Acts 2:1-21
Set Afire
James Sledge June
5, 2022 – Pentecost
I probably don’t need to tell you that the
number of the religiously unaffiliated adults is growing rapidly in America. A recent
Pew Research study said that nearly three out of ten Americans have no formal
religious connection.[1]
And younger Americans are even less likely to have a religious home.
El Greco,
Decent of the Holy Spirit
Among the unaffiliated, a popular self-designation is SBNR, or spiritual but not religious. Different people mean somewhat different things by this, but a lot in this group think of organized religion as musty old institutions that aren’t really necessary for someone to find a connection to the divine.
I can sympathize with such thinking. Churches have at times gotten focused on things pretty far removed from following Jesus. Add in the hatred espoused by some churches and throw in some sexual misconduct and abuse by clergy, and it isn’t too hard to see why some folks are suspicious of institutional religion.
But when spirituality gets understood as distinct from religion, spirituality moves almost entirely into the private, personal sphere. The term spiritual even takes on a kind of ethereal sense, largely disconnected from the day to day. It’s about internal experience, feelings of well-being and contentment, a warm vibe from a connection to something beyond yourself.
Perhaps such notions originated in the Church. Plenty of church members think of the spiritual as highly personal and private, and if the spiritual is ethereal and all about internal feelings, then perhaps that is where the Spirit operates. A lot of Christians see the Spirit confined to what gets labeled as spiritual, and so she isn’t much a part of the corporate, community religious experience.
Now certainly the Spirit can and does have a role in personal religious experience, in sensing God’s presence and providing guidance. But if our scripture reading today is any guide, the Spirit has a very public manifestation that gets noticed by those who have the Spirit as well as those who do not.
In our scripture reading, the coming of the Holy Spirit happens, not in a private moment of prayer and meditation, but when they were all together in one place. The word “all” seems to refer to the entire community of believers which at that time numbers around 120. All of them experience the rush of the Spirit into the room, and the Spirit rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit…
And all of them began to speak in other languages. It’s not just the apostles; it’s everyone, men, women, young, and old. The Spirit equips the entire community so that others can’t help but notice. A crowd gathered around these Spirit filled folks. Many of them were amazed and what was happening, but others figured that only drunkenness could explain such an event.
What to make of this story? Could it have really happened? And does the Spirit still move in ways that are so clear and obvious that no one inside or outside the church could fail to notice?
In one of her sermons, Barbara Brown Taylor tells of attending worship at singer Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis Tennessee. For three hours she joined in the clapping and hand waving. But then people began to be “slain in the Spirit.” One woman did a jerking dance then collapsed on the floor. An usher covered her with a sheet to preserve her modesty and several members gathered in prayer around her until the convulsions stopped. Barbara Brown Taylor writes:
I felt like I was caught in the middle of a thunderstorm, so I did what you are supposed to do: I made myself very small and held perfectly still. Lightening did not strike me, which was an answer to my prayer, but in the months since then I have wondered about my reaction. Was it simply a reaction to that kind of worship or was it more than that? If I had been in that room on the first Pentecost day, would have done the same thing. “Oh God, if you are about to pour out your Spirit and this is what it looks like, would you please skip me?”[2]
All of my life I’ve associated church with being proper and respectable, people known for being nice and kind and helpful, but not the sort that would make any real waves, certainly not the sort that people might mistake for being drunk. And in the churches where I grew up the elders and deacons were among the most respectable and proper folks, the very last people who would act drunk in public.
But the story of Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit does a lot more than give people spiritual warm fuzzies. The Spirit may well blow through the place, turning everything upside down and setting people on fire.
I wonder. Could that really happen? I certainly hope so.
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