The Risk of Faith
The Risk of Faith
June 5, 2022
Acts 2: 1 - 21
Today is the birthday of the church -- the day the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus' frightened and furtive disciples, transforming them into proclaimers of the gospel.
Church tradition envisions Pentecost as a miracle of language. The miracle was not one of ecstatic utterances that Paul speaks of in Corinthians, but one of the Good News being preached to a multicultural multitude of listeners who understood the disciples, each in his or her own language. On Pentecost, our mind's eye sees tongues of fire, while our mind's ear hears a symphony of languages pouring forth over the crowds.
But the miracle that made up Pentecost is not all that clearly defined by Luke. Since biblical scholars have identified Luke as a master weaver -- pulling together strands of stories and traditions from various sources to create the whole of his own text -- we can trace several different components that work together to form the whole of this week's account.
Obviously, one thread told of an event where the disciples were filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and spoke with startling authority and clarity to a gathering of Diaspora Jews – Jews living in many other countries visiting in Jerusalem. Luke's definitive linkage between the arrival of the Holy Spirit's power and the rich diversities of the group addressed may or may not have been part of the original telling of the church's birthday party.
Luke's emphasis on the various nationalities represented by the Pentecost-day crowd often clouds our image of a basic homogeneity that ran through this group. This crowd was made up of Jews and gentile “God-fearers” who had gathered to observe the Jewish festival of Pentecost. They may have been from many different places, but they had gathered because of their roots in a common faith. This multiethnic crowd had a Jewish soul.
Recognizing this common heritage makes the miracle Luke describes perhaps less linguistic and more truly spiritual. This gathering of faithful Jews of the Diaspora and resident Palestinian Judeans would not be as linguistically diverse as we might assume. Verse 8 insists that those gathered heard the disciples speaking to them in their own "native language." Yet the "native language" for Diaspora Jews was not the local dialect of the isolated region in which they lived but was typically either Greek or Aramaic. For Diaspora Jews in Western regions, Greek was their vernacular tongue. For Diaspora Jews of the East, Aramaic was their native language. The Galilean identity of the disciples did not put them outside this tradition -- no matter how quaint their Galilean accent might seem to other Jews.
In order for the disciples to turn and address this crowd, in the native tongues present, it may have been that they had only to speak out to them in Aramaic and in Greek. But if this were the case, what was the "miracle" at Pentecost? Returning to the text, we note something startling: While Luke describes the arrival of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples while they are still in some safe and secretive room (v.2), once they were "filled with the Holy Spirit" and began to speak with power and authority, the scene shifts to an out-of-doors event.
This new setting, identified as a gathering of devout Jews come together to celebrate Pentecost, would surely be at the temple site. The holiness of the temple site and the worship that went on there was emphasized not just by rituals and robes, but by language as well. The language of worship for Judaism has always been Hebrew. Within temple grounds, the vernacular of any and all regions was replaced by the common language of Hebrew -- despite the fact that for many Jews it was a foreign and incomprehensible tongue. If the temple is the setting for this first testimony of the Holy Spirit's power within the disciples, it would be a shocking sound, reacted to with wonder and amazement, to hear the familiar words of Aramaic and Greek spoken there in the midst of the worshipers. Instead of the holy, but largely unintelligible sounds of Hebrew, the crowd is stunned to hear a message they can clearly understand. The vernacular had become a vehicle for the Holy Spirit's message.
Obviously, such an event could elicit the mixed reaction Luke records. While some ask, "What does this mean?" others assume the disciples are drunk and have so lost all sense of place and propriety that they use common language on holy ground.
At this point, Luke weaves a third thread into his story -- using the strength of an apocalyptic tradition to testify to the magnitude of this moment. The text skillfully introduces the concept of time through Peter's testimony that the disciples could not be drunk since it is "only nine o'clock in the morning" (v. 15). While it may be early in the day, Peter's words suggest that the true measure of this time is as an apocalyptic moment.
It is a time of a new, never-before seen event. It is time to mark the birthday of a new creation by God, a creation that itself invokes the beginning of the end times. The miracle of the Holy Spirit's arrival is not based on linguistic abilities. It is marked by the birth of God's power and authority on earth through the new creation of the church.
One of the first science projects that children are likely to undertake is watching a plain little caterpillar spin a cocoon about itself until it is completely shrouded within a chrysalis. Then the wonder of transformation is made real to the children when, days later, an entirely different creature -- a beautiful butterfly -- emerges from the apparently lifeless shell.
As children, we focus on the delicate creature that emerges so mysteriously from the cocoon. With the actual process inside the cocoon unseen, there is a lot of romance about the cocoon. A creepy, crawly caterpillar is magically transformed into a radiant, soaring butterfly. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
But, for the caterpillar, there is nothing "wonderful" about it.
A caterpillar doesn't just grow into a butterfly. A caterpillar must undergo molting and metamorphosis -- the dramatic silence of the pupa in which the insect's physical stuff is entirely rearranged. How ironic that in today's vernacular, that word "cocoon" has come to mean exactly the opposite of what it means to a caterpillar. A cocoon isn't safe. A cocoon is where a caterpillar risks it all -- where it enters total chaos, where it undergoes total rebuilding, where it dies to one way of life and is born to a new way of living. A cocoon is where a caterpillar allows itself to disintegrate into a blob of gelatinous liquid without structure or identity so that it can emerge with sharpened sensory perceptions and breathtaking beauty.
Only in taking the risk of entering that inert pupa can the caterpillar go from dormancy to potency, from ugliness to beauty. This is the reason the butterfly is an authentic symbol of resurrection! Not because it's cute. But because it risks dying to be born to new life.
On Pentecost morning, the miracle of the Holy Spirit was not that of multilinguistic translations. The miracle of Pentecost was and is that the Pentecost power makes a fundamental transformation. The presence of Christ's Spirit burst out of accepted, established parameters. Holiness became accessible to all, even the fearful disciples, and it was preached to all who would listen. Human attempts to keep the Holy Spirit contained in one holy language or one holy place failed. Christ's sacrifice split open the chrysalis and sent the Holy Spirit soaring out into the world.
Notice that when the apostles received the Holy Spirit, they did not rent the Upper Room and stay there to hold holiness meetings. No, they went everywhere preaching the gospel. (Will Huff)
Jesus did not give the church a safety-first, risk-free, sit-in-the sanctuary commission! He did not authorize the church to be a bunch of wimps or milktoasts! So, why are we looking to God more for day care than for dare care?
There is no such thing as a risk-free life. Nothing is absolutely safe. "Safety first" was not the motto of Jesus, nor of John Wesley, nor of any of the saints of our Church. Safety first is fatal to true holiness.
Cocoons are self-contained packets of risk. If that frumpy, dumpy little caterpillar didn't take the ultimate risk of re-creation, something which can be experienced only in the cocoon, he would never be able to break out as a butterfly. The way to the safety of a transformed life is found in risk.
Too many of us are lured only by "the safety of the chair," instead of being enticed by "the challenge of the dare." But the ultimate danger is in the chair; and the safety is in the dare.
A father told about his 6-year-old, Thane, who gets nervous about taking that first step onto a moving escalator. He hesitates, halts, and hovers on the edge; he is reluctant to step off that edge.
That first step can be difficult. But once you take it, the movement of the escalator carries you along effortlessly. When Thane plays stop and go at that first step, there is the greatest danger. We all topple over him, or he panics and bolts forward, dragging others with him. Thane is safer taking the risk of getting onto something beyond his control than he is holding back. The hardest part is that first step of faith; but from then on, it's easy.
We cannot NOT be risk-takers.
You probably didn't think about it, but you took considerable risks getting here this morning. Did you realize that you had:
* a one in two million chance of dying by falling out of bed.
* a one in 350,000 chance of being electrocuted by your alarm clock.
* While brushing your teeth, you flirted with the 20 percent chance that your local water supply has infectious bacteria in it.
* Men endured a one in 7,000 chance of a serious shaving injury.
* Men and women endured the danger of a one in 2,600 chance of being zippered, snapped or buttoned into some sort of injury.
* If you avoided the stairs, you may have taken a one in six million risk of an elevator injury.
* A one in 11,000 risk of dying in your car while traveling, as either a passenger or a driver.
* A risk of one in 145 of your car's being stolen still waits for you.
So, you are pretty lucky that you made it here to church alive. You survived all those risks and made it -- in one piece!
If the disciples had been safe and sure and purely “holy,” they would have stayed in that room where the Holy Spirit met them. They would have found some order of worship that would have sought another touch of the Holy Spirit.
But, instead, they left
The danger lies with safety; the benefits lie with risk. We must give up the church's "safety-first," risk-free approach to ministry and mission. We need to embrace a more entrepreneurial, risk-taking, failure-embracing strategy. We need to support the more imaginative and energetic self-starters among us.
The disciples risked ridicule and retribution by proclaiming the gospel message out to that crowd in words they could all easily understand. They took a chance and believed that the authority and power of the Holy Spirit would work through their words. It was a profound risk. But, that moment of proclamation brought into being the church as the new creation of God.
That brings us to us and to Mt. Salem Church.
There is no life in safety. There is no safety in safety; there is safety only in the risk and dare of a life of faith. Faith is but another word for "risk."
God is the biggest risk-taker of all. Albert Einstein could not come to terms with his own theories because he said that God couldn't have built this kind of risk into the universe. God couldn't have created a universe with this kind of indeterminacy and unpredictability and chaos. "God does not throw dice," Einstein said.
Well, Einstein was wrong. And late in life he came to see how wrong he was.
God does take chances. God created you and me with the right of refusal. God built risk into the very heart of the universe: at an atomic level, at a cosmic level. God is big enough and bold enough to put the very being of the Godhead at risk by creating you and me.
That doesn't mean that God is endangered by our right of refusal. But it does mean that God suffers because of our rights of refusal. God created a cosmos where the creation can participate in God's own creativity. And we can create good or evil.
That also means that, you and I don't get safety, but we do get joy and delight and the experience of the divine. We get the privilege of participating in the creativity of God.
Using traditional forms we have identified a new way for us to offer Christianity to our neighborhood. As our mission statement puts it, we are to learn to love and forgive our neighbors so that they can experience God’s peace and God’s life-giving power. We are still figuring out how we will do this loving and forgiving and sharing. It is a big risk – probably at the risk of the continuing existence of our Church.
But the Holy Spirit is moving among us in ways we have not seen or understood before. We all need to listen and learn and try out new life and faith patterns. We need to risk this new life.
We want to say that we can’t do this, we are too small and too old. We thought that we could no longer do a meal big enough for our Memorial Day Celebration. But, boy did we do it; we outdid ourselves. We can do what we need to do. I want to predict that we will do what God leads us to do. The power of the Holy Spirit will flow in and through us as we bring God’s love to this community.
As we risk our Church’s life, let us find God’s blessings in our lives as we walk this new walk – going forward in the light of God’s favor and trusting God’s power.
Amen
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