A Fresh Wind’s Gonna Blow! - June 4, 2006: Pentecost Sunday

Acts 2: 1-21, Ezekiel 37:1-14

Today marks a shift in the church calendar. We have two Sundays of celebration, and then we settle into the longest season of the church year: Ordinary Time. Next week we will celebrate the Trinity, but for today it is all about the Holy Spirit.

Many of you might remember that I was raised in a church that was called a “spirit filled church.” Now, that’s a rather fuzzy phrase. I’m not 100% sure what that means exactly, but I remember that it was a very important distinction of the church when I was young. What I believe it meant to those who proclaimed it was that the gifts of the Spirit, specifically speaking in tongues, and interpretation of tongues, as I just described to you in my reading of Acts 2, were practiced regularly in worship.

Now, as I stand before you as one of the Frozen Chosen, you probably have two questions pop into your head: Was that stuff real? And, Did you do it? These are my answers: I believe so, yes—it is real. And my second answer is that looking back on it all these years later, I’m not sure if I did it or not. But I do recall the moment when I knew it was real.

I was about fourteen that summer, and just about to give up on the church. You remember fourteen. A person is just about darn-near invincible at fourteen. There is not much that can convince you that you are not on the cusp of Something Big at fourteen. The Something Big I was on the cusp of was turning away from the church. But first I had one more summer of church camp.

Even though the jury was out on my feelings about God and the church, I liked church camp. Church camp was a week away from chores and responsibilities at home, a week away from my pesky little sister. Oh—did I mention? There are boys at church camp. Boys from all over Indiana. City boys. For a week I could be something other than that “freakishly tall, skinny, braniac who lived with her nose in a book” everybody knew me to be at home. At church camp I was a free agent.

Now, at the church camp I attended, the one for kids from Assembly of God churches, there were all sorts of rules and regulations designed to keep boys and girls apart the vast majority of the week. The only males allowed in the girl’s dormitory were fathers on drop-off day, and vice versa for the boys—mothers could make up their bunks for them on the first day, but that was it for females in the building. We had separate swimming times, too, and girls had to walk to the beach fully covered up past the knees because we had to walk past the boy’s dormitory to get to the beach. It was, on the whole, rather a wholesome place, not exactly Wisteria Lane. And the main reason that parents sent kids to camp happened at night— the nightly three-hour revival meeting.

Revival was mandatory. There were counselors who did dorm checks at the beginning of each service to make sure nobody was hanging back, skipping out; the doors of the big metal pole barn structure where revival was held were closed and blocked by counselors, to prevent anyone from leaving until the service was over. The camp staff had put every system in place to make sure that every camper ‘got their Jesus on’ every night. If a kid left without a significant encounter with God, well, it wasn’t the camp director’s fault!

I don’t remember which night it was that camp week. It was probably not the final night because that was always talent show night. I don’t remember the Scripture that was read or the sermon that was preached—although I’m sure it lasted at least 45 minutes. What happened happened at the end of the service—at what is known as the altar call. My experience of altar calls is that I usually sat there and prayed my head off for the preacher to not look at me—to not give me that look that said, “Girl, you need to get down here and let me pray over you.” If that sounds cynical, just remember: I was fourteen and trying to find a way to leave the church.

I don’t remember if there was music playing, although surely there was. What I remember is that the air changed. Outside it was a breezeless, humid, warm Indiana summer night. I remember that detail because I wanted there to be a reason that the air changed inside that building. I wanted there to be a storm brewing outside. Years later I can finally admit that there was no dramatic barometric change. There really is no scientific explanation, you see. There is no way to explain the wind inside the building. There is no way to explain the sound of angels in the room that night, or the way the lights—ordinary barn lights, suspended from the metal rafters—the way those lights shimmered that night. There is no way to explain the experience that night of a cynical fourteen-year-old girl, a girl on the cusp of Something Big, a girl who would later turn away from the church and everything it meant to her. No laws of physics can explain away the unmistakable message that night: “I will go with you, no matter how far you run. And when you come back—and you will come back—I will be the One right beside you.”

Two weeks from today I will be smack in the middle of General Assembly. If ever a group needed a little Holy Ghost revival—I think the Mainline Protestant church is it. We Presbyterians are bleeding membership at the rate of 40,000 a year. But you know what? I’m not a cynical fourteen-year-old anymore. I pay very close attention to what people are saying about the future of the church, and it is scary. There are voices from within our very own denomination who are announcing that we are dead on arrival. When the voice calls out, “Mortal, can these bones live?” There are voices that answer back a resounding “No!” Maybe they’ve never felt the wind blowing in a closed up barn, I don’t know. But I’ll bet those who gathered in that upper room on the first Pentecost weren’t there to trouble shoot what was wrong but to be open to what God wanted. What happened to them was unexpected, and probably frightening at first, as unlikely as a vision of dry bones growing flesh and breathing.

Ezekiel prophesies to those living in Jerusalem, before and after its destruction. He is a herald of both God’ impending judgement of Israel and of God’s restoration of her. In the vision we hear today, God is about to do a new thing for Israel—Israel who in exile lay as motionless and lifeless as dry bones, Israel who was decimated and left for dead, Israel who had given up on herself. But God keeps God’s promises, and God remembers. God’s promise to Israel through the prophet Ezekiel is that Israel will feel a fresh wind, that she will regenerate sinew, muscle and flesh where they had dried up, and that Israel will not limp, but will dance!

There is a lot of talk about what this denomination needs to do to revive itself. Most of that talk involves polity—changing this part of the Book of Order, or that part. As someone who believes that our polity reflects our theology and that our theology reflects our intention to live out our faith, I can see the value in that. But honestly, it doesn’t matter how we try to make this Book of Order that we live under reflect our faith and our commitment to live it, if we are not willing to submit ourselves to the fresh winds of the Spirit.

One of the issues that some pundits predict will be the watershed moment this year at General Assembly is the vote to accept (or not) the report of the Task Force to study the Peace, Unity and Purity of the church. (Nicknamed the PUP report for short.) Depending on how one interprets this report, one might believe that it will either save the church or split it in two. I’ll go on record, as saying I think it will do neither. But a very curious thing happened to this group that was charged with studying the peace, unity and purity of the church.

Twenty people representing the broad theological spectrum of our denomination, working across gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age (One of whom was Elder Scott Anderson of the Wisconsin Council of Churches) were charged with completing a four year long study of how we can continue to be the Presbyterian Church (USA) together. At the heart of their study were such issues as the interpretation and authority of Scripture, the standards of ordination to office in the church, and in general how we treat those with whom we have fundamental disagreement in matters of our life serving God.

Twenty people— who might as well have been Phrygians, Medes and Mesopotamians, found that they could understand the language of the Spirit, and that through the language of grace, they could agree—unanimously agree—on some issues. And not only that, but that they could discern recommendations for the rest of us that they could agree on. If that is not a fresh wind, I don’t know what is.

Ezekiel understood that the revival, restoration, and regeneration of Israel began with God’s vision for her. In the upper room that day, the wind of the Spirit could no longer be held back.

‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Perhaps we are living in the days when revival is mandatory. Perhaps it begins with us, with a willingness to witness the work of the Spirit, to hear others speaking in the language of grace, to raise up these tired old bones and dance!

Thanks be to God.