What's Stopping You?

Acts 2:1-21

We tell this story every year, around this time. It might sound familiar by now: there’s fire, and the Holy Spirit, and everyone preaching in the streets; lots of different languages, astonishingly understandable - a babble with a miracle, and the people believe.

Three thousand are baptized.

It changes the world.

And two thousand years later, we celebrate this story every year as the birthday of the church.

It’s exciting, if you like evangelism.

It’s familiar, but in a way that makes it sound distant; not like us.

I can’t imagine that any of us are going to end the day out on the corner of Maple and Main (or down at Daley Plaza in the city), proclaiming God’s deeds of power in every known language.

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t in the disciples’ plans either, that day in Jerusalem. If street preaching had been obvious, if they’d wanted to do it, they would have been out doing it already.

Jesus had done it, sure. But now that Jesus was gone (again) they didn’t know what to do with themselves. He’d told them to go out in Jerusalem and the whole earth and be witnesses for him, but now they were fewer and more vulnerable than they used to be. They had more important things to do, figuring out how to survive and get back to normal, and, well, how are you supposed to witness all over when there just aren’t that many of you?

If they were anything like us, they were probably in a meeting about that, remembering things that had worked for Jesus in the past, waiting for someone to volunteer to lead that…

And then they hear noise, and start seeing things – auras, like fire around each other.

And out they go.

But what if they hadn’t?

What would have happened if they’d stayed in the room?
If they did the rational thing, played down the hallucinations of fiery auras, didn’t go out in the streets, and kept trying to get back to normal?

In fact, for all we know, some of them might not have gone out that day.

Something might have kept them in. Anything might have kept them from changing the world.

What keeps you from changing the world?

Seriously.

What keeps you from changing the world?

Fear.

Don’t know what to do. The problems are too big for me.

People will think I’m nuts. They won’t listen.

Oh, fear. It comes in so many flavors and forms.

There’s the fear of pain, of loss, of shame.  Of death, of fear itself.

Because if you screw up, it hurts.

You could scrape your knee, or break your neck.

If you’re changing the world, you could be embarrassed, laughed at.

You could lose friends.

You could lose money.

You could die.

You can even fear success, fear doing so well that you’re suddenly responsible for keeping it going, for handling things you’re unprepared to handle.

So how do you get over fear, or past it, or through it?

Companions help.

Ask the Cowardly Lion, or a child facing the first day of school, or the person who finally made it to the gym with a friend.

Buddies help.

So does love.

Ask a parent who faces down impossible odds for their child.

Prayer – that brings both companionship and love.

And for the fear of failure – for the painful, deadening knowledge that the problems are too big and we just don’t have the capacity to solve them ourselves – we have forgiveness, the unbearable lightness of repentance and release.

I’m busy. It’s someone else’s job.

Busy-ness is a disease. We can catch it from the people around us and give it to them in turn, and it’s particularly contagious through smartphones and other technology, or through child-rearing.

It keeps you from changing the world not so much because you don’t have time to act as because you can’t see the options and alternatives. Busy-ness steals your ability to focus, and your ability to explore.

God has something to say about overcoming that, and it’s called Sabbath. It’s a rule in the Bible, one of the ten that we claim to pay extra attention to:
Keep the Sabbath. STOP.

Just stop, even though you can’t stop.

Breathe. Don’t. (Do – NOT!)  Over and over again.

Because until you stop, you can’t see where you are,

much less where you could be.

And then there are the reasons we don’t even feel.

How many of you here are comfortable?
Not with the pew you’re sitting on, but generally comfortable in your life. It’s more or less working for you?

When you’re comfortable you want things to stay the same, whether you realize it or not. Because changing the world means taking the chance on becoming un-comfortable. Comfort makes it hard to hope – to have that powerful expectation of something infinitely better.

And comfort makes us easy to threaten, to trigger with anxiety, or guilt.

And guilt doesn’t make it easier to change the world. 

Worry doesn’t.

They just make it easier to look back, to wish for the way things used to be. To trust that we already know the right way for the world to be, that we don’t really have to change a lot.

Turning to what we know, or think we know, is solid for everyday life, but when it comes to changing the world, it’s a trap.

If you want to get past anxiety and guilt, you can’t do that with comfort.

And to get past comfort you can’t use worry or shame.

You need joy.

If you listen to Jesus’ Kingdom of God stories, you hear about joy. Nothing about the kingdom of God is comfortable, not even for the oppressed it will set free. Joyful, yes. Exciting, loving, abundant, exuberant – and fueled by joy.  God’s joy, and our joy.

Now, some of you are already changing lives, but it’s possible that many of us are not particularly worried about changing the world.

That the world is fine for you as it is, or that your worries seem closer to hand and more urgent: money, health, job security, family…

It’s also possible that you’d rather the world would change less, or that it would go back to the way it used to be when things were better.

That’s normal. 

But we need some change here at Calvary, because our comfort zone and familiar work is getting unsustainable.

God’s always been interested in changing the world, and our own church business is forcing us to start now.

So it’s good news that God didn’t send the Holy Spirit just to enable one day of street preaching two thousand years ago.

God opened up the Holy Spirit within you when you were baptized, wraps the Holy Spirit around you in this place. You breathe in the Holy Spirit, the breath of God, every time your lungs expand, in your ordinary body as a beloved child of God.

That’s the story of Pentecost. Not that a few dozen disciples in Jerusalem changed the world with fiery preaching, but that all of us – all – receive the Holy Spirit so that we can change the world.

There are things that hold us back, all the time, but we’ve already been equipped by the Holy Spirit with what we need to overcome that:

equipped with love, forgiveness, support, Sabbath, and joy.

The Holy Spirit is in you, and around you,

now, here,

fire or not,

and God is ready for us to act.