An Impossible Gathering
David C. Myers
May 31, 2009
Pentecost
Ezekiel 37:1 - 14
Acts 2:1 - 21
Texts: "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, 'O dry bones, hear
the Word of the Lord.'" . . . Ezekiel 34:4
"I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and
daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams." . . . Acts 2:17
Today we celebrate Pentecost Sunday, a day we refer to as the birthday of the church. As was read from Acts, "Jews from every nation under heaven" were gathered. According to the Scripture reading from the second chapter of Acts, every nation on earth had somebody there on Pentecost; every nation including strange nations with strange and difficult to pronounce names like Cappadocians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians (vss. 9-11).
As we learned from Matthew's Genealogy, a seemingly mundane listing of hard to pronounce names can be important, so let's explore this a bit deeper.
1.) First of all, this listing of the nations here at Pentecost is usually taken to mean that people from everywhere were there, people of every tongue and tribe of the world then known to the Hebrew people. Think about that - even with air travel and all the modern technologies, even now we can't get all the nations together in one place. So, as impossible as that seems, that is just the beginning, for a more careful reading of verses 9 - 11 points out that not only was this a diverse ethnic gathering - Medes, Persians, Elamites, Cappadocians, Phrygians - but it is also a historically impossible gathering! Those Medes who were at that Pentecost would have had a real tough getting to Jerusalem from Mesopotamia, not just because they would have had to travel a few hundred miles, but because they would have had to have traveled a few hundred years as well. The Medes had been extinct, long gone from the face of the earth for at least two centuries. And those Elamites are mentioned back in Ezra 2:7 but never again. That was some 400 - 450 years prior to Pentecost - we're not sure about the date of Ezra's authorship. The Elamites were also lost in the past. So we have a gathering of people not only from the north and the south, the east and the west, but also from the living and the dead.
It is as if Acts 2 is saying, "You should have been there with us on Pentecost, 2009, we had Sri Lankans, Ohioans, the Floridians, the Californians, an Australian, the Africans, not to mention a whole van load of Assyrians, a couple of Babylonians; and, best of all, Dr. Richmond himself was there!
This impossible gathering is the author's way of saying that when God's Spirit was poured out at Pentecost it wasn't given only to those who spoke Hebrew and happened to be living in Jerusalem in the first century; it was given to people who spoke Cappadocian and even English; it is an event given to people of every century and every place it was a timeless event. We were all there. We are all there!
2.) Which brings me to my second point. As William Willimon said, "If there is anything worse than having no history, it is having too much history. If there is one thing worse than not being able to remember, it's not being able to forget." [ Willimon, "We're All Here" from The Intrusive Word, Wm. B Eerdman's, 1994]
Joe Matthews, brother of Bishop James Matthews and founder of the Ecumenical Institute, had a wonderful way of expressing it, "Your past is accepted, and your future is open."
The Pentecost story is like the story of the Tower of Babel, except in reverse. You may remember the Tower of Babel. It was when the descendents of Noah all spoke one language and they tried to build a city with a tower tall enough to reach into the heavens so they could talk to God directly. God didn't particularly like their idea. It had the similarity of Eve plucking the apple from the tree of knowledge and eating it - people trying to know too much and exceeding the human limitations God had created for humankind. And since heaven wasn't the only place God was located, God destroyed the tower, scattered the people and gave them many tongues to care for all the diverse places of the earth.
Pentecost operates a little in reverse. Now God brings all the diverse people together - people of different cultures, different languages and infuses them with God's Spirit and they felt so caught up in the Spirit that they knew what everyone was thinking.
Well, Pentecost may have brought people together, but it didn't erase the past, or why God saw fit to send people apart with different languages as God did at Babel. We need to remember, need to fix those days in our collective consciousness and learn from our past. We can never learn from our past, can never get free of our ancestors if we fail to remember, fail to recall. It is only in recollection and remembrance that our history can be redeemed.
That day at Pentecost, we were all there. We were given the means to remember our past, to sit at table with our ancestors. Pentecost claims that the church has been given the holy means of remembrance, to tell of "the mighty works of God" as well as the silly and sometimes even sordid acts of humanity. It means that "this promise is to you and to your children" that we are able to get together with our history, that our ancestors; even the ones we have attempted to forget, that all those forgotten voices and excluded people get included and invited to the table. God's blessed, forgiving, empowering, liberating Spirit was given to us and to our parents. We were all there. We are all there.
3.) My third point is from Ezekiel has to do with the power of the Spirit and dry bones. It's not often in Christian churches where we cite the Hebrew Bible to look at home Scripture helps us look forward, but that is the case here. This story is, perhaps, the first metaphor of resurrection in history. It occurs at the time when Israel was in captive exile in Babylonia, deprived of their homeland. They were a defeated people, longing for their home, their temple, and their church. Captivity had sapped their hope. They regarded their political and military defeat as an irrevocable historical judgment. The people sighed, "Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost; we are cut off completely."
When God addresses Ezekiel, "Mortal can these bones live?" Ezekiel can scarcely answer "yes". The only reasonable response is "No." Yet God orders Ezekiel to prophesy to those dry bones and to call them back to life. In a time of unraveling hopes that is the prophetic task - to declare the unimaginable, to call people to new hope.
To prophesy to the dry bones and to bring them back to life. It is to restore hope. And this has to do with a church that is developing and getting to know its vision.
We, the Chevy Chase United Methodist Church, are not in captive exile here, at least not politically or militarily. But in a spiritual sense, we, are prisoners of society and its values and, in a real sense, are held in captivity. Attendance in churches across the country is declining, there are financial shortfalls, people don't seem to believe like they used to, many churches focus less on mission and community service, and the moral fabric of our society seems to be crumbling. Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones could as well be describing us - captives to societal values bereft of caring.
Let me remind us all that the church is only one generation away from extinction. It is through our efforts of being true to God's guidance that the church is to be kept alive. But not just for the sake of being the church. Then it is only an institution, and our society has enough of those.
The church has a greater purpose - and that is to transform society, make it meaningful, and a place of justice and peace for all. The church is an institution that endeavors to see to it that each person is seen as a person of value, a daughter or son of God, a brother or sister of every other person. The church is to remind us that the human family is a family. And when the church does that its praise and worship are acceptable to God.
Sometimes the people in the church lose sight of our real goal and do things that only take care of our building and of ourselves. Sometimes we see our mission work in the world as just too futile - and it's then that our bones dry up. So to keep us from being consumed with ourselves and our buildings we develop and Vision and Mission statement.
In your bulletins you found a rubber band. Please take it out and put it between your two thumbs. Just keeping the elastic loose represents the way things are. Kinda loose, just like it would lay on a table. Lifeless, no energy.
Now with one thumb stationary stretch the elastic with the other. You will notice there is tension. The stationary thumb represents the way things currently are. The second thumb is the Vision. It calls us away from who we are; and that will create some tension. And there is energy in that tension. If you don't pull enough, there won't be very much movement, or very much tension, and conversely, very much energy. If you pull too hard the tension could break the elastic or the vision will slip off the thumb and go flying. To have a vision means we must have tension - tension to move away from the status quo, to move us away from a primary focus on buildings to having a focus that only sees buildings as a means to mission and programs that will enable us to witness our mission.
It is the energy of the creative tension that is fueled by God's Spirit that breaths life in our dry bones. And through that Spirit, we discover that "We are a community on a journey outside ourselves. We serve and are served, heal and are healed, through God's transforming love." [Chevy Chase UMC Mission Statement, adopted by the Church Council in April, 2009] It keeps alive the Spirit so we can be renewed by our energy. It reminds us of our work that the Lord anointed us to do: "to preach Good News to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty the oppressed."
Be the tension by pestering one another so that we will not only continue, but expand our mission to Our Lady of Lourdes, Greentree Shelter, the Montgomery Interfaith Alliance, Hospice, City of Tents, our Sister Church, the Dental Program in Nicaragua, and so much more. This Mission and Vision Statement also shows that what we do with others is done in relationship with them - we don't just serve, we are served; we don't just heal, we are healed! We don't simply write a check, but we get involved in their programs, and as we give them something, they also give something back to us. We benefit from being in mission not to them or for them, but with them. By doing this you we can renew our worship and allow us to sing the Lord's song in this strange, strange land.
As we read in the story of the first Pentecost, God's spirit blows in utterly remarkable ways - causing people to say to one another, "Amazed and confused, they said to one another, what does this mean?" That is the tension that is created when people have a vision. But with a vision and mission, we can now begin to shape our future.
Our bones may be dry, but God has promised that we can come back to life. And, after all, we are still a part of the family. And God's Spirit at Pentecost and today has fallen on each and every one of us - truly an amazing, if not impossible, gathering.