The 1st United Methodist Church of Napa

¹When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹²All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

¹⁴But 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. ¹⁵Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

¹⁷‘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. ¹⁸Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. ¹⁹And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. ²⁰The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. ²¹Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

²⁶Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. ²⁷And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Our breath is at the very center of our well-being. I thought again of this as I was visiting Marjorie Pope in the hospital this past week as she's recovering from knee-replacement surgery. In those first few days of recovery it's really important for her to keep her lungs clear of fluid – to prevent bronchitis of any kind, but particularly pneumonia. What's been recommended by respiratory therapists are those plastic tubes that have a calibrated chamber holding a small colored ball that's, in turn, connected to a little hose; you wrap your lips around the mouthpiece at the end of the hose and inhale, as deeply as you can, trying to get the little ball to rise in the tube as high as it will go. The idea is to open up the tiny air sacs of the lungs (the alveoli) and keep them free of fluid. I was there as the nurse was instructing Marjorie that she really needed to inhale deeply with this thing at least ten times every hour, as well as cough loose anything that might be building up in her lungs. For any of us, taking a deep breath is always a healthy thing to do; but for Marjorie, recovering from surgery as she is, it becomes a way to prevent serious lung complications.

I would invite us all to take a deep breath – more than once today – because it's not just a healthy thing to do, but because it also connects us to the other end of the wonderful gift of respiration: the sigh. [Breathe and sigh] As Paul knew, in his letter to the Christians at Rome, often those "sighs too deep for words" become ways in which we directly experience a connection with the Spirit of God. Think about it: we can have our own little "Pentecostal" moment, at any time of the day, just by taking a deep breath and letting it out with a sigh! Join me: [Again… breathe and sigh]!

Charles Schulz (whose middle name was "Monroe," by the way!) knew the value of a sigh, very well. As the creator of the cartoon-strip Peanuts, his character Linus van Pelt^³ represented his spiritual side.^⁴ Here's Linus in an interchange with that cartoon's curmudgeon, and his older sister, Lucy:

I think that it's significant that in the Hebrew language the word for breath, wind, and spirit is the same: ruaĥ. In our tradition it was there at the very beginnings of creation.^⁵ This breath of the Spirit makes for wonderful forms of new life. As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, "He lives most life whoever breathes the most air." A colleague once told this story:

On a windy day last spring, when the howling gusts sent even the sturdiest pigeons [flapping] for cover, our four-year-old daughter asked, "Mom can I go out and play with the wind?" Her mother, who wants her children to give notice before heading out into the neighborhood, said simply, "Sure, Rachel. Go have lots of fun." Out on the back deck, the little girl twirled and swirled. She swung her arms and twisted [until she was dizzy]. Rachel unknowing had written a new verse for Browning's poem: "She lives most life whoever dances the most wind."^⁶

Wind, fire and fearful followers – suddenly (so the story goes) the Spirit descends and the disciples, once afraid, are no longer. Wishful thinking and timid whispers turn to courageous proclamations, new beginnings arise out of the ashes of painful endings, life is proclaimed in the face of the inevitability of death. Those who once were filled with the spirit of Jesus are given a "second wind," and in these moments of commissioning and sending, the church is born.

To hear the "word of God" in a dozen different languages is really to hear it in a dozen different worlds, each with its own reality, its own pattern of allusion and resonance. Language all too often draws a wall around us and is used to define who belongs and who doesn't – witness the latest round against immigrants trying to make the United States of America their home.^⁷

What in the world, then, went on at Pentecost? Clearly it was more than just a breakdown of the barriers of language. It was a breaking down of cultural barriers, of inherited prejudices and marks of identity which keep us isolated and wary of each other. On that day it didn't matter whether someone was a Jew, a gentile, Parthian, Mede…and today we would be right to add African and Asian, citizen and non-citizen, Gay and straight – on that day it became clear that the Mystery belonged to all of them. For a moment the individual threads of human consciousness were gathered up and woven together in the sustaining miracle of life itself.

For many of us the question of our identity is the hardest and scariest issue that we'll ever face. Who are we? Who or what do we belong to? Where do we fit in? All too often we feel very alone in the world, and very fragile.

But the miracle of Pentecost is that our identity is there already. We don't have to worry about it. Because beyond the miracle of our own uniqueness is an even greater miracle: the miracle of our grounding in the Mystery of the Holy Spirit, in the very power, the very breath and dance of life itself. All that we need to do is freely live, rejoice, give and receive, throw back our heads and feel the wind on our faces! Life is a miracle when we're open to it.

So today Pentecost Sunday has gathered us – young and old, finders and seekers, believers and skeptics – and we're all the direct descendants of that first community, separate selves and yet bound together by a transforming experience of the Spirit, empowered to become witnesses to that Sacred Wind in the lives that we lead beyond this upper room. That's what's meant by church. Take a deep breath of life! [Breathe deeply and sigh] And may it be followed by a sigh of thanksgiving!

1 One of the most important allusions of the Pentecost story is that it's a reversal of the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9). Do you remember that one? According to that legend, at one time everybody on earth spoke the same language until – presumably because people were simply too "full of themselves" – God divided them up into different language groups. Pentecost reverses this ancient story: the Spirit of God becomes a communication that brings people together, instead of separating them. Would that this story were really true!

2 In a way this reading from Paul becomes an important balance for the story of Pentecost. That, supposedly, was an event that happened solely to and for members of the Jewish Christian community. Paul reminds us that the gift of the Spirit is meant for everybody…not just us.

4 Schulz touched on religious themes throughout his work, including the classic television cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which features the character Linus van Pelt quoting the King James Version of the Bible (Luke 2:8-14) to explain "what Christmas is all about." In personal interviews Schulz mentioned that Linus represented his spiritual side. Schulz, reared in the Lutheran faith, had been active in the Church of God as a young adult and then later taught Sunday school at the Sebastopol United Methodist Church. By the late 1980s he told one of his biographers (Rheta Grimsley Johnson) that he identified with secular humanism. In the Sixties, Robert Short interpreted certain themes and conversations in Peanuts as being consistent with parts of Christian theology, as he (Short) explained in his bestselling paperback book, The Gospel According to Peanuts. Schulz did not endorse Short's specific interpretations and often said that "the only theology is no theology," yet Schulz gave permission to use many of his strips in the book, and his newspaper comics continued to have enough theological themes to fill many Sunday School lessons. Schulz seemed concerned about having the focus of his strip viewed as being narrowed to be a religious-themed comic, when it had many more wonderful insights into life that went beyond a specifically defined theology [this from the same site as above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Schulz].

5 As it's recounted in the opening verses of our Bible: "In the beginning when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1: 1-2). Later on (in yet a second version of the creation story) God is portrayed as forming that first human being – adám – from the dust of the earth, then "breathing" into it the breath of life (Genesis 2: 7).

7 I still highly recommend that everyone take the time to see the Oscar-winning movie of last year, Crash, in which real but unreasonable prejudices make wreckages (hence the title) out of human lives: a Brentwood housewife and her D.A. husband, an Iranian store owner, two police detectives (who are also lovers), an African-American television director and his wife, a Mexican locksmith, two street-wise car-jackers, a rookie cop and his cynical partner, a middle-aged Korean couple – they all live in Los Angeles, and during the next 36 hours, they will all collide. See more about this excellent movie at http://www.crashthemovie.co.uk/.