Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But 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. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

‘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.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

It’s with shock that I acknowledge that in less than two weeks my 40th high school reunion will be taking place in Atlanta, Georgia. Oh yes. I graduated from Briarwood High School in 1969, and it seems that for at least that long the reunion committee has been trying to get me to attend the event. What began as an announcement and then an invitation has more recently turned into a series of e-mail messages that all end in exclamation points. And so two weeks ago I opened my e-mail to read: “Buccaneers, (our school symbol), don’t miss this opportunity to see your classmates!” A week later I opened by e-mail to read: “Buccaneers, only 12 more days until the great Bucs reunion!”. And then finally, yesterday I opened my e-mail to read: “Bucs, be there!”

Though I’m intrigued, and, yes, have been to the reunion website to look at class pictures, I can tell you that I won’t be going to my high school reunion. Part if this is because Atlanta is far, far away in geography and consciousness. But more than the distance involved, I’m not very keen on touching back to a time when so many of us, especially at that age, were trying so hard to conform, to sand away our odd edges, to hide our difficulties, in order to fit in to some high school standard of acceptability and inclusion that was vitally important to us then.

And yet, I have to admit to a certain amount of longing as I think about the idea of that darn reunion, of what it would be like to reach back and without the pressure of high school conformity, to see if genuine reunion were possible with Gary and Carlene, with Christine and David, with Ruthie and Glenda.

Reunion or union without conformity. Connection without losing unique identity: Our longing for this and the identification of God with this is part of what the Feast of Pentecost is all about.

This is how the story goes:

Before Jesus’ departure at his Ascension, he tells his disciples to stay in the city of Jerusalem, and to wait, They’re gathered together in a house when they hear a great violent rushing wind, a wind that would normally scatter everything and everyone all about. But instead of scattering things, the wind fills the house and then fills them with what you might call a tremendous breath of fresh air, a breath of fresh air that then expresses itself through them in speech—not their everyday normal speech but speech in languages that are not their own.

And what is this speech saying? What is it about? The many varieties of speech are all witnessing to one thing: to the saving love of God—a love that lifts us up or breaks us out of prison. But in that the disciples are speaking different languages, this message of the saving love of God, is being understood by the great variety of geographies and languages who have gathered to listen in on the disciples’ odd speech.

And so this makes we wonder:

What are the times that you and I have experienced connection to the saving love of God, a love that lifts us up or breaks us out of prison, without having to give up our particular language, the particular way we come at the world? Or put another way: What are times we’ve experienced the saving love of God that comes to us like a breath of fresh air, and comes to us not only no matter who we are, where we are, or what language we speak but through who we are, through where we are, through the language we speak.

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd” Flannery O’Connor once said, making a delightful and important point about a dimension of living the Christian life in the world. Pentecost also seems to suggest that the way God makes the truth of God’s saving love apparent and available to us is through the particularity, through the oddness that each of us already is.

Why is this important?

It’s important because like it or not, many of us still carry around in us a kind of high school conformist mentality when it comes to God—that the way we have access to the saving love of God’s love is through smoothing off all the odd edges of who we are in order to become acceptable. We still carry around the idea that we will need to let go of our own language, so to speak, to be claimed by the love of God.

But the story of Pentecost at least to me says, no. The source of our union with God or with each other is not lodged in our conformity with others or our imagined conformity to some image we have of what it is to be a Godly person. Rather the source of our union with God comes through God’s own initiative, an initiative that lifts us up or breaks us out of prison, an initiative we will get to witness and participate in this morning with our baptisms of Christopher Wagner and David Fallgren: baptisms that will be done in the name of God, the creator of variety, God, the one who embraced particularity in living a specific human life and God, the Spirit who inspired the declaration of that love to a variety of peoples through a variety of languages.

Early this morning I pulled up the newly created Briarwood High School reunion website and clicked on the link to my classmates’ images and scrolled down through their faces, reading their names, looking at their features and their expressions, and, of course, their hairstyles. I also remembered this event or that in our lives together back then as we struggled to make it through our high school years of mistakes and accomplishments, sadness and exhilaration, experimentation and, in some cases, tragedy.

And then, of course, I looked at my own face and remembered my fiery, burning desire to be who I was and at the same time my desire to dampen that fire as a way of fitting in and being connected to the suburban middle-class Southern culture I grew up in.

Today is Pentecost, what some call the birth of the Church. May this day not be about dampening Christopher of David’s or our fires as a way of receiving God’s love or fitting in either within the Church or in the world. Instead may it be all about God’ fiery love for us in our odd particularity and God coming to us as wind and fire: the one who send us into the world, wonderfully odd, tongues released and hearts on fire.

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