Day of Pentecost A

May 11, 2008 

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104:24-35, 35b

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Last winter, shortly before Christmas, I saw a young man in a coffee shop carrying a guitar case with bumper stickers all over it. They said things like: ‘Think green,’ ‘Love the earth,’ the peace symbol that we used to wear on our t-shirts when I was a teenager, and one of my favorite quotes from Ghandi, ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’ I hadn’t visited that quote in a while and I felt my soul spring up when I read those words. Shortly after Christmas I was visiting our people at Good Samaritan and I saw a piece of the quote again on one of the bulletin boards "Be the change you wish to see." Again I felt a lightness in my soul.

Having encountered those words twice in a short amount of time, I figured it was no coincidence and that I needed to ponder them. Especially when my eyes caught those words just before and just after the Nativity of our Lord. It was as if that phrase about change held the Incarnation and all that it means for us in parentheses, Be the change you wish to see in the world. Didn’t Jesus have something to do with change on the earth? The testimony of the scriptures is that he embodied the change God wanted to see in humanity.

In the beautiful and familiar story that poetically marks the beginning of the relationship between humanity and God, God took a clump of damp dirt from the earth and with strong, warm hands, patiently worked it into a man and then held the man’s face, breathed into his nose and mouth and the breath of God changed a clump of mud into a living creature. When the man created from the earth, continued to disappoint God, God must have thought maybe one man and his family can’t fulfill my dream for the world. Maybe it will take a whole nation. Then through Abraham God called together a People so that all of them together could be God’s dream for the world. But it still didn’t happen. God had to be the change God wanted to see in the world and that change began in Jesus. Even he didn’t become the change God wanted to see all at once. It happened little by little. He started out as a baby, grew up and was baptized. He taught those who would listen to him about God who was responsible for creating them and all that is. He showed them God’s love, how God wanted them to be whole and healthy, and not broken in mind, body and soul. Through his suffering and death Jesus took all that brokenness back to God, transformed it into new life through his resurrection, and then he ascended into heaven so that God could do a new thing and be the change God wants to see in the world in a new way.

Here we are at another Pentecost Sunday. The story we remember today is once again about God bringing change to the People of God. God breathed on the place where Jews from far away regions, who spoke different languages, gathered together to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. Suddenly they were changed so that they all understood the truth of the mighty acts of God as it was proclaimed by Galileans, the followers of Jesus who were not like them. They did not speak the same language.

Ghandi, the greatest voice against violence since Jesus, is from a different culture and a different part of the world than I am. His native tongue, Gujarati (Goo ja ROT te) is completely foreign to me. We have different names for the Holy One, the Transcendent One. He wasn’t speaking of or for my God when he said in my native tongue, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." It is only through the Holy Spirit that I hear them that way. And his words are particularly meaningful to me today. Today I recall all the ways God has been the change God wants to see in the world in the person of Jesus. And I can hear those words as if they are spoken by Christ to all of us who have been united with him in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. I hear them as our mission, our purpose while we are on the earth.

When we receive the Holy Spirit in baptism we don’t fully become the change God wants for the world, the change that Jesus was and is, we grow into that change little by little, the same as he did. The Spirit within us gives us a new way of being in the world, knowing we do not fully and completely embody the change God wants to see in the world. We’re not yet the best we can be. But we are committed, even compelled by the ever-new, ever-creative, breath of the Holy Spirit to avail ourselves to constant change in response to the life that is in us, in response to our relationship with our Creator, and to live more fully into the promises we made in baptism when we were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. Baptism changes us from children of the earth to children of heaven, adopted Sons and Daughters of God. Through the power of the Holy Spirit living within us and among us, we are the way that God is still present in the world.

There are many voices who speak the truth of the Holy One, the truth that God is, and was, and will be. They are all around us if we are alert enough to pay attention to them. That’s the true gift of the Holy Spirit for the world. The Day of Pentecost is a day for the Church (with a capital C) to remember that.

Speaking of other voices, I found a Native American prayer that seems to me to be a perfect prayer for Pentecost. A prayer offered in humility to the power that gives life to the living. A prayer that lifts my soul. A prayer that speaks tenderly of the earth as though we love it, even if we don’t appear to. A prayer that points to peace on the earth even while we lack the understanding and courage to work for it. I’d like to share it with you.

Oh, Great Spirit whose voice I hear in the winds and whose breath gives life to the world, hear me. I am small and weak. I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things you have made and my ears sharp to hear your voice. Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes so when life fades as the fading sunset, my spirit may return to you without shame. Amen.