Ghost Words - Jody Clegg (Pentecost Sunday)
Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
Congratulations (or warning?): you are the hearers today of my first official Sunday morning sermon. My Sunday School class has heard many unofficial ones when I haven’t had the decency to stop talking and ask a question. Intentionally putting a sermon together is quite different, of course. As an ardent film buff, I thought of the many bumbling clergy portrayed in movies. My favorite one is the nervous priest played by Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral. You may recall the scene when he performs his first wedding ceremony and ends his opening prayer “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Goat . . . eh, Ghost.” He proceeds to butcher the bride’s and groom’s names and have the groom take the bride as his “awful wedded wife.” Finally, this ordeal ends, and he offers a prayer “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spigot . . . eh, Spirit.”
Hopefully, I’ll be less tongue-tied this morning. However, I share something in common with this nervous priest, and maybe you do, too. How often do we fumble our words when we try to talk about the Holy Spirit? After all, how are we to speak of one who seems to be, as Lauren Winner writes, “the least easily defined person of God, the person who never speaks in words to us from the pages of Scripture, the person whose body is never described, the person we never get to see?”[1] If we refer to the other two members of the Trinity as the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit can seem like the Eccentric Cousin, one who shows up uninvited and ignores our household rules. It can seem like this odd combination of mystery and mischief, a little like . . . a ghost.
I was amused by a news item I found that the County Council in Norfolk, England issued guidelines last year for religion classes in the county’s schools. The Council instructed teachers to avoid using the term “Holy Ghost” because the term made the third person of the Trinity seem “trivial and spooky.”[2] Thanks to a long line of tales from Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary slasher movies, we have come to associate the term ghost with horror, but the term originally was synonymous with spirit or soul. I think the Council probably should have recognized terms didn’t matter. Unfortunately, many Christians for two millennia have found the Holy Spirit trivial and spooky, no matter what name it was called. So, let me ask you a bold question- are you afraid of this Ghost?
I admit I asked an obnoxious question, and one prone to put adults on the defensive. The question may suggest that if you answer “Yes,” you’re admitting to a weak faith or to childish fears. Yet, this fear may not vanish with age or experience, because this Ghost can haunt us with determination. It has work to do and intends that all who have been raised to new life in Christ should take part in that work. If you count yourself among the frightened ones, take heart- I don’t imply any judgment in my question. I’ve been afraid of this Ghost many times. So, perhaps it may help me- and all of us- to take another look at what this Ghost is intending to do through us and with us.
The second chapter of Acts doesn’t introduce the Holy Spirit for the first time in Scripture, for we see many references to it from the psalmists, prophets, and Jesus himself. However, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit blows into Jerusalem with a specific role of which Jesus had already hinted to the disciples. In his farewell discourse recorded in John’s gospel, Jesus told them he was going away, but the Advocate would come. The Advocate who walks alongside us doesn’t act as an independent representative giving a wink to the home office and then doing its own thing. Jesus said this Advocate ”will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and make it known to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:14-15) Jesus lets the disciples know that after He is gone, they will not have only the memories of time with a friend and charismatic leader, or even the miracles they witnessed with him. With this Advocate’s help, they will know the wonder of sharing fully in His life.
Yet this wonder is not for them alone. Jesus’ last words to them pass on a promise and a command: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) By the day of Pentecost, 10 days have passed since Jesus’ ascension. The disciples desperately need to know the Holy Spirit’s presence, and the rest of the world needs to hear the disciples’ words. There is no time to lose, and the Holy Spirit has no qualms about interrupting a holy day to get the ball rolling.
The disciples have gathered in Jerusalem with thousands of Jews to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. This Feast celebrated the time of harvest and God’s giving of the Torah, a time when God explicitly spoke in a way to identify and transform his people. The gathered assembly begins to perform the rituals of this holy day, but they are interrupted by something like wind and descending tongues of fire. When something like that happens, would anyone want to proceed as scheduled? However, the Holy Spirit does not arrive to awe the crowd with a wind and fire show. Something more astonishing happens. The disciples learn what Jesus meant when he said they would be his witnesses. Through the fiery words the Holy Spirit gives to them, they become instruments of God’s resurrection power that inaugurated a new kingdom fifty days earlier. From this day forward, on earth, there will be a signpost of this kingdom through a strange entity called the church, which will be kept alive by others knowing this power for themselves and bearing witness to it.
As I picture this scene, I remember the summer I spent praying for an unknown tongue to come to me. It was the summer of 1996, which I spent at an intensive Japanese language program at Middlebury College. The program requires all participants to sign a language pledge at the beginning of the two-month program that- to the extent possible in the middle of Vermont- they will only speak, read, write and hear Japanese for the duration of the program. My thought processes could only operate in English, and obeying this language pledge proved to be an ordeal. Throughout the program as many students progressed quicker than I did, I felt I needed a linguistic ability I didn’t possess.
I couldn’t find a consensus among New Testament commentators as to whether the Holy Spirit makes the disciples in fact speak other languages or speak glossolalia- Greek for good, old-fashioned Pentecostal tongue-speaking. At a minimum, we know from the passage that the Holy Spirit gives them a linguistic ability they didn’t possess, enabling them to speak of God’s wonders in a way that penetrates any communication wall and cuts to the heart of their listeners. They don’t speak as Galileans, conscious of dialect and cultural barriers that separate them from members of the listening crowd. They speak only as witnesses of the risen Christ. The Holy Spirit has taken what belongs to Jesus and makes it known to the disciples on this day by putting it on their tongues in a way that all for whom Jesus died and rose can hear it.
In this chapter, Luke doesn’t speak of the disciples as having a privileged spiritual status for receiving this gift. In fact, he doesn’t even record what the disciples actually say, for they’re not having a Spirit-filled experience for their own reward. N.T. Wright incisively remarks that “[d]espite what you may think from a previous generation about new spiritual experiences, God doesn’t give the Holy Spirit to people so they can enjoy the spiritual equivalent of a day at Disneyland . . . [T]he point of the Spirit is to enable those who follow Jesus to take into all the world that he is Lord, that he has won the victory over the forces of evil, that a new world has opened up, and we are to help make it happen.”[3] Tellingly, Luke quickly shifts the emphasis from the disciples’ speech to the hearers and their response to it. I should probably say responses. Some of the listeners, in what has to be one of the more amusing accusations in Scripture, say the disciples’ newfound speech is the result of having too much wine. Others who have allowed the Holy Spirit to unclog their ears and open their hearts don’t hear drunken nonsense. Instead, they hear the very words of life being spoken in their own languages.
What accounts for these differing responses? Why do some hear so clearly, and others dismiss it? Perhaps the better question is how do we ever hear God’s words spoken clearly to us through another human being. Maybe I’m just confessing to being a bad listener. Yet on our own, don’t we always operate out of a personal agenda that shapes how we listen, a self-directed heart that will always view someone else as an Other, no matter what language he or she speaks?
Some historians tell us language was the least of the divisions among first century Jews. When they weren’t fighting Rome, they fought each other over politics and religion with the same zeal. Have you every heard someone whose political affiliation you didn’t share or whose personality you detested actually make an insightful comment? Your first thought is, “I agree with that, but COULDN’T SOMEONE ELSE HAVE SAID IT? What could he ever say to me that’s worth my attention?” We run the risk of tuning out more than another’s opinion.
We know that such listening barriers can be as much a fact of church life as committee meetings and potlucks. We cling to those self-imposed barriers and can dismiss words from the Holy Spirit spoken by another with as much contempt as we would dismiss a drunk’s nonsensical babble. Does he have to use such a patronizing tone of voice? Doesn’t she believe in evolution? Didn’t he vote for Bush? Isn’t she a fundamentalist? He’s such a geek! Make your list; we’ve all heard and spoken our own variations of it. If we fear the Holy Spirit, I wonder how much of that stems from what it can do to our listening and speaking abilities. I don’t expect anyone to be “slain in the Spirit” here today, but does the thought of being fully alive in the Spirit make us as uncomfortable? The Ghost shows up and has no regard for our household rules, least of all the ones that define others and delineate who can speak God’s words to us. Yet, if are we to call ourselves the body of Christ with a straight face, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words will always be true in the life of the church: that the “goal of Christian community is to encounter one another as bringers of the message of salvation.”[4]
So we read this account of Pentecost and stand in awe of God’s power on display. Just like our ecclesiastical ancestors, though, we wonder today on the church’s birthday what this all means. Peter still gives the best answer to this question in his sermon recorded in Acts 2, and no sermon preached today anywhere will rival it. I won’t try. I will stand here today and say with the same confidence as Peter that “God has raised Jesus from the dead and we are all witnesses of that fact.” (Acts 2:32) That is what Pentecost means today. It means the Ghost can pick a disciple known for his verbal ineptitude and give him the power and words to preach the church’s first sermon as clearly and eloquently as anyone has preached since, because Jesus’ death and resurrection are a living reality in him. Yes, Peter, God has raised Jesus from the dead, and all who claim him as Lord and Savior are witnesses of that fact.
And it means the Ghost is up to the same high jinks today as when it blew into Jerusalem. It haunts this building and every corner of our lives so that we will hear God’s words spoken clearly to us. It still takes what belongs to Jesus, which has been passed on to him from the Creator, and makes that known to us so we will make it known to others. The Ghost may stun, perplex and even frighten us, but we run from it at our own peril. It not only teaches us how to speak and listen, but reminds us who we are. As Paul reminded the Romans, it is a Ghost that does not make us fall back into fear but gives us a “spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:15-17a) This means that when we claim Jesus as Lord of our lives, we share fully in the life of God now made visible to us and, as the church, through us.
Jesus has won the victory over the forces of evil, and by the same spirit that raised him from the dead, life is at work here. So, Happy Birthday- and keep the leftover party hats for next year and the next, because the Ghost isn’t finished. Don’t be afraid, and don’t run from it! Listen and speak as it directs. Then, when we come together, these words are not just a simple old song: “And for these blessings, we lift our hearts in praise. Without a doubt we’ll know that we have been revived when we shall leave this place.”
-Jody Clegg
Congratulations (or warning?): you are the hearers today of my first official Sunday morning sermon. My Sunday School class has heard many unofficial ones when I haven’t had the decency to stop talking and ask a question. Intentionally putting a sermon together is quite different, of course. As an ardent film buff, I thought of the many bumbling clergy portrayed in movies. My favorite one is the nervous priest played by Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral. You may recall the scene when he performs his first wedding ceremony and ends his opening prayer “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Goat . . . eh, Ghost.” He proceeds to butcher the bride’s and groom’s names and have the groom take the bride as his “awful wedded wife.” Finally, this ordeal ends, and he offers a prayer “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spigot . . . eh, Spirit.”
Hopefully, I’ll be less tongue-tied this morning. However, I share something in common with this nervous priest, and maybe you do, too. How often do we fumble our words when we try to talk about the Holy Spirit? After all, how are we to speak of one who seems to be, as Lauren Winner writes, “the least easily defined person of God, the person who never speaks in words to us from the pages of Scripture, the person whose body is never described, the person we never get to see?”[1] If we refer to the other two members of the Trinity as the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit can seem like the Eccentric Cousin, one who shows up uninvited and ignores our household rules. It can seem like this odd combination of mystery and mischief, a little like . . . a ghost.
I was amused by a news item I found that the County Council in Norfolk, England issued guidelines last year for religion classes in the county’s schools. The Council instructed teachers to avoid using the term “Holy Ghost” because the term made the third person of the Trinity seem “trivial and spooky.”[2] Thanks to a long line of tales from Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary slasher movies, we have come to associate the term ghost with horror, but the term originally was synonymous with spirit or soul. I think the Council probably should have recognized terms didn’t matter. Unfortunately, many Christians for two millennia have found the Holy Spirit trivial and spooky, no matter what name it was called. So, let me ask you a bold question- are you afraid of this Ghost?
I admit I asked an obnoxious question, and one prone to put adults on the defensive. The question may suggest that if you answer “Yes,” you’re admitting to a weak faith or to childish fears. Yet, this fear may not vanish with age or experience, because this Ghost can haunt us with determination. It has work to do and intends that all who have been raised to new life in Christ should take part in that work. If you count yourself among the frightened ones, take heart- I don’t imply any judgment in my question. I’ve been afraid of this Ghost many times. So, perhaps it may help me- and all of us- to take another look at what this Ghost is intending to do through us and with us.
The second chapter of Acts doesn’t introduce the Holy Spirit for the first time in Scripture, for we see many references to it from the psalmists, prophets, and Jesus himself. However, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit blows into Jerusalem with a specific role of which Jesus had already hinted to the disciples. In his farewell discourse recorded in John’s gospel, Jesus told them he was going away, but the Advocate would come. The Advocate who walks alongside us doesn’t act as an independent representative giving a wink to the home office and then doing its own thing. Jesus said this Advocate ”will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and make it known to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:14-15) Jesus lets the disciples know that after He is gone, they will not have only the memories of time with a friend and charismatic leader, or even the miracles they witnessed with him. With this Advocate’s help, they will know the wonder of sharing fully in His life.
Yet this wonder is not for them alone. Jesus’ last words to them pass on a promise and a command: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) By the day of Pentecost, 10 days have passed since Jesus’ ascension. The disciples desperately need to know the Holy Spirit’s presence, and the rest of the world needs to hear the disciples’ words. There is no time to lose, and the Holy Spirit has no qualms about interrupting a holy day to get the ball rolling.
The disciples have gathered in Jerusalem with thousands of Jews to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. This Feast celebrated the time of harvest and God’s giving of the Torah, a time when God explicitly spoke in a way to identify and transform his people. The gathered assembly begins to perform the rituals of this holy day, but they are interrupted by something like wind and descending tongues of fire. When something like that happens, would anyone want to proceed as scheduled? However, the Holy Spirit does not arrive to awe the crowd with a wind and fire show. Something more astonishing happens. The disciples learn what Jesus meant when he said they would be his witnesses. Through the fiery words the Holy Spirit gives to them, they become instruments of God’s resurrection power that inaugurated a new kingdom fifty days earlier. From this day forward, on earth, there will be a signpost of this kingdom through a strange entity called the church, which will be kept alive by others knowing this power for themselves and bearing witness to it.
As I picture this scene, I remember the summer I spent praying for an unknown tongue to come to me. It was the summer of 1996, which I spent at an intensive Japanese language program at Middlebury College. The program requires all participants to sign a language pledge at the beginning of the two-month program that- to the extent possible in the middle of Vermont- they will only speak, read, write and hear Japanese for the duration of the program. My thought processes could only operate in English, and obeying this language pledge proved to be an ordeal. Throughout the program as many students progressed quicker than I did, I felt I needed a linguistic ability I didn’t possess.
I couldn’t find a consensus among New Testament commentators as to whether the Holy Spirit makes the disciples in fact speak other languages or speak glossolalia- Greek for good, old-fashioned Pentecostal tongue-speaking. At a minimum, we know from the passage that the Holy Spirit gives them a linguistic ability they didn’t possess, enabling them to speak of God’s wonders in a way that penetrates any communication wall and cuts to the heart of their listeners. They don’t speak as Galileans, conscious of dialect and cultural barriers that separate them from members of the listening crowd. They speak only as witnesses of the risen Christ. The Holy Spirit has taken what belongs to Jesus and makes it known to the disciples on this day by putting it on their tongues in a way that all for whom Jesus died and rose can hear it.
In this chapter, Luke doesn’t speak of the disciples as having a privileged spiritual status for receiving this gift. In fact, he doesn’t even record what the disciples actually say, for they’re not having a Spirit-filled experience for their own reward. N.T. Wright incisively remarks that “[d]espite what you may think from a previous generation about new spiritual experiences, God doesn’t give the Holy Spirit to people so they can enjoy the spiritual equivalent of a day at Disneyland . . . [T]he point of the Spirit is to enable those who follow Jesus to take into all the world that he is Lord, that he has won the victory over the forces of evil, that a new world has opened up, and we are to help make it happen.”[3] Tellingly, Luke quickly shifts the emphasis from the disciples’ speech to the hearers and their response to it. I should probably say responses. Some of the listeners, in what has to be one of the more amusing accusations in Scripture, say the disciples’ newfound speech is the result of having too much wine. Others who have allowed the Holy Spirit to unclog their ears and open their hearts don’t hear drunken nonsense. Instead, they hear the very words of life being spoken in their own languages.
What accounts for these differing responses? Why do some hear so clearly, and others dismiss it? Perhaps the better question is how do we ever hear God’s words spoken clearly to us through another human being. Maybe I’m just confessing to being a bad listener. Yet on our own, don’t we always operate out of a personal agenda that shapes how we listen, a self-directed heart that will always view someone else as an Other, no matter what language he or she speaks?
Some historians tell us language was the least of the divisions among first century Jews. When they weren’t fighting Rome, they fought each other over politics and religion with the same zeal. Have you every heard someone whose political affiliation you didn’t share or whose personality you detested actually make an insightful comment? Your first thought is, “I agree with that, but COULDN’T SOMEONE ELSE HAVE SAID IT? What could he ever say to me that’s worth my attention?” We run the risk of tuning out more than another’s opinion.
We know that such listening barriers can be as much a fact of church life as committee meetings and potlucks. We cling to those self-imposed barriers and can dismiss words from the Holy Spirit spoken by another with as much contempt as we would dismiss a drunk’s nonsensical babble. Does he have to use such a patronizing tone of voice? Doesn’t she believe in evolution? Didn’t he vote for Bush? Isn’t she a fundamentalist? He’s such a geek! Make your list; we’ve all heard and spoken our own variations of it. If we fear the Holy Spirit, I wonder how much of that stems from what it can do to our listening and speaking abilities. I don’t expect anyone to be “slain in the Spirit” here today, but does the thought of being fully alive in the Spirit make us as uncomfortable? The Ghost shows up and has no regard for our household rules, least of all the ones that define others and delineate who can speak God’s words to us. Yet, if are we to call ourselves the body of Christ with a straight face, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words will always be true in the life of the church: that the “goal of Christian community is to encounter one another as bringers of the message of salvation.”[4]
So we read this account of Pentecost and stand in awe of God’s power on display. Just like our ecclesiastical ancestors, though, we wonder today on the church’s birthday what this all means. Peter still gives the best answer to this question in his sermon recorded in Acts 2, and no sermon preached today anywhere will rival it. I won’t try. I will stand here today and say with the same confidence as Peter that “God has raised Jesus from the dead and we are all witnesses of that fact.” (Acts 2:32) That is what Pentecost means today. It means the Ghost can pick a disciple known for his verbal ineptitude and give him the power and words to preach the church’s first sermon as clearly and eloquently as anyone has preached since, because Jesus’ death and resurrection are a living reality in him. Yes, Peter, God has raised Jesus from the dead, and all who claim him as Lord and Savior are witnesses of that fact.
And it means the Ghost is up to the same high jinks today as when it blew into Jerusalem. It haunts this building and every corner of our lives so that we will hear God’s words spoken clearly to us. It still takes what belongs to Jesus, which has been passed on to him from the Creator, and makes that known to us so we will make it known to others. The Ghost may stun, perplex and even frighten us, but we run from it at our own peril. It not only teaches us how to speak and listen, but reminds us who we are. As Paul reminded the Romans, it is a Ghost that does not make us fall back into fear but gives us a “spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:15-17a) This means that when we claim Jesus as Lord of our lives, we share fully in the life of God now made visible to us and, as the church, through us.
Jesus has won the victory over the forces of evil, and by the same spirit that raised him from the dead, life is at work here. So, Happy Birthday- and keep the leftover party hats for next year and the next, because the Ghost isn’t finished. Don’t be afraid, and don’t run from it! Listen and speak as it directs. Then, when we come together, these words are not just a simple old song: “And for these blessings, we lift our hearts in praise. Without a doubt we’ll know that we have been revived when we shall leave this place.”
-Jody Clegg
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