Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 15, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Our two Scripture readings this morning are two of my favorites, or at least they have a couple of my favorite passages. One of my favorite parts of the Pentecost story from Acts, a part that strikes me as Pentecostal comic relief, is the line "but some thought they were drunk on new wine" and Peter’s reported response that this couldn’t be the case because it was only nine o’clock on the morning. I guess the disciples adhered to the old rule of no alcohol before noon, or maybe Peter only meant that they hadn’t had time yet to get drunk that day. Either way it seems clear from Peter’s response that if it had been later in the day or in the evening, the new wine hypothesis would have been completely reasonable. Apparently the disciples were hardly teetotalers.

And I love Joshua’s plea to Moses in the Numbers story. I mean, Eldad and Medad weren’t following the rules. They were off by themselves, or at least not with the leadership. And they were touched by the Spirit! It wasn’t supposed to be that way! They were engaging in unauthorized prophesying! We can’t have that! They might say something new, something different, something the leadership didn’t like! Horrors! That has to be stopped! So Joshua ran to Moses. Moses! Do something! Moses, however, had a very different reaction to this unauthorized prophesying that had Joshua so upset. He said: "Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets." Moses wanted all of the people to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Now let me tell you once again something I’ve told you many times before. These great Bible stories aren’t just about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They are about us. Specifically, these two great stories about God’s people being touched by the Holy Spirit and beginning to prophesy aren’t just about a few ancient Hebrews in Sinai 3,500 years ago or about a few followers of Jesus in Jerusalem over 1,900 years ago. They are about us as their direct spiritual descendants. And so we have to ask: What are these stories telling us about our life as people of faith today?

First the story from Numbers. Last Sunday at First Congregational UCC in Eugene, Oregon my father led an adult education session on the topic "Who Were the Prophets?" Consider that title: "Who Were the Prophets?" There are a couple of major assumptions in that title, aren’t there? The most obvious one is that the Prophets are people from the past, specifically, people from the far distant past in a place far away who either wrote something that made it into the Bible or who other Biblical writers wrote about. In other words, prophesy is something from the distant past. It isn’t something that’s happening today, and it’s something done by a few remarkable, Spirit-filled people. It isn’t something that ordinary people like us do.

Now, some of this is consistent with the primary Biblical image of the prophets. The Bible for the most part indeed calls prophets a rather small number of remarkable, spirit-filled people, people like Moses, Miriam, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the like. Our Numbers passage, however, offers a different vision of prophesy. Moses says: "Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!" Numbers 11:29. Moses, the greatest of all the Hebrew prophets, offers a different vision. He doesn’t want to hoard the gift of prophesy. He wants all of us to be touched with God’s spirit and to speak the word of God with power and truth. All of us! All of you! That, I think, is what the Numbers passage is telling us here today.

What about the Pentecost story from Acts? It repeats the theme from Numbers that the Holy Spirit and prophesy are for everyone. The Holy Spirit came upon the entire gathered community, not just upon a few specially chosen people. Then we see the effect that the Holy Spirit can have on people. Filled with the Holy Spirit, the disciples began to speak languages they didn’t know. These first followers of Jesus were not educated people. They weren’t learned people. They weren’t cosmopolitan people. We can safely assume that they only spoke one language, their native Aramaic, and that with a provincial Galilean accent. They may have picked up a few words of Greek or Latin, although most of them probably didn’t even have that. I imagine most of them never thought they could learn a foreign language. Learning a foreign language is hard, and I’m sure these first disciples thought it was totally beyond them.

But then came the Holy Spirit, and all of a sudden they were doing the impossible. They were speaking all sorts of languages they hadn’t known. They were excited. They were energized. They began preaching, prophesying, speaking about God’s deeds of power as Luke puts it. It was all so strange, all so out of character, all so energetic, wild even, that some were moved to say: "They are filled with new wine." They’re drunk, or so it seemed to at least some who saw them.

Our tradition teaches that on Pentecost the Holy Spirit brought the Church of Jesus Christ into existence. Pentecost is the birthday of the church. Here in this church we are engaged in a process of renewal-spiritual, renewal, mission renewal, financial renewal. On this Pentecost Sunday we need to acknowledge that we cannot renew this church on our own. We can do it only with the help of the Holy Spirit. We need to pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit into our life together, into this church. That indeed is the single most important thing we can do for our church.

We need the Holy Spirit, and that’s a problem. We are good Congregationalists. We are good mainstream Americans. We’re reserved, dignified, orderly-not as orderly as Presbyterians maybe, but still orderly. We don’t shout. We laugh, but properly and not too loud. But being filled with the Holy Spirit is like being filled with new wine. People who are filled with new wine are loud. They can be in your face. They’re uninhibited. They say what they think whether they think you’ll like it or not. In other words, they aren’t at all like us. Well, we need to get over it.

On Pentecost, the disciples began speaking foreign languages that they didn’t know. Well, there’s a language we don’t know, that most of us think we can’t learn, that indeed most of us don’t want to learn. That language isn’t Spanish or French of Japanese or Russian, but it’s a foreign language to us all the same. That language is Evangelism. If we are going to renew this church, we need to learn to speak Evangelism. That, after all, is why the Holy Spirit gave the disciples those foreign languages on Pentecost, so they could evangelize all over the world.

What is Evangelism? In our liberal mainline tradition many of us think it’s a dirty word. We think it means trying to cram your faith-invariably a very conservative faith-down people’s throats. We think it’s something annoying that they do, not us. We think it means Bible thumping and screaming about sin and hell and the end of the world, and we don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Well, here’s the surprising thing. All of that is decidedly not what evangelism means. Our word evangelism comes from the Greek word euangelion, which simply means "good news." Evangelism is nothing more nor less than telling the good news. In the Christian tradition it is specifically telling the good news of Jesus Christ and of God’s grace. Beyond that, it is telling the good new about Christ’s church. For us, it is telling the good news about this church.

Friends, if the Holy Spirit could enable those disciples so long ago to speak in languages they didn’t know, the Holy Spirit can teach us to speak Evangelism. We need to be filled with the Holy Spirit and tell the good news of this church as though we were drunk with new wine. We have good news to tell. Almost everything that keeps so many people out of Christian churches simply isn’t true of us. We aren’t Biblical literalists at war with science and modern learning. We don’t preach a narrow, judgmental social conservatism. We don’t think all non-Christians are going to hell. We don’t make people check their brains at the door. We welcome everyone. We are Open and Affirming, which means we truly welcome all people with all of their God-given humanity. We can be a church home for people who aren’t welcome or who wouldn’t feel at home in any other church.

But we need to tell the good news. We need to speak Evangelism. We preach the Good News of God’s free and unmerited grace for all people in a way that is unique in this community. This church is good news for this town, and it can continue to be that indefinitely if we will get over our fear of speaking Evangelism and share the Good News of Jesus Christ and of this church with everyone we know and find ways to share it with people we don’t know. Maybe they’ll think we’re drunk on new wine. So be it. Better a Spirit filled, irrational exuberance that tells the good news than a sober respectability that doesn’t. Let’s get on with it. Amen.