Lake Edge United Church of Christ

Can you imagine a story like this? The leader, or big boss, of a large group of religiously identified folk called for a conference on the subject of empowerment by the Holy Spirit. There were seventy persons invited and registered for the conference. It was held at a retreat center outside the place where this group lived. The conference was very successful. God himself came to the conference. After scolding them for their grumbling and lack of faith, God took some of the spirit that had previously been invested in the leader of this group, and spread it around to all the others. And all of the people at the conference began prophesying. It was really miraculous. And then they stopped.

However, two of the seventy people who had been registered for the conference hadn’t even showed up. They had stayed back with the main group. Nevertheless, they got some of this Spirit that had been passed around, and they were prophesying in the community. They didn’t stop, they just kept on going and like a pink bunny we all know. Anyway, one of the young men who hadn’t been invited ran immediately to tell the leader. Right away the administrative assistant told the big boss to stop them from prophesying. The leader’s response was right on target. He said, “What’s the matter, are you jealous for my sake? I wish all the people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them.”

And the scripture - you knew it was scripture, didn’t you? - the scripture says that Moses and the Elders of Israel returned to the camp. Of course it was Moses. This was in the Book of Numbers. Everybody had been grumbling that they didn’t have any meat to eat, and that they had been better off in Egypt. Of course - manna looked like coriander seeds and had the color of gum resin, and you mushed it up in mortars, and boiled it, and made it into cakes like oil cakes, and you ate the stuff, day after day. These people could still remember cucumbers and melons and onions and leeks and garlic in Egypt - and they grumbled, they complained and they wept. And Moses, he complained too: “Why do I have to be the one burdened with these people? I’m not their Daddy!” And that was when God told Moses to get these seventy elders out to the Tent of Meeting, and the rest is history, or at the least a very meaningful myth.

Now you’re wondering what’s my point, aren’t you? Simply this - the idea of the Holy Spirit had been around for a long time when Jesus was talking about it in John’s gospel, as we heard earlier. Peter knew that. He didn’t seem to have any trouble at all coming up with an explanation right out of the prophet Joel.

And wow! What a colorful story! Sometimes we sing “When the Saints come Marching In” and there is a line about “When the moon drips red with blood,” and here it is, associated with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit -- on Pentecost. Pentecost was already a festival day, fifty days after Passover. You may know that the Jews still celebrate the feast of weeks - a week of weeks adds up to forty-nine days, or fifty days counting the first day, and that is Pentecost when you get it into Greek, the language of that day.

In the gospel reading from John, the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples on Easter, in the evening. In the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, it was on Pentecost. In the first Letter to the Corinthians, (one of the other readings for today) it was being continually poured out. Can’t these guys get it straight?

On Friday I attended a scripture workshop at St. Stephen’s in Monona put on by the Wisconsin Conference of Churches. The speaker was Dr. Ken Stone, Professor of Bible, Culture and Hermeneutics at our Chicago Theological Seminary. Ken was on the panel that critiqued my position paper in my last term in seminary, but I never had a class with him. The title of the workshop was “subversive Books of the Bible for Subversive People of Faith” and dealt with lesser known texts rarely if ever heard in a worship setting - Esther, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Song of Songs - and one of the interesting sidelights was discussion of the fact that these books tend to take the opposite point of view from other old testament books: compare Ruth with Ezra and Nehemiah which warn against marrying foreigners, especially Edomites and Ammonites, but Ruth was an Edomite, and she became the grandmother of King David, and Matthew reminds us that she was one of the ancestors of our Jesus. So much for finding agreement in the Bible.

We have a tendency to want to treat the scriptures as if they were history, and to a certain limited degree, they are the artifacts on which history is based. Their more important function is to tell us what is always true. God’s Spirit was always in the world, God was always breathing His Spirit into the world and its people. He breathed His Spirit into Jesus, His chosen one. He breathed His Spirit into the Church, and the apostles were very aware of it in 29 AD. They were certainly still talking about it in Corinth in AD 54 (see 1 Cor 12: 3b-13), they were talking about it a quarter century later when Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles and another decade or quarter century later when John got around to telling it his way. The experience was real, it was the telling of it that got distorted. And the Spirit has been with us ever since - it is with us now, and it will be with us.

When the Spirit came to Eldad and Medad - those are the two jokers who registered for the conference, but didn’t show up at the meetings - it wasn’t because Eldad and Medad were always in the right. They didn’t even show up in Church, but the Spirit came to them and they were prophesying. Meanwhile, those who prophesied in the meeting stopped.

How concerned we get over those who don’t show up for church! How could we even listen to those who stay away. Whether it is in troubled times or rich and fruitful times, we are really skeptical about those who don’t show up in church. How can we possibly listen to them. We think the Spirit is with those who show up, but God couldn’t even get through the first five books of the Bible without giving us an example of the Spirit resting on the two guys who didn’t even go to Church. We have to listen even to those who are not showing up, to see what Jesus is saying by the Spirit through them.

When we think about who isn’t showing up, it isn’t just the people who are either lazy or who have abandoned the church. It is also the people who never got invited. It is the people who are different. It is people who express themselves differently, whether in dress, in the songs they sing, or the way they organize their lives. It is the people who feel they will be judged if their way of working, or their way of courtship, or their way of spending their money is different. We probably do judge them, and judge them harshly, but we may find the Spirit working in them, and some will build their own churches, while others will never get the Good News because we failed to pass it on.

Now, back now to the story of the folks who were prophesying. What is a prophet? What does a prophet do for God, and what does a prophet do for the tribe, for the people, for the church? I’ve been looking in my Bible Handbook, and I’ve found some interesting facts. We are always thinking that prophets predict the future, but strictly speaking, that person who predicts events is a seer rather than a prophet. We may think of prophets as preachers, as isolated mystics, as political analysts, as cultic officials, as keepers of tradition, even as raving ecstatics, but the role that is most important is that of moral philosopher. A prophet is one who is called to link the human and the divine, and the prophets served to bring Israelite religion to a higher level of development - these were the moral and ethical innovators.

Taking on a prophetic role had a price, however. When you speak the truth about the powerful and those in control, you are quickly suppressed. That is why there are so few prophets, and none in the Bible after Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. They were too radical. People like Joshua son of Nun wanted them to stop. You have to control such outbursts of God’s Spirit, if you want maintain control, especially if you want to continue to exploit other human beings for your own purposes.

We like to have careful control over our prophets, too. I’ll just give one example - J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, broke many laws in order to try to control Martin Luther King Jr. We try to suppress prophets in the church, too, which is why so many of my ancestors and yours were chased out of one country after another during the Protestant Reformation, and it was why Protestants also did their share of religious persecution. We probably have more freedom right now to prophesy - to speak for God - than at any other time or place in history.

Let me give another example of a prophet. I have visited his church, which was founded by Dr. Ken Smith, President of Chicago Theological Seminary. The church is the largest in the UCC. I have heard this prophet preach, and I have been to an ordination of a friend there. Several of my classmates were members of this church, and they all had their tuition provided by the congregation. The church is unapologetically African American in orientation, and speaks to the needs of its members. The pastor, now retired, takes seriously his call to preach the gospel, and he is equally serious about the prophetic role - he presents his critique of American culture as a regular diet. He tells what is happening to African Americans in our society, he tells what this country is doing to people in developing countries, and what is happening to nations embroiled in wars that take place because of failure to read the culture.

And, like other leaders of our nation who have failed to read the culture correctly, the Rev Jeremiah Wright sometimes fails to read the culture correctly, as in his absurd statement about AIDS. But it isn’t absurd to those who are aware of the government’s Tuskegee experiment. It isn’t absurd to those who are aware of Abu Ghraib. It isn’t absurd to those who know that we have made a great deal of money selling arms and landmines which blow the feet off of children. It isn’t absurd to those who know how prisoners are sometimes interrogated, or to those who know about the disproportionate rate of incarceration of black men in America, especially Wisconsin.

While the Spirit gives the gift of prophecy, it does not guarantee that the prophet will correctly read the cultural landscape. The prophet needs to prophecy whether he reads the culture correctly or not. We as the church must affirm the right and responsibility to prophecy - and we must also be ready to share in love our critique of their message.

Perhaps we should be more critical of those who stop prophecying. The world needs the voice of those who have moral grounding. There need be voices speaking out against moral outrage. Some of the most vocal prophets of the church today appear fixated on what most of us consider minor issues in scripture rather than the mandate from Jesus to care for the orphan, the widow, the stranger.

In spite of what we see around us, God doesn’t limit the number of prophets, and Moses understood how important it was to have prophets who would speak for God. The prophet Joel, speaking of God bursting in on human lives, said this:

Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and daughters will prophecy,
your old men will dream dreams,
and your young men will see visions.
Even on the male and female slaves,
in those days I will pour out my spirit.

On the day of Pentecost, in a burst of wind and fire, God did pour out Spirit, and everyone could understand what others were speaking, even in other languages, when they talked about the mighty deeds of God. That was the real beginning of the church, the event we celebrate today. In a bGiven onurst of wind and fire, God made us all prophets and visionaries, who can see the power of God to combat injustice, to feed the hungry, to end wars and all war. The church does speak out against injustice, the church does help to feed the hungry, the church does seek in holy love to turn the powers of this world from war to peace. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to be the prophet of today in your community.

I know that many, maybe even all of us, are involved in some way in bringing that prophetic voice with which we are charged, bringing it bear on one or another injustice or instance of suffering. What I see as the role of the church is to help us to work together to bring God’s word of peace, of justice, and of healing to a broken world. We need the encouragement of one another. We feel so limited, just as Moses did when he felt he was the only one charged with carrying God’s people to the promised land.

In John’s gospel, Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”I believe that we are included in that commission. We are sent forth, empowered by the Spirit given as Jesus breathed on them, blew wind on them, to be ministers of his forgiveness and healing,and prophets of God’s justice and righteousness

There are no limits to the number of prophets today. Neither is prophecy something to be left to preachers, to writers, to political activists and the heads of charitable organizations. God can do so much more, and God does call us into his church to carry out his will together. The spirit that was in Christ is now in us to be God’s agents of forgiveness, healing, love and abundant life.

We can pray today that the same wind will come to us - the word in Hebrew for Spirit is ruach, the same as the word for wind, and the same as the word for breath. The same is true in the New Testament Greek: the word pneuma has the same multiple meanings, and we find these words used with great consistency throughout the Old and new Testaments. God breathed life into Adam, and Jesus breathed the spirit into the apostles.

On Pentecost, a wind came with tongues of fire.

Let us pray: Let that same wind, that same breath, fall on us, O Lord, and renew that Spirit within us. Let us be open to the work of the Spirit in our midst. Let us celebrate this day not only as the birthday of the church, but as the day of our rebirth, the day we are sent forth, in Jesus name.

Amen.