Windblown
Rev. Amy Butler
The Day of Pentecost
May 11, 2008
Acts 2:1-21
(Audio)
I don’t know what your mental image of the Sahara is, but mine is one of extreme heat and mind-numbing monotony—sand dune after sand dune the same as far as your eye can see. It’s huge! The Sahara desert stretches 1200 miles from the Mediterranean Ocean into central Africa.
Recently, a National Geographic and NPR program called “Radio Expeditions” produced a series on the desert life of the Sahara. The reporter, Alex Chadwick, traveling from Timbuktu, followed a camel caravan through the desert along the same route that they have traveled for over a thousand years, to the great salt mines of Mali.
The caravan came upon a village in the middle of the desert, a village named Araouane. Araouane was built on low land, like a bowl in the desert, to provide some protection from the strong winds and the constantly shifting sands. All that stands in the village are a few single-story mud buildings, a mosque and a well. Mr. Chadwick interviewed an old woman who had lived in Araouane all her life, as had her family for many generations; she had never left her village in her whole entire life.
He asked her about the winds, which blew sand constantly over her house. She said that everyday she got up, went out and tried to shovel the Sahara away.
And . . . day after day, week in and week out, caravans make their way over that terrain, clearing a path that would only be covered up again whenever the wind decided to blow, a landscape at the mercy of the sand and the wind, reformatting everything in its wake. Every single day the landscape looks totally different because the minute the winds start, everything changes.
What a strange situation the blowing of the wind creates. For us humans bent on assimilation and institution, it’s downright disconcerting to live in a situation where everything is changing all the time. And this image of wind blowing is certainly not the first image I would associate with the institution of the church, this place and experience that becomes a fixture in so many of our lives, a place that serves as backdrop for our memories and refuge in the times that life leaves us battered.
In fact, it seems utterly bizarre to me that today, on the Day of Pentecost, the birthday of the church—that great institution in which we have come to understand and express our faith—we hear a story about wind: shifting and changing, blowing everything we’d come to expect away and leaving us gazing out over a whole different landscape.
Here’s what was going on around the story we heard this morning. Once again, the disciples were gathered together in a little room behind closed and locked doors. They were terrified, and I don’t think I am exaggerating to use that word. They’d given up everything to follow Jesus and that last six weeks of their lives had dragged them all the way from hopeful anticipation of the future to mind-numbing horror as they watched Jesus crucified all the way back to hope, when Jesus suddenly appeared among them in a little room like that one and birthed the thought that maybe things could just get back to normal. But then he left again. There they were, gathered together after hiking back from Mt. Olivet where Jesus had ascended into heaven and they were left standing there, gaping at the sky in disbelief. Now they had to decide what was next.
So, they gathered in a little room together, sitting there wondering, probably aloud, or maybe even arguing with each other about what steps they should take next. I doubt they were using Roberts Rules of Order, but I expect they were desperately looking for some kind of organization or direction or structure for their little gathering.
In the middle of that meeting, suddenly, the text says, a sound like the rush of a violent wind came into the room where they were sitting. And when that happened, everything changed . . . the whole landscape of life as they knew it; their entire understanding of God; the way in which they had begun to imagine their faith . . . with the gust of a violent wind everything shifted and nothing would ever be the same again.
Try to imagine the scene: aside from being emotionally traumatized, the disciples were probably physically and mentally drained. They’d gotten their way of life down to a science, this nomadic experiment of following Jesus. Now everything was different and none of them could imagine what that would look like. These followers of the man Jesus—what would they do now? They didn’t have much to build on; they were changing direction in the middle of the process; they didn’t know what was next.
As the story goes, tongues of fire came down from heaven and rested on the disciples’ heads. Then the disciples suddenly started speaking in other languages, going out into the streets and continuing the essential work of the church: telling the life-transforming story of relationship with Jesus Christ. They didn’t plan it; they didn’t expect it; they weren’t prepared and they certainly didn’t know what was coming next, but out they went. And their decision to follow the wind of God’s Spirit out into the world that day shifted the entire landscape of human life.
Aside from the obvious, wind and fire and sudden linguistic skill, there are some really curious things going on here.
First of all, when all this happened the city of Jerusalem was in the middle of a huge pilgrimage celebration called the Feast of Weeks. Scholars are in disagreement about what the religious significance of that celebration was for the Jews of Jesus’ day, but practically speaking I imagine it was something like Mardi Gras is every year in New Orleans: hotels were full, restaurants were crowded, the streets were filled with all sorts of pilgrims from all over who had made the annual trek to the holy city to celebrate. Lots of litter along the roads; crowds of people to push your way through whenever you try to go anywhere; cacophony of music and voices and languages filling the air.
Though it’s true that the folks crowding into Jerusalem that week shared an identity as Jews and gathered in from many places to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, we should know that the Jewish people were scattered all over the region—just like today, where you will find Jews in every country of the world. The Jews in Jerusalem that day struggled to find commonality when they practically came from different cultures and very often spoke totally different languages.
And that backdrop helps us understand another curiosity of the situation. After the wind blew in and changed everything, the disciples poured out into the crowded streets and started telling their stories of experience with Jesus Christ in all kinds of different languages—not “speaking in tongues” in an ecstatic, Hollywood way, but opening their mouths and telling their stories in real languages, the native tongues of all the folks in the crowd that day so that, in this strange city all of the sudden each person in that crowd was hearing her mother tongue.
Well, that’s strange enough, but wait until you learn this. Galileans, that ethnic sub-group from which most of the small group of Jesus’ disciples came, was known in the larger, extended Jewish community as the more, shall we say, provincial part of the family. Specifically, they were known to be rather less educated and have real difficulty with linguistics: everyone knew that the people in Galilee spoke a rough version of Aramaic and not much else. No polished Hebrew or educated Greek down there; no one who came from Galilee had the education or the cultural awareness to speak another language well.
So, you can imagine the curiosity of what happened that day when the wind blew in. It would be like, maybe, getting out of your car at a gas station in, say, rural Arkansas (sorry Nancy and Phil), and discovering the people behind the counter speaking with refined British accents or something.
No one could believe what they were hearing, these amazing stories coming out of the mouths of rough-hewn Galileans in languages from all over the world. The landscape had shifted with the wind of God’s Spirit . . . and nothing would ever be the same again.
Last weekend I traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, to speak at a gathering of 600 Virginia Baptist pastors. I was there to speak on a panel about revitalizing the modern church, to explore with other pastors and church leaders how we might “do church” in such a way that it is vital and relevant for modern folks.
Of course, this is a topic all of us church professionals love to explore. We long for a prescription or idea, a formula or a structure that will make the church, this institution we love, alive and well in a society that increasing disregards its relevance. For three, two-hour panel sessions, I sat up front with two other pastors and fielded questions from the crowd.
What should we do, many asked, about the burning question of whether or not to install a screen at the front of the church? How should I handle the uproar over the use of drums in worship? What kind of building should we build to attract new members?
I didn’t have the answers to these questions, and, believe me, if I had I would not have been spending my weekend in Lynchburg, Virginia telling my secrets to 600 pastors who could just as easily purchase my slickly packaged program for church success!
In response to the increasingly frustrated questions from the audience asking for a plan or a formula or a fail-safe strategy, one of the other pastors on the panel, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, told the story of how his church does ministry: he called it “a ministry of chaos.”
You could almost see the horror on the faces of those listening as he explained that anybody in their church who feels God’s direction leading them to try something new, a new kind of ministry within the church or within the community, is empowered to do that. Sometimes, he told us, ideas take off, like the basketball league created with the one rule that no members of the same violent teen gang can play on the same team, which has now become the biggest sports program in Fredericksburg and radically helped reduce the gang problem in their community. And sometimes ideas don’t work well, like a mid-day worship service that no one attended because there are not enough people working in the immediate neighborhood of the church.
When ideas take off, he told us, the church runs with them. When they don’t, the church stops them and tries something else. It’s always changing, ever-fluid—a ministry of chaos!
I was trying to imagine coming to the Church Council and proposing my next harebrained idea: a Ministry of Chaos!, all the while reflecting internally on how hard it is for we humans, who push and push to institutionalize our ideas, our faith, to live with something like a ministry of chaos.
One pastor got up to respond and said that, while he appreciated what the staff at FBC Fredericksburg was saying, he could not imagine how that would ever work at his church. He explained: life is so chaotic anyway. Our society moves at such a mind-numbing pace, asking us to change constantly, to learn new things and adjust all the time. How could he possibly ask his people to allow their church, the one hour of refuge and stability in their otherwise shifting lives, to change?
The pastor of FBC Fredericksburg looked at that man and asked: “How could you not?”
How could you not?
The disciples learned an important lesson that day when the wind of God’s Spirit blew in. They learned that following God is never a static endeavor that we could ever easily package or explain or expect. In fact, just when we think we have God figured out, the wind of God’s Spirit blows in and changes the landscape of our relationship with God, then takes us to places we’d never expect, not in a million years.
This is hard for us. It’s hard for us who like stability and institution. It’s hard for us who like to know what’s coming and predict next best steps. It’s hard for us who build buildings and plan programs and want so hard to know God in a way that provides comfort and answers and situations we can come to expect.
But this is not the God we follow.
The God we follow blows into our lives and turns them on their heads, changing everything we expected and landing us in places we never thought we’d be. The wind of God’s Spirit is also the lively force that blows in and creates new possibilities when all we can see is what has been there all along.
I got married when I was very, very young—it will be 18 years this August. Since we were so (so) young when we got married it was a really big deal that we got to rent a car on our honeymoon. We were on a very tight budget so we had reserved a small, economy car.
One of my favorite memories of that trip was leaning over the rental car counter to sign the rental agreement and birdseed falling out of the shellacked hairdo I was still wearing from the wedding. The rental agent looked at us in surprise and asked if we’d just gotten married. When we told her yes, she then made a big deal over us and announced: she was upgrading our rental . . . to a convertible.
We were really excited to have a convertible for our trip. Wherever we went we lowered the top and sped down the road, enjoying the sun shining on our faces, singing along to whatever was playing on the radio.
One thing I quickly found during that experience is that riding in a convertible, while a lot of fun, does have its downside. Riding in a convertible, I found, does not lend itself to maintaining a presentable hairstyle.
When the top is down, the wind whips through your hair and any efforts you made to look reasonably well groomed, well . . . fly right out the window. In fact, riding around in a convertible leaves your hair standing on end, hopelessly tangled and ridiculously arranged. I admit I vainly wanted to look good in those pictures from our honeymoon but that would have required keeping the top up . . . and the weather was just too beautiful, the occasion too carefree to ever do that.
I supposed we could have left the top up, but if we’d done that our good fortune of a rental car upgrade—to a convertible!—would have been pointless.
And so it is with the wind of God’s Spirit that blows in and changes our lives and our community. We could try as much as we can to make our experience of relationship with God a static one, but if we do that we might miss the gift of God’s Spirit, given to the church on this Day of Pentecost as a gift that constantly reshapes the landscape of our lives and opens our eyes to new possibilities God offers.
It’s never easy to follow the wind of God’s Spirit to new and unexpected places. It can be messy; it can seem strange; it can feel unfamiliar. But God’s Spirit is always on the move, and it’s up to us to follow, no matter where the wind blows.
Amen.
