May 19, 2024, Can These Dry Bones Live?, Acts 2:1-21 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ May 19, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

As above the recording, so below the text.

If you have been in the Episcopal Church, or the Catholic Church, any of the liturgical churches, for a good long while, as most of us have, you will know that the church has a calendar. Every year we cycle through one of the gospels. Every year takes us through the story of Jesus’ life: the expectation of his coming, and his birth, his baptism and ministry, his preaching and healing, his instruction and preparation of his disciples, his Passion and Crucifixion, his glorious Resurrection, his return to the Father in the Ascension, and the Coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost – around and around, year after year, again and again, we remember the central story of our faith.

But every once in a while we need to remind ourselves that we are here for something more than just remembering, more than just keeping the story fresh in our minds, and I would say that there’s probably no better day to do that reminding than the day of Pentecost.

In Jewish tradition, which came before ours, of course, Pentecost is also known as Shavuot. It comes fifty days after the first Seder of the Passover feast – pentecost means fiftieth. Shavuot is a celebration of the spring grain harvest, and also a celebration of the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. It’s a big festival, and that’s why there were so many people in Jerusalem on the day we read about today, people who had traveled there from all different countries, who spoke all different languages, and who had come to celebrate Shavuot in the Temple.

The first outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem happened on Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, which also happened at the time of the Jewish Passover. It had been ten days since Jesus had returned to the Father on the day we call the Ascension. In those ten days, the disciples had gone back to Jerusalem, as Jesus told them to do, and they were waiting, as he had told them to wait. They were waiting to be baptized by the Holy Spirit. They were waiting to receive power to do all that Jesus was sending them to do. I’m pretty sure that they had very little idea what was about to happen to them. They waited in obedience, in hopeful anticipation, and I’m sure in quite a bit of fear and trepidation as well. I imagine it was a really long ten days; waiting for the unknown is intense.

And when the day came, no one could possibly have predicted what it would be like. All the disciples were together in a house in Jerusalem – about 120 men and women and probably children on top of that – and who knows what they were doing at the very moment the Spirit rushed in? Talking or preparing a meal or praying or napping – whatever they were all doing, suddenly they all heard a noise like a hurricane, filling the entire house with its roar. And as they looked at one another they saw tongues of fire, like the flames of candles or torches, resting on the heads of every person in that place. And all at once they were filled with the Holy Spirit, something none of them had ever experienced, and they found themselves proclaiming the mighty acts of God. They must have been making quite a commotion, loud enough that people out on the street heard them. And a huge crowd began to gather, and suddenly they realized these strange people weren’t just speaking Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic, they were speaking the languages of people’s homelands, no matter how distant that homeland was, so that everyone in that crowd understood what they were saying.

We call Pentecost the birthday of the Church, because the coming of the Spirit gave the disciples power to go out and begin the work of spreading the kingdom that Jesus had given them to do. On that first Pentecost we see Peter the bumbling fisherman preaching to a massive crowd, with such power and eloquence that people were converted by the thousands – a fisher of men, indeed! And not only Peter, but all the apostles and other disciples, were literally fired up, as they began a movement that spread like wildfire into every corner of the civilized world, and eventually, beyond that, to the farthest corners of the earth.

So on the day of Pentecost we remember all that excitement and power and astonishment every year, fifty days after our Easter celebration. And it’s a wonderful thing to remember. But there is a more immediate and urgent need for our annual celebration than just that it was a red letter day 2000 years ago. The pouring out of the Spirit of Christ wasn’t a once-for-all-time event. It was a first. It was a beginning. Never before had the Holy Spirit come upon God’s people in such magnitude. Never before had the Holy Spirit given people the authority to confer his power on others. Never before had the Spirit of God spoken to people from so many tribes and nationalities. It was a beginning. But it wasn’t the end.

Because we are still in very great need of empowerment. Most of us have been baptized and confirmed in the Church. We received the anointing of the Holy Spirit, in the washing with water, in the anointing with holy chrism, in the blessing of the Bishop. But we still find ourselves again and again feeling like the bones of Ezekiel’s vision, dry and brittle, disconnected, lifeless. Sometimes in the midst of our messy lives we forget that God is present with us in his Spirit. Sometimes we get so beaten down by worry, or pain, or grief, or bitterness, or just by the overwhelming darkness in the world around us, that we lose our fire. Sometimes we find ourselves running on empty.

And it’s not only a matter of our individual, personal spiritual lives. Like the disciples gathered in the house in Jerusalem, who were the whole worldwide Church of Jesus Christ at that time, the Church itself desperately needs to receive the comfort and teaching and guidance – and the power – of the Spirit, or it will falter and die. We live in a particularly dry and fragile time in the life of the Church. Across the country and around the world congregations and denominations are diminishing in size. Our membership is getting increasingly elderly; fewer young people are attending churches. We are set in the midst of a society that has little interest and less understanding of the teachings of Jesus – a whole generation has grown up, including many of our own children and grandchildren, in many cases, who see no real use for faith in the “real world.”

And the main reason so many people have turned away from the Church is not that they’re all a bunch of sinners – we’re all a bunch of sinners, after all – no, the biggest reason is that the church itself has too often exchanged the power of the Spirit for the power of politics or money or influence or tradition. The Church today is in great danger of becoming little more than a field of dead, dry, impotent bones. The Church in America has in so many ways sold her soul. We thought we were getting a seat at the table of power, but all we got was a lot of empty words and a lot of empty pews.

And that is why we need to celebrate Pentecost again and again and again, year after year after year, because we need to keep on coming to God in our emptiness, and ask him to fill us again, as his beloved children, and as his own beloved Church.

The Spirit of Christ is able to take even our dry, lifeless bones and to clothe them with flesh and to knit them together and to breathe the breath of life into them if only we come to him and ask. And that’s what we do today. Again. When you come up to the Communion rail, or when I come down to you to bring you the elements, just raise your hand if you want to be filled again with the life-giving Spirit of Christ. And he will do it.

Like the disciples on the first Pentecost, we never know what will happen. Like those disciples, we wait in obedience. And we wait in hope. And maybe we wait with a healthy burden of skepticism and doubt. That’s all OK. We just have to come, and to ask, and to wait, and we will be filled afresh with the Holy Spirit, who is our teacher, and our comforter, and our guide; who gives us power, and who will empower his Church, to do what God is sending us out to do. Because he will never leave us as orphans. He will always come to us. And he will be with us, even to the end of the age. +