the fact that you could see the Aurora Borealis in Tennessee and North Carolina and Southern California, how wondrous is this creation wrought by the power of the Holy Spirit or the solar eclipse we had not long ago.
So much wonder. [00:10:00] This psalm just lifts it up and reminds us of God's power. Also through the Holy Spirit. And then we come to this gospel, which is very Johannine. John's Jesus talks in all kinds of circular ways and mysterious sentences and sentence structures. But the heart of this passage is reminding his disciples that while he must depart from them, they will not be comfortless.
The Holy Spirit will come and again, give them what they need. Including answers to the questions that they can't handle right now. And if any of you heard Jack Nicholson saying, "You can't handle the truth," it's okay. A lot of us hear that character of Jack Nicholson saying that line. Jesus is saying, I haven't told you everything yet.
There's more to come. You aren't ready for it yet. [00:11:00] But the Holy Spirit will lead you into all truth.
It's a great biblical weight. There's more and there is so much more We are Pentecost people. We have been given the gift of this Holy Spirit. We are are given the gift of the Holy Spirit that comes to us sometimes as a gentle comforting dove and sometimes like that wild goose ready to nip us on the rear and get us out of this church and going to change the world in Christ's name.
Indeed, the Holy Spirit will not let us simply sit here with the grace of Jesus Christ in our hearts, but causes our hearts to burn, so we have to share the love of God with others. And in so doing, with that hope of things we don't yet see in our hearts, [00:12:00] we can be God's partner to continue to bring about the dream God has for this world.
The dream of a world restored, a world of love and grace and mercy, a love of peace of every child of God being who the spirit has created them to be. God's dream realized. When we, lit on fire by the spirit, allow the spirit to get us out there in the world to be the people of God's love and transforming grace.
Amen.
