St. Mary's Episcopal Church

The Feast of Pentecost: Blown over and fired up
(Acts 2.1--11; John 14. 8-17
Loving God, may only your word be spoken, may only your word be heard.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. AMEN

Before you sit down, I want to invite each of you, if you are able, to pick up you stuff and move to a different spot to sit.
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Pentecost is a Jewish harvest festival.
In Jesus' day, Pentecost was one of the three high holy days when all devout Jewish men who lived within 20 miles of Jerusalem were expected to go to the Temple to worship.
Passover, 50 days earlier, was another of those high holy days, too, but because the weather was so often bad around Passover, many of the Jews skipped over Passover and waited till the better weather at Pentecost to come make their pilgrimage.
Making Pentecost a high attendance day.
So the Holy Spirit was strategic in her timing: there was a great crowd of faithful Jews gathered in Jerusalem on the day when the Holy Spirit showed up in wind and fire.
It wasn't the first time the Holy Spirit was present-indeed, it was the Spirit, the Breath of God, that blew over the waters and created heaven and earth.
No, this wasn't the first time the Holy Spirit was present.
But it may have been the first time that the whole crowd noticed.
It may have been the first time that all of the faithful knew that the Holy Spirit was within them.
That the Holy Spirit was present not just within them but within them with power and with might.
The gathered disciples didn't know what they had been praying for the past ten days since Jesus ascended into heaven and told them to pray-but they certainly got a powerful answer to their prayer!
Today during our 10:30 worship we will pray for McCarley Elizabeth, and we will see the Holy Spirit come into her life of at her baptism.
After a person is baptized and stamped with the sign of the cross on her forehead, and introduced to her new family with delighted applause and smiles, she receives a candle that is lit from the Paschal Candle, the Easter candle, the candle that reminds us through our baptism we are resurrected with Jesus.
The deacon says some comforting words: "Receive this candle as the sign that the Light of Christ came into your daughter/goddaughter's life today."
I believe that's true.
But I believe that we under estimate the power of the Holy Spirit.
Because I think the lit candle is also a reminder that within the new baptized is the same Holy Spirit who came into the midst of the gathered disciples with such power that there was the appearance of heads on fire and sound of hurricane winds.
Picture the difference between a reporter in rain gear standing and swaying in the midst of hurricane winds in Galveston versus the romantic couple running from the rain to the shelter of a gazebo where they embrace and kiss.
Yes, McCarley receives the comforting, every present Holy Spirit today.
The gazebo shelter Spirit.
She also receives, as we all did, a Spirit that can blow us full of power and burn us up with love.
She also receives the hurricane Spirit that causes us to hold on for dear life.
Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, says this about the Holy Spirit (these words may be familiar to you): "Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? …..It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers with signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake…..and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."
Like sitting in a new seat during church.
The Holy Spirit does not draw us out on to where we can never return on some casual whim.
The Holy Spirit's purpose in drawing us to a new place is so that we can see God in a new way; so that we can see one another in a new way; so that we can know God in a new way; and so that we can have new opportunities to serve God.
When this new way is comfortable it is a sweet gift.
My experience, however that that Holy Spirit wind and flame can be very, very unsettling. A gift. But not so sweet.
That Holy Spirit wind and flame which comes into and out of our very souls enables us to do what Jesus told us we will do in our gospel today:
Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me [Show of hands, who believes in Jesus?; then this is you] you will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father .[If that's not enough, Jesus continues] I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it….You know the Holy Spirit, because The Spirit abides with you [right here, right now], and The Spirit will be [tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow] in you." (from John 14. 8-17)
When I invited you to sit in another place, I introduced the invitation with the words, "Those of you who are able."
The Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, yes, and there are times that Holy Spirit sits with us in our comfortable place and allows us to rest there.
More often, however, as we saw more of you who were able to sit some place new, the Holy Spirit wants us to go to a new place, to do a new thing, even if it means being a bit uncomfortable and a little off balance. When we are in that new place, we pay more attention, don't we?

When we are in that new place, we will have to rely more on the Holy Spirit.
One other piece about the Holy Spirit is that the gathered disciples felt that wind, saw those flames in community.
We are told that all were gathered; we are told that all were filled with the Holy Spirit.
There is something mystical, mysterious when we wind-blown, fire-lit people gather-the individual gift of the Holy Spirit that we each have adds up to a MegaSpirit power and might when we two or three or more gather together.
Sometimes we feel it. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we forget to look.
But it's here-right now.
Now. And in the future.
Together we are able to do even more than Jesus did in the 30 or so years Jesus walked the earth.
More healing, more teaching, more forgiving, more celebrating than Jesus.
Jesus also says that we'll be able to pray as Jesus did.
Whenever we pray as Jesus did, the Holy Spirit will enable us to do more than Jesus did.
That's what praying in Jesus' name means-not a magic formula, "In Jesus' name," but to pray in a way and for the kind of living that is consistent with the way of living that Jesus lived.
Don't expect to receive a positive response when we do more than Jesus did.
On that day of Pentecost, some of the gathered pilgrims thought that the disciples were drunk.
So take off your baseball caps and straw hats and put your crash helmet on.
The Holy Spirit is right here. Right now.
The Holy Spirit will never ever hurt or harm us, but oh, the Holy Spirit will most certainly blow us to a new place and give us hearts on fire for God.
AMEN