A Spirit River

Pentecost

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Acts 2:1-4, 14-17

On Pentecost we celebrate the arrival of God's Spirit, poured out upon us.  We are people awash in a river of Spirit.  It winds between us, circles round us, and runs beneath us.  This flow is the circulation of God's presence through us all.  Today we give thanks for the Spirit and open ourselves yet again to its dancing energy.

You are the powerful people of God.  Your life is carried by a river of God’s Spirit.  And you don’t need to wait on me, the pastor, for directions or permission.  You don’t need the elders or the deacons to tell you what to do.  Your life is powerful.  It’s full of meaning and significance and opportunities to love and serve and bless other people in God’s name.

 

Our reading from Acts recounts that first dramatic Pentecost.  God poured out the Spirit and there was loud, rushing wind; tongues of fire danced above their heads; and they began praising God in languages they’d never learned.  This scene was so riotous, chaotic and strange that the crowds assumed these folks were just plain drunk.

Peter gets up and preaches a sermon to the crowds.  These people aren’t staggering around from an all night bender, he says.  The ancient prophet Joel told us to get ready for this.  And now God has poured out the Spirit that Jesus promised.  No longer will there be only a few leaders who know God.  All who believe in Jesus Christ will receive his Spirit.  It will fill every corner of their lives.  They’ll see visions and dream dreams.

The Spirit is a new power that surges through God’s people, enabling us to live together and carry on the work of Jesus Christ.  And in Acts that means the Spirit gathers us to read Scripture, to share our lives, to break bread together, and to pray.  The Spirit inspires generosity, sharing, and healing.  The Spirit leads us in mission as we spread the good news about what God has done for us, so that others can experience it.  God becomes intensely personal for us.  And nothing says that more clearly than Joel’s prophecy that God’s Spirit will nurture in us dreams and visions.

Ezekiel 37 is a vision or a dream.  It shares the irrational, nonsensical, image-based character of our dreams.  Dry bones rattle and come together and get clothed in sinew and skin.  And then the prophet summons God’s breath upon them and they live.

Like all dreams, this dream might mean many things.  It means that Israel can live with hope that God will gather the people back home from exile.  But it also suggests what happens to Jesus in that dark tomb, his body broken and dead and lifeless until God appears in a great mystery and breathes into him resurrection life.  It suggests the ways God might bring hope out of difficult situations in your life - breathing new possibilities into our imaginations when we’re trapped in no-exit situations.  It suggests the ways God might breathe new life into our congregation, and into our wider community, by unleashing the Spirit river upon us.

There’s a book of meditations I read every day.  One I read this week said this: “Don’t preach with the goal of leading people to the doors of the church.  Instead, lead people to their own souls.”  In other words, help people reconnect with who they are.  Help people listen to what’s going on in the depths of their own lives. 

It is possible, of course, that we never really live our lives.  It’s called an unlived life.  And people do it all the time.  They never really take ownership of their lives.  They expect others to do their living for them.  When we’re young, our parents do a lot for us.  But we can get stuck there.  There are people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, still expecting their parents to fix their problems.  That’s an unlived life.  When we fail to take responsibility for our lives, we project all our hopes on someone else.  We hope that a school, or a government, or a church will tell us what to do and who to be.  We do this because it’s a way for us to avoid doing the hard work of becoming the people we want to become.  It’s hard to live fully.  To be really alive.  To take responsibility for yourself. 

What’s at stake is whether you’re really present to yourself, and to the flowing of God’s Spirit in you and through you.  Are you tending to your own dreams, your own energy, your own ambitions?  I’ll share with you what I shared with the graduating seniors last week.

The tallest building in the world is a tower called the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.  If you don’t know where Dubai is - it’s part of the United Arab Emirates.  It sits in the Persian Gulf, between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Burj Khalifa stands 2,722 feet tall.  You can take one of the 57 elevators all the way up to the 160^th floor.  It would take nine football fields stacked on top of one another to reach that height.  Just for comparison’s sake, the Burj Khalifa is twice as tall as the Empire State Building in NYC. 

The building was designed to sway back and forth about five feet at its tip.  A special tubular steel construction allows it the flexibility it needs to bend with the wind.  They had to design a special kind of glass for the exterior because of the blistering desert heat (Dubai can reach 122 degrees in the summer).  And they had to design the base of the building in a three-pronged “Y” shape to keep the building from twisting and tearing apart in the strong winds.  To keep a building this tall from tipping over, the foundation is anchored by 192 steel and concrete piles, each of which is buried 164 feet down into the ground.

This is not just a slightly bigger version of a regular building.  Everything had to be redesigned for a building this tall. There are 24,348 windows.  So the building has a specially designed window washing system with horizontal tracks built into the exterior at three different levels.  It takes 36 specialized window cleaners four months to clean the entire exterior.  But humans don’t even touch the top 27 floors.  It’s way too windy up that high for humans.  So they designed unmanned robots to crawl over the surface to clean the windows at the top.

This building is the kind of thing we typically refer to as “ambitious.”  It’s competitive, and gargantuan, and very much wants to be seen.  But I think that’s a rather unhelpful way to think about ambition.  When you see ambition that way, you restrict it to a certain set of strivers.  The rest of us are left out and left behind and referred to as “unambitious.” 

Each of us has to decide whether we’re ambitious or not, and if so, what that means for our lives.  I reject the idea that ambition is a scarce resource, possessed only by a select few.  Instead, I find it more helpful to think about ambition as another name for the energy that flows in everyone’s life.  Some of it you’re aware of but most of it you’re not.   If you took psychology, I’m talking about what Freud would call your “unconscious.”   It’s a seething swirl of desires, needs, instincts, fantasies and dreams that lives just beneath our conscious lives. 

It’s like a river that flows just beneath your awareness.  Or a basement that you never knew about, but it turns out it’s filled with beautiful things.

The goal of life is to discover your energy and figure out what it’s about for you.  It might be colossal, adventurous, risky, and visible.  But if your ambitions are small or medium sized, it doesn’t mean you’re not ambitious.  It just means your ambitions are yours, and not someone else’s.

If you can tend to your ambition, you will live an interesting life.  If you can help the people around you tend to theirs, your happiness will double or triple. 

When God pours out the Spirit upon us, this Spirit comes to meet us down in the depths of who we are.  It travels down into our depths, and there meets with our energy and our ambition.  The Spirit creates in us dreams and visions for ourselves, our community, our congregation, and the world.

Here’s how Paul (or a student of Paul) put it in a letter to the Ephesians:

“I pray that God out of his glorious riches may strengthen you with power in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.  And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:16-19).

Our lives are energized by a river of Spirit that God has poured out upon us.  This is Pentecost.  And on Pentecost we do our best to remember who we are.  We are people whose lives have been pulled into a powerful stream of the Spirit’s work.  We’re not just a gaggle of individuals.  We’re not people who’ve signed up to believe a list of things.  We’re not consumers shopping at the same spiritual store.  We’re not a crowd being entertained by the professionals up front. 

We’re a church.  We’re the body of Christ.  We’re part of a new family doing the work of ministry together, all of us gifted by the Spirit with the capacities and skills we need.

And we pray for visions and dreams to come our way, as they have for so many of God's people.  This is the Sunday set aside to remember who we are - God's beloved children, gifted with the Spirit to share in God's work of blessing the world.