Yearning for the Spirit: A Guided Meditation for Pentecost

June 4, 2017 Day of Pentecost

A Sermon Preached by Jack Cabaness Katonah Presbyterian Church

Acts 2:1-13

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.”

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, Visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs …

Many years ago on a Pentecost Sunday I received a nervous phone call from the liturgist at six in the morning.

“How am I supposed to pronounce all those names?,” the voice said on the other end.

“What names?,” I asked.

“All those names in the reading,” came the reply.

I thought about it for a second. I knew how to pronounce most of the names, but Phrygia and Pamphylia still had a tendency to catch me off guard. Through the years I’ve looked them up dozens of times in my HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, and then they completely slip my mind until the next time Pentecost rolls around.

Ask me next week at the church picnic how to pronounce Phrygia and Pamphylia, and I’ll probably give you a blank stare.

So I said to the liturgist, “Well, we could consult a Bible Dictionary right before worship starts, or you could fake the pronunciation with confidence and most people would never know, or instead of going down that list of names you could simply say ‘people from all over the world’ and leave it at that.”

To this day whenever I see Phrygia and Pamphylia in print, I, too, am tempted to say simply, “people from all over the world,” but I don’t do that. Instead, I get out the Bible Dictionary, and I refresh my memory, and I make diacritical pronunciation marks on my manuscript,

FRIJ-ee-uh pam-FIL-ee-uh and I read through that long list of names, because that long list of names is actually quite significant. There’s an entire sermon in that list of names. You see, it’s not just a list of peoples from all over the world; it’s a list of peoples from all over time. By the first century, the Medes and the Elamites already belonged to the annals of history. In the words of one commentator, Luke’s list of the people present on Pentecost would be the equivalent of someone today saying, “You should have been here for church on Pentecost Sunday. We had visitors from Montana, Arizona, and Michigan, not to mention a half dozen Assyrians and a nice little Hittite couple.”1

It would be like wandering the streets of Manhattan, and hearing not only French, Italian, and Chinese, but also Latin, Old English, and ancient Greek.

If the mighty wind and the tongues of fire weren’t enough to get our attention, the mere presence of all these people from every place and every time should startle us into taking notice.

2 What would all these people have said to each other apart from “Hey! Your head is on fire!” ?

Yet, Luke tells us that those who were filled with the Spirit on Pentecost were given the ability to speak the gospel in a way that the crowd heard what they said in their own languages. Does Luke mean that the believers got divided up into language groups—some of the speakers speaking this language and others speaking that one?—or did they speak one ecstatic language that was somehow heard in translation by each hearer?

And, come to think of it, how did the hearers know that the speakers were Galileans? Did the Spirit allow them to keep their Galilean accent?

Luke doesn’t tell us, but the salient point for Luke is that God’s mighty acts must be praised in understandable language, and such proclamation was the first manifestation of the Spirit-filled community.

In the words of one commentator, Luke gives us a blueprint of the missional life of the church: praising God in every dialect, extending the gospel of God’s gracious presence in Jesus Christ into every human arena, obliterating the word “foreign” from its vocabulary.2

Arabs and Jews are praying together. Parthians understand Medes. Asians walk and talk with other people of color from Africa, and together they strike up a conversation across time with slaveholders from the antebellum South.

A disabled veteran of the U.S. Army meets a former officer in the Viet Nam Liberation Army, and they talk past their differences, knowing deep down that they are brothers under the skin.

Imagine an international 12 Step Program in which there is no language barrier because we all know where we’ve been and where we’re trying to go.

People who speak the language of Fox News are suddenly able to converse with those who speak the language of CNN, and they are able to hear one another and be understood.

Those of us who usually do everything in our power to avoid difficult conversations are suddenly able to share honestly about what’s on our hearts, and we are able to hear one another and be understood.

As a church, we listen to and learn from the wisdom of ancient Medes and Elamites, and, they, in turn, in a wonderfully anachronistic miracle, are able to listen to and learn from us.

3 This is Pentecost. Not just the diversity of the peoples and the languages being spoken from every time and place, but the fact that each person in attendance is able to hear and be heard.

To be an inclusive church means more than having a diverse gathering of people in worship; it means that we take the time and make the effort to hear one another and be heard.

The promise of Pentecost is that the Spirit enables us to listen to one another. Just as the Spirit enabled all those gathered on Pentecost to hear in their native languages, so the Spirit today enables us to listen to each other, about our honest experiences, about our frustrations, about our hopes, and about our joys.

What do you think the Spirit is saying to Katonah Presbyterian Church? What works of faithfulness and service would prompt praise?

What areas of neglect would invite correction?

What words of encouragement would we need to hear to remind all of us to remember our first love and to be unflagging in our zeal?

My prayer is that we will have honest conversations about these questions, and that the Spirit will enable us to listen to one another.

In your bulletins this morning is an insert of a paper flame—either red, yellow, or orange. On this sheet of paper you may write your name, and something that you yearn for the Spirit to do in your life and/or in the life of our church.

On my paper flame, I have written “Pastor Jack” and “I yearn for the Spirit to enable us to listen to one another in a spirit of honesty, empathy, love, and joy.”

In a few minutes I’ll invite you to place your paper flames on the table with the red tablecloth. In this way we will symbolically collect all these yearning prayers even as we pray for the Spirit to be poured out upon us and upon the bread and the cup.

Later, at the conclusion of worship, I’ll invite you to come back to the table and take one of these paper flames home with you, and more likely than not it will be someone else’s paper flame. And I’ll ask you to spend this next week in prayer for the person whose name you drew and for their particular yearning. So, if you happen to draw my paper flame, you’ll spend the next week praying for the Spirit to enable us to listen to one another in a spirit of honesty, empathy, love, and joy.

That’s the invitation. Let’s spend about three minutes thinking about what you yearn for the Spirit to do in your life and in the life of our church.

[Long pause as worshippers write down their responses]

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Concluding Prayer:

Gracious God, we have set a table with our prayerful yearnings. Hear us now as we long for the day when we will sit at table with you in your eternal reign …

© Copyright 2017, The Rev. Dr. Jack Cabaness, Pastor, Katonah Presbyterian Church. All rights reserved.

Endnotes:

1 Thomas G. Long, “A Night at the Burlesque: Wandering through the Pentecost Narrative,” Journal for Preachers, 1991.

2 Long, Ibid.

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