Filled with the Spirit

Acts 2:1-21

House of Hope Presbyterian Church

8 June 2025

               This week, while reading the very familiar story of the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts, I was struck by the final bit of the text—the passage from the book of the prophet Joel—that sets the context as “In the last days” when there will be portents of the coming, glorious, Day of the Lord. 

               The passage from Joel is apocalyptic.  Which is not the usual perspective we take with this story from Acts.  Maybe that perspective leapt out at me this week because of the troubled times in which we live?  Many people read or watch the news these days and see portents of worse to come.  I’m sure many feel that we are living in apocalyptic times.

               If so, if a similarity of feeling exists between us and the time of the prophet Joel and the telling of the story of Pentecost in the Book of Acts, what word from God might we hear for us, that helps us see portents not of doom and destruction, but of the glorious coming of the Lord?

               The last few weeks I’ve started getting to know you better.  Your staff, your systems, how you do things, your worship, the many things going on every week, the big projects and issues, and your building.  If you follow me on Facebook, you know I’ve been delighting in noticing all sorts of little details around this building. 

               This beautiful building, of course, is rich in detail, and I assume I will sit here for years and still see something new.  The prospect of that delights me.  Mark, our office administrator, has challenged me to find the cricket in the stained-glass windows, and I haven’t located it yet (please don’t tell me if you know, I want to find it myself).

               Monday morning, after I finished reading this week’s lectionary texts, and began the process of thinking through them, this apocalyptic perspective leapt out at me.  When it leapt forward I then had an idea—go look at the Apocalypse window. 

               You can’t see it right now, as it is behind you, and the wonderful Fisk organ impedes your seeing it, but the grand window that adorns the choir loft and the front of this building is the Apocalypse window.  I know that our Bible study class recently spent one of their sessions in the choir loft examining the window.

               I had, myself, not carefully looked at it, so on Monday morning I left my office to stroll over here to look.  Funny enough, on the way down the stairs, I ran into Peter Swanson, a man who was here on Monday studying and taking photos of some of our windows, those by the stained-glass artist LeCompte, and he and I got into a lively conversation about stained glass.  I pointed out the serendipity that I was that very minute headed the sanctuary to examine one of our windows.

               So I climbed the balcony steps, pulled up a chair, and just sat, looking carefully at the window.  I didn’t take any of the descriptions of the window with me, wanting to first see what I could see.  I read the in depth descriptions afterwards.

               And you know what you don’t see in our Apocalypse window?  Dire portents.  Blood and fire, smoky mist and darkness, are not there.  Oh sure, there are obvious images from the Book of Revelation—the seven golden candlesticks, the angels sounding the seven trumpets, the Agnus Dei—the slaughtered and risen Lamb of God.  But this window is no dark image by Albrecht Durer or Peter Bruegel.  Not even the mix of hell and heaven of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.  In fact, for an Apocalypse window, ours is rather serene.

               Because our Apocalypse window reveals the coming glory of the Lord, and that is ultimately a vision of beauty and peace.  What I see in that window are images of God’s sovereignty and grace extended to the world, the final fulfillment of God’s dream for creation.  David Johnson’s description of the window, in the book he wrote about the church, is that “it represents the Kingdom in fulfillment, Christ in his glory in the company of the redeemed.”  A window that was intended to “throw a brilliant illumination into the church.”

               Our Apocalypse window reveals something about the nature and vision of God.  Which is really what apocalyptic is all about in the Biblical understanding of the concept.  Apocalypse isn’t about end-of-times portents of doom and destruction, but a pulling back of the curtain, a lifting of the veil, a revealing of what’s truly going on behind-the-scenes and underneath the surfaces.  What our window proclaims is that when one really looks, with eyes that can see, one beholds the peace and glory created by God’s sovereignty and grace.

               The story of Pentecost is also a revealing of who God is and what God dreams for us.  In our own troubled times, God speaks words to us in this story, and if we hear them, if we open ourselves to be filled with the spirit, God’s words to us can calm our fears and bring us peace.

               Which is not the same as saying that the story itself is calm and comforting.  For it is not.  There is a wildness to this story.  A wildness that evades our attempts to contain it.  For the Spirit isn’t too keen with our proper order, she likes to blow wherever she wants, on whomever she wants, doing surprising and new and sometimes discomforting things.  She wants to fill us, to embody herself in us, in ways that lead to bold new happenings.

               One of my United Church of Christ colleagues, Dr. Bruce Epperly, says that Pentecost is a day for the mystics and spiritual adventurers.  He writes, “God is doing a new thing and we must prepare for the breakthroughs of divine spiritual novelty.”  Pentecost teaches us that “God is imaginative and we are to embody divine imagination in our daily lives.”  Bruce Epperly proclaims, “Don’t be afraid. Be bold. You are God’s beloved and God is at work in [you].”

               Our own Jimmy Hoke goes further in pointing out what’s happening in this story.  He describes, in his commentary on this passage, “the wild and messy multiplicity of queerness that moves around Pentecost.”  After all, there are pyrotechnics (tongues of fire) and speaking in tongues and people criticizing the whole thing as a drunken mess.  To be filled with the Spirit is not a cautious and orderly enterprise.

               June, being Pride Month, fits well with seeing the queerness in this Pentecost story.  The multiplicity of voices, of people from all over, speaking and hearing and understanding one another.  Of finding unity in our acceptance of diversity, not in some enforced conformity.  As Jimmy writes, “When we look closely at the meaning of ‘tongues’ we understand how this story is really about language and difference—the queer multiplicity of many different people being able to access community without having to change their ways of speaking.”

               He draws the conclusion that “Pentecost is a queer invitation to chaos, to chatter, to a wild and critterly multiplicity, and to making our world and our history more complex and just.”

               These colleagues who draw out the mystical and the queer possibilities in this story help to lift the veil for us to see in fresh and new ways what God is doing in this story and what God dreams for us.

               The Christian Church does believe that this story helps to teach us something about who God is.  We meet the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as she descends upon the gathered disciples and births the movement that becomes the church.

               One of my favorite theologians is the Baptist James McClendon, who wrote a rich and wonderful systematic theology that approached the great topics of the faith in novel ways.  For example, he began his systematic theology with an exploration of human embodiment and with discussions of what we learn from the Blues, and the love letters of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards, and the prison writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He concluded the enterprise with a Pentecostal vision of God’s dream for creation that flows from the very nature of who God is.

               And who God is, in McClendon’s words, is “an ecstatic fellowship.”  That’s what is revealed in the concept of a Trinitarian God—a God who is in constant relationship that overflows.  A relationship of deep, mutual, ecstatic love that births creation.

               And this ecstatic fellowship is what God dreams for humanity.  God desires that we too are caught up in the ecstasies of genuine fellowship with one another and mutual love that brings about a new and better world.  This is the adventure of life that God calls humanity to.

               And in order to bring this vision for the world and for humanity to fulfillment, God has given birth to a church.  I love how Julia puts it, that God’s church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church.  The church is God’s great instrument to bring about God’s desires and dreams for the world.

               And what we see here in the Pentecost story is a church of many voices, stirred to new and wild and messy expressions by the winds of the Spirit.  A church that dreams dreams and has visions.  Where young and old and all genders speak boldly the prophetic words that God has given them to speak.

               In my candidating sermon last February, I presented to you some of my sense of the vital need for the church during these troubled times in which we live.  Last week I read yet another great thinker making a similar claim, this time the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa.  My son Sebastian and I attended our spring church retreat up at Clearwater Forest, our Presbyterian campground, and what a lovely place that is.  We hiked in the woods, played on the ropes course, chased each other in games of tag, paddled the lake, and enjoyed each other’s company.  And what I most needed and most enjoyed was sitting beside the waters in an Adirondack chair and reading a book.  In all the busyness of moving the last few months my own reading life had suffered.  So, to get away from all the boxes and to do lists and tasks and just sit, and rest, and enjoy the natural beauty, and read, was a blessing. 

So while the heron skimmed the water and the loons made their plaintive cries, I read a leading sociologist analyzing the troubled times in which we live, explaining why the church is needed right now to embody the spiritual and humane values. 

I feel this conviction deeply—humanity needs the resources, traditions, and skills the church possesses: from our stewardship of the arts to our work for justice in the streets; our quiet contemplative practices and our moments of fellowship and belonging over a cup of coffee or a picnic on the lawn. 

Humanity needs us, and God is calling us to meet that need. 

Because God is calling us, we are not alone in this adventure.  No, Jesus promised to send us another Advocate.  And so the Spirit comes and blows among us, filling us with power and gifts and glory, that we might be who God desires us to be.

If we open ourselves to the Spirit.  To the queer, mystical, diverse, wild, messy, ecstatic, and prophetic voices of Pentecost.  To the bold adventure of the new.  Then God will use us to meet the world’s need and help fulfill God’s mission and dream.

And then, we will arrive at that vision of the glorious coming Day of the Lord we catch a glimpse of in that window up there—the beauty, joy, and peace that results from God’s sovereignty and grace.  In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.  On that great and glorious day, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

That this vision may be so, this Pentecost, let us here, today be filled with the Holy Spirit.