The Spirit Speaks Backwards

First delivered at Light Street Presbyterian Church on May 28, 2023.

Scripture

Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there 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.

Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

‘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 servants, 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.’

Sermon

One of my pet peeves in church is when preachers string together quotes and call them sermons. Let’s hope that’s not any of your pet peeves.

Anglican priest and author Michael Mitton said this:

“The Holy Spirit is not a tame bird, kept in a clean cage, to be released for short bursts of charismatic meetings… The Holy Spirit makes her habitation in some of the wildest, darkest places this world has to offer… The Holy Spirit is wonderfully free, able to go to the dark places of our own lives, for healing to the dark unvisited places of our churches, and to the dark and demon-infested places of our society.”

My colleague at Catonsville Presbyterian, Kenneth Kovacs shared that quote this week, and quite possibly has used it in his own sermon this morning. And despite my own arbitrary reservations about quotes, I think it has captured something critical to our lives. Therapists, nurses, parents, teachers–so many–are not only colliding with places of anguish, but are finding themselves immersed in the power of evil on earth. But if I were to make a wager, every one of us found ourselves scarred by the pain of crosses and roads to calvary. At the very least, we’ve wandered by those hills.

We don’t have to stay peering into the demon-infested places of our society, as Mitton puts it, I don’t think it’s hard for any of us to conjure up those images. And Lord knows today’s a day of celebration and joy! That’s what we’re here for, that’s the rhythm the church calendar has invited us to enjoy.

But what we do need to hear is this: Today has no more Holy Spirit and no less Holy Spirit than any other day. The Holy Spirit isn’t especially close on May 28, 2023, and it isn’t especially distant on May 29, 2023. And perhaps even more important is this: The Holy Spirit isn’t confined to joy, hope, celebration, and lives that are rife with the love I feel in this space. Make no mistake, those things are most certainly fruits of the Spirit. Loving, hoping, celebrating, those are absolutely the ways of the Spirit which will subsume us.

But there is something even more remarkable, that our attention is being drawn towards: The Spirit has already been with us in our anguish and despair. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness–all those things of the Spirit–are not something for the future, some investment that needs time to mature. Christ Jesus who descended into hell itself and who harrowed the foundations of evil has already poured out his Spirit upon us. Around and within and between every single one of us, the Spirit has already irrevocably changed what it means to travel through evil. The Spirit has irrevocably changed what it means to live with the past. Those scars of the past, the traumas we have endured, and the experiences of hell that we trudged through. The Spirit speaks not only in the present moment, but also speaks backwards to our past. The Spirit invites us to reinterpret our histories, to find healing for festering wounds, to re-form the narratives of our past.

Peter is proclaiming the prophet Joel on the day of Pentecost. We’ve seen this happen before, because Jesus–throughout the Gospels–is doing this same thing. So when Peter does it, it’s nothing new. At first glance, it really just provides some context. “Here’s what’s happening, here’s what the Hebrew scriptures said about this.” “Hey, if you like this, you might like that.” But ah ha, we are not the intended audience of the first century writers.

When Peter quotes Joel, it’s definitely adding context. It’s definitely helping to explain what’s going on, and helping those around them make sense of this bizarre scene. But it is also widening our camera, telescoping us above and out of these New Testament images, bringing into focus the ancient past. The Spirit, as Peter is pointing out, is not a gift confined to the present, but it is a gift that has been woven and proclaimed in the past, too. The Spirit is speaking to those cries and wounds of the past.

When our camera lens telescopes outward, we see the Spirit speaking to those wounds of the prophet Joel. In Joel, prophesies confront the horrors of invading armies, multiple nations that are surely coming to eviscerate the Hebrew people. “Fire devours in front of them,” the prophet writes. “and behind them a flame burns... Before them peoples are in anguish” [1] It was hell, a time of famine and great fear. There was no remedy, and the Hebrew people’s temple may have been destroyed just decades after writing.

The prophet Joel, which Peter brings into the light of the Spirit and Pentecost, is a deep-seated, existential wound of an ethnic people. As a Jewish man, Peter’s life was marked by the legacy of that wound, whether explicitly or implicitly. He was marginalized, violently subjugated to colonizers like Persia and Rome, and had his cultural heritage merely tolerated under a fickle, iron fist. When he is proclaiming and quoting the prophet Joel, he is gazing upon the wounds of his people, the wounds of his life, and the wounds that were seemingly confined and locked away to the past. He is bringing it into the light of the Spirit and the ongoing movement of God, going backwards to find healing.

The Holy Spirit is able to go not only to the dark corners of our present lives, but is able to rip through the sinews of time, breaking the bones and tendons that confine us in pain, woundedness, and anguish. Though we are bound by time, God is not. God is still in the past, moving around, turning over our memories, moving through places of grief, shuffling around what we knew and what meaning we formed from the past.

The Holy Spirit speaks to us today and will speak to us tomorrow, but also continues to speak to our past. Our worship together as Presbyterians is fixed on this notion. Worship holds the sacred memories of our faith, binding together our past, present, and future in God, uniting them into this miraculous gift we call “faith.” Take Communion–it is the real and special presence of God that was instituted by Christ millennia ago, bringing us together as one community today, and nourishing us to go forward as followers of Christ. The Spirit is beckoning us to encounter that same movement in our lives. To acknowledge that the Spirit’s voice and movement in past is inviting us somewhere. To accept the light of God throughout our memories, wounds, and history.

Let me give another example. When I was working as a hospital chaplain, there was this odd pattern that held across most patients. It wasn’t always especially overt, but it seemed to always play out in some way. Often when a patient received a frightening diagnosis, they didn’t want to talk about their treatment options or prognosis and likelihood of survival. They’d want to talk about how they raised their children, or what it was like losing their spouse, or someone they knew who had the disease. When someone was dying, they wouldn’t want to talk about “heaven,” or what the “great beyond” is like. They’d want to review their life and talk about the good moments, the bad moments, and the so-and-so moments.

What I learned is that it seems that the past is every bit as important as the present, just as important for the future. It has a bearing on who we are today and tomorrow. We know who we are because of the past. We know who we might become because of the past.

So when our attention returns to some memory or a feeling that is seemingly lodged within us, that’s a sign that the Spirit is still moving within us. When moments of woundedness spill out into our relationships, or our church, or our words, it might because the Spirit is still clamoring about, demanding our attention. When we think, “Why can’t I just move on from that pain, or that friendship, or that feeling,” it could be because the Spirit is crying out in those dark, hurting, unvisited places. Because the Spirit of God desires you, and I, and everyone in this room and on Zoom to be healed with peace, love, tenderness. Even though we may always carry scars, we will always carry the Spirit, too. Even when our lives have moved on–or the news cycle has moved on–it doesn’t mean the Spirit will abandon the past we carry.

With the guidance and wisdom of therapists, mentors, spiritual directors–hopefully all of them–we might heed the Spirit’s call in our past. To reinterpret our experiences and to make sense of what our past means. This movement of the Spirit isn’t limited to woundedness or pain, it’s open to the fullness of our experiences. In worship, we look back to stories of victory and praise, to moments of paradox, to the poetry of people’s lives. Just like in worship, it’s a dance with the Spirit, a give-and-take, where we follow each others’ leads.

Let’s not pretend that the present and the future aren’t important, though. This present moment is pretty special. It’s pretty wonderful. This church means so much. It means enough for someone to destroy a flag outside. I don’t know Tim very closely, but I do know that all of you mean a great deal to him, too.

Every church has its stories, its memories, its ways of retelling the past. It’s the carpet color, or the members who used to attend, or the ministries that used to pack the pews. I don’t know the stories that this congregation likes to tell, and I don’t know what wounds and triumphs are held here. But every church has them, and every church has its collective consciousness.

And while the Spirit never immobilizes us with some dreamy romanticism for the way things used to be, we do have to hold these memories. This season of Pentecost is primed for us to look around, poke under the carpets, see what we’ve buried and open ourselves to the joy and pain of living. And searching for a way forward amidst a world on fire is no comfortable task.

Our lives have already changed dramatically these past few years, and it is only a sign of what is surely to come. That’s both on a personal level, and on a congregational and global level. When those feelings of nervousness or anger or apathy set in, it’s because the Spirit still has work to do. We have some dancing left to do. 

The present moment will always be doomed to be the past moment. And I think that’s part of the magic of Pentecost and God’s transcendent, time-bending presence. We’re not going to get things right today. We’re going to do our best and strive to love and serve and minister with faithfulness. And that might be all we can do for now. It won’t be perfect, and it might not even be enough. May 28, 2023, might even be full of mistakes.

But God won’t give up on today. God doesn’t give up on who we were, and who we used to be, and how we felt or the mistakes we made. God will stay here, mysteriously, on May 28, 2023, and keep speaking into our lives from it. God will keep pushing us to reexamine, reflect, re-interpret our lives, to continuously listen for the invitation to fuller, more abundant life. In short, it is for us to be “reformed and always reforming.”

So that’s really the good news. I don’t think there’s some charismatic, frenzy-filled experience waiting for us today. Like Mitton said, the Holy Spirit is not some “tame bird, kept in a clean cage.” But praise be to God, the Spirit is in those dark places of our past, still moving, still working to bring healing into our present life and our present world. Whether it’s like Joel, with enemies surrounding us with evil, or whether it’s the day a loved one died, or some experience filled with incomprehensible fear, or just a season of life we remember that was filled to the brim with isolation.

As the day of Pentecost proclaims and as is woven throughout the church’s life, know this, friends. God is not done with us–or our pasts–yet.

Amen.