Maddening and Holy Waiting

 Acts 2:1-21

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

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

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

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

What’s new this year for Pentecost?  My search for an answer to that question led me back to Chapter One of Acts where Jesus told his disciples what they should do next after the resurrection.  You’d expect something like go and baptize, maybe?  Nope.  Spread the Good News possibly?  Nope.  Then it must have been heal the sick and feed the hungry, right?  Nope.  Jesus told the disciples… to stay right where they were… and wait.  Wait for the promised Holy Spirit.  Just.  Wait.  Now, I know questioning the Messiah, the Son of the living God isn’t usually a good idea but, Jesus Christ!  Have you seen the world out there?!  Don’t you see the mess it is?!  There’s a LOT that needs to be “gone and done”.  Don’t you think WAITING is the wrong play here?  Shouldn’t we get to it sooner, rather than later?  But nope… Jesus says WAIT.  WAIT for the promised Holy Spirit before you go and do.  

Those HOLY, but frankly terrible sounding instructions from Jesus back then, also apply to things both deadly serious and infinitely less so in our world today!  Here’s an “infinitely less so” example.  You see, I want to do an Alien Fun Run fundraiser for the church.  People would pay us to run FROM aliens and people would also pay us to BE the aliens and chase the runners!  We’ve got the concept, we’ve got theater people to build us a crashed flying saucer in a field, food experts to make us flying saucer burgers and even a crazy person with a Master’s Degree in Food Science to formulate a blue alien drink!  We’ve EVEN got an actual famous alien abduction site, located about a 5 kilometer fun run away from the church!  So why haven’t we done it yet?  Because we need to wait.  Wait for the Holy Spirit to come with the last piece of the puzzle.  Because it’s the gifts of the Holy Spirit that makes things go!

What’s that last piece you ask?  Well, when you look at this body you will quickly, and correctly, determine that this body… does not run.  I used to say I only run if someone bigger than me is chasing me, but now I’ve decided I’m not running, even for that… they can just catch me.  As a consequence of that, I have a huge gap in my knowledge when it comes to anything having to do with “running.”   The Spirit has given us the Alien Part.  The Spirit has given us people for the “Fun” part.  But the Spirit has yet to give us anyone who knows about the “RUN” part!  So, until the Holy Spirit shows up with that, we wait.  But when the Spirit DOES show up… and the Spirit always shows up… we’ll be off like a people with our hair on fire, chased by aliens, in the middle of a wind storm!

When I tell people that idea they usually accuse me of being drunk on new wine.  I get that.  Dreaming dreams and seeing visions is often misinterpreted by the world as drunk and disorderly behavior.  When new paths forward and ideas are floated, they can sound like a foreign gobbledegook and make no sense!  But you see, with the gift of the Holy Spirit everything that sounded to the world like drunken gibberish before suddenly becomes clear and shows a new way forward!  Like Luther said, We can’t even BELIEVE in or FIND Jesus on our own without the Spirit, let alone do an alien fun run!  We need the gifts of the Spirit to make literally ANYTHING happen in this world, including the ability to believe in God!  So sometimes, we do just have to wait.  Wait until the Holy Spirit gives us the puzzle pieces needed to make it happen.  

I know very well how depressing it is to look out the window and see the world’s overabundance of puzzles and its maddening shortage of puzzle pieces to solve them RIGHT NOW!  Gun violence, Christian Nationalism, a popular fascist replacement theory, war and hunger… not to mention how to do the “RUN” part of an alien fun run.  It is so very tempting NOT to wait and just go and do SOMETHING!  

But when I asked what is “NEW” for Pentecost this year, what I heard was this reminder… that sometimes the thing we are called to be doing is to be waiting and watching for the promised Holy Spirit.  Not passively or with heads buried in the sand, but together as a community, actively helping and encouraging one another to keep an eye out for the Spirit’s gift that WILL give us all we need to “go and do” without just spinning our wheels, but with all of the tools we need to actually get things done!  

For the record, I don’t like waiting for that last puzzle piece, particularly for puzzles that leave people dead, like gun violence, replacement theory fascism, and religious nationalism.  I want to go and fix it NOW!  But the hard lesson for this Pentecost is that sometimes the faithful thing to do IS to wait for the promised Holy Spirit.  She does always come.  I know.  The pieces WILL fall into place.  I know.  God’s will, will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  I know.  But waiting is SO VERY HARD!  I know.  

And it is because this waiting is SO VERY HARD in the face of all the unsolved puzzles of our world today we need more than ever to wait and watch together… keep one another awake and on the lookout…  so when the Spirit DOES come with that last holy puzzle piece we’ll be ready to fan those Holy Spirit flames and GO and change the world.  Amen.