Your Daughters Will Prophesy (Pentecost; Confirmation (Part II); Acts 2:1-21; May 20, 2018)

Your Daughters Will Prophesy

Pentecost
Confirmation (Part II)
Acts 2:1-21
May 20, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Here it is: the Day of Pentecost, the day of the Great Fifty (as our Orthodox siblings call it). It's fifty days after Easter. Like many of the earliest Christian practices, we didn't come up with this ourselves. We "borrowed" it from the Jewish tradition. On the second day of the Passover, which celebrates the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt with the festival of Unleavened Bread, the Jewish people were commanded to begin a count of days. On the fiftieth day they are to observe another festival, Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks.

Like many Christian festivals, Shavuot took over another festival and imported a new meaning. It had been a festival celebrating the barley harvest. On top of that meaning, the Jewish tradition has overlaid a celebration of God's gift of the Torah. To me it is a wonderful thing that the Scripture that is read on Shavuot is not a text that describes Moses going up the mountain and being given the tablets of the Law. Instead, the reading for Shavuot comes from the book of Ruth. The story of Ruth is set during the barley harvest. Do you remember? Ruth is a stranger to Israel. In fact she is a Moabite, Israel's bitterest enemies. But she decides to embrace the Torah and the God who had given it. In that way she resembles the people of Israel, the people who were no people until God delivered them from slavery and gave them the Torah. So it sort of works. It also connects to the barley harvest, as I just said.

I don't know how much you remember about the story of Ruth, but part of it hinges on the righteous actions of Boaz who is a relative of Ruth's husband who has died. There are two things that the Torah requires that farmers not do at harvest time. They are not to harvest right up to the edges of their fields. I once knew a farmer who calculated what portion of his harvest came from the end rows and--in a gesture toward the principle of this law--donated that portion of his harvest to charity.

The second thing farmers are not to do is to go back over their fields and pick up the grain that might have fallen to the ground in the course of the harvest. Instead the landless poor may gather it. It was this second law that was good for Ruth. She joined the poor in gleaning the fields behind Boaz's harvesters. Further, Boaz ordered his own workers not to be too careful about gathering the grain. They were to deliberately let some grain fall to the ground near where Ruth was.

In both of these cases, as far as the Torah is concerned it is not a matter of doing a nice thing. What gets dropped during the harvesty belongs to the poor. It is theirs as soon as it hits the ground. A farmer who hires gleaners steals this grain from its rightful owners. What grows in the margins of the fields belongs to those who live marginal lives. Farmers may not steal this grain from the marginalized by harvesting right up the edges of their fields. This is not a matter of charity; it is a matter of justice.

Why have I mentioned all this? Partly, it's just me being me, but it is also because of the fact that this year is one of those rare times when the Christian and Jewish calendars coincide. The first day of Passover began at sunset on Holy Saturday. Accordingingly, the Festival of Shavuot began at sunset last evening. In both the Christian and Jewish reckonings, then, today is the Great Fifty, Pentecost, fully arrived!

Many people in the Christian tradition have made of Pentecost a sort of birthday for the Church. And, I suppose, they are at least partly right. We do celebrate at least a beginning of the Church with the gift of the Holy Spirit. But I'd like to ask this question: If we are celebrating the birth of the Church, what do we imagine that the Church was born for? The older I get, the more it is true for me that birthdays have become more than milestones, more than a marker that I have traveled another 584,226,000 miles around the sun while the sun traveled some 394,200,000 miles relative to the center of the galaxy. (Wow! No wonder we feel tired sometimes!)

The older I get the more that birthdays become occasions for reflecting on the what and the why of my life. It's nice to bask in the good wishes of my family and friends. I'm certainly not too old to enjoy presents. But more and more birthdays are a reminder that I am alive for a reason and I'd best be getting on with it. And that means that the first thing to do is to clarify the "why?" of my life.

So, I think, for the Church, if Pentecost is indeed a birthday, it is for us to reflect on the why of our existence. Not that I don't like cake and ice cream, you understand. But if that is all it is, we're just throwing ourselves a party and patting ourselves on the back.

If Pentecost has anything at all to do with Shavuot, then perhaps the purpose of the Church has something to do with the Torah, especially in its summary forms, the Ten Commandments, the Great Commandment, and the one that is like it. “The rest,” as Rabbi Hillel, is said to have said, "is commentary. Go and learn it."(Talmud Shabbat 31a) If that is the case then the text that offers the most pointed and emphatic commentary must be Deuteronomy 16:20, צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף, "Justice, justice you shall seek."

We might have known. We might have known from the story of Ruth. We might have known from the selection from the prophet Joel that Stephen took as his sermon text on Pentecost. Look at what Joel does in this short passage. He lifts up ancient divisions in humanity, those that seem to plague us at all times. When he says that the Spirit will be poured out, he deliberately includes sons and daughters. Maleness and femaleness are no longer categories to which the Spirit is bound. Joel deliberately includes the young and the old. Generations, as different as their outlooks and experiences might be, are no longer categories to which the Spirit is bound.

And, to add to that, the outpouring of the Spirit is no longer bound to the divisions of language and culture. The long list that Ken read--and bless his heart, this is the hardest reading of the year!--is no longer a list that bars or privileges anyone when it comes to God's love.

Joel is right to go on to talk about the day when the sun turns dark and the moon shines red. Dissolving the categories of male and female, of young and old, of American and non-American is a world-shattering event. The world as people have fashioned it, the interior world that we take for granted, the socially-constructed world that gives some of us advantages over the rest of us lives on borrowed time. The Church is born as a foreshadowing of the new world that will emerge from the ashes of the old one. It is a first attempt to fashion a world characterized not by the divisions that we are so fond of, but by justice and peace. It is, as a number of early theologians declared, a third ethnos, a third people, that is neither gentile nor Jew, but something different, something new. That community that seeks justice is what we celebrate and commemorate today.

Today, Emma, we confirm you in this community. That is, we strengthen the bonds of allegiance and love that bind you and us together. That is, we together make them more firm, we con-firm them. Like us, from this moment on you will be publicly identified with the Church's purpose; together with us you will seek justice; and, together with us you will seek to be God's presence in the world.

That not only seems like a lot to load onto the shoulders of one young woman, it is a lot. It's far too much, really, if you were to attempt to do it alone. I don't doubt that your generation will make steps in the seeking of justice that mine has been unable or unwilling to do. But we will encourage you. We will be encouraged by you. You don't have to do it alone.

And more than this, the Spirit is still here just as on that day in Jerusalem so very long ago. The Spirit of Jesus is quite alive. It moves among us, but it will not be restrained by us. We give it freely to you. But the Spirit doesn't wait for us. It is there around you and within you, to make you strong, to give you a clearer vision of God's dream, to give you the power to become a place in the world where people may see the love of God at work.

So, may God the Spirit work within you and all of us so that the love of God, revealed to us through Jesus Christ, may transform you, and all of us, and our world, that we may come to live together as a part of God's dream come to life among us. Amen.

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