Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
May 15, 2005 Pentecost
Acts 2: 1-21
A woman describes a potluck supper in her home church in Louisville. “They’d say at church: ‘We’ll all meet at Sycamore Lodge in Shelby Park at 4:30 on Saturday. You bring your supper and we’ll furnish the lemonade and iced tea.’ But if you were like me, you’d be out on Saturday and come home at the last minute. When you got ready to pack your picnic, all you could find in the refrigerator was one dried-up piece of baloney and just enough mustard in the bottom of the jar so that you got it all over your knuckles trying to get to it. And just two slices of stale white bread to go with it. So you made your baloney sandwich and stuck it in a baggie and went to the picnic.
“When it came time to eat, you sat at the end of the table and spread out your sandwich. But the folks who sat next to you had brought a feast. They were all good cooks and they had worked hard all day to get ready for the picnic. They had fried chicken and baked beans and potato salad and homemade rolls and sliced tomatoes and pickles and olives and celery. And two great big homemade chocolate pies. That’s what they spread out there next to you while you sat there with your baloney sandwich. But they said to you, ‘Why don’t we just put all this together.’ ‘No, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t even think of it,’ you murmured, embarrassed, with one eye on the fried chicken. ‘Oh, come on,’ they’d insist, ‘there’s plenty of chicken and plenty of pie and plenty of everything. And we just love baloney sandwiches. Let’s just put it all together.’ And so you did. And there you sat, eating like royalty when you’d come like a pauper.”
In the words of our Conference Minister, Mary Susan Gast, “Only someone who receives a feast after contributing a stale baloney sandwich can understand the unpredictable wildness of God’s love for us. Only someone who has been given gifts all out of proportion to what is deserved can extend that kind of generosity to others.” Abundant grace from the abundant Spirit of God.
Today we read the familiar story of Pentecost, the birthday of the Christian church – the day Jesus’ disciples received the gift of the Holy Spirit and the church began. I know this text very well; many of you do also. I’ve preached on it many times and you’ve heard many sermons about Pentecost. But as I was thinking about it this past week, what really struck me was the wild, uncontrolled, overflowing abundance of this spirit. It is so exuberant. Nothing can contain it. The wind filling the entire house, tongues of fire everywhere, every known language suddenly being spoken, even the suggestion that perhaps the disciples had enjoyed an abundance of wine. God pouring out God’s spirit. Not parceling it out, not saving it, not holding something back for a rainy day. God just lets it flow. Actually, I didn’t read to you another example of Pentecost abundance –because it always intimidates me a little bit. Reading on in the Book of Acts, we read in Acts 2:41, that after Peter’s sermon, 3000 people were baptized and joined the church that very day. 3000! I’m still waiting for the Holy Spirit to give me that sermon. And I tell you, we’ll be passing the offering plate twice on that day! 3000 people joining the church on that first Pentecost. Again, an example of the wild, exuberant, abundant spirit of God. Nothing holding it back. Nothing, that is, except me.
Some of you know I recently went fishing up on the Fall River with a few renegades from this church and some other folks, and every day I caught a few fish. Not as many as some others, probably a lot fewer than some, but I was doing ok. But about the middle of the trip I really was feeling a little down – why am I not a better fisherman? Why am I not catching more fish? It was the end of our second day. There were two of us in the boat. The sun was setting, you could hear the Canada geese honking as they flew overhead and the birds were singing. My friend turned to me in the boat and just out of nowhere he said, “Don’t you think God smiled when he made this place?” He was right! That was very helpful and I deeply appreciated that comment. It drew me out of my funk. Here I was in this beautiful place with good company, hardest decision we had to make each day was whether to go downstream or upstream, and I was worried about not catching enough fish? So focused on my own feelings of scarcity and inadequacy, I was missing the incredible, absolutely marvelous abundance all around me.
I once came across this true story about Glenn Adsit, a missionary who spent most of his career in China. When the communists took control of the country he and his family were placed under house arrest. One day the soldiers came and said, “You can return to America.” The family began celebrating, then the soldiers added, “You can take two hundred pounds with you.”
Two hundred pounds? They had lived in China for years, had many beautiful and meaningful things. The family - two children, wife, husband - got out the scales and began the sorting, arguing and weighing. What to save? What to discard? There was the beautiful and valuable vase, the new typewriter, the beloved books. What about this? What about that? Everything was weighed and finally, after much work and discussion, they had it, right on the dot, two hundred pounds.
The soldiers returned and asked, “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes.”
“Did you weigh everything?”
“Yes.”
“Did you weigh the children?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Weigh the children.”
And in that minute, said Rev. Adsit, the typewriter, the vase, all their valuable stuff became garbage, nothing but garbage. It no longer mattered. In that moment, he and his wife discovered true abundance. All they had to do was look into the eyes of their children.
In the words of that noted theologian, Paul Simon, “I have reason to believe, we all will be received, in Graceland.” Well I have reason to believe he is talking about more than a mansion in Memphis. Again in the words of Mary Susan Gast, “We all will be received into the graced land of our longing, the Graceland opened up and made accessible for us by Jesus. None of us can earn that kind of love. It is a gift, life is a gift, something given totally unearned, given by a gracious God for God knows what reason. There’s nothing we can do to earn it. There is nothing WE can do.”
Except to trust in God’s generosity. Except to trust that there is enough love and grace to go around, that we are not talking about a limited poor of resources here. Except to trust that the Almighty's blessings will come in good time and in appropriate forms to each of us.
I am reminded of a Vietnamese chant:
I am full of God
I have all I need
I can give what I have
There need be no struggle
There is enough
Certainly this has to be one of the meanings of Pentecost – this wild and uncontrolled and unlimited outpouring of love and hope and grace for creation by the Creator, given with “pizzazz!” as Annie Dillard says. Such abundance, all around us. “I am full of God. There is enough.”
The story is told of a man who was to meet a visiting minister at the airport. He had never seen the minister before. He scanned the faces of the incoming passengers and finally spotted a man he was certain was the minister. Walking up to this likely suspect, the man said, “Excuse me, aren’t you Reverend Johnson, the minister I am to meet?”
“No, sorry,” the man responded. “I’m not a minister; I just got a little air sick on the flight.”
Could that be how the world sees us – how it sees people of faith? Dour and anxious, even angry, looking like we have just pulled our heads out of an airsick bag? Actually if you see some of the TV preachers, you might think that is pretty close! But that isn’t Pentecost. That isn’t how the church started. Pentecost is about wind and fire and hope and energy and new beginnings; it is about abundant grace and love. That’s what I want the world to see on our faces; that is what I want it to see on my face.
On Saturday, May 7th, one of our church members, Charles Moore – Chas – delivered a keynote address at the Santa Rosa campus of New College of California. He quoted me in that address, which was nice, so I thought I’d return the favor and quote him this morning. Chas said, “There is an old cliché about optimism referring to whether the glass is perceived as half-full or half-empty – a critically flawed understanding. Optimism does not concern our perception of the current situation at all. Optimism lives in our belief about the future, a belief that a better world is not only possible, but probable and coming, that if our cup is empty it will be full again, that we can and have already gone forth and started to bring about a New World.”
The Spirit blew then; believe me, the Spirit blows now, just look at our confirmation class. Allow yourselves to be filled with the inexhaustible richness of the eternal God. The cup is always being refilled. The Pentecost message is that creation is infused with the Creator’s abundance and generosity. And if we will, we can find the hope, the faith, the practices, yes the institutions, to allow that generosity to work. That new world is coming; indeed it is already here among us. May God’s boundless, reckless Spirit, empower us to trust God’s generosity and share it, that all God’s children may have life and have it abundantly.