The Winds of Pentecost

May 26, 1996

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Scripture: “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like  the rush of a mighty wind...” Acts 2:2a 

I don’t usually begin a sermon with a plug for a movie, but if adventure, excitement, noise, and the raw explosive power of nature is your bag, go see Twister, now playing at your local theater. 

It’s about tornadoes, those devastating, twirling, massively destructive storms that erupt when certain meteorological conditions are met, and which have the capacity to wreak almost unspeakable damage to anything that gets in their path. 

What’s so dangerous about a tornado? At least one thing, is its unpredictability. 

It’s hard to tell where it might go, where it might strike next. Sometimes they lift off the ground, and swirl harmlessly in mid-air, then the next minute, the next second, touch down again to tear to splintereens whatever has the misfortune to be there. 

Unlike a hurricane, which we know more about in Florida, and which, while larger in size, tends to follow a more prescribed path, one that can be charted and even planned for, a twister is CAPRICIOUS, fickle, almost whimsical in its choice of movement.... 

It hits here and misses there; it spares this target and demolishes that one; it bypasses this potential victim and blows that one to immediate death. 

The force of a tornado may be the most fearsome, the most awesome of all of nature’s power. 

Wind speeds of well over 200 miles per hour near the drunken, spiraling center can literally slam steel beams through concrete walls, and pitch semi-tractor trailers around as if they were Legos. 

In one scene in the movie the tornado chasers, those relatively crazy people who are trying to find out more about tornadic patterns so they can speed up the warning process, are sitting around a table attempting to explain to a neophyte the degrees of intensity of tornado force. 

“That last one was F-2”, says one, “maybe borderline F-3. You don’t want to be around anything bigger than that. An F-4 can wipe out a small city. It can level an area flat and leave it devoid of habitation.” 

“How about an F-5?” asks the neophyte naively. “What’s that like?” 

There is a pause, as the others freeze, almost in reverence. “An F-5”, finally says one of them, “is like the finger of God.” 

The winds of destruction are incredibly awesome, earth-shattering, and life-changing. BUT SO ARE THE WINDS OF RENEWAL. Today is Pentecost Sunday in the Church, THE DAY OF THE MIGHTY GALE THAT BLEW THE CHURCH INTO EXISTENCE. 

I’m sure, almost sure the producers of Twister weren’t thinking about the Church calendar when they released this picture this time of the year, but a preacher looking for an angle, a tie-in, can’t help but jump at the comparison and contrast. 

Pentecost is Twister turned around, turned on its head. The two phenomenon are different from each other, of course...in some ways radically different. 

A twister is destructive...Pentecost was constructive. 

A twister tears down...Pentecost built up. 

A twister takes away...Pentecost added. 

A twister leaves people diminished and isolated....Pentecost left them strengthened and unified. 

A twister brings fear...Pentecost brought hope. 

A twister is a natural event..... Well, what can you call Pentecost but a supernatural event? 

A twister comes out of earth and sky...Pentecost came out of heaven. 

You can explain a twister, if you know enough meteorology.... You can’t explain Pentecost entirely, no matter how many “ologies” you’ve mastered. 

The two experiences stand in sharp contrast in some basic and fundamental ways. BUT NOT IN EVERY WAY. Both represent an awesome display of POWER. Both are unexpected. Both expose the essential precariousness of the human situation. Both remind us of how vulnerable we are to forces outside of ourselves. Both make us aware that we’re really pretty puny when face to face with genuine potency. 

 And both experiences, when you go through them, make things different from what they were before. 

 We’re not sure what to do with the Pentecost story in the New Testament, are we? We’re not quite sure how to handle it.... I guess because we’re not sure it can BE handled, any more than an F-5 twister can be handled. 

In Acts, it must seem to erupt, out of nowhere, without warning, without prior notice. Suddenly, there it is, and everything is changed. 

Nothing Luke tells us about the behavior of the disciples after the Ascension prepares us for the astounding character of Pentecost itself. 

Oh, they knew something special was in the air. Jesus told them when He left, but they had no idea it would be like this. 

They go back to Jerusalem, as He instructed them...they wait, they engage in prayer...they wait...they take care of a few routine administrative matters. At this point it sort of reminds you of an Annual Conference session. They have to elect somebody to fill a vacancy on a committee.... Two candidates are proposed, their credentials checked...speeches are made, someone probably offers an amendment, and somebody else moves the previous question on all that is before them. 

We’ll go through it next week in Lakeland.... Nothing new under the sun. 

Finally---gosh, this is embarrassing---FINALLY, they make the decision by means of a LOTTERY. It just shows you how badly in need of outside help they were in. 

BUT THEN, SUDDENLY, right there on the floor of the Conference itself, PANDEMONIUM BREAKS LOOSE...a spiritual twister hits ‘em broadside. That’s exactly how Luke describes it...a violent wind whips through the room. Tongues of fire reach out and land on every head. There is noise and commotion. 

People are overwhelmed by a sense of the HOLY, so all-encompassing that the only thing they can do is cry out in ecstasy. 

All semblance of order disappears, the presiding officer pounds his gavel, the sergeant-at-arms throws up his hands...NOTHING HAS ANY EFFECT. The people are seized by a spiritual frenzy. 

Now, that’s scary! Let me tell you, that’s really scary. Think of something like that happening in one of our worship services. I can’t imagine anything in the world that would be more unnerving to a worship committee, or a liturgist, or a minister of preaching, for that matter, than having all your worship arrangements, all your Sunday preparation, all your plans for a service suddenly taken out of your hands by the very One in whose name you had gathered....That’s scary! 

How glibly and sometimes perfunctorily we pray, “Lord, come and be among us. Lord, make your presence known in our midst....”  HA! What if God did? What if God took us up on it? 

A Pentecost is no tame experience. Having the Lord on your hands.... Paul, Scherer has written somewhere, “What if we stopped singing ‘Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine’, and started singing, ‘Blessed Disturbance, I am His’?”....HAVING THE LORD ON YOUR HANDS---NOT the Lord of modest decorum and timid decency, but the full-throated and robust God of the New Testament....Having THAT God on your hands is nothing to play around with. 

But that’s how it is in the New Testament. This is not the only place we see evidence of the unpredictability, the unruly nature of God’s Spirit. 

Put God in a box, or try to, try to tame God, try to confine God within normal, safe, bureaucratic operations....or institutionalize God, to make God work through proper channels, INVARIABLY GOD’LL BREAK OUT TO DISRUPT AND STIR THINGS UP FOR GOOD. 

The New Testament’s full of it. 

When God wants to send a Son to the world for its redemption, does God do it through the religious establishment? NO, He dispatches the Spirit to whisper in the ear of a frightened peasant girl, way out in the periphery.... 

When Simon Peter continues to cling to the old idea that the Gospel is primarily for the household of Israel, a limited, restricted group, the Spirit interrupts him in a dream to show him that nothing God has created is to be called unclean. The Good News is not for a clique; it’s for everybody. 

When Paul plans his missionary itinerary, having some success in Phrygia and Galatia, and decides on his own to move next into Bithynia, up to the northeast, the Spirit stops him cold, saying, “Go the other direction. Go over into Macedonia, where God wants you to go.” 

OVER AND OVER IT HAPPENS...unruly and unpredictable. 

We call Luke’s account the Acts of the Apostles. A better name would be THE ACTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT AS MANIFESTED THROUGH THE APOSTLES. 

It’s the free, uninhibited, creative, innovative, pulsating, throbbing activity of God, which calls a people into being, shakes them up, shores them up, and sends them out to be about His business in the world. There would have been no Church back then, and there can still be no true Church, apart from the enervating dynamism of the Holy Spirit. When that blows in, things happen. 

Now, I want to be careful. I don’t know how far you want to press the details of Luke’s description for literal accuracy. That bothers some people, especially since some in the Church take part of the description and use it as a litmus test for spiritual authenticity. 

It helps me to think of it as picture language, RELIGIOUS language, couched in images of physical phenomena. Could you have clocked the speed of the wind that day the way tornado chasers try to measure a twister’s wind speed? I don’t think so. To think of it in those terms is to miss the point. We know enough Bible now to know how to translate these things. Wind and fire stand for God and God’s activity. 

What Luke is telling us is that God is bigger than our little buckets, bigger than our labels, bigger than our institutions, bigger than any of our categories and structures. 

We can’t control God and we don’t program God. To meet God is to be shaken up and reordered. 

I can’t explain Pentecost any more than I can explain Creation or 
Incarnation. I don’t think Luke could explain it. I don’t think he was trying to. 
Luke was writing filled with awe at the sovereign majesty of the Lord God of the universe, who by God’s grace acts in human life for our redemption, who acted here in a mighty way....AND LUKE’S KEY EMPHASIS IS NOT ON THE PARTICULARS OF THE EXPERIENCE, BUT ON THE RESULTS. 

What happens when God takes over, when the Spirit blows in, when Pentecost erupts in a life or a church? 

1) Well, for one thing, EMPOWERMENT COMES. Look at the evidence in the Record. It’s a different crew after Pentecost from the gang that started out. Same names, but not the same people. The numbers alone reflect the change. From 11, plus 1, it jumps to 120....By the end of the day, 3000 more were added. What’s going on? Think how that would look on a pastor’s annual report. POWER! 

But the real difference is on the inside. Timidity is swallowed up in courage.... Caution is devoured by boldness. 

Hesitation is made slave to resolution. 

You can’t even recognize Simon Peter as the same quivering personality who cowered in the corner when the girl accused him of being Jesus’ follower: “What are you talking about? I don’t even know the Man.” 

LOOK AT PETER NOW...assuming leadership, standing up before the crowd, proclaiming the glory of resurrection in absolute disregard for what it might cost him. SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED TO HIM. 

When J. B. Phillips wrote his brilliant translation of the Book of Acts- he entitled it ‘The Young Church in Action’—he said afterward, reflecting on the experience: “It is impossible to spend several months in close study of this remarkable book without being profoundly stirred, and, to be honest, disturbed. The reader is stirred because he’s seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history. The newborn Church, as vulnerable as any newborn child, having neither money, influence, nor power in the ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for Christ.

No one can read this book without being convinced that there is Someone here at work besides mere human beings. Perhaps because of their very simplicity, perhaps because of their readiness to obey, to give, to suffer, and, if need be, to die, the Spirit of God found what surely He must always be seeking—a fellowship of men and women so united in love and faith that He can work in them and through them with a minimum of hindrance. Consequently, it is a matter of sober historical fact that never before has any small body of ordinary people so moved the world that their enemies could say with tears of rage in their eyes, that these people have turned the world upside down.” 

They were simply not the same people they were before. They could never be again. There's something thrilling about that, something that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. 

I know I’ve quoted before something one of my professors at seminary used to say, “Jesus promised His disciples three things and three things only—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.” 

At Pentecost His promise came true. When the Spirit comes, EMPOWERMENT ENSUES. 

2) Now, Luke hints at more. Well, he does more than that. It’s right here. When the Spirit comes, the Spirit brings INCLUSIVENESS. 

If the winds of twister divide, the winds of Pentecost UNITE. Where twisters discard, Pentecosts COLLECT. It’s right there in the Record. THE EXPERIENCE BROUGHT TOGETHER INTO ONE FELLOWSHIP THE WHOLE COMPANY. 

Isn’t that the real meaning of the naming of the nations, and the languages, and the tongues? There were people there from the entire known world. Luke names them. He doesn’t leave anybody out. 

Exactly! There IS nobody left out. Pentecost is a “for everybody” thing. “Each person heard in his own language.” 

Even in the turmoil, there was intelligibility. Even in the diversity, there was unity. Differences were not erased, but tying them all together was a bond of ONENESS. 

The Spirit of God does that. That’s how you know the Spirit’s been there. Maybe we can’t point to explanations of Pentecost....Maybe we can’t define it, or account for it, but we can point to evidences of it. The Spirit may come without warning, but the Spirit leaves footprints where the Spirit has been, and those footprints inevitably take on an inclusive shape. 

Where divisiveness lives, you can be pretty sure the Spirit does not. Where walls of separation prevail, the Spirit still bides its time. 

When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, they rummaged through the papers he had left. Among other things, they came across a list of suggestions for future stories. One read, “a widely separated family inherits a house in which by the stipulation of the will, they all have to live together.” 

It’s the story being written in the world today. Maybe we’re learning the only way it can be done is by the power of God’s embracing, encircling Spirit. 

Remember Edwin Markham’s old poem: 

He drew a circle that kept me out, 

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout, 

But love and I had the wit to win; 

We drew a circle that took him in. 

That’s what the Spirit does. When the winds of the Spirit blow, NO ONE IS LEFT OUT. 

Someone asked Carl Sandburg once, “What do you think is the ugliest word in the English language?” Mr. Sandburg paused just an instant, and then said, “I think the ugliest word in the English language is the word ‘excluded’.” 

Pentecost says, NO ONE HAS TO BE EXCLUDED NOW. Isn’t that great news? You can’t run far enough to get away from God’s pursuing grace. You can’t sink low enough to be unredeemable. THAT’S THE GOSPEL. 

Simon Peter, filled with the Spirit and with the Spirit acting through him, stood up at Pentecost after the wind subsided, and quoted those ringing words from the prophet Joel: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” EVERYONE! What a glorious thing to be able to proclaim! 

Did you know John Wesley preached on that text more than on any other text in the New Testament? If you’re separated from God in any way, for any reason, it’s hard to hear any better news. When the Spirit comes, INCLUSIVENESS ENSUES. 

3) Now, one more thing.... Well, there’s always more, but one more thing for today. The winds of Pentecost bring Empowerment...they bring Inclusiveness...And they bring, inevitably A FLOOD OF MISSIONARY ZEAL. 

They bring a heart of concern for other people. They bring a burning commitment to OUTREACH... always. 

After Pentecost, you never hear again about a Church being closeted in a little room. That violent wind the text talks about blew the walls down in a sense and pushed the disciples out into the street...OUT INTO THE WORLD. 

That’s what the Spirit does. The Spirit motivates, the Spirit prods, the Spirit stimulates, the Spirit needles...it says, “Listen, folks, if you think you’ve made your quota when you’ve come apart with others to worship and take in, then you haven’t felt the full measure of your calling.” 

The Church gathers for something to eat...of course, it does. The Church gathers for nourishment, for insight, for training, for stimulus...but then the real work begins, as the Church scatters out into the world, to make an impact. 

Pentecost changed the character of Christianity forevermore, or maybe it would be more accurate to say it caused it to find its true character. It made it a mission religion, it made it a sharing religion, it made it a giving away religion. We’ve lost some of that divinely reckless prodigality, I’m afraid, some of that “hilaritas” that didn’t worry about spending and giving freely because it knew where its real treasure was. We’re so nervous now about protecting and preserving our assets. 

But when the energizing winds of the Spirit blow, people can’t help but be generous with their time, and their money, and their skills, and their witness. The Spirit gets inside somehow and makes it happen. 

There’s an old missionary story about an African convert who was given a copy of the Bible. He was enormously excited and appreciative of his “treasure”, which made the missionary all the more surprised when, a few months later, they met again, and the missionary saw the condition of the Bible---torn, worn, battered, with what looked like lots of pages missing. “I thought you  would have taken better care of the Bible I gave you”, the missionary said. 

Oh, replied the African, “It’s the best gift I ever received. It’s such a wonderful gift, I gave a page to my mother, and a page to my father, and then a page to everyone in the village.” 

Pentecost had come to that man. Maybe there were some things he didn’t understand, but the power, and the inclusiveness, and the compulsion to share which Spirit bestows when it comes blowing in had caught him up in the Spirit’s grasp, and made him alive. 

It happened to a group of followers 2000 years ago, and from that day on everything was different. “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.” 

Do you suppose...do you suppose...?