A few weeks ago, the story of the first Pentecost came up in a conversation with several of Trinity’s first graders. I described how when the Holy Spirit came, Jesus’ friends saw fire on their heads and could suddenly speak lots of different languages.
“That sounds scary,” one of the kids told me.
“Could it also be cool?” I asked (not wanting anyone to have nightmares later). “Cool, or kind of fun, if all of a sudden you could speak Turkish or Spanish or Hebrew or anything else? And the fire didn’t hurt?”
Nope. Scary.
That was unanimous.
The languages might be kind of entertaining, but this fire on the head and rushing out into the city is unambiguously scary.
They’re right. It is scary.
Adults might be able to transmute the fire into metaphor inside our own heads, and defuse the fear that way. But then some of us think about the public speaking the fire seems to require, and the terror ramps right back up.
And, as I think about it – seeing fire over all your friends’ heads, your own, in a closed room? Yeah, I have to take seriously that this was scary. Genuinely, unhappily scary for that group of friends of Jesus, gathered in Jerusalem, already uncertain, wondering what was supposed to happen next.
This story – handed down to us as a hero story, a miracle to rejoice in – might have been nauseatingly anxious all the way through for some of those disciples who absolutely never wanted to ever speak in public, or have a crowd focused on their words. They might have been proud of themselves a year later, and still terrified to think of doing it again – or doing it that one time, even after it’s over.
I want this story of good news told by divinely lit friends of Jesus to be the story of an exhilarating roller coaster ride (for those who love the drops and rush of coasters). Of enjoying the adrenaline and surmounting a challenge, the way rafters launch on the overwhelming spring whitewater rush, or surfers seek bigger waves.
And it might be. It really might be that exhilarating.
But I have to acknowledge that it’s very probable that receiving the Holy Spirit, being lit up by God’s power and Jesus’ mission, is actually, genuinely, unattractively scary.
I can’t read today’s gospel now, either, without considering that.
Friends of Jesus are huddled in a room, already some variety of scared and anxious because their leader has been condemned and murdered by The Authorities.
And now there are rumors he’s not dead… and Jesus appears, screwing up the laws of reality, and then breathes the Holy Spirit into them saying “you’re now responsible for forgiving or retaining sins”.
Into an unnerving and uncertain set of circumstances comes the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, with a huge new responsibility.
I’d find it scary. I think many of us would.
Even if it’s exciting, exhilarating, it’s probably also genuinely scary.
And now that I’m thinking about it, I suspect that happens a lot, with the friends and followers of Jesus.
That the Holy Spirit often comes to us – lights us up, breathes into us, whatever – in times where we’re already anxious and uncertain. Times and places where we know what we have to do – sometimes want to do – but have no idea how to do it. Or times and places where the ground has changed under us, or is still changing, and we have absolutely no idea what to do next.
It could all absolutely be exhilarating.
But scary, too.
Because the Holy Spirit lights us up to do what we can’t do by ourselves.
Things like telling the Jesus story to people we don’t know, in languages and ways we know we don’t know.
Or forgiving with God’s own power.
Or the ability and responsibility to heal, to change reality, to speak with God’s voice, to know things it’s not normal to know (all things Paul tells the Corinthians they’ve been given by the Spirit).
And taking on something you know you don’t know how to do, especially if the world around you is already uncertain, is very definitely scary.
As scary as having an actual fire on your head.
There may be a time in your life – maybe even now – when this has already happened to you. When you’ve embraced something powerful, life-changing, and holy, even as the sheer size of the change has frightened you.
It may have been a time when you asked for God’s help, and power, in a place of uncertainty and transition.
Or you may not have asked.
Jesus’ friends in Jerusalem didn’t ask for help in their uncertainty about what comes next. Jesus just told them the Holy Spirit is coming, whether they’ve asked or not. That’s why they are sitting around in that “upper room” together.
Maybe you didn’t ask to get baptized with the Spirit, either.
At our own baptism, the Holy Spirit pours out anyway. At your baptism, or at baptisms you’ve witnessed and supported in the Episcopal Church, you and I have “renewed our own baptismal covenant”. We’re going to do that again today, by a custom of the church.
And when we do, we commit that we – you, me, specifically – are taking on holy tasks we cannot accomplish ourselves. That we will be doing things that – when we look them right in the face – are often scary for us.
Proclaiming – out loud, with our words as well as deeds – the Good News of God in Christ. Just like those friends of Jesus lit up in Jerusalem so long ago.
Loving our neighbors – the neighbors who don’t look, talk, act like us – as deeply and pro-actively as we love ourselves.
Acting to bring about peace, justice, and the dignity of every human – in our personal lives, in the business transactions and daily choices we make, in our nation’s laws and the way those are carried out; even peace, justice, and human dignity across the whole world.
Those jobs are way too big for me.
Tackling those commitments seriously scares me, at least some of the time.
And yet, at my baptism, at yours (even if we didn’t say those same words at yours), every time you or I support another baptism, we accept the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that launches us into that probably intimidating, possibly exhilarating, oversized and profoundly holy work.
Just the same as if we had fire on our heads and unknown words on our lips, centuries ago in Jerusalem.
Many of us didn’t ask for it. Peter and Jesus’ other friends in Jerusalem didn’t ask for it.
But we need it anyway, this forceful, nerve-wracking, hope-filled, awe-filled Holy Spirit.
There’s a lot of not knowing what’s next that might be swirling in your life, or in mine.
Some of that is swirling quietly around our church – around Trinity, and in different ways around the whole Christian church – as we adjust to new realities of who’s here, how we’re structured, funded, worshipping, and working together.
Some of us may, very reasonably, be anxious, uncertain, wondering how we’ll do what we need to do, even wondering what we are supposed to do.
Just like the friends of Jesus were in today’s stories from the Acts of the Apostles and from John’s gospel.
Just like in these stories where Jesus pours out the Holy Spirit, unasked, big and powerful and maybe exhilarating and probably scary.
I’ve spent a lot of this week trying to think about how to make it seem gentle and attractive, this work of the Spirit that I know is happening, is going to happen, with us.
And sometimes it may be gentle.
But when you come right down to it, I want this powerful kindling of the Spirit for us even when it’s terrifying me.
I want us lit up. I want us breathing deep.
I want us brave.
Brave – not the opposite of scared, but the triumph of embracing the scary; loving and living and doing impossible things (with God’s help) anyway.
I want us to embrace the uncertainty around us, and embrace the help God sends that might be scarier than we planned.
And I suspect that’s a gift of the Holy Spirit, too.
That courage – like language and forgiveness and fire and healing and who knows what else – comes as a gift unasked: to make us joyful and brave and all God wants us to be.
