Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Acts 2:1-21 Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2009

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.

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One of the things I've noticed is that there are a lot of people around who just love sports; all kinds of sports: baseball, football, soccer, golf, tennis... Some of my friends in ministry are like that. They follow various teams and use illustrations in their sermons all the time from things that happen at games or things that team managers say. There's a part of me that has always envied that. I hear people talking about how the Red Sox are doing or whether the Patriots are likely to pull off another upset - part of me would love to be able to get into that conversation. And I do, once in awhile, but I couldn't ever keep it up for long. I just don't know all that much about sports, and any true fan would see through my act in a pair of seconds.

So for all those of you who are sports lovers who have been missing out on all the good sports stories all these years listening to my sermons, let me just apologize right now. Paul, the apostle, once said that he had become all things to all people so that he could win as many souls as possible. But much as I try to follow his example, I'm just never going to be a true sports fan, and I'm sorry. I do want to say that if you have any good sports stories you'd like me to use I'd love to have them and I'll try not to mess them up. As we say, nobody gets all the gifts, but I'm definitely planning to be a sports fan in my next life, just so you know.

Part of the problem is that most of my exposure with team sports back in school didn't go well. In grade school, I was well enough coordinated not to be the last one picked for the kickball team, but I always ended up feeling sorry for the ones who were picked last and that kind of spoiled the fun for me. I was on the track team for one year, but I almost always came in last and the coach yelled at me a lot so I quit. I tried out for the golf team, but stopped after only one round when one of the guys on the team told me he had never seen so many balls lost in one day. I did go to the Homecoming game my freshman year in High School, but a bunch of kids beat me up after the game, I decided it hadn't been worth it. It kind of amazes me sometimes that most of us actually manage to survive our childhood.

When I think of school sports though, what really sticks out in my mind was my first ever, Junior High Pep Rally. We were all required to go so ducking out wasn't an option. The Rally was held behind the gym in a big U-shaped area paved with asphalt that was surrounded by high walls on three sides. Imagine, in that space, three hundred some teenagers yelling at the top of their lungs; "We've got Spirit! Yes we do! We've got Spirit! How about you?" I wasn't sure how much school spirit I actually had, but between the drumming, the cheering, the yelling and screaming, my ears were ringing for the rest of the day. I don't remember who won the big game, but I do remember promising myself that I'd arrange to stay home sick the next time Spirit Rally Day came around.

The thing is, if you leave out sports, how many places are there in our lives that people can get worked up about something, in a good way I mean. There's a great old story about Jesus showing up at a football game. He sits up in the bleachers and the first time there's a touchdown he cheers and hollers and does the wave right along with the crowd. A few minutes later though, the other team scores and Jesus jumps up and starts cheering and hollering just as loud as he did the first time. The guy sitting next to him says, "Hey, who's side are you on?" Jesus replies, "Oh, I don't care who wins. I just like being somewhere where people are excited about something."

Well, lets be honest, most of the time our churches aren't all that exciting. It'd be o.k. with me if some of you wanted to jump up and cheer after one of my sermons sometime, by the way, but that isn't' really what I'm going for. On the contrary, what most people seem to like about church is that it's usually a place of peace, sanity, meditation and loving community in the midst of a world that is often more chaotic and overexcited than it really ought to be. Cheering isn't exactly what we come here hoping to find.

However, church should at least be a place where people come away feeling energized, don't you think? If there isn't some sense of spirit going on here, I can easily imagine people beginning to look for excuses for doing something else on Sunday. Would you keep coming if every week left you feeling bored or frustrated? Maybe some of you would, but only reluctantly, out of a sense of duty. The church - the living church that is, not the dying one - the church depends for its very life on enthusiasm and inspiration. Both of those words, if you didn't know it already, mean essentially the same thing. Inspiration is "In spiriting," which is obvious when you think about it. Enthusiasm, less obviously, comes from the Greek "entheos." En meaning in, Theos meaning God; the original meaning was to have God in us or to be in-spired by God.

People, we have some legitimate concerns about the future of the institutional church these days, but what I keep telling people is that you can't kill the Spirit. Whether the church survives in the form we have all come to know and love, isn't something entirely within our control. But as long as people coming through our doors sense that the Spirit is alive in our fellowship here, I don't think we have all that much to worry about. If we keep the spirit alive in our fellowship, our church will live. If we don't, well, don't we have to wonder whether any church empty of the spirit even deserves to keep going? What would be the point? You'd only be preserving a museum.

The Spirit does not and can not die. But the church is by no means the only place where people can find a spiritual connection. Right after I first got here, I shared a piece with you that came to me attached to an email. It was called "Tough Leading a Spiritual Life," and it bears repeating. Let me read you a little bit of it.

"I was having an out of body experience one day so I grounded myself and got centered with the help of my spirit guides and almost astral traveled. But the phone rang. I sensed the negative vibrations so I threw the I-Ching and checked my numerology chart. But my energy was too blocked, so I did some bio-energetics and self-parenting, took some flower essences and ate an organic oat bran ginseng muffin, but my inner child wasn't feeling nurtured yet so I had a Rice Dream Frozen Pie too, but that made me hyper so I did the relaxation response while listening to my subliminal tapes, but I was feeling depersonalized so I did some polarity work, foot reflexology and post life regression, then re-birthed myself and called Moon Beam the body worker to make an appointment for a Shiatsu, Reike, Rolfing, Feldenkreis, Swedish, Japanese deep tissue massage…"

That, if you can believe it, is only about half of it but I think you get the idea. The first time I shared this, someone came up to me after the service who felt deeply offended that I was making fun of other people's spiritual practices. I hope you understand that I'm not trying to make fun of anything here. The piece is certainly tongue-in-cheek, and I do find it funny. But the point is that there are any number of ways of connecting with the spirit that people have come up with. There's no doubt in my mind that people can connect with the spirit without coming to church. After all, do we not believe that the Spirit of God is infinite and omni-present. If God is truly present in all of creation we probably shouldn't be surprised at the variety of ways and places in which people find God. But we're here hoping that some of them are going to find God here, aren't we?

I love Pentecost. It's a great day. This is the one Sunday of the year we use the red cloth decorations for the Pulpit and Lectern, and I wear a read stole. Red, in church history, has always been the color of the Holy Spirit, so it is particularly appropriate to use red for Pentecost. We can also use red on Reformation Sunday, but that isn't something Congregationalists pay much attention to. It's more a Lutheran thing. I love the fact that our church was born, as the story says, in the flames of the Spirit. Pentecost is not just the birthday of the church. It is also a model for what the church must be if it is going to live in faithfulness.

There's an old Sunday school song most of us grew up with. "I am the church. You are the church. We are the church together..." In the middle of that song are these words: "The church is not a building, not a steeple, not a resting place. The church is the people." But that's only true as far as it goes, and it doesn't go far enough. The church, as the living community of God, is not a building, that's true. But it's not just the people either. The church is the people inspired. It is the people enthused. If the Spirit isn't in us, then we're really not the church are we. Hopefully, we're not just going through the motions, of long standing church habits. Hopefully, we're allowing the living Spirit of God to flow in and through us and direct us. We come here not just to hear about God and share coffee and cookies at the fellowship hour. We come here to catch the spirit, to be in-spirited. And what is true of us as adults is certainly also true of our children.

What happens, let me ask you, if we simply assume that our children are going to catch the spirit? They might. It's entirely possible, but they won't necessarily catch it here. They won't necessarily or automatically become faithful Christian church members in their turn, and I think that should concern us. To be specific, it should concern us when our Christian Education Board goes begging week after week for teachers.

Now, you know that I'm not a big fan of guilt. But it needs to be said, that our children need and deserve the attention of all of us if we are in fact the inspired community of faith we claim to be. We can't simply assume that our children will catch the faith from our example. We need to teach the faith. We need to raise up the next generation. We need to learn the faith ourselves, so that we might be inspired, so that we might have an inspired faith to share, and then we need to share it, especially, though of course not exclusively, with our children.

And before you all start warming up your "perfectly good reasons" for not teaching, let me just say that I've been serving the church for some twenty-five years and in that time I've heard every imaginable excuse many times over. "I don't relate well to children." "I'm too busy." "I've done it before." "I can't get down the stairs." People, this church needs you. Our church needs your attention to our children if we are going to have a future. It really is that simple.

I'll leave you there, thinking perhaps about how you might get me off of this and back to sports illustrations. This is the day of Pentecost, the birthday of the church. We are here to be and become the inspired, enthusiastic people of God in this place, and thus rebirth the church year after year. And for that to happen, we need to continue loving and serving one another and the world in the name of God's Holy Spirit, and I trust we will.

Amen.