“Listen before You Speak”

“Listen before You Speak”

Pentecost Sunday, Year B May 19, 2024

Acts 2:1-21           Psalm 104:24-34, 35b   Romans 8:22-27

First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho

Pastor Andy Kennaly

Maybe you’ve noticed how the sanctuary at First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint has excellent acoustics. The way the room is situated allows sound to have a quality that other venues cannot match. It’s a great place to have a concert. A story from a recent one illustrates this.

The Festival at Sandpoint Youth Orchestra featured performers whose arms are barely long enough to reach the end of their youth-size violins. One of these young children used her bow to create the sound of a note. Then she paused with an amazing look on her face. This caught the director’s attention; he asked her, What is it? She said, The sound. This isn’t like our practice hall. It’s amazing. The director thought to himself, Ah, you’re listening at a higher level than most kids. You’ve noticed something about music.

This morning, we celebrate Pentecost Sunday. The sound of the Spirit on the move, like a rush of violent wind inside the place where the disciples gather with a crowd, is also visible as flames, tongues of fire that enable people to share the gospel story in a variety of languages. This commissioning echoes through the ages, but to be that Spirit-sent presence in the world, it helps to listen before you speak, to listen at a higher level as we learn of Spirit.

In this story from Acts, not only did the disciples speak in other languages, but the visitors understood them. This story symbolizes how the message of the Christ mystery resounds throughout the world, and resonates in every culture because it connects with the human condition that goes beyond cultural expression.

Pentecost Sunday is the day we remember those disciples gathered in one place in Jerusalem during their biggest feast time of the year. Devout Jews from all over the known world gathered, and when the Holy Spirit filled the disciples with the ability to speak fluently in the various languages, this recognizes the universal impact of the Christ mystery, the relevance of who Jesus is and what Jesus does, and the powerful difference it makes in life to awaken to the Presence of God, to the active, ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, and to the living Christ in our midst.

It does make a difference in life to awaken to the Presence of God, to the active, ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, to the living Christ in our midst. Notice I say the word awaken. On Pentecost, churches tend to emphasize the movement of the Spirit. This often gets translated as revival. The word revival in a churchy way means to recreate spiritual fervor, to renew faith’s intensity, to re-vivify, and to make great again a sense of membership engaged in the mission of the church. But also notice that in using the word revival, all the descriptors, like recreate or renew, they use re- at the beginning of them. Re- means they are based on the past and they look back. Revival is a yearning for lost paradise, the good old days that are perceived as more faithful and in the truth. This orientation to the past can become idealized, and the desired effects for the present tend to be limited to church membership and the internal aspects of Christian faith in an exclusive sense. We try to make people join us and be like us.

The word awaken is similar, but different. It also involves an intensity to it, spiritual realization that changes everything. But a main difference is the forward, future look rather than a desiring for an improved upon past. The process of spiritual awakening is also not limited to the church, has very little to do with membership and renewal of mission. Rather it includes the larger society as culture itself undergoes transformation of attitudes and assumptions because human consciousness changes. We look to other people to learn from them. This unfolding also comes from the future and is a process that has its own momentum.

While revival emphasizes an invitation to yield oneself to an established story, awakening is an invitation to help unfold the story in new ways. Yet neither, not the past-focus nor the future-focus, can stand independently, for the Spirit unites past, present and future in a relationship that involves influence and dynamic give and take.

That first Pentecost, people from around the various countries recognized their languages. There was certainly a degree of fervor and excitement, but also confusion and dismay. As the world changes, this can come across as unsettling, and easy answers don’t tend to fit, like people saying they were drunk, but this was not the case.

That first Pentecost also has a global reach. Sometimes people look back at history and say Christianity depended on the Roman Empire to disseminate, that God’s plan needed the Roman Empire to spread the religion. But this is not the case in terms of dependence. The early church, as this scene of Pentecost shows, was fully equipped; sent by God to join the Holy Spirit who is already at work in the world.

Geopolitics of the Roman Empire is a later thing. It wasn’t until 325 that Constantine designated Christianity as the official religion, and with that comes Empire religion. The early church was much freer, more dynamic, and less rigid and codified than the institutional, Empire religion that developed.

Practices changed with the Roman designation, such as serving in the military. The early church refused violence and the command of Jesus to put your sword away and the vision of changing weapons into plowshares and pruning hooks was taken with literal deferral of military service and other forms of domination and violence.

It’s no wonder that spiritual teachers of the early church fled when Rome co-opted the faith, and those we call the Desert Mothers and Fathers lived out their days away from direct influence of political power and domination systems. Notice I said, Desert Mothers and Fathers, God’s equal call to male and female. Yet God doesn’t call everyone to the desert. Most of us need to cultivate an inner awareness, a contemplative stance that remains engaged with the world, in the world, and learn how to develop responsiveness in non-reactive ways.

As Pentecost remind us, we are participants in God’s larger purposes, in God’s ability to create, in God’s deeper desire to define us in ways that matter, beyond the superficial or culturally driven ways that we tend to settle for and so intensely defend. Pentecost invites us to trust God’s patience, even as we are embraced by that which truly defines: grace, love, peace.

These are gifts that no Empire can limit, no law confines, and no violence can destroy because they are gifts from within, gifts of the heart based on a Reality that gives us what we need. Maybe not what we want, but what we need.

The Reality of grace, the Reality of love, the Reality of peace; these realities are eternal, interacting with time from beyond time, for they find expression as past, present, and future influence each other, for the Spirit blows where she will. The Spirit is active, and this movement awakens the world to God’s divine intent of life.

Thanks be to God for festivals that remind us we have so much to be thankful for. May we seek to pay attention as we offer ourselves through awareness to what God is doing in the world. As we claim the fervor of revival’s passion and a longing for dedicated renewal; as we expand our consciousness through awareness and openness to God at work in awakening the larger world; may we trust that calm, grounded heart space that has good acoustics in and through sacred silence.

May we pause, and learn, to listen, so we may speak what is a gift from God to express the joy of Christ and becomes beautiful notes as part of love’s melody in the world. And may God be glorified, now, and always. Amen.