Like the Rush of a Violent Wind

Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37

Romans 5:1-5; John 14:8-17, 25-27

Pentecost breaks down the self-constructed barriers that keep us from knowing God fully. God is breaking down the walls the divide and the barriers that we have constructed. God will not be confined by this or that language. Instead, God becomes transcendent of language. God’s transcendence of language is a wide-open embrace. It is God meeting us, exactly where we are.

“I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful that I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16). Such is the Baptists answer to those who were filled with expectation at the coming of the Messiah. You see: Baptism is the promise of Pentecost.

But the baptism of which the Baptist speaks and which Pentecost brings is not the passive and tame christening of an infant with its dribbling or maybe even pouring of water across the crown of the head. This is not the gentile baptism where the water is dried away with lacy white cloths, where candles are lit with small and safe flames, and where sweetly smelling oil dabbed on the forehead.

No! This promised baptism of Pentecost portends our full immersion, an inundation like Noah’s flood – the water entombing us in its embrace. But it’s a baptism by fire so perhaps we should say that we will burn, entombed in an explosion, a conflagration of God’s power lapping skyward – inexhaustibly skyward, fueled by our souls.

Baptism can be soulful like in that American folk song, “As I went down in the river to pray…” But even in its soulfulness, Baptism is a hope to change. Baptism in water and by fire is hope to change, a regeneration by the elements. Water is dangerous. Fire is dangerous. Baptism is dangerous. The Holy Spirit is dangerous. Water and fire are atoms unleashed sent into the world. But this is what the John the wild-Baptism promised. This is the baptism of Pentecost.

“I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful that I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Not water on the head, drip by dribble, but fire that consumes.

On August 30, 1983, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger in what was the first nighttime liftoff for the shuttle program. STS-8, the eighth shuttle mission was originally scheduled for an early morning liftoff on August 4. It was rescheduled for August 20 with delays caused by ineffective satellite coordination pushed the launch ten days further out. Then, during the on pad delay, Tropical Storm (later Hurricane) Barry hit Melbourne, Florida, gusting up to 80 mph at the launch site. The storm had only been identified two days before so the Space Shuttle Challenger rode out the storm on the launch pad. Challenger finally launched on August 30 at 2:32 am after an additional seventeen minute delay on launch day due to thunderstorms in the area.

Space shuttle launches were a dangerous affair. They were dangerous for the astronauts and they were dangerous for the spectators who lined up to watch. Liquid hydrogen at 423 degrees below zero mixed with liquid oxygen to inaugurate an explosive thrust of 37 million horsepower. The raw explosive power, even just of the sound waves, would kill you if you located much closer that a football field away.

I remember that August morning. As watchers, we waited some ten or twelve miles away, across the water at Jetty Park off Port Canaveral. We had been there for many hours already, with a picnic dinner and bed rolls in van. But it was still much like a festival atmosphere on launch day. I remember it being a balmy August night in Florida. For most the night, it was clear and one could see the North Star and the Big Dipper in the nighttime sky above the launch pad. Spectators lined the shore of the Banana River, all along Port Canaveral, stretching to the Atlantic Ocean. The scent of bug spray and citronella were in the air.

At about an hour before the launch, a bank of ominous clouds rolled in off the Atlantic, bringing thunderstorms that would threaten the launch. Undaunted, NASA continued the countdown until T-minus 30 minutes or so when lightning struck. Later pictures would reveal that lightning actually struck the shuttle tower. The countdown clock was stopped. Would the launch proceed? The launch window was only thirty-five minutes wide. But there was no more lighting and no more thunder. Apparently NASA was satisfied so the clock started again…thirty minutes…fifteen minutes…five minutes.

Finally, it was into seconds and then the final countdown…10-9-8-7-6-5. At four seconds remaining, liquid hydrogen was released into liquid oxygen resulting in an extraordinary explosion. The shuttle lifted off like an old man rising from an armchair.

But it was no old man! It was raw explosive power that turned night into day. As someone close to us exclaimed, “Its instant sunrise.” The fireball lit up the sky. I swear that the horizon itself glowed. The cloudbank turned orange as did the water. The fish in the Banana River, the alligators, the frogs, the egrets, and the crabs…they all seemed paused to catch a breath of incredulity at the sight.

And, then, finally, came the roar. For me, the most remarkable part of the launch was the roar. It is low rumbling roar that speeds across the face of the earth. During daytime launches you can actually see the wave as it ripples across the water. It speeds along at 4.729 seconds per mile, far slower than the speed of light. At 12 miles away, the sound reached the spectators at Jetty Park a full minute after the Shuttle’s first lumbering movements. But it bathed us in a remarkable, extraordinary, almost tangible sound.

For Jesus’ followers, locked in the upper room, they heard the sound first, before they saw the flame. They heard the sound of spirit traveling faster than light, not slower.

Up until this point. Actually, up until they locked themselves in the upper room, the disciples had been decidedly incarnational believers. Jesus was alive. Jesus was physically present. They had walked with him and talked with him. Even after his death, they had met him on the road or at the seashore or in that same upper room where they thrust their fingers into his hands and their fists into his pierced side. They had believed with their bodies.

But the incredible authority of Moses and the indefatigable power of Elijah eluded them. The prophetic wisdom of John and the illuminating essence of Jesus at Transfiguration was absent. If such an essence was their hope, it was not yet a reality.

But now, in the story told by Luke in Acts 2, the possessing Spirit came with a roar just as it had at creation. The same breath of God, the ruach the hovered over the deep came roaring in like hydrogen mixing with oxygen, fanning the flame. Yes, it was the roaring of the Spirit that first baptized these neophyte Christians. The Holy Spirit came with a roar and a fire…and translation!

Perhaps your baptism was much like mine: You received the Holy Spirit in some civilized ceremony, with little rivulets of water falling onto your head, over your crown, and into a little bowl. The priest probably placed a polite sign of the cross on your forehead and the Deacon handed your father or mother a little white candle. The church ladies smiled and nodded, “How sweet.”

But neither they, nor you, nor I realized the power transmitted by liquid drops of hydrogen and oxygen onto your head. H2O – the power of atoms – the very Spirit of God in you, unbridled, unconcealed, and uninhibited.

You are Jesus’ heir and you don’t even know it.

“Have I been with you all this time, Phillip, and you still do not know me?” Jesus asks Phillip this question in the Gospel story told today but Jesus might just as honestly be asking the question of me. Yes, I would like to think that I know Jesus, that I would be able to recognize what Jesus is about where the disciples did not. I would like to maintain that my faith (unlike that of so many others) is unshakeable. I would love to pretend all this, painting a portrait of saint-like faith and angelic-like virtue. Such a picture would be quite flattering and self-congratulatory, but it would also, ultimately, be self-denying. It would be full of pride and arrogance for I know that Jesus is asking me the exact same question, “Have I been with you all this time, Phillip, and you still do not know me?”

One of my favorite hymns is “There’s a wideness to God’s mercy” (Hymnal 1982 469). A little known stanza in the song (not found in our hymnal) reads,

“But we make God’s love too narrow,

with false limits of our own;

And we magnify His strictness

With a zeal He will not own.”

This is perhaps why I do not know the fullness of God. At least in part, I am guilty of making God small. I am guilty of making God small enough to fit into my box, into the confines of my life, into the confines of my mind. I am guilty of making God fit rather than allowing myself to enter into the vastness of God.

The flaming tongues of Pentecost that would lead to the preaching of the Word and hearing of the Word in ways understandable by all who were there reflects this idea well for me. In this scene written by Luke, God is breaking down the walls the divide and the barriers that we have constructed. God will not be confined by this or that language. Instead, God becomes transcendent of language. Now, let me be clear, this is no purging of culture or identity. It isn’t the creation of a homogeneity imposed by an empire onto another people. No, God’s transcendence of language is a wide-open embrace. It is God meeting us, exactly where we are.

This way that God meets us, in the language that we can hear, it seems significant and somehow important in making us feel welcome. In our common parlance, we speak of a “mother tongue” not just because words and how they go together is learned from our mothers and fathers, but because there is something about language and culture that perpetuates a soul-deep understanding of self and personal identity, of being welcomed and comfortable.

My grandfather came from Italy when he was nine. As far as I could tell, he and his mother and his sister came through Montreal, arriving in Cleveland in 1927. As might be expected, they didn’t know much English when they first arrived but they soon found the Italian section, “Little Italy.” It was there, with people whose language they knew and whose culture was familiar, that they connected, something in them felt like they had come home.

It was what one immigrant called the “translated life,” for once they were lost, but now they are found. In Pentecost, we experience the “translated life,” for once we were lost but now we are found, once we were dead, but now we are alive – fueled by the Spirit, enlivened by the roar and kindled by a fire.

God longs to have relationship with us, to speak to us in translated life. God desires us to know God in God’s fullness, swimming (as it were) in an open ocean, connected to something that feels like home. God desires to connect in ways that are soul-deep – to who we have been, who we are, and who we will be. It was in this Pentecost moment, when the Spirit roared and tongues of fire appeared over the heads of the disciples, that God broke down the barriers. God broke down the barriers between divine and worldly, between sacred and profane, between God and me and you.

And so suddenly, we can understand each other. I see you for who you really are, for the perfect image of God in which you are cast. There ought be no barriers for you are Christ to me and so am I to you and we, with a language of love between us, share in this transcendence. And all of this because we have allowed God to be big and deep and wide.

“Have I been with you all this time, Phillip, and you still do not know me?” I miss God because I do want to see God or do not expect to find God or do no choose to hear God in the new or the unexpected or the ancient reformed. I do not look for creation anew. I might expect to find God in church but I forget to look for the breath of the Divine in the misty morning. I might expect God during my daily prayer but I fail to see the Divine the kindness of a stranger. I might expect God in the Bible story but I fail to recognize God in the loving embrace of two fathers with their daughters. I might look for God in my neighbor but dismiss the divine presence in the stranger at our borders. I miss the ways that God is always with me because I confine God with limits of my own. I stop seeing God walking with me because I build borders around where God should be. I fail to know God fully because I dictate where I think God belongs.

So, instead of building up walls, we are challenged by today’s lessons to be open to seeing God in new ways. Jesus invites us to open our eyes and see anew where God is in our lives. In doing so, we must heed Jesus’ advice, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” I find a certain irony in having the lectionary pair together a reading about a roaring Spirit and flaming tongues of fire with a reading that commands us not to be afraid. Indeed, sometimes, the movement of God can be dangerous and scary. It can be unfamiliar and it take us outside our comfort zones, to places outside of who we think God to be. As our barriers are broken down, we must hold on to the promise of God, “Peace I give to you – my peace I leave with you.” When our barriers and limitations are broken, there will be an element of the unknown. And yet, in this unknown, we will be embraced – entering into the wideness of God’s mercy, feeling as if we have finally come home.