Spirit of the Living God

Spirit of the Living God – fall afresh on us. Melt us and mold us to hear your Word, to speak your Good News with boldness, and to follow your Way of Love. Amen.

 It’s Pentecost Sunday – when we celebrate the Spirit of Christ being poured out on the community of Jesus followers. Today is a big birthday party for the church. Our other big worshipful parties we throw in the church each commemorate a specific tangible, embodied moment. 

At Christmas we marvel that God became flesh, with Mary giving birth to the small, squirming, baby Jesus. At Easter we rejoice that after Jesus was killed, the love of God raised him from the dead, and he appeared in the flesh to his disciples, bearing scars on his hands and side.

But at Pentecost we don’t have something to reach out and touch – there is no baby to rock to sleep, no warm arms that have overcome death, there to embrace us.

What we celebrate today is the power that we cannot control. And this is the power of the Spirit that sets us free. The Spirit of God is wind and breath, fire and flame, language and life itself at work in our lives and world. We rejoice today that God’s Holy Spirit is disrupting our dis-ordered world and bringing forth a new creation.

In our Acts 2 passage, the disciples still the final words of Jesus still ringing in their ears before he was lifted up into heaven: “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). 

The disciples, still in Jerusalem, busy themselves with the questions of leadership. Judas, who had betrayed Jesus and bought a field with the money he’d made – dies abruptly after his stomach bursts open. The other 11 male disciples hold a CLM, a Community Life Meeting, cast lots and select Matthias to be added to the group of apostles. There are women who are part of this group too – Mary the mother of Jesus and many unnamed others – and the whole entourage finds themselves in Jerusalem, gathered in one place on the day of the Jewish holiday Pentecost.

“And suddenly from heaven three came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

It’s holy chaos! A wild, bewildering, loud party – and it draws all sorts of Jews from the diaspora in to listen. It’s a moment that can’t even quite be described but only experienced. Our text hints at this – the sound was like the rush of a violent wind. The divided tongues resting on people were “as of fire.” What was happening defies the limits of our language to describe because it was an explosion of language and life  – it was God’s blessing of all the diversity of creations scattered at the tower of Babel, God’s breath animating every language and people in one flamingly improvisational outburst.

And as you all might know there are two different ways to experience any kind of party – you can get swept up in its fun and merriment and gifts and joy and dancing – or you can stand at the edge of the room, arms crossed, analyze what’s going on, and check your watch or phone to see when it might be socially acceptable to leave.

Those drawn in awe to this Pentecostal gathering ask in wonder, “What does this mean?” This is a question of curiosity. 

To ask “What does this mean?” is a prayer of invitation, welcoming God to help you live out the answer to that question in your life.

But others stand at the edge of the party, with arms crossed and sneer with an explanation for what they saw happening, “These folks are drunk!” they say.

I have to admit that I didn’t know much about the history and living traditions of Pentecostalism until I went to seminary. I learned about what began in April 1906 in downtown Los Angeles in a run-down building on Asuza Street, where a black preacher named William J. Seymour spoke in tongues and crowds gathered for faith healings and testimonies and continuous day and night revival services. Azusa street was a tremendous disruption of the status quo.

At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation and violence and in an era when women couldn’t vote – women and men of all ages and races and social classes gathered at Azusa’s altar together – testifying, preaching, healing, singing in tongues, praying. As my seminary professor Keri Day wrote,

 “Azusa forged a community across differences, a community where black men laid hands on white women and black women laid hands on white men to receive the power  of the Holy Spirit. It was a community that announced a new humanity, a humanity that rejected the nation’s segregated social order. Azusa was a holy, insurgent communion. The gift of black people leading white people into an encounter of loving community at Azusa rocked America in the same way that Jews gathered were rocked by the disciples speaking in their mother tongues.”¹

But the Azusa street revivals also provoked a backlash – many white Pentecostal leaders were disgusted by  the racial integration at Azusa’s altar and others criticized what they saw as the work of hyper-emotional Holy Rollers as also being  racially and sexually perverse.

When we encounter the story of Pentecost in Acts 2 or learn about the sweaty, loud, around the clock revivals of Azusa Street question do come up. Maybe speaking in tongues is something you’ve experienced in your life or something you view with skepticism. 

However we think about the way the Spirit does and maybe doesn’t work into our lives and world – what I hope we can take away from the story of Pentecost is a willingness and openness to live into the question, “What does all this mean?”

Pentecost isn’t about Jesus abandoning the earth and the Christian movement somehow only concerned with the spiritual realm. Pentecost is about is the faithfulness of God in Jesus to be present with us in the here and now and always. The Spirit groans with us and with all creation in the labor pains of a new world and a beloved community being born.

Attentiveness to the Spirit – sharpens our attention to the diversity of bodies and lives and languages around us and to the Spirit actively moving and dwelling and animating our own individual bodies and the shared body of the church.

To live out that question of discernment – “What does this mean?” – is to try to hear where the Spirit of Jeus might be speaking and to try to orient the sails of our lives to catch the Spirit’s wind. To ask “What does this mean?” it is to lean forward in curiosity, so our souls can be warmed and set ablaze by the Spirit’s fire.

The journey of making meaning isn’t found in objective detachment but in the stubbornness and persistence and joy of life with others, a life lived in the presence of God. It is such a gift that we as the church get to ask the questions together – “What does this mean?” and “Is this the Spirit of Christ moving here or not?”

So I am curious for you all – has there been a time in your life when your world was disrupted by the Holy in a way that created beloved community?

Where do you feel the breath of the Spirit sustaining your life?

How might the Spirit breathing life here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, even this week as  funds set aside at UNC for diversity, equity, and inclusion are being steered towards more policing? 

Where is the Spirit forming a new humanity where all people might be siblings and diversity is not just ignored or tolerated or merely a buzzword – but where the splendid array of creation becomes a kaleidoscope baptized by the power of God working through each beloved body made in God’s image?

How might the Spirit be breathing life into our church here at CHMF – where we, like the disciples, have pressing questions of leadership and logistics – who will be our moderator, who will be our treasurer? Who will say the prayer or help out with the service project? 

Yet even in the midst of our gathering – how is the Spirit speaking in the prophecies of our children and the visions of our youth and the dreams of our elders? And are we listening?

A couple decades after the Azusa street revivals began, a Connecticut Congregational pastor and professor of practical theology named Henry Hallam Tweedy, thought that “some of the old Pentecostal hymns were to me unsatisfactory…and I was eager to interpret the symbolism of the story in Acts in a way that modern men could understand and sincerely mean” and so he wrote a new hymn “O Spirit of the Living God.”² – it’s not in our hymnal – but it’s words are beautiful for this moment.

So some two thousand  years on from the outpouring of the Spirit retold in Acts 2 and over a century from the revivals of Azusa street – I pray that we continue to be open to the disruption of the Holy Spirit and give thanks for the new creation that is being born in and around us:

“O Spirit of the Living God” by Henry Hallam Tweedy

1. Keri Day, “We need Pentecost,” Christian Century, May 9, 2018, p. 10-11.
   See also Keri Day’s Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2022), especially chapter 4 “Azusa’s Erotic Life.” ↩︎
2. C. Michael Hawn, “History of Hymns: “O Spirit of the Living God”” Discipleship Ministries: The United Methodist Church, June 12, 2013. https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-o-spirit-of-the-living-god  ↩︎