I can’t decide whether this is an intimidating story or an exciting one.
Just not sure whether this story of feeling surrounded by fire, rushing into the world with your friends, pouring out stories about Jesus to anyone who will listen, is filling me with energy and joy, or anxiety and dismay.
I do feel a sort of whimsical delight, when we retell the Pentecost story every year – when we wave our kite and hear the glorious mashup of languages in this story of disciples, friends of Jesus, literally fired up to share everything they’ve loved about Jesus with anyone who will listen - and unexpectedly understood in languages as diverse as Portuguese, Farsi, Swahili, and Russian.
I love this story as an observer.
I’m only scared, only intimidated, when I think about being one of those speakers; telling an unprepared, disinterested world about my personal relationship with Jesus. When I think about being surrounded by something like fire – and by unexpected listeners, and predictable scoffers.
At which point I think many of us would feel at least a bit unsettled and anxious.
And that happens a lot with the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit who gives us eternal life at baptism – and according to Jesus’ promises makes us “witnesses” to share God’s story, ready or not, with all the world.
For some of us, just the thought of public speaking is enough to make us sweat.
For others of us, comfortable with the speaking part, it’s the proclaiming the gospel bit that feels daunting.
For some of us it’s the other work of the Holy Spirit that can shake our knees or just feel far, far, far too big, too impossible.
We talk about these things – these things the Holy Spirit ignites and empowers in us – at every baptism.
Make promises about working for justice and peace for everyone, everywhere. Resisting evil. Finding Christ in everyone and loving every neighbor, not just the nice ones. Proclaiming the gospel in both action and in word, continually.
Many of those things feel daunting – sometimes impossible – to me.
Many of my neighbors – physical and metaphorical – are, well, quite difficult to love. Some neighbors (colleagues, or people I know online, or people I’ve just met, or the person literally next door) I’m afraid to try to start loving because of how much work it will probably be.
Universal justice and peace is an enormous ask – flawed courts and disruptive protests and international conflicts and tragic injustices fill our news, and often I can’t even imagine how to start working toward peace and justice. I’m intimidated by the scale of the work. Or I’m afraid that I’ll get myself in trouble, just trying.
Conflicts and injustices are dangerous things to step into.
Proclaiming the gospel is almost guaranteed to feel just as awkward in our diverse and secular-leaning society as it did to proclaim Jesus resurrected and divine to the Roman Empire that killed him.
Even the “continuing in the apostles teaching and fellowship and breaking of the bread” that we promise at baptism isn’t always easy. Not when so many of us juggle a life that tells us that being with our church, investing in study and prayer and sharing communion every week, is less important than work and sports and getting the chores done and the family to the right places and so much else.
Or it feels risky to pray for things God might turn around and try to get you to help accomplish.
The work the Holy Spirit wants to do with us can be overwhelming. As scary as finding yourself afire with a miracle and having to preach about it in the street.
But I suspect, also, that many of us want the power to do some of these things that scare us. That feel too big for me, or you.
Think about this with me for a moment – what acts of love, or justice, or peacemaking, or defeating evil, or sharing faith would you do if you could?
If it weren’t hard, or countercultural.
If you weren’t afraid of getting in over your head, or getting yourself in trouble
Would you make peace in some workplace conflict, or an international one?
Would you make it possible for everyone everywhere to get healing care without the fear of falling into terrifying debt?
Would you stand up in the streets, or the statehouses, or the boss’s office to call out an oppression, or injustice, or uncover an abuse?
Would you tell a friend a truth about what’s in your heart, so you could love each other more honestly?
What’s the brokenness in our world that makes you angry, or despairing, that you would truly love to heal?
What’s the joy you’d share if it weren’t terminally embarrassing?
What’s the evil you want to protect everyone from, if it weren’t too much, or too terrifying to get in the way?
What if you could?
What if you really COULD do that?
How would it be if you were filled with all the courage and energy and wisdom and power to do the love, the justice, the peace, the holiness that you wish you could do?
Sit with that for a moment.
Sit with that powerful possibility.
Because this is the day to accept that possibility as real.
This day when we tell stories about a few uncertain, ordinary people getting literally fired up and changing the world,
this day when we immerse souls full of potential into the Spirit-igniting water of baptism,
this is the day we remember, together, that all the things our hearts wish we could do with God’s help are indeed possible.
That the dreams of justice, love, peace, faithfulness that stir our hearts and scare us are indeed within reach. Within the all-encompassing reach of the Holy Spirit, entirely possible for God – and so, possible for us, fired and filled with the Spirit of God.
Because whatever soul-renewing miracles, whatever world-healings, whatever good news, love, peace, justice, and faith we wish we could see and do and share, are not things we must do, or feel, or know, alone.
These are things that God does with us.
With us together, as the people of God, the friends of Jesus, the hands and feet and voices of the Holy Spirit.
Not one of those fired up disciples preaching to strangers in the street in our Pentecost story was on their own. They were surrounded by friends. And they were surrounded, filled, with God.
And so are we. So are you and I.
As we tell the story of Pentecost together, we are – just a little bit, all of us together – on fire right now.
We are, and will be, just a little bit wet from the wash of the Holy Spirit in baptism.
We are – together, each of us – at least a little bit more empowered than we came here believing we are.
So we can – with God’s help, we really can – do those bold and courageous healing things that scare us. We can plunge into those impractical miracles that should fill us with amazement and delight. We can do those things we couldn’t do alone, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.
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